Why We Want To Be Perfect | Amber Hawken Dip. Mindfulness CBT

I’m going to talk about something very fucking vital to our joy and sense of freedom in life.

When you chase enlightenment, per se, you quietly grow a deep sense of loneliness and inadequacy as the human being you are right now.

Let’s place this in relevant social media context.

It’s easy to post beautiful images with the perfect lighting dripping across the waves of our body (‘art’, we call it), followed by a quote we read (or googled) from the Bhagavad Gita. It’s easy, and that’s okay, there’s nothing at all wrong with this.

But ease in this sense is a suffocation, distraction and truly, turning away from what’s much deeper and vaster in this world. Ourselves.

What is far more difficult (and paradoxically freeing) that many of us pull back from as a reflex to avoid discomfort, is opening to the very uncomfortable parts of being a human. Our messy, dark, chaotic, childish, insecure, fear ridden, self centred, controlling, darkness. We want to get away from ourselves and try to ‘transcend’ the parts of ourselves we need to love and embrace.

What takes real courage is not a yoga teacher training, TD meditations or plant medicine, no. It’s getting close and intimate with our personal human history, our shadow sides and the imperfections we’d rather filter away through our curated artsy photography accounts and oh so delightful seductive silhouettes in rainforests because – #pachamama.

Take this one in; when the focus is to “transcend”, to have “no mind”, to “be free” before we are willing to get well acquainted with the unconscious version of self that we hide with our conscious projection (the great and together person we are to the world), we are skipping a step. Bypassing.

To not be intimate with our humanness—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and it’s core fears—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present in our world underneath the pretty photos and facades.

Whatever you don’t want to be, that’s what needs to be faced front on, open hearted.

This work is rough as fuck. It’s frustrating. It’s fear ridden, anxiety inducing, and it’s so damn uncomfortable because it requires falling apart and dying over and over again. It’s rejection, abandonment, shutting down, insecurity and being trapped, embraced in full force to be felt, experienced and THEN, and only then, transcended.

Are we really ignorant enough to believe that the mind is wrong? It’s our greatest gift if we use it well, and our humanness is not something to be “transcended”, our rejection of it is.
The thing is, it’s not the people around us we are afraid to be fully seen by. No. It feels that way, yes, but truly, we don’t so much want to hide the parts of ourselves we have rejected from the world, as much as we want to deny to ourselves that they exist in the first place. We’re most afraid of our own rejection, and of course this compensation and fear of figuring out we are in fact, a glorious human fucking mess, spills out into the world as the construct of ‘me’. So pretty. So perfect. So enlightened.

The single most potent catalyst for shame is rejection of our darkness. The more enlightened we desire to be the more we can be damn fucking sure we are headed in the opposite direction of freedom.
Btw, what I say to you, I say to me. My life is this current lesson.

Tallyho,