Making Peace with Perfection

“New year, new you.” That’s a phrase we hear every January 1st, as we make plans to polish and perfect anything that didn’t go quite “right” the year before. We set intentions and resolutions to do things “better.” We expect that, this year, our life will be more perfect than the last. Our work will be more perfect. Our relationships will be more perfect. We will be more perfect.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to attain this new level of perfection and inevitably feel let down when something goes awry or we fall back into an old habit or pattern. Maybe you started this year with high hopes and high expectations of yourself, and maybe now, two months into 2018, you’re already judging yourself for not measuring up to them. Enter tonight’s Full Moon in Virgo. The sign of the Perfectionist.

My moon sign is Virgo, and one of my big life lessons (and challenges) has been making peace with my own perfectionism and recognizing all the ways that it was limiting me and stopping me from doing the things that I truly wanted to do. I came to realize that this never-ending need to be perfect put me in a very black and white view of the world: either things were perfect or they weren’t. Either I was perfect or I wasn’t.

All those things that I really wanted to try that I wasn’t sure I could do perfectly? I would avoid doing them completely, because if the options were perfect or nothing, my best option was nothing. And since I wasn’t perfect, I was “nothing” too. 

In my eyes, nothing I did was good enough. I was never good enough. It wasn't a healthy way to live. It wasn't a fulfilling way to live. And it certainly wasn't a joyful way to live.

In our quest to be “perfect,” we often reject or disown the parts of ourselves that we’re afraid or ashamed of. We scrub and bleach and polish into perfection anything that we think is “bad” or “ugly” or “unlovable.” We forget that these “flaws” are actually key qualities of our being that are natural and essential to us in some way. Unique attributes of who we ARE.

The truth is that you already are perfection itself at your core. Seriously. Take a moment to breathe that in.

There is nothing to perfect. There is only the infinite Perfection which wants to be personified through you. Through your unique personality. Your unique voice. Your unique vision.

So this evening...this month...this year...I encourage you to free yourself from the black and white prison of perfection and step, instead, into the full-color, full-spectrum, bright, bold, beautiful world of self-acceptance.