Perfectionism scramble (with a side order paradox)

I recently confessed that sometimes I get scared of not being perfect enough, but I’m just as scared of being too perfect. For me, polar opposite fears are a good indication that something unconscious is running the show. (Why hello there, ego!) My Dance of Shiva practice is confusing the hell out of me helping me clarify this nonsensical pattern.

I’ve been doing the Dance daily for a couple of months now. And I love it for both the epiphanies and the sense of ritual. (Okay, ritual schmitual, I’m getting to be an epiphany addict.) I still have a steady stream of questions about the how and the why of it all, so if you’re still confused, you’re not alone. I’m pretty obsessed with learning more about how it works. I was reading an old blog post about finding the challenge (remember, the challenge is key) and I read this bit that triggered a little something in me.

You’re not supposed to be able to combine arms and legs yet. 
After just a couple months? That’s crazy talk.

 Oh no! Back to that part about how I’ve only been doing it for a couple of months. Immediately after reading this statement I thought, ewww, how annoying of me. I am combining arms and legs. This is terrible!  Who do I think I am? And then: I must be missing something. I’m probably missing the whole point. I’m clearly oversimplifying or cheating or something. 

At which point all of these scrambled neural pathways in my brain are so tangled I can barely think straight. Funny idiom, thinking straight, huh? It feels like my brain is firing in a new direction and for a minute here it doesn’t seem to be firing at all because I’m so utterly flummoxed. And I’m apparently pretty annoyed with myself for being too good at the Dance. Too perfect. I can’t let anyone find out about this. All of the Shivanauts will hate me. (*She typed neurotically just before hitting publish.*)

Hmmm. Interesting fear, considering yoga is pretty much all about love, huh?

Then I started wondering why I might be getting it earlier than expected. I’ve always loved sports that push both my body and my brain. Here’s where you can bust out laughing because the first such sport I’ll mention is, wait for it, cheerleading.

The brainy part of cheer had to do with learning a dance routine that gave my brain something to think about while my body was moving, which makes perfect sense to me in light of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory about flow. I felt the same way about kickboxing; remembering the sequence of moves would keep my brain from complaining about the pain in my shin as my leg made contact with the bag. And it’s part of why I love tennis. And now the Dance. 

Oh good, so now I kind of have an excuse for learning the Dance ahead of schedule and I can be all self-deprecating and humble so that no one thinks I’m annoying for being too good too soon. Right. Except making excuses to diminish my progress isn’t such a happy pattern.

But the cool thing is noticing how I can recognize patterns that aren’t serving me or fears that create lose-lose situations: Being scared of polar opposites is kind of a red flag. I’m scared of not being perfect enough and I’m scared of being too perfect, and that just doesn’t fly. As soon as I become aware of both fears, the emotional charge kind of plummets. Once again, I can identify this as a gift from my cuddly reptilian brain.

The kicker is that learning the Dance, or doing it “right,” is actually all wrong. Because the more confused I am, the more neural pathways my brain is creating. So if I’m getting the Dance, I’m not getting the epiphanies. Which kinda means that all of the Shivanauts who are struggling to combine arms and legs are actually more successful with their practice than I am. Oh, hahaha. This is too much. I could whip us around in a few more spirals of paradox if I tried, but I think that’s plenty for now.