Perfect Is Not The Goal

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello my darlings and welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name,

As always,

Is Tiffany Andres Myers and I am so happy to be here with you today and the many days through which this recording may reach you traveling crazily and invisibly through the audio waves.

This episode is all about our goals,

Our intentions,

What is it that we are actually aiming for.

And I feel like this podcast is important because this understanding has really changed radically for me in my own journey through the years.

I may have shared in one of the earlier original podcast episodes that when I first began my own meditative journey,

I think there was an unconscious belief that through meditating and working with my mind and practicing that in some way I would become less human or life would become less life.

And what do I mean by that exactly?

I mean that I expected to get more of the good shit and less of the bad shit.

And I want to say like in a real way my loves,

This is true.

It's true because what I've found for myself and I think that this is pretty ubiquitous.

I really don't like to make many promises when it comes to what your practice will give you,

The gifts,

The outcomes,

Right?

But I think one that's inevitable is we become less reactive to what's happening both inside of us and outside of us.

And I know that in an earlier episode I talked about how much I fucking adore the fact that meditation is called a practice because it's not about being good at meditating,

Right?

No one gives a shit.

What it's really about is practicing being the kind of person and embodying the kind of characteristics that you want to have when you're out in your day to day life.

So when I say I think it's somewhat inevitable that we become less reactive,

This is because it's inevitable that at some point when you're sitting in meditation you're going to get annoyed or agitated or frustrated,

Right?

You're going to get a body pain or an itch or an ache and everything inside of you,

All of the habitual responding is going to want you to move.

It's going to want you when you're bored or annoyed to get up and quit your practice.

And maybe when you first practicing you actually give into that.

But if you stick with it inevitably there will be a time where even though everything inside of you is saying I'm bored,

I'm agitated,

There's so many other things that I need to be doing,

There's anxiety,

It's going to occur to you to say but what is this really like?

I'm going to stay here and I'm going to sit with this,

Right?

One of my favorite phrases in working with my own reactivity when I'm practicing is to ask myself what's here and can I be with this,

Right?

And I think those words can I be with this invites like an expanding and understanding that we don't have to be contained by what's happening in the space of our experience but instead we have the capacity to widen,

To become larger,

To hold ourselves in those moments of difficulty.

And the more we practice that,

The more when something happens in our life we don't feel like we have to react the way that everything inside of us is telling us to.

We begin to have that choice in what we do with what the world presents us with.

So in this way I want to say yes at least for me and I think this is probably true for anyone that's willing to invest in themselves,

In yourself in this way,

You absolutely will become less reactive.

It doesn't mean and maybe this is what I want to start honing in on,

It doesn't mean that your conditioned responses stop being what they were but that you actually have a choice in what you outwardly express,

Right?

So the example that I always use and I know I've used this example before is yelling at my son.

When I first began practicing and working with meditation and mindfulness,

Yelling just came naturally when I got frustrated,

Agitated or annoyed and then of course after the moment was over there would be the shame of having behaved in a way that didn't feel honorable to my own heart.

It wasn't an expression of love,

It wasn't who I wanted to be.

And I want to say it took me many years of working with and paying attention to the reactivity in my own body to understand how not to yell,

How to make a different choice,

Right?

But here's what I want to offer.

I think what I expected through the practice of meditation was that it would stop bothering me altogether,

That things wouldn't irritate me anymore,

That I would in some way float through the world just a happy feather being blown along by the wind and never having myself be ruffled.

And while I think this is like the ultimate goal,

As a Buddhist practitioner of course I have the hopefulness of fully awakening,

Of enlightening,

Of having the gradual experience of waking up to myself and to reality as it truly is outside of my conditioned mind so that one day that really is the way I live for the rest of my life.

But I think I made the mistake,

And this podcast is all about this offering,

I think I made the mistake of thinking that if that was not how I was in a moment,

Then I wasn't doing it right.

And that's just not the truth,

My loves.

It's not.

And so I wanted to make this episode,

I feel like I needed to make this episode because as we dive into a meditation practice,

The world starts to feel different.

We do wake up to ourselves,

We do start to feel things in a new way,

Moments that would have passed unnoticed become some of the most meaningful moments of our lives.

And when we taste this and we experience it,

It's so fucking hard not to feel like every moment should be that way.

We should be happy and joyous and equanimous in every single moment because fuck,

I've tasted it,

I've felt it and it feels so good.

