The Gifts of Imperfection

“Do and Don’t. The Do column was brimming with words like worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, authenticity, love, belonging, joy, gratitude, and creativity. The Don’t column was dripping with words like perfection, numbing, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, being cool, fitting in, judgment, and scarcity.”

“I learned how to worry more about how I felt and less about “what people might think.” I was setting new boundaries and began to let go of my need to please, perform, and perfect. I started saying no rather than sure”

“courage, compassion, and connection”

“Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply setting their intentions;
Inspired to make new and different choices;
Going. They take action.”

“self-compassion, acceptance, and gratitude”

“unless we’re willing to have an honest conversation about what gets in the way of putting these into practice in our daily lives, we will never change”

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

“Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness. The key word is practice.”

“Trying to co-opt or win over someone like that guy is always a mistake, because it means trading in your authenticity for approval.”

“I can recognize shame when it’s happening. I know my physical symptoms of shame”

“Wholeheartedness requires ordinary courage”

“Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage.”

“Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line.”

“Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.”

“When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.” - Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.”

“One of the greatest (and least discussed) barriers to compassion practice is the fear of setting boundaries and holding people accountable.”

“We’re so exhausted from ranting and raving that we don’t have the energy to develop meaningful consequences and enforce them. This rage-blame-too-tired-and-busy-to-follow-through mind-set is why we’re so heavy on self-righteous anger and so low on compassion.”

“the connectedness we experience in our relationships impacts the way our brain develops and performs”

“In our technology-crazed world, we’ve confused being communicative with feeling connected. ”

“Somehow we’ve come to equate success with not needing anyone. ” - the myth of self sufficiency

“Until we can receive with an open heart, we are never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.”

“If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.”

“The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute.”

“love is the mirror image of shame”

“Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

“Love belongs with belonging.”

“Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves”

“Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

LOVE, BELONGING, BEING ENOUGH

“If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way—especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.”

“Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough. If we want to develop shame resilience—the ability to recognize shame and move through it ”

“The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.”

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

“the fear of being perceived as unworthy is enough to force us to silence our stories”
“Guilt = I did something bad.
Shame = I am bad.”

“Shame resilience”

“1.Who do you become when you’re backed into that shame corner?
2.How do you protect yourself?
3.Who do you call to work through the mean-nasties or the cry-n-hides or the people-pleasing?
4.What’s the most courageous thing you could do for yourself when you feel small and hurt?”

THE THINGS THAT
GET IN THE WAY

“authenticity is not something we have or don’t have. It’s a practice—a conscious choice of how we want to live.”

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.”

“Most of us have shame triggers around being perceived as self-indulgent or self-focused. We don’t want our authenticity to be perceived as selfish or narcissistic.”

“choosing being real over being liked is all about playing it unsafe. It means stepping out of our comfort zone.”

“Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand on your sacred ground.”

Guidepost 1: Cultivating Authenticity
Letting Go of What People Think

“shame is the birthplace of perfectionism”

“when we don’t claim shame, it claims us. And one of the ways it sneaks into our lives is through perfectionism.”

“perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life-paralysis.”

“Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because there is no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Additionally, perfectionism is more about perception—we want to be perceived as”

“To overcome perfectionism, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities to the universal experiences of shame, judgment, and blame”

“self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness”

“things that get in the way (self-judgment, isolation, and overidentification”

Guidepost 2: Cultivating Self-Compassion Letting Go of Perfectionism

Guidepost 3: Cultivating a Resilient Spirit Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness

“here are five of the most common factors of resilient people:
They are resourceful and have good problem-solving skills.
They are more likely to seek help.
They hold the belief that they can do something that will help them to manage their feelings and to cope.
They have social support available to them.
They are connected with others, such as family or friends”

“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.”

“hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Emotions play a supporting role, but hope is really a thought process”

“Hope is learned! Snyder suggests that we learn hopeful, goal-directed thinking in the context of other people.”

“Tolerance for disappointment, determination, and a belief in self are the heart of hope.”

“If we question our need for power, think about this: How do you feel when you believe that you are powerless to change something in your life?”

“If we want to cultivate a resilient spirit and stop falling prey to comparing our ordinary lives with manufactured images, we need to know how to reality-check what we see.”

“practicing critical awareness is actually one of the four elements of shame resilience”

“everyone numbs and takes the edge off and that addiction is about engaging in these behaviors compulsively and chronically.”

“When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. In fact, addiction research shows us that an intensely positive experience is as likely to cause relapse as an intensely painful experience.”

“recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude, and grace”

“The only experience that seems broad and fierce enough to combat a list like that is the belief that we’re all in this together and that something greater than us has the capacity to bring love and compassion into our lives.”

“For me, spirituality is about connecting with God, and I do that most often through nature, community, and music. We all have to define spirituality in a way that inspires us.”

“Without purpose, meaning, and perspective, it is easy to lose hope, numb our emotions, or become overwhelmed by our circumstances. We feel reduced, less capable, and lost in the face of struggle. The heart of spirituality is connection.”

“A = Have I been Abstinent today? (However you define that—I find it a little more challenging when it comes to things like food, work, and the computer.)

