Embracing Imperfection - Series 2.

I have blogged about Embracing Imperfection before. This is the 2nd series in that same context.

I guess its one of my most challenging inner works, simply because its never done. 

I accept one thing, and there are a five new situations or complexities which I struggle to accept...

So, I keep going back to the practice of Mindfulness and Simplicity.

This whole post about Embracing Imperfection and working with the complexities of Life is by Ines Freedmen, who has been a Vipassana Meditation teacher from 1985. It is from a talk in an ongoing meditation class. She is currently the Director at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

I hope you read it, maybe see a glimmer of understanding and insight and apply it to your own complexities of Life.

"Good morning.

What I want to talk about this morning is the idea of embracing imperfection. 

There’s a Japanese philosophy called, “Wabi-sabi,” which is a philosophy that takes into account and appreciates the complexities of life, and at the same time values simplicity. 

It acknowledges and appreciates three qualities in life: that everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. Instead of struggling with these realities it looks to be at peace with them. In other words, saying it is, is, nothing lasts, nothing’s finished, and nothing’s perfect, including ourselves. 

Life rarely works the way we want it to all the time.

This whole idea is very close to the Buddhist concept of dukkha, dukkha, 

The First Noble Truth that there is dukkha in life. 

Dukkha’s often translated as suffering but it refers to the whole range of experience, from the very minor annoyances, discomforts, things that aren’t quite just the way we want them; to the major sufferings in life of: grief, loss, death, illness. 

The Buddha spoke of three kinds of dukkha. The first one is dukkha dukkha, which is pain, the pains we get in life. You fall down or hurt yourself, ‘it hurts,’ the emotional pains, all the very obvious, very blatant pains that we have in life.

The second kind of dukkha is the oppressing quality of the continuous maintenance of life of: you have to get up in the morning, and you make breakfast, you clean up the kitchen, you go to work, you have to tune up your car regularly, your clothes wear out, you clean your house really well and it’s all down hill from there. 

That’s the continuous maintenance.

I think of it as the dukkha of the Golden Gate Bridge: they start painting it and by the time they finish they have to start all over again. It’s this continuous cycle of: ‘it’s never done, never done.’

The third form of dukkha is the dukkha of change: that no matter how happy we are, how good things are in our life, it doesn’t last. Maybe we’re really very disciplined in our lives, and we’ve really worked hard at making our lives just the way we want them. We have a really great relationship, we’ve got a really nice home, we’ve got work we love; we do all these things, and we’ve got almost everything, but something happens. 

We strain our ankle, or something happens at work and this big project falls through. 

As Gilda Radner said, “it’s always something. If it isn’t one thing—it’s another!” And that’s the nature of life. 

You can’t just rest, ‘here it is, I’ve got it down, here it is.’

It’s always changing.

All three forms of Dukkha happen in meditation. How many of you have never had pain in meditation? 

There’s nothing more obvious about the maintenance than when you sit down each day: ‘got to watch the breath again,’ especially if you’re not settled. 

You have to start all over, get settled. The dukkha of change, of impermanence, even in mediation: you get really settled, you get really peaceful, feeling really wonderful; and that changes too, that goes away. 

So, the three forms of dukkha apply in all levels of life.

We all have some limitations, some areas in our personality that we may think aren’t quite the way we want them. We all have unfinished business in our lives. So, how do we deal with these things? Do we change ourselves?

In Buddhism, some of the deepest concepts of Buddhism have the quality of paradox. 

I think Suzuki Roshi said it really well when he said that we’re all perfect just as we are, but there is always room for improvement. This is really what the practice addresses: both of those things at the same time.

We have to accept ourselves and we have to make choices to improve ourselves.

So that’s a huge part of the transformation, but that’s not all we have to do. 

For instance, what happens when we become mindful, like, here you are getting angry at your spouse again over the fact that they didn’t do the dishes when they said they were going to do them. You’re just about to be a little bit irritable to them, but mindfulness kicks in and we have that moment where we can make a choice. The anger may still be there, but we have a choice to restrain ourselves from snapping at them. And let’s say we do snap at them. Then we have the choice of whether we’re going to reproach ourselves or accept ourselves. 

Choice is always there at any given moment.

Acknowledging our imperfections, which is what making mistakes is, right? 

This is the same quality, acknowledging that we may not do things the best way possible. Knowing and accepting that we do that is what allows us to learn how to do it better. 

It’s what allows us to succeed in whatever we’re doing because we can see honestly what’s going on instead of trying to push away: “I’m not good at that,” and trying to hide it. 

A huge part of the practice is becoming transparent, transparent to ourselves and transparent to others.

So in this practice what we do, we turn towards our imperfections, we turn towards our difficulties instead of trying to fix them, trying to get them to go away; and we get to know them. 

It doesn’t mean that that’s what we do all the time. Sometimes things are so difficult that we have to approach it just a little at a time. That’s okay. We have limits. 

It may be a huge fear and all we can do is just tap it. ‘Oh, that’s enough.’ It’s okay to back away, to have compassion for our suffering.

The last thing I want to say is that the Buddhist path really comes into fruition not when we get what we want, but when we don’t get what we want. 

That’s really where our growth flowers, when we face difficulties without adding to them with our attitude, without making difficulties a problem. If we value the difficult, every moment in our life matters. 

Every moment in our life is valuable. There aren’t any moments that we wish weren’t there if we turn towards the challenging moments.

In that sense, I‘d like to encourage you to embrace imperfection: to allow impermanence, incompleteness and imperfection, to let those be your practice.

Thank you."