How do we not crave being that way in every moment?

And the fascinating part of this is that by craving and desiring to be that way every single moment,

We're just perpetuating the same cycle of suffering.

We're just pushing away at ourselves and our lives every moment that it doesn't look like utter perfection.

And this,

This is what we're taught in the Buddhist philosophy is the root of suffering,

Is clinging and craving for everything that we like and rejecting and being angry about everything we don't and being completely ignorant to everything that falls in the middle,

Which inherently has so much beauty of its own.

So what do I mean by all of this?

What's my hope?

What's my offering?

My dears,

My hope is to say that having a human experience is the most beautiful thing we can hope for.

To be human means that we are going to ride the waves.

We're going to go up,

We're going to go down,

We're going to experience joy and ecstatic experiences and we're going to experience sadness and angst and pain.

The moment that we stop feeling the lows is the moment we stop being human.

And so this is what I meant earlier when I said that I think somewhere in there I believed that to be a meditator or to practice enough would mean that I stopped being human.

It would mean that I stopped ever hurting or getting angry or behaving poorly.

And yes my loves,

I still have many moments of behaving ridiculously,

Of making shitty choices,

Of reacting quickly instead of actually creating the space to choose.

And I think that the biggest thing that has changed over my years of practice,

Over my years of being with myself is maybe this year is the first time that I've stopped punishing and criticizing myself for my moments of getting it wrong.

Of fucking course I'm going to get it wrong.

I am still human.

I'm not yet a Buddha.

I'm not yet awake.

So of course I'm going to get it wrong.

And the same is going to be true for you.

So what does it look like instead of punishing or criticizing ourselves in our moments of getting it wrong to actually acknowledge that my dears,

If you are practicing and you are meditating and you are working to be the kind of person you desire to be,

Then check yourself in those moments that you fucked it up.

Because I promise you,

You fucked it up because you're hurting.

You're suffering.

You're in pain and you're reacting habitually.

You're covering your heart instead of opening,

Instead of tenderizing,

Instead of placing your hands at your heart and saying,

Oh my love,

I see you.

You're trying so hard.

I'm so proud of you.

It's a possibility my dears.

We can offer this to ourselves.

And again,

I still get it wrong so many times.

It's a practice.

It's a work in progress.

And just because we're on the journey,

We're walking patiently and with love towards ourselves does not mean that because we're not all the way there yet,

We're doing poorly or we're getting it wrong or we deserve our own harshness or criticism.

I also want to acknowledge that at the beginning of this episode,

I said that I also expected the world to become less itself or life to become less life.

And what I mean by that is this shit is unexpected,

Y'all.

And if COVID has not taught us anything or if it's taught us one thing,

It's that the rug can be ripped out from under us in any given moment.

And if I can offer maybe a silly story of when this really got hardwired for me,

I was on a one day silent meditation retreat with my amazing wife.

And at lunchtime,

We both kind of separately realized that we had forgotten to bring silverware.

And of course in the car,

We only had one package of plasticware.

So we had to share and we kind of had to make this work in a way where we weren't communicating with one another.

So when I noticed that I left it on the hood of the car and walked away and my wife came up and picked it up.

And as she ate her meal,

I was sitting on my yoga mat,

Taking in the incredible beauty of the natural world around me and looking up at the sky with this canopy of trees overhead.

It's almost as if the shape of the trees looked like a set of lungs over top of me.

And knowing that these beautiful plants were creating air,

I almost felt like I was looking at the lungs of the earth and watching her breathe.

This really big experience,

You know,

This wide,

Vast experience of the earth as a whole in her breath.

Well then I turned over on my mat and I looked down at the grass next to my mat and in this completely microscopic way,

I see this adorable little spider,

Probably the smallest spider I've ever seen.

And I'm normally not a fan of spiders,

But this one was small enough that it really couldn't be scary.

And here it is on a single blade of grass.

And it occurred to me that this is this spider's world.

Like if it looked up at me,

I'm going to be the size of the whole fucking earth and my gazing at the trees above me.

And I watched the spider take a single piece of thread and lower herself down towards the ground and pull herself back up.

And she's just sitting on the very tip of this blade of grass when all of a sudden my wife comes over to give me the plastic ware and steps on her.

Oh my God,

Did my heart break?

This little creature that I had just made this magnificent connection with.

And you guys,

I'm sure she was dead.