E = Have I Exercised today?

I = What have I done for myself today?

O = What have I done for Others today?

U = Am I holding on to Unexpressed emotions today?

Y = Yeah! What is something good that’s happened today?”

Guidepost 4: Cultivating Gratitude and Joy Letting Go of Scarcity and the Fear of Dark

“in order to feel a true sense of belonging, I need to bring the real me to the table and that I can only do that if I’m practicing self-love”

“When the Wholehearted talk about gratitude, there are a whole bunch of verbs involved. It seems that gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works—it’s not alive.”

“Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness. Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you’re lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.”

“Happiness is tied to circumstance and joyfulness is tied to spirit and gratitude.”

“in addition to creating happiness in our lives, I’ve learned that we need to cultivate the spiritual practices that lead to joyfulness, especially gratitude”

“Most of us have experienced being on the edge of joy only to be overcome by vulnerability and thrown into fear. Until we can tolerate vulnerability and transform it into gratitude, intense feelings of love will often bring up the fear of loss.”

“we’re starving from a lack of gratitude. Lynne says that addressing scarcity doesn’t mean searching for abundance but rather choosing a mind-set of sufficiency” - always being in the I don’t have enough of … mindset

Guidepost 5: Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith
Letting Go of the Need For Certainty

“the importance of intuition and faith as key patterns in Wholehearted living”

“what silences our intuitive voice is our need for certainty. Most of us are not very good at not knowing”

“Intuition is not a single way of knowing—it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason.”

“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”

“Faith is essential when we decide to live and love with our whole hearts in a world where most of us want assurances before we risk being vulnerable and getting hurt. To say, “I’m going to engage Wholeheartedly in my life” requires believing without seeing.”

Guidepost 6: Cultivating Creativity
Letting Go of Comparison

“The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of “fit in and stand out!” It’s not cultivate self-acceptance, belonging, and authenticity; it’s be just like everyone else, but better.”

“If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing—it doesn’t matter. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning.”

“Letting go of comparison is not a to-do list item. For most of us, it’s something that requires constant awareness.”

“Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.”

“it’s so important to find and be a part of a community of like-spirited people who share your beliefs about creativity.”

Guidepost 7: Cultivating Play and Rest
Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth

“It’s play! A critically important component of Wholehearted living is play!”

“play shapes our brain, helps us foster empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups, and is at the core of creativity and innovation.”

“play is apparently purposeless”

“we base our worthiness on our level of productivity—spending time doing purposeless activities is rare”

“true play that comes from our own inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting joy and satisfaction in our work”

“insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression”

“If we want to live a Wholehearted life, we have to become intentional about cultivating sleep and play, and about letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.”

“make a list of the specific conditions that are in place when everything feels good in your life. Then check that list against your to-do list and your to-accomplish list. It might surprise you”

Guidepost 8: Cultivating Calm and Stillness Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle

“I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity”

“It’s extremely effective to identify the emotions that are the most likely to spark your reactivity and then practice non-reactive responses.”

“breathing is the best place to start. Just taking a breath before I respond slows me down and immediately starts spreading calm”

“Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.”

Guidepost 9: Cultivating Meaningful Work Letting Go of Self-Doubt and “Supposed To”

“God lives within us, not above us. Sharing our gifts and talents with the world is the most powerful source of connection with God.”

“To overcome self-doubt and “supposed to,” we have to start owning the messages. What makes us afraid? What’s on our “supposed to” list? Who says? Why?”

“Overcoming self-doubt is all about believing we’re enough and letting go of what the world says we’re supposed to be and supposed to call ourselves.”

“Make a list of the work that inspires you. Don’t be practical. Don’t think about making a living; think about doing something you love.”

Guidepost 10: Cultivating Laughter, Song and Dance Letting Go of Being Cool and “Always in Control”

“collective ecstasy”

“Laughter, song, and dance create emotional and spiritual connection; they remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration, or healing: We are not alone.”

“Shame resilience requires laughter. ”

“music reaches out and offers us connection—something we really can’t live without”

“Until we teach our children that they need to be concerned with how they look and with what other people think, they dance. They even dance naked. Not always gracefully or with the beat, but always with joy and pleasure.”

“There are many shame triggers around the vulnerability of laughing, song, and dance. The list includes the fear of being perceived as awkward, goofy, silly, spastic, uncool, out of control, immature, stupid, and foolish.”

“We hustle for our worthiness by slipping on the emotional and behavioral straitjacket of cool and posturing as the tragically hip and the terminally “better than.” Being “in control” isn’t always about the desire to manipulate situations, but often it’s about the need to manage perception. We want to be able to control what other people think about us so that we can feel good enough.”

“When we don’t give ourselves permission to be free, we rarely tolerate that freedom in others. We put them down, make fun of them, ridicule their behaviors, and sometimes shame them.”

“Dare to be goofy.”

“The truth is that meaningful change is a process. It can be uncomfortable and is often risky, especially when we’re talking about embracing our imperfections, cultivating authenticity, and looking the world in the eye and saying, “I am enough.”

“Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people—including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that’s how I feel most of the time … brave, afraid, and very, very alive.”