Imperfection

Great Spirit please accept my shortcomings as an offering.
That I may know humility in grace and grace in humility.
To be at peace with unrest and strive patiently ever toward you.
To recognize the perfection in imperfection which allows for us to cultivate love under all conditions.
With love I share these stories from I to you.
I am you and you are I
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After a month living for a month at an ashram, striving for purity, eating less, sleeping less, practicing endlessly hoping to attain further liberation......................I began to feel trapped.
Trapped by the very things that would supposedly liberate me I forgot to watch my mind closely. I envisioned myself as a lame horse being dragged along miles of breathing and volumes of mantra meditation. Would I ever get it? The stories of great yogis were filling my head. The climb seemed insurmountable. And the world was thick with suffering, being consumed, spirits of the people pushed down. There was a feeling of urgency. To wake up now, to let go of attachment, to break through all inertia. To not care about the cold or heat, fatigue, to endure endlessly in the necessary work.

A quiet mantra: "Come on, come on, get up." I was too busy to hear the cracks from my whip on my back . Then after raising the bar one more time beyond reach, I snapped. In flooded all the masochism and self-loathing from past years, confusion, oppression, helplessness. I thought that these thought patterns had left my mind, vanished like vapor in the light of positivity. Turns out I had merely closed the door to that mansion of struggle, rendered the patterns dormant.

When I recovered my mentor told me I needed to take a break. Wisely I was advised to let go for a week and to only practice minimally. Soon after, I realized I was blinded, that some self destructive force under the label of spiritual perfection had walked into my mind and opened that door. I was not watching my thoughts, taking the time to feel their resonance and recognize the return an old subtle mantra of the West:

My friend and I were talking of it. She felt incapable for no reason and could not see her own shining character. I saw her as such a light of love, I wondered what could possibly be playing in her head to make her not see.

This mantra is "I’m not good enough."
Can you hear it? It’s quiet but pervasive in this culture. A culture of competition, of somebodies and nobodies, we’re taught even good isn’t good enough. We are NEVER doing enough, rich enough or free enough. Yes, never even spiritual enough. A mind saturated with this sensibility must have little room for compassion and self nurturing. Impatiently we become paralyzed by ideals instead of inspired.

But what is this perfection we are trying to obtain? Looking around at God’s perfect world, it seems pretty imperfect. It comes out of balance, wails in injury, becomes diseased, yields confusing creatures such as us. It’s almost as if we cannot be lifted from our paradoxical nature, sometimes we hurt by trying to help, are blinded by our successes and shown clarity in the depths of failure. Perfectly imperfect and always imperfectly perfect in our strivings. It is as if the arrow of will spirals in toward the goal, it never hits the mark yet it also never misses.

Perhaps if we were perfect we would not need God. There would be no entrance for the miraculous to move through. God comes through the cracks. Where would the spirit move up through if part of us was not empty, the heart yearning for liberation?

I once attended a dance at the Center for Alchemical Studies near New Paltz. Late in the night a very cripple woman came to the dance floor. I was told she was once a great dancer who two years previously had encountered a bad accident. She spent those two years undergoing physical therapy to walk if only minimally and regain some control of her limbs. She refused to be told not dance, practicing constantly. With the aid of her friend she performed for us. I watched her arm ward off the near constant shaking and with tremendous effort move into grace. Every micro-motion, a battle against circumstance fought with patience and courage. There were times where she would jerk and wobble, nearly falling. And yet the power unleashed by one graceful movement of that arm though space was enough to cause myself to tremble, holding my breath, was somehow greater than a whole league of perfect ballerinas floating along the stage .

I’d like to share a poem written by one of my teachers, Rashani, who found me at the right time in Kona Hawaii :

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.