Reflections of a Recovering Perfectionist

Balance and symmetry are not necessarily the same thing.

I realized this after my teacher showed me today how large my liver is on my right internal side body compared to the small spleen on the internal left. They are not symmetrical, but they can be in balance within the whole system of my body.

This may not seem like a huge revelation. To some it may come as perfectly obvious, but for me, having come to understand symmetry as an expression of perfection and the ultimate expression of balance, it was ground breaking. I had confounded these three concepts in my efforts to be perfect.

Similar to my interior body, my life can be balanced without needing to be symmetrical or perfect.

I say perfect, because as I write this I am recognizing an old understanding that I learned at a very young age about perfection and symmetry being interrelated AND their being the aspirational path to being “the right kind of person.”

And while it may have served me to follow that advice to gain my parents’ and extended family’s approval – an approval that I needed to survive as a young child. It was a survival technique that held me back from appreciating the ebbs and flows of my true being: one that isn’t symmetrical, but is still perfect in its own way. A system that sought balance and mistakenly followed the signs toward a perfection based on the principles of symmetry. Principles which were taught all around me as the basis for belonging and “proper” maturation, but they were using a definition of perfect based on comparison and measuring up to others. Instead of a balanced definition of perfect which is to function as well as possible within the realm of what is possible and needed.

By seeking an other-validated perfection I was in effect chasing an unattainable persona and safe-guarding my missteps with the needed armor that would keep me from being outed by my community as “less than perfect’ and therefore risking being outcast for my inability to attain what “everyone else” was able to attain.

In truth, no one attains it. Other-validated perfection is a fictional construct of perfection. It is fleeting. Any one who believes that is is attainable to please everyone else is not truly seeing themselves or how they armor themselves against the world.

Finding perfection in what is already; that is a path which can ebb and flow in and out of balance. But it doesn’t have to be symmetrical.

Balance is attainable as a practice. The moment we lift one foot to take the next step, but before we have both feet firmly planted to launch the next step contains just as much balance as standing in place. The step is a negotiation of balance, back and forth.

The lungs filled with air and then expelling the air in an exhale are in a dance of balance. They are no more perfect when they are filled than when they are empty, nor when they are mid-breath.

So many aspects of our day to day drive us to practice balance. And that balance is where the perfection lies. Validated by movement, by oneself, symmetrical or not. This is the perfection I seek to attain.

At once, whole, and bruised and broken, but perfect in the here and now.