How to Love Your Imperfections

Have you ever put time and energy into something, hoping to make it perfect? Had you gotten your hopes up, had high expectations, only to be disappointed?  What are your expectations around perfection? Perhaps it is time to learn how to love your imperfections.

Expectations are premeditated disappointments

Have you ever heard this statement before? Perhaps when we expect perfection, we are setting ourselves up to fail. Recently, when I was looking over our freshly published weekly newsletter, I caught sight of a couple of glaring mistakes that had been made in the writing. First, I felt shocked to see the errors and wondered, did this really happen? Next, I felt disappointed to realize that I was responsible for these errors. This was soon followed by feelings of incompetence and stupidity. Eventually, I moved into a resigned acceptance; “There’s nothing I can do about it now.”

Find your tools that help you process

It was a tad shocking to see how many wheels started churning within me as a result of me bumping into my ‘perfection expectations.’ Writing about this experience helped me process it. Perhaps my process is similar to yours and you will resonate with writing down your thoughts and feelings also. Bumping into my imperfections has motivated me to learn to love them as opportunities for self-growth. One of my past teachers, Rosalyn L. Bruyere used to suggest that if we didn’t have anything to bump up against in life, then we wouldn’t have anything motivating us to grow.

Our daily struggles remind us that we are human and it’s ok

I like to remind myself that we all fail daily. Making mistakes is part of being human. Sometimes nobody sees it and it’s our own private failure that we get to process. Other times, it’s a larger audience and the weight of our failure feels greater. Opportunities continually present which help us learn how to love our imperfections. It’s not healthy to beat ourselves up every time we fail. I’ve always noticed that, although occasionally painful, I learn immensely from my failures, I get lessons that might not have gotten through to me any other way. As a result, I’m grateful for the imperfections that were revealed.

What if there was no such thing as failures or mistakes?

Perhaps everything we are going through are just experiences that don’t need to be judged as right or wrong, good or bad, failure or success. Doesn’t it depend on your perspective? How you view something reveals your perspective. Do you react with blame and judgment or with curiosity and compassion? If we practice acceptance of what is, we may navigate through our experiences differently, seeing them only as learning opportunities. We might examine experiences based on what you’ve learned from it or whether you’ll need to repeat it to understand it better.

How did we become perfectionists?

What could possibly have motivated us to get locked into this mentality? Once again, I have to state that all our self-healing roads lead back to our early childhood experiences. Most of our parents did the best job they could in raising us. That being said, it doesn’t mean that they were perfect; but it might mean that they expected perfection.

We were always being called out for our imperfections

Growing up, I repeatedly heard the following phrases, “Who left this out?” “Which child left this mess?” “Why haven’t the bikes been put away?” Our parents had high expectations of us. I’m sure it was their attempt to instill values and responsibility. Unfortunately, unmet expectations resulted in punishment and shaming. I wonder how it would have changed things to be calmly reprimanded for a mistake. Instead, we were on high alert once the angry yelling began.

We are born intuitive

Our intuition connects us to our higher self, to our Divine nature. This Divine nature connects us to the Divine, to God, to the Universe, to Great Mystery… however you define this.  Children are very intuitive and if this is recognized and celebrated, it will develop uninterrupted. As our intuition develops, we learn to find our answers through our intuitive connection to Spirit.

How our intuitive nature gets sidelined

Fight or flight both uses and disrupts our intuitive nature. In fight or flight, our gut instinct may help us survive a traumatic or scary situation. However, if we are stuck living in fight or flight all the time, we rarely experience peace, calm or relaxation. Because of this, it becomes difficult to develop our intuition or to find our answers within. Our intuitive nature is fed, strengthened and amplified by the relaxed side of ourselves. If we don’t get to spend much time in this calm, peaceful side of ourselves, then our intuitive nature develops at a much slower rate.

Finding your way back to your intuitive self

I don’t believe our intuition ever goes away permanently. Humans are hard-wired to be intuitive. If we don’t use it though, we may lose our easy access to it. Barriers to our intuitive nature include negative self-talk, over stimulation by media, emotional upsets, etc. Our intuitive flows may also be clogged with congestion or static from being stuck in fight or flight. The good news is, that this too can be healed.

How to begin to love your imperfections

If you are ready to stop second-guessing yourself and stop overriding your intuitive nudges, you have only to ask for this to change. Desiring more access to your intuition is the first step towards realizing this. The next step is asking for help to make that happen. This step might include asking for Divine help, receiving counseling or enlisting the help of relaxing therapies such as Reiki, massage, or acupuncture. By receiving relaxing sessions on a regular basis, the body remembers how to relax, and soon you begin scheduling regular self-care sessions. As our intuitive channels start to clear, we begin receiving intuitive answers about our life, our issues, our health. We may receive insights both through our own efforts or with the help of a spiritual mentor.

Simply breathing Light into your emotions begins the self-healing

I have spent the past 35 years cultivating the relaxed and calm side of me to be present. Over the decades, I have actively called light into my system (Breathe in Light technique), into my issues, into my stuck emotions and allowed them to be transformed and breathed out. Self-healing is a real thing. But we just don’t realize how simple the process of transformation can be. Most of us have forgotten how to trust in our own abilities to heal ourselves. We never learned how to patiently and methodically clear out our stuck energy on our own. All this is possible with a little guidance at the beginning of the self-healing process.