Striving for perfection is harming your wellbeing.

As you try to line everything up like 6 layers of Emmental that you insist on seeing through you are sanitising your life.  Manicuring it and moulding it to unsee wobbles, challenges and imperfections.  This is a hugely stressful way to live.  Whilst it may give a sense of control, at what cost? Life is not meant to be neat.  The whole point is to flow and change, in ways that cannot be predicted by graphs or algorithms.  This constant smoothing, curating and controlling doesn’t create safety. It creates strain. It asks your nervous system to stay permanently on guard, and your soul to stay permanently quiet.

It is no surprise that fashion and interior colour and style trends are towards greys and neutrals.  It is appealing to the worn out nervous systems of life manicurists.  Colour, differentiation and individualism is what we crave deep down though.  Control and elimination of difference are skin deep.  Your heart and soul are being smothered.  You feel this as a ripping and tearing deep inside as a hole emerges and gets bigger and bigger.  A void of need. That needs to be expressed and move through you on a mental, physical, emotional and energetic level. Not as a neat curated version of you but raw and dirty.  Splashes of colour, snot and tears, talking about what really matters to you and how you have had hope squashed.  Of course this feels frightening. We’ve been taught that mess is dangerous, that emotion is indulgent, that order is virtue.

Let yourself go, move into being you.  

• Sing like no one is listening.

• Dance like no one is watching

• Create like the end result isn’t important.

• Gather memories and interesting things around you.  

Let nature in to work its wonders.

Nature is not dirty or to be feared, it is part of you and you are part of it.  A mutual entwinement.  Your food consists of earth, air, water and fire (sun).  Your home consists of these same elements and so do you.

Fire is the sun, your inner spark and the volcanic core of earth.  Your driving force, your willpower, your passions and desires.

Air is the wind, the clouds, thoughts and beliefs.  How you communicate and how you stop yourself.

Earth is the resource base, the stability and the sense of safety and belonging that you so desperately want.  The soil. The fungi, the unseen network communicating all.

Water is the flow but also the erosion.  Your fears and your feelings.  From white water rafting to stagnant pools and placid lakes.

Energy flows between them, connecting, carrying the changes forward.  Whilst we can draw on our past experiences, change flows inexorably forward, never backward.  Change is strong.  Change is a battering ram charging into your careful selection of careful protection.  Change will win so better to unblock the dams of perfectionism and let yourself flow and convert the control to a curiosity of what might come next.  Next second. Next hour, Next day etc.

Let go, ruffle your feathers and welcome imperfection into your life.  The unpretty, the quirky, the different and allow yourself to explore the parts of yourself which have been hidden away.  Your mind body and soul will thank you for it.  The struggle and the internal divide you sense inside will fill and morph into a receptacle for your explorations and development and a profound sense of ease and contentment.

Nature, dirt and deformity are not your enemy, they are your transformation partner. 

The Japanese, who have an ancient tradition of zen calmness have a concept called Wabi Sabi.  In brief it is the idea that beauty is in the imperfections not the perfections.  We love the brightly coloured Autumn leaf because its colours are blotchy and change from hour to hour.  The willow branch is beautiful because it is not straight or even.   The same principles can be brought into interiors and your own life.  When we appreciate and accept imperfection beauty is all around us and we can relax and enjoy being part of it rather than be caught up in trying to make it perfect.

I live in the countryside and to get to me you drive on a country road with no street lights and cross a gravel track.   There have been many an occasion where someone arranges to collect an item from us and doesn’t turn up.  I wonder if they are afraid of the imperfect countryside?   It’s dirt, its unpredictability and its constant change.   That it is an affront to their controlled environment they have curated.  Someone once asked how we see the way when we drive at night.  We had to hold in the laugh as we responded - we use our car’s headlights.   They seemed to think you needed streetlights to see the way.   If this applies to you perhaps you are missing out on a huge part of the world.   The expanse of the stars in the sky.    The ranges of hills or mountains receding into the distance.   The panoramas which show you how insignificant you are yet also make you feel held and that you belong here as one of earth’s creatures.

I invite you to go outside on a clear night, preferably somewhere with low or no light pollution.   Andalucia is great for this….  Look at the sky and feel your cares and worries melt away.   You may see a shooting star - they are surprisingly common or even the Aurora Borealis.  Once a thing only seen in the Arctic Circle or nearby the light show is coming a long way South at present.

Get dirty once in a while.   Walk on the bare earth, look at the food that nature could give you.  You can forage too but only if you know what you are doing.  Noticing the abundance of fruit, berries, leaves and more is enough to connect to the earth and all it provides.   See how the berries vary in size and shape.  The fruit matures at different rates and is available only in season.   More things which are not perfect and on demand.

This loosening up of perfection releases tension within you.  As you relax it becomes easier to release ideas, people and situations which are not useful for you.  From a position of release you attract more of what you wish to receive.   The contentment, the sense of fulfillment, things things which come in many forms and which cannot be bought.

This loosening of perfection doesn’t make life fall apart. It makes it inhabitable. Breath returns. Shoulders drop. Choice widens.