The Perfectly Imperfect Self

This has to do with a favorite practice.

I wanted to share what has been coming up a lot in the last week. I now find myself in the full-on editing process of my new book that is coming out soon about caregiving for elderly parents and loved ones. (More info will be coming soon!) And I was reading Dr. Kristin Neff's wonderful book called Self-Compassion. I was reminded of how much I use this in my coaching sessions.

Self-Compassion includes three elements: self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness is the recognition that the human experience will inevitably have suffering, heartache, disappointment and failure. Showing self-kindness is taking a moment to soothe yourself for being human and talk to yourself gently as if you were soothing a dear friend, instead of criticizing yourself for falling short. Give yourself a kind, caring response when you feel pain, frustration, anger, other heavier emotions. What would you do or say if it was a dear friend going through something similar?

Many times, we are able to give the words of encouragement to others more than we would for ourselves. I’m raising my hand here! However, I encourage you to try having this same gentleness towards yourself and this practice is worth it. 

When you think about how everyone has challenges, in a myriad of ways, with ups and downs, it contributes to a larger sense of self-compassion.

I like to do a play on words and the way I approach self-compassion is using the expression “accepting your perfectly imperfect self” when I introduce the idea of self-compassion to my clients. When I say these words, automatically I see the shift. The tension drops, and the ones who have noticed the self-criticism hasn’t been working, start practicing self-compassion and getting better results overall when it comes to reaching their health and well-being goals.

Because, there is no need to criticize yourself when you are learning from the human experience or Earth School. We learn from trial and error and this is how we grow! How would we learn otherwise? A lot of times we are learning from hard knocks, or the messy moments.

 When things aren’t going well, and you don’t feel good emotionally, it’s okay to acknowledge this, and not avoid it, sweep it under the rug, or overreact with your emotions. This is the mindfulness part of self-compassion: to acknowledge and step back to objectively observe what’s happening without overreacting and letting your emotions take over you. This is also a practice.

“To give ourselves compassion, we first have to recognize we are suffering. We can’t heal what we can’t feel. We often fail to recognize feelings of guilt, defectiveness, sadness, loneliness, and so on, as moments of suffering can be responded to with compassion. We certainly feel the falling short of our ideals, but our mind tends to focus on the failure itself, rather than the pain caused by failure. This is a crucial difference. The moment we see something about ourselves we don’t like, our attention tends to become completely absorbed by our perceived flaws. In that moment, we don’t have the perspective needed to recognize the suffering caused by our feelings of imperfection, let alone respond to them with compassion.” (Neff, 80-81)

I will more often than not experiment with an idea and it might not work out. When the world events start to weigh heavily on me, I can also show myself self-compassion. If I feel pain, frustration, or disappointment, I can tend to my feelings first, give myself a hug, and soothe myself with kind words of encouragement. This is NOT how I usually react and I know I am not alone. But I am willing to do things differently and actively practice accepting my perfectly imperfect self.

Journal prompt:  What would it look like if you started practicing your perfectly imperfect self?