Revisiting Ease: What it Means to Lean into Perfectly Imperfect

“Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”
― Brené Brown

It’s the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend – this day always feels like extra space and time to me, it’s after the hustle and bustle of the big feast (which was oh so good this year albeit quieter with only one of our three sons at home) and then the energy of Black Friday. It’s a bit like gaining an hour at the beginning of Daylight Savings time. I can give myself permission to sit back, do a puzzle, read a book, play a game. It doesn’t have to be go, go, go on this day. It feels like ease to me and coincidentally this is my word of the year (see my January blog post). I was reminded of this word, ease, during my morning yoga class last week when the teacher brought up effort and ease. It got me thinking of how I’ve done with living into ease this year. I have to say it hasn’t come easily. 😀 In the balance of effort and ease, I’ve spent much more time and energy on effort than I have ease, there has not been much balance at all. There’s always one more thing on the to-do list, one more email to write, one more item to pick up at the store, one more meal to cook, one more problem to solve. ​

More, more, more, faster, faster, faster. That’s the soup I’m swimming in lately. So not very easeful when I think about it. Not easeful at all in fact.
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And yet, there have been lots of moments of ease, it is possible for me when I choose it. I often forget to choose it, it’s not my habit. Just this morning I woke up and instead of hopping out of bed to get the day going, I got out my book and started reading. What a luxury it is to read in the morning before I get up – I only do it rarely and this weekend I’ve done it three days in a row! And it just so happened that the book I’m reading, the TransformAble December book of the month, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, describes the trap of speed that’s running amok in our culture right now. “As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at super-human speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster.” Wow, do I get caught in this trap a lot! And it's all wrapped up in the striving, proving habit of mine. That part of me that really, really wants to be perfect. 'Perfect,' it's the holy grail of living right?! That's what my judge tells me. In fact, she goes farther, she waxes poetic on all the ways I won't survive if I'm not perfect. When it's actually the opposite, the only way that I do live and thrive (not just survive) is by stepping into the ease of perfectly imperfect.

Almost 6 years ago I vacationed in Kauai with a stress fracture in my hip. The perfect getaway hiking trip to explore the beauty of the island 22 years after our honeymoon with our dear friends became something else for me because I not only could not hike but also was on crutches. Oof, it was NOT perfect to say the least. And yet, it quickly became the perfectly imperfect trip! In fact, this trip was one of the most meaningful and wonderful trips I've ever had because I was on crutches. Midway through the trip after lots of reading and sitting in the sun I Googled "healing and Kauai" to schedule myself a massage or something similar while the others hiked. I came upon Touch Kauai and scheduled my healing journey with Katharina. We spent a whole day exploring the beauty of Kauai along with my old habits and contracts that were keeping me on the fast track to the impossible destination of perfection. At one point we visited a Hindu monastery. As we gazed upon the beauty of the river, Katharina asked me to really look at the natural beauty, to see all of it, not just the perfection but the flaws, the perfectly imperfectness of it. This shifted me in a profound way. The beauty and richness is not in the perfection but instead in the flaws. In our humanity, we too are most beautiful in our wholeness. Not in just the parts that "fit" or "look right" - in all of it, all of us. This is the ease of perfectly imperfect. All is welcome, all is acceptable, all is well. When I see this in nature and myself I can see it in others. It's a practice and it's one I sometimes forget. And with a balance of ease and effort I can choose to slow down and just be. This feels like ease as we enter into a busy holiday season. Looking for ease and wholeness, let's connect.