I recently had the opportunity to go on silent retreat with Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose work has profoundly shaped the field of mindfulness and my own experience of it.
One idea that felt especially alive for me on retreat was the way Jon spoke about mindfulness as a relationship to life. In one of his many books, Mindfulness for Beginners, he writes, “I see mindfulness as a love affair with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world.”
This idea surfaced again and again throughout the retreat, and I have found myself returning to it since. I’ve been wondering about how we might approach our lives, and ourselves, as a love affair—all while continuing to explore themes of perfectionism and mindfulness.
How Perfectionism Becomes Protection
When we are truly in a loving state, we’re not looking for flaws or continually assessing what needs to be improved. Rather, from a loving place, we embrace the whole of someone, and things that might look like imperfections from the outside may be the very things that we find most endearing.
Yet, many of us learned to experience ourselves in a less kind way, feeling that we’re not enough, flawed, wrong, or lacking. And our desire to appear perfect becomes a kind of protection. We strive harder, do more, and work to get things just right because some part of us believes that getting them wrong will reveal something bad about who we are.
This kind of conditioning is ubiquitous in our culture, and often comes from parents, school, culture, religious affiliations, and the broader world around us. Over time, we absorbed the message that we are not good enough as we are and that our accomplishments, appearance, money, success, or something else about us will finally make us enough, and so we strive more.
The focus is on something other than our inherent, Buddha nature being.
And, over the last couple of decades, social media has intensified this. We are continually shown carefully curated versions of people and their lives, all polished and glossed over into some version of perfection.
But that is not how life actually looks.
Wabi-Sabi Offers Another Way of Seeing
There is a Japanese concept called wabi-sabi that offers us another way of seeing.
The roots of wabi-sabi are found in Zen Buddhism and were shaped, in part, by the Japanese tea ceremony. Wabi refers to simplicity and an appreciation for what is humble, modest, natural, and asymmetrical. Sabi speaks to the beauty that comes with age, wear, and the passage of time.
Together, wabi-sabi reflects a worldview that finds beauty, value, and serenity in imperfection, impermanence, and simplicity.
Among its principles are asymmetry and irregularity, simplicity, weathered beauty, naturalness, subtle grace, freedom from convention, and tranquility.
Think about how different this is from perfectionism, which often involves judging, comparing, critiquing, and striving. Operating from this perspective, we strive to be the best, to be perfect, to gain attention, to win, or to get something exactly right. Much of this way of thinking also becomes very binary. We are good or bad. We are right or wrong. We succeeded or failed.
Wabi-sabi points us toward another way of being. It asks us to notice the unique characteristics of each being with tenderness, kindness, and curiosity about all that is already here, without needing to change it or make it different.
To understand this better, you might think about a tree. Its branches and leaves do not grow in perfect symmetry. Bark becomes marked with age and weather. One side may receive more sun. A branch may have broken years ago in a storm. Each tree develops its own shape, history, and particularity.
This irregularity is part of its life—and every tree is beautiful in its imperfectly perfect form.
Or consider kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery in a way that highlights the cracks rather than hiding them. The history of the object is not erased, and what happened to it becomes part of what we see.
I wonder what it would mean to relate to ourselves in that way?
Pop the Perfectistic Thought Bubbles of the Mind
Jon Kabat-Zinn has written and taught often about learning to see thoughts as thoughts rather than as facts. He has compared them to bubbles that arise in the mind, linger for a moment, and then dissolve when we are able to see them clearly.
I find this image especially helpful when thinking about perfectionism and mindfulness.
For instance, if I am writing something and the thought I am not good enough arises, that thought becomes its own bubble. The same is true of I cannot do this, I have to get this right, or I cannot get this wrong. Before I know it, I may be caught up in these thoughts, believing that they are all true. However, once I become aware of a thought, the bubble pops.
This is where awareness becomes so important.
When we become aware of the perfectionistic thought, awareness itself can begin to change our relationship to it. Jon has used the image of a soap bubble, and I find that very helpful. Once we see the thought, we can pop it. Awareness pops it, and then it begins to dissolve and lose its power.
Instead of being held inside the thought, we are back in the larger field of awareness.
Cultivate a Love Affair with Yourself
When we begin to pop our perfectionistic thoughts and loosen the hold of the constant sorting of ourselves into right and wrong, or good and bad, we can begin to move out of critiquing, comparing, and judging and into what I think of as the wider expansiveness of loving it all. This includes the parts of ourselves that wabi-sabi asks us to see differently, such as the asymmetries, irregularities, weathering, changes, and missteps that come with being human.
This brings me to Rumi’s well-known line about the wound being the place where the light enters. The wounds, cracks, history, and ways we have been shaped by life do not have to be hidden or perfected before we can hold them with tenderness. They are part of the particularity of who we are, and sometimes the very places that appear broken or imperfect are also where the light enters and a deeper beauty becomes visible.
If we can begin to see ourselves in this way, Jon’s invitation to cultivate a love affair with life begins to turn inward as well. Perhaps cultivating a love affair with life also asks us to cultivate a love affair with ourselves.
This does not mean loving some perfected version of ourselves. It means meeting our body, history, and qualities that make us who we are with tenderness, kindness, and curiosity, without immediately needing to change them or make them different.
And when perfectionistic thoughts arise again, as they will, we return to awareness.
Each in-breath, a new beginning.
Each out-breath, a letting go.
With love,
Karen
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