Discomfort & Perfection: The Crossroads Of A Seeker

The Perfectionists

I played soccer. Once. When I was a kid. I was four years old. At the end of the game I was crying, near hysterically, because I didn’t score a goal and we didn’t win the game. I hated it and I never played again.

The perfectionists among you might relate.

The memory has been with me so long, I just assumed I was born a perfectionists. But now, I realize we’re all born perfectionists. For most of us, however, I think it masquerades as an inability unwillingness to be uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable On Purpose

Of course no one wants to feel uncomfortable. So you try to fix, control or tend to circumstances, people and your environment —to make it perfect. So you feel juuusst right.

When I turned to my mom for help that day, she didn’t understand either. She was one part amused, one part uncertain of how to respond and one part completely relating to my experience of utter frustration. What she didn’t know is that we’re supposed to be slightly uncomfortable.

On the surface, you want to feel good. Deeper down, you know something more is going on and you want to get at it; you crave to understand it and feel it’s depth. There’s a very odd and uncomfortable friction that happens because of this. You are always at the crossroads of being both spiritual and physical. It can be uncomfortable, and when it is, it causes you to seek. This friction is the beginning of your spiritual journey. Without it, what would motivate you to practice? If you felt great all the time, how would you learn connection and compassion?

Broken By Design

Though your body is limited — it is aging and eventually it will die — yet connected to it, to you, there is a limitlessness. This is the more you feel in the fullness of love, the expanse of your dreams, when you nail a pose you’ve been working towards for years, at the vision of art, the sound of a symphony or the depth of intimacy. You can’t quite explain it, you can’t see it, yet you know it’s there and it moves you.

Consciousness chose to contract from infinite, into form. It chose to go from limitless to limited. It chose to become you. And every day you wake up again, in that body, it has chosen again. Some part of you intuits this and wants to get back to the wholeness from which we all originated.

The crookedness, the way you are broken, was intended. It urges you to go deeper. When you feel lack, when you feel unworthy, when you feel unloved it spurs you to get on your yoga mat or your meditation cushion. This film on your light, called Anava Mala in Sanskrit, makes you want to get out of pain. It makes you seek perfection, because some part of you remembers that ‘perfect’ is your essential nature.

The Good & The Bad News

At your essence you are whole, complete and connected. At your essence nothing at all is missing. You started with fullness, perfection, limitlessness, then were born into a body that is limited. So there is a longing to remember your fullness, to reconnect with wholeness. As long as you are alive, you will always be at this crossroads. You are supposed to have this friction.

If you feel unloved, if you feel unworthy, if you feel like something is lacking, or you feel unappreciated this is Anava Mala. If you feel like you can intuit that there is something more going on and you’re missing that part of yourself, it’s going to cause you to seek. Nothing is wrong with you, even if it might feel like it…

Comfort In The Discomfort

I used to think that if I just did enough work I’d get out of this discomfort. But I’m not. And neither are you. I’m always going to be in this body. You’re always going to be in that body in this lifetime and there is a certain amount of discomfort that will come from that. But also joy, and love and beauty and all the depth we constantly seek.

It means you need to learn to be comfortable with discomfort. You need to cultivate patience. You need to persevere and keep at it. You need to learn to flow with the ups and downs. You need to honor your physical form as the conduit to spirit. Without a mind you could not think about this. Without a body you could’t feel this depth.

 

Approaching The Boundary

The friction, that crossroads? It’s a boundary. If you push through it too far or too fast, you’ll rubber band back. Instead you need to approach it slowly, with reverence. You need to remain open to the full depth of the experience, the highs, the lows, the easy poses and the more challenging ones. To the friction and discomfort, and the perfectionist seeking a glimpse of wholeness.

Every yoga pose places us in the crosshairs of this boundary. By creating an inviting and welcoming space for yourself, you align to this depth, physically and mentally. Instead of pushing away the discomfort, you make space for it, and you dance on the edge feeling both full and empty simultaneously.

As you bring your hands together at your heart, you honor the midline —the metaphor for where spirit and form meet — the crossroads of limitless and limited. Right on the edge.

Can you learn to be comfortable in it?