Letting go of needing things to turn out 'right'

Over the last few months my partner and I have been going through what most people would call a 'rocky patch'. We've become really reactive to each other and have both said and done many hurtful things. Things are definitely not 'right' between us. There's a lot of resentment and anger and we're finding it hard to forgive.

Because I'm the sort of person who likes things to be just so, I'm having a hard time accepting this 'not rightness'. I feel that I need to do something to change the situation, or to change him, or to change myself. I struggle with this feeling of uncertainty and transition and I feel that if I can't make things 'right', right now, then I might as well give up, run away.

But what I'm realising is that it is often in these times of chaos, or pain and disillusionment, that real transformation occurs. As Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön advises, when things fall apart, when we cannot get a handle on anything anymore, when we lose all control, then an opportunity is created to reconstruct things in a new way.

It's the same when our plans don't turn out the way we want them to. Here we can either struggle and moan, fixating on our idea of how things 'should' be, or we can let go and allow this new set of circumstances to reveal itself to us. Perhaps it is life's gift; even if it is a challenge it could still provide an opportunity for us to look at ourselves differently, to expand our idea of ourselves or the world around us. It's all about perspective, of acknowledging that just because life doesn't feel 'right' (according to our limited idea of what right is) doesn't mean that life isn't in fact perfect as it is. 

Life's perfection is chaotic and it's just this quality that makes it so magically synchronistic and replete with potential. We can never predict or control it, and if we try that's when things start to go wrong. When we resist life it starts to become deformed, things don't flow so smoothly anymore, the wheels and cogs of life become snagged on our rigidity, our refusal to surrender to it's infinite possibilities. 

Learning to let go of the need for things to turn out 'right' seems at first like a hard task. But if we look at it another way we can see that holding on takes a lot of energy. Letting go just means relaxing, falling back into the arms of life, trusting that all will be well. When we see it in this way letting go becomes a simpler way of living. We don't have to worry so much anymore. As Eckhart Tolle advises, we can simply 'allow things to be as they are'. This is true freedom.

Letting go of being perfect

In the past I was one of those people who's addicted to self-help books. Why? Because I've always felt there was something wrong with me that I had to fix, something that I could improve about myself. I felt that until I was perfect I was not worthy of love.

In my work especially I felt I needed things to be just so... Even when I did my best I always felt that I could have somehow done better, that the work I produced was somehow flawed. If someone gave me negative feedback it would send me into a tail spin!

This way of looking at myself meant that for a long time I seemed to attract partners who reflected back my need for perfection. They were always offering suggestions on how I could correct this or that fault, or how I could improve myself. On the other hand, because I had such high expectations of myself I also demanded perfection in them. Needless to say we made one another pretty unhappy!

It took me a long time to realise that achieving perfection is both impossible and undesirable, not to mention that in striving for it we lead ourselves into all manner of difficulties along the way. By expecting perfection of ourselves we set ourselves up to fail over and over and over again, at least in our own eyes. Other people may be impressed by our work, they may love us dearly despite all our flaws but this is never enough. We never believe in their love or praise because in terms of our own aims we have fallen far short.

Letting go of the need to be perfect is difficult, though I've found along the way that a few things can help us along.

Firstly, look to nature; nature is replete with desperately beautiful things that are deeply flawed if looked at from the perspective of conventional beauty. Nature is messy, smelly and seemingly disorganised but somehow harmonious. When we look at our own lives we can see many parallels here; we begin to appreciate that it is our 'imperfections' that make us uniquely, beautifully, who we are.

Secondly, daily meditation helps us to become mindful of our thoughts so that instead of working towards perfection we instead start to notice the kind of thoughts and actions that work for us and those that don't. For example we may notice that drinking a lot of alcohol when we're depressed simply makes us more depressed, so we stop doing that so often. We don't stop because we want to be a better person or to live up to some ideal, we stop simply because we can see clearly that it doesn't work for us.

We no longer struggle to change, we simply let go of what no longer serves us.