So as I watched this happen,

It became so obvious to me that that spider did nothing wrong.

It didn't deserve to be stepped on.

But this is what it means to be a creature of the earth.

The world is just an unexpected place.

We experience energy and movement and life in such a way that in a way it is both explicably tied to and completely irrelevant to us,

Or at least the story of us.

And so I say that to say unexpected things are going to happen all the time.

They might be small,

They might be big,

But we live inside of this movie reel story of ourselves that we feel like everything that happens is a direct correlation to what we have done.

This is the,

I think,

False idea of karma.

If I do something bad,

The world is going to punish me.

So when something bad happens in my life,

It's like,

Oh,

It's because I'm bad.

And I hate how many religions are based on this idea of sin and punishment and you get what you deserve,

Right?

Because the truth is that little spider didn't have malintention.

It's living its life to the best that it can to survive,

To reproduce,

And just to be a part of the world in a way that actually does inherently create goodness and create some negativity for the things that it inevitably has to consume.

But it's a part of the whole.

And the same is true of us,

Right?

So the last thing I want anybody to think is that by meditating and practicing and working with mindfulness,

That somehow you're going to have more control over what happens in your life.

And again,

In a way,

Yes,

Because now we have the chance to make intentional choices from thoughtfulness,

From deeply feeling our own experiences,

Instead of making choices rashly from reactivity or from anger or from a lack of thoughtfulness.

So in that way,

Do we have more control?

Yeah,

Of course,

Because we're actually directing the course of our own experience in a way that's intentional and not asleep.

But in the same way,

That does not mean you can control everything that happens around you.

We can't create a tight little box of ourselves so that nothing bad comes in and only good goes out.

The gift of mindfulness and meditation is that we learn to be in love and at peace regardless of what the world throws at us.

And I want to offer an openness and honesty that I am recording this episode today because the last couple of weeks of my life have been hard.

There have been some unexpected experiences that have created deep moments of pain and sadness.

I would say every single day for the past week and a half minus maybe two,

I've had moments of being deeply experiencing tears,

Sadness,

Pain,

The uncertainty of what's to come next.

And the difference that I feel deeply in my body and in my mind and in my experience of my life is that for these last two weeks,

I've still been happy.

There have still been so many moments of goodness and beauty where waking up in the morning,

The sun is shining through the slits and the blinds and I can feel the warmth of her energy where I look up and see my puppies sleeping in their beds and I'm touched deeply by the acknowledgement that I get to care for these creatures where my son pops his head out of his room after a few hours of gaming just to say,

I love you.

There is so much every single day that feels like it's a gift.

It's a reminder of the beauty that's constantly around us.

And so yes,

I want to say these last two weeks have been hard as fuck and simultaneously they've been incredibly beautiful.

I love my life and I wouldn't change a moment of it.

And even in my deepest moments of suffering,

There's this sense of immense gratitude for the capacity to feel this deeply.

There's a quote from one of my favorite authors,

Khalil Gibran that says,

Look again at your sorrow and you'll find that you're weeping for that which has been your delight.

The deeper sorrow carves into your being,

The more joy you can contain.

And that doesn't mean go out and seek sorrow,

My loves,

But it means don't hide from it when it's presented to you either.

So what's our goal?

For me,

I think the new goal is to embrace every single piece of my humanity,

To understand when I feel at equilibrium.

And that doesn't mean that I'm without difficult emotion.

I can be at equilibrium when I'm feeling fear.

I can be at equilibrium when I'm feeling sadness,

Not quite at equilibrium when I'm feeling anger,

But I feel like that's because it's a reactive emotion to something more deep,

Sadness,

Hurt,

Pain.

So what is your equilibrium look like?

What's your star cluster of different equilibrium experiences?

Because sometimes I can be in equilibrium and I have so much energy and so much excitement and I'm here and I'm present and there's a drive,

There's a love.

And sometimes I'm at equilibrium when there's a subtle sadness,

A longing,

An emptiness and everything in between.

So my offering,

My hopefulness here is the goal is not to become perfect.

If that's our goal,

We're going to fail every single time.

So taste your life,

Touch it,

Experience yourself.

What is your experience of being at ease even when things aren't perfect?

What does your goal look like for yourself?

What is your star cluster of equilibrium?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I would love to hear what this idea of equilibrium,

Of non-perfection actually looks like.

Thank you all so much for being here with me today.

Thank you for listening.

Until next time.