Mindfulness for Perfectionists: When the Cushion Becomes a Scoreboard

By Martha Fernandez

A client once turned his phone toward me in the first minute of a session.

On the screen was a meditation app showing a streak of more than four hundred days. He had not missed a single morning. He also had not slept through the night in a year, and his wife had started sleeping in the guest room. He is a composite, drawn from common patterns I see in my work with executives, founders, physicians and attorneys. But the phone is real enough. I have seen that screen, or something like it, many times.

The people I work with are very good at practices. Give them a practice and they will do it daily, track it, improve it and quietly compete with everyone else doing it. That is exactly the problem.

The striving mind is patient

Perfectionism is not a habit of liking things neat. It is a way of earning safety. Somewhere along the way, often early, a person learned that being acceptable depended on performing well, and the mind organized itself around that bargain. Every domain becomes a place to prove something.

So when a perfectionist sits down to meditate, the striving mind does not leave the room, it simply changes its costume. Now it is counting minutes, protecting the streak, grading the session. A “good sit” is calm and focused. A “bad sit” is restless, and a bad sit means trying harder tomorrow.

Chögyam Trungpa had a name for a version of this in his 1973 book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism: the ego’s talent for turning spiritual practice into another possession, another accomplishment, another way of becoming somebody. High achievers are not uniquely guilty of this. They are simply skilled at it.

What the cushion is actually asking

Compassionate attention asks for something the perfectionist finds almost unbearable: noticing without grading.

Not “I noticed my anxiety and then I calmed it, well done.” Just noticing. The restless sit is not a failed sit. The wandering mind is not a performance gap. The tightness in the chest before the board meeting is not a problem to be optimized away before nine o’clock.

For many of my clients, the first honest moment of practice is not peace. It is the discovery of how loud the inner judge is. They sit down to breathe and find a voice that narrates every breath as a test. That discovery matters. It is also the moment when many people need more than a practice.

Signs your practice has become another metric

A few patterns suggest the scorekeeper has taken over:

• You feel guilt or anxiety when you miss a day, more than you feel anything during the sit itself.
• You rate your sessions, out loud or silently.
• You use meditation mainly to get back to work faster or to push through one more late night.
• You sit through symptoms that are getting worse, such as broken sleep, rising irritability or more drinking, because the plan is to meditate harder.
• No one in your life knows what you are actually struggling with. The practice is private, and so is everything else.
• None of these mean you should stop practicing. They mean the practice is being asked to carry something it was not designed to carry alone.

When the next step is a person, not a practice

Perfectionism is usually formed in relationship—in families, classrooms, teams and workplaces where approval had conditions. It tends to loosen in relationship too, in the experience of being seen at your worst by someone who does not withdraw.

That is what good therapy offers that a cushion cannot. The cushