Perfectionism is Just Another Word for Never Good Enough

So I fancy myself someone who is pretty good at whatever I put my mind to. Recently I decided I was good at hot yoga. You know the one; a hundred plus degree room, high humidity, lots of sweat, and no breathing through your mouth.

The class goes 60 or 90 minutes depending on your tolerance for torture. I went to those 90 minuters for a while but recently had enough humility to cut it down to 60. I’ve also always had clinically low blood pressure, low enough for nurses to remark upon every time I go in for my decade check up. They do advise that I visit more frequently but hey, just check out the title of this article for my take on that.

Now until recently, this blood pressure thing has been a blessing, not a curse. But I’ve discovered that low blood pressure + hot yoga = nausea/blackouts/discomfort to the max. Still, I tried to power through it. You see, the thing about a yoga class in Denver, no less, is that there’s usually someone ripped AF, they’re usually a man, and I usually have a big ass chip on my shoulder about men being better than me at anything. I’ve been told that’s because I usually incarnate as a man so I can kind of see that it’s important to have balance in your incarnations and be a woman once and while but I’ve still got that karmic streak of masculine competition that kind of kills me every so often. Like it’s been doing in the yoga classes.

I’ll be at the point of pain, shaking like hell while standing on one leg, and almost blacking out just to not fall out of the pose before that guy does. And finally, my body pulled the kibosh on me and just went ahead and started blacking out as soon as I walked into the room.

Three times now I’ve walked into the yoga room ready to kick some yoga ASS (insert american flag and eyeroll emoji here) and have literally had to lay down the whole class. Now something very curious happens when you’re laying on a mat in a room full of active sweaty people while literally unable to move a limb let alone sit up.

First I felt shame, then embarrasment, then anger, then a desire to explain myself in the middle of class, then shame again, then just tears. I’ve heard people say that certain yoga poses can free up stored emotions and you may laugh or cry spontaneously in class while deep in a very advanced and technical pose. How utterly ridiculous and totally humbling that the pose that broke me down was the Dead Lady Corpse pose; the one where you just lay there and do nothing at all because you can’t. And how profoundly telling, too.

While I was on that floor, I kept thinking of a quote by Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor (swoon) which is worth quoting at length:

“Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again…. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching, in other words.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart.

Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.”

Why am I writing all this? Because I preach about how to actually live like Jesus says and the death-dealing forces of the idolatry of perfectionism ALL. THE. TIME. To congregations, to clients, to friends, to students, to my own teachers, to anyone who will listen. Why? Well as any good preacher/teacher/counselor knows, we only ever say the things that we ourselves really need to hear. I needed to hear about letting go of my competitive perfectionism so bad that my body literally colluded with Spirit and laid me down on a mat in the middle of a bunch of sweaty people who could easily do the thing I could not. And I am so grateful. Because over that hour I discovered just how loved and cared for and held I really am. The class went on, the teacher taught, the people did their poses and filed out, Spirit kept me company on the floor, and at the end the instructor came to me and said, “Cindy, try putting some salt in your water.” As simple as that. Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I’ll leave you with:

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea. — Isak Dinesen