Days 70-76: Mantra for Imperfection

My inner perfectionist was ROARING this week. She is always there, and I've been doing a pretty good job lately at keeping her at bay, but she managed to come out kicking and screaming and knock me over. I spent the duration of a 90 minute yoga class yesterday angry at how imperfect I am. I don't think I breathed one full ujayii breath during that practice. UGH.

But at least I know that most of what she says is just a story. Nonsense.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how making positive changes, and in my case, losing weight and feeling better about myself, comes with it's own set of challenges. First of all, every feeling or emotion that I have in addition to the energy that I sense from different people or experiences, I now feel on a much stronger level. I'm not using food to create numbness in myself anymore, which is amazing, but the flip side is that it sometimes feels like my emotions or moods are swallowing me. For example, last Wednesday it was a rainy day and I didn't have much going on, so I stayed home. I wasn't productive and didn't do the work I needed to do, or practice yoga, or read, and I started to feel the rainy blues pretty strongly. It was hard. Enter this voice: "you're lazy, you're not accomplishing anything, you suck, people won't like you if you aren't always doing or producing something..."

I'm choosing to see this experience and the emergence of my inner critic as growth. I've stuck with my new eating plan for 76 days, and we all know that most of the time, love and happiness and ease are born from a really shitty experience, a struggle. Maybe my inner perfectionist is here to take me to the next level of self-love. Part of my own personal practice, in food and in life, is being ok with the cyclical nature of things. Most paths are not linear, and it's natural to go in and out, up and down.

So I want to start this week off reminding myself (and my readers) that I am never going to get "there." Every time I get closer to what I think the perfect me looks like, she moves farther away. Because she's a fucking illusion and there will always be imperfection, mistakes, fuck-ups, hiccups, dumb moments, and life is not a straight shot to any destination. It's a weird and sometimes ugly winding road where we sometimes get lost or repeat the same part of the circle over and over until we figure out that it doesn't matter where we're going in the first place (because truthfully, there's no way we can know that information anyway).

New mantra: I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. Repeat, repeat, repeat...