Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  “I suggested she could use her mindfulness training to identify the critic and see her remarks for what they were: just thoughts, unconnected to the reality of her life. Several months later, she reported that the critic still twittered away at times, but the volume was much lower, and she had ceased to care about what he had to say. She had found some genuine freedom and was able to enjoy the blessings in her life.

  “When students ask me how to handle their inner critic, I often suggest, ‘Make her a nice cup of tea and suggest she take a nap. She’s tired, and it’s been a long day. Going over and over those negative thoughts must be exhausting. She’s beginning to repeat herself, a sure sign she needs a rest.’”

  This gentle approach to the critic immediately diminishes her power. Does this mean that you are going to forever silence your negative thoughts? No, that’s not likely. But you are going to be able to deal with them differently.

  When you lull the inner critic into taking a nap, you’re in charge—not her. You might still feel some anxiety arising and be stung by her critical voice, but you won’t be tensing for a fight. You will strengthen your trust that you can learn from your mistakes and start over. This helps to convey a sense of peace or wholeness despite imperfection.

  Another useful technique is to give the inner critic a persona—a name and perhaps a wardrobe. (Josephine gave her critic a “stern, black, schoolmarmish dress.”) I named my own inner critic Lucy, after a Peanuts cartoon I saw years ago. In it, Lucy was telling Charlie Brown, “The problem with you is that you’re you.” Ah, yes.

  That Lucy-dominant voice had been so strong in my early life. Through meditation practice I’ve learned to respond with, “Hi, Lucy,” or, “Chill out, Lucy.” This way I avoid overreacting (“You’re right, Lucy, I’m worthless,” or, “Oh my God, I’ve been meditating for so long, I’ve spent so much money on therapy—how appalling that she’s still here!”) Instead, I give Lucy a nice cup of tea and she just sits there calmly.

  I told that story to a group I was teaching, and a man responded that he’d adopted a similar technique through work in Al-Anon. He’d personified his inner critic as a punk rocker, a character he wouldn’t take so seriously. Another man told me his inner critic was a forbidding judge in full regalia. Have some fun with this! See your inner critic as a crabby old relative coming for a visit. Sigh at his antics, or settle her down with tea, and spend a moment wishing that they themselves were more able to enjoy their lives.

  REFLECTION

  THE NEXT TIME your inner critic starts on you, take a step back to inquire:

  –Does your critic have a voice or face? Whose?

  –What happens if you thank your critic for worrying about you, but say you’re just fine for now?

  –Is your critic keeping you from trying something you might enjoy?

  CHAPTER 4 PRACTICES

  Remembering your goodness

  If you find yourself ruminating on the things you regret and the mistakes you’ve made, try this exercise. It will help you redirect your attention and remember goodness within. The point is not to deny your mistakes, but if you keep rehearsing them, analyzing them, creating stories around them, you’re simply reinforcing the pain and alienation they’ve already caused you. When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring. Standing in that place increases your ability to look honestly and directly at whatever is difficult and gives you the energy and courage to move forward.

  Sit comfortably in a relaxed, easy posture and close your eyes. Now bring to mind one thing you have done or said recently that you feel was kind or good.

  It does not have to be newsworthy! Maybe you smiled at someone or listened to their story, maybe you let go of your annoyance at a slow checkout clerk, maybe you were generous, maybe you sat down to meditate, maybe you thanked a bus driver. It’s not conceit or arrogance to consider these things. It’s nourishing and replenishing to take delight in the good that moves through us.

  Or you might think of a quality or skill in yourself that you like or appreciate: perhaps you are enthused about helping others learn or committed to practicing patience toward your irascible neighbor.

  If you still find yourself caught up in self-criticism, turn your attention to the mere fact that you have an urge toward happiness. There is kindness and beauty in that. Or simply recall that all beings everywhere want to be happy, everybody wants to be happy.

  Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness. Recall that this is your birthright. Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves and others. But that urge toward happiness itself is correct, and when we support it with mindfulness, it can become like a homing instinct or a compass pointing us toward freedom.

  If any impatience or judgments emerge during this meditation, don’t feel as though you have failed. This is entirely natural. Simply allow the negative reaction to ebb as a wave on the beach, and see if you can return to the positive contemplation without self-criticism.

  5

  LETTING GO OF PERFECTION

  If you don’t love yourself, that’s just weird.

  —CALISSA GRACE PARROTT, AGE SIX

  HOW DO WE RELATE TO perfection? With caution. We tend to handle things we think of as “perfect” with reluctance—gingerly keeping our distance. Perfection is fragile; interacting with something that seems perfect puts it in peril.

  Think of a perfect arrangement of flowers in a vase. As soon as they were cut, the flowers started to wilt. Or slice into a perfect cherry pie hot from the oven, and watch the lattice crust crumble. Then you take the first bite, and it is perfect. Three bites later, its sweetness may already be starting to cloy. Moment to moment, perfect passes into imperfect.

  This is why clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier to real love for ourselves. Perfection is a brittle state that generates a lot of anxiety, because achieving and maintaining unwavering standards—whether they’re internal or external—means we’re always under threat. We become focused on avoiding failure, and love for the self cannot be a refuge because it has become too conditional, too dependent on performance. As Oscar Wilde said in his play An Ideal Husband, “It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.” And that means every last one of us.

  The illusion that supports perfectionism is the notion that, with superior self-control, we can sustain a perfect life. But of course this is impossible. We may believe self-criticism will help make us “better,” or more lovable, or even liberate us from suffering. But this is a displaced—and unproductive—use of our energy and attention.

  As an internationally renowned yoga teacher, Kathryn Budig deals with the pressure of perfection on a daily basis. In a recent conversation, she explained to me, “It’s common for people to start their day with the habitual negative narrative—to be unhappy with what you see—focusing on what needs to change about yourself.” In order to not only survive but also thrive in her work, Budig has had to totally reframe what it means to be perfect. “Perfection is just a societal norm,” she says. “During meditation, I constantly tell myself, ‘I am perfect … I am not my body.’” By disconnecting the idea of perfection from her body (which the media tells her must match some fashionable ideal), she has been able to reach a place of self-acceptance and self-love. Like meditation, reframing our perspective in this way can become a practice.

  Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and instead focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow. This itself is an act of love.

  Elaine, a student of mine, actually defines self-love as the opposite of perfectionism. “Finding lov
e for myself is letting go of the need to find the culprit for something that’s wrong, in myself and with others,” she says. And, she adds, “constantly assessing things in terms of success and failure means that someone must be at fault.” But Elaine says she’s learned to “change the channel” on this way of being, moving from a stifling and fundamentally noisy state of mind to one that is more expansive and forgiving.

  THE FREEDOM OF IMPERFECTION

  WHEN I FIRST started to co-lead meditation retreats, my perfectionism caused me a lot of suffering. Our retreats included an intensive day of meditation, with time for instruction and meetings with a teacher, followed by a formal discourse in the evening. I was thriving on interaction with the students, and I had much I wanted to say, but I was terrified of giving that evening discourse. I worried that I would lose my train of thought or state something so ineptly that my mind would freeze. The image of me sitting there speechless was so vivid that I refused to teach. I was silenced by my own perfectionism. One of my colleagues would just have to speak instead.

  Months went by like that. Eventually, I decided I could try to give a talk on lovingkindness and lovingkindness only. I figured that if my mind went totally blank, I could launch into the traditional lovingkindness meditation, and maybe no one would notice my imperfect performance.

  Then one day I realized that all our talks were basically about lovingkindness. The point wasn’t to give a perfect performance, it was to connect with the people gathered to listen and to extend a sense of inclusivity and care to them. My ability to share my insights with more freedom came about when I started to connect to myself and to that space of care from within. I shifted my attention away from self-protection and needing to be perfect and focused instead on giving what I had to offer. It was a big shift in intention, a move away from the lonely self to a space of connection. And when I came to this recognition, I found my voice.

  Many years later, I was one of the Western meditation teachers invited to speak at a weeklong event where the Dalai Lama was teaching about patience. It was the largest crowd I’d ever addressed, and my fears about getting it right resurfaced. Fortunately, the Dalai Lama gave us all a profound teaching about “getting it right.” He was seated on his throne before about 1,200 people, explicating an eighth-century text. Following the usual format for such talks, he would read a passage in the original Tibetan and give his commentary, and while it was being translated, he’d flip ahead to the next passage he was going to discuss. At one point, something in the English translation caught his attention. He looked up from his manuscript and told the translator, “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yes, it is,” the translator replied. They argued back and forth for a while, until the Dalai Lama went back to the passage in dispute. He looked at it and burst into peals of laughter. “Oh, I made a mistake!” he exclaimed, as though he’d made a delightful discovery. The Dalai Lama’s laughter amplified the love in the room. I’d guess many of us in the audience imagined that if we were as evolved as the Dalai Lama, we would never make a mistake. His comfort with himself, his easy admission of error, drew us all into the openness and light of the love available when we accept life as it is.

  Though it may seem counterintuitive to our inner perfectionist, recognizing our mistakes as valuable lessons (not failures) helps us lay the groundwork for later success. In an interview with David Letterman reported in The New York Times, filmmaker Spike Jonze said, “I made a lot of bad stuff and each time I learned from mistakes and got a little better.” And in a study of students in a neurosurgery program, a sociologist found that those who ultimately failed claimed that they rarely made mistakes, while those who succeeded not only admitted their mistakes but also revealed what steps they would take to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future.

  PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU LOVE

  IF WE STOP setting impossibly high standards and punishing ourselves for failure—or what we perceive as failure—how will our lives improve? Getting curious about the origin of these standards is the first step to achieving more freedom from them.

  First, ask yourself whose standards you’re trying to meet. My student Charlotte talks about how her habitually critical father had instilled in her a pattern of profound self-criticism. But once she recognized this dynamic with her dad, she felt much more empowered and was able to make changes in their relationship and in her relationship with herself.

  Often it’s our peers who set the standard. Raina, a young meditator I know, was determined to create the perfect birth experience for herself and her baby. She planned to give birth exactly the way her best friend, Laura, did: in a deep Jacuzzi tub at a birthing center staffed by midwives and accompanied by a doula, with celestial music playing in the background. Everything was going according to plan the day Raina went into labor—that is, until the baby’s fetal heartbeat began to drop dangerously low and the midwife had Raina rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section. At first, she felt like a complete failure, having let down everyone important to her: her husband, the midwife, the doula, Laura, and especially her baby and herself. But as distraught as she was at first, the moment Raina cradled her infant daughter in her arms, she was able to let go of her disappointment. “It was a huge teaching moment for me,” she recalls. “I learned once again that life calls the shots, not me or my plans for the way life should be.”

  If you can’t put a name to the source of your perfectionism, try examining the social messages that surround you. Have you somehow bought into the notion that you should be the perfect (select all that apply): hostess, mother, son or daughter, partner, boss, employee, meditator, athlete, fashion plate? As soon as you begin to notice the messages you’ve internalized as distinct from you, you can begin to set healthy boundaries.

  Next, get even more curious: Do you agree with the expectations you’ve identified? Do they reflect your innermost values? Mindfulness allows us to balance our drive for self-improvement with a healthy skepticism about external standards. Do you really want to maintain a spotless home just like your late grandmother, or are you willing to let that go to spend more relaxed, enjoyable time with your children? Loosening the grip of other people’s goals lets you focus on what you love.

  The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism. Think of something you’ve made an effort to master, whether it’s lap swimming, getting higher grades, or gardening, and then try to remember when you started feeling a strong inner push to do it. Did you take pleasure in making progress, even when it was incremental? Did you feel a strong desire to do it well, even when you knew no one else would notice? When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.

  I’ve heard this again and again from writers and artists. I have one author friend who compares writing his books to climbing Mt. Everest. “I always start out with a vision of making it to the top or, in my case, creating my perfect dream of a book. Sometimes I get pretty close and I feel like, maybe if I kept tinkering forever, my manuscript would indeed achieve perfection, only it never quite does. Still, at a certain point I have to decide it’s good enough, say Basta!, and move on. Otherwise I’ll go nuts.” But, my friend adds, “Actually, I think this is a good thing. If one of my books was perfect, what would be the point of writing another? It’s the gap between my aspiration and what I’ve actually created that gives me energy and fuels the next project. Which, of course, will be perfect.” He laughs.

  My friend has the wisdom to realize that perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. It is unforgiving and rife with fear. When we cling to unrealistic standards, we undermine our abilities and obsess unnecessarily over disapproval and rejection.

  Yet it’s also important to remember that pursuing excellence is not a problem. In fact, focusing on what we most care about, whether it’s our work, our relationships, or collecting butterflies, can be a genuine act of self-love, but only if we’re not fixated on
the outcome of our efforts or on perfecting ourselves.

  Fortunately, when we relate to ourselves with lovingkindness, perfectionism naturally drops away. We may realize we’ll never sing an aria at the Met, but we can continue to love opera, follow our favorite singers, and perhaps join a local chorus. There’s no frustration, bitterness, or self-criticism in this kind of loving acceptance. It doesn’t mean we’re complacent, but rather we stop resisting the way things actually are. Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of lovingkindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.

  CHAPTER 5 PRACTICES

  Self-acceptance

  1. Bring something you did or said that you regret very clearly into your mind and get in touch with your feelings about it.

  2. Now imagine you are listening to a friend whom you care about deeply express regret, guilt, and self-blame to you in conversation. What would you say to console your friend?

  3. Begin to look at yourself through the eyes of a caring, supportive ally.

  4. Recognize that imperfection is a part of all human experience. We are no worse than anyone else because we have made particular mistakes. We can be complete in this moment just as we are.

  REFLECTION

  Step back to inquire: Are there particular areas of your life where perfectionism emerges most often? Appearance? Personality? Job performance? Social life? Parenting? What would “just okay” look like in these areas?

  Try to catch yourself in the moment: When the anxiety of control arises, take time to breathe and repeat, “Let go, let go.”