Tiny Buddha's guide to loving yourself

building work going on outside, and concentration was nigh on impossible. As a result, our tutor added 10 percent onto everyone's scores to make up for the disruption. What did I get? One hundred and ten percent. And what was my first thought? “Hmm, I could've done better. And anyway, it was so easy.”

Out of the 140 other kids in the class, how many others got 110 percent? You guessed it—it was just me. This is it, you see, the madness of perfection: it isn't even satisfied with perfection.

Another example: a couple years later, I planned, cooked for, and led the ceremony for my own wedding. The day went smoothly. Many people said it was the most special, personal wedding they had ever attended. But I felt disappointed, in floods of tears at the minor imperfections, which no one but me had noticed. And despite having lost thirty pounds and being on the verge of being underweight, I still felt fat.

What is tragic is that I know I am not alone in this.

I had been hypnotized by the madness of the perfection-focused culture we inhabit, where even the most beautiful of bodies are airbrushed, and talented voices are digitally enhanced to reach ever-new heights of perfection. We are shown the sublime, and have been acculturated to search for the flaw.

No wonder we always feel ourselves falling short.

It seems that everything is now within the sphere of the perfection virus, not just our school test scores, but our bodies, our homes, our weddings, our parenting, our intimate relationships. We are expected, according to conventional “wisdom,” to “give 110 percent”—all the time. “Failure is not an option,” we are chided. “You can always do better, be happier, be richer, look younger . . .” I bet you recognize this?

Even those of us who like to believe that we perch outside this mainstream hysteria are often pulled in by the books of self-help gurus and spiritual guides demanding that we be more mindful, more patient, richer, less worldly. Everywhere the message is the same: You are not good enough the way you are. You. Must. Try. Harder.

We buy this, right? We take these messages into our hearts and stab ourselves in the back with them every day. But at some point every perfectionist discovers that even 110 percent isn't enough.

We find ourselves trapped in the perfection spiral: creatively blocked, self-loathing, controlling, and alone. And we see that perfection is not an absolute, but always shifting, unreachable, indefinable— and outside our grasp.

Perfectionism is our denial of two very basic truths of existence: we are not perfect; and we are not, ultimately, in control. When we absorb the law of perfection, we are infected with the virus of self-doubt, which eats away at every area of our lives. The more perfect we are, we believe, the more valid we are as people. But with every advance in one area, we find ourselves wanting in another. We worry that we are not good enough, and, therefore, on some level that we do not deserve love, happiness, or maybe even life itself.

We fear our imperfections will expose us as failures when actually they show the places we have grown, the markers of our realizations, our unique situation in the sands of time and cycles of nature. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”

The truth of the matter is that in our quest for perfection, we negate our experiences and ourselves. In a perfect world, in a perfect story, the moment of 110 percent would have been the perfect lesson. So neat and tidy. But in reality it took many more years of hating my beautiful body, being bridezilla over my special wedding, and finally being simply a good enough mother with my three imperfect children to lead me to this moment (which I still have to relearn continuously): I will never be perfect. I can only be good enough.

Having seen the impossibility of perfection, I sought another path, another gauge—one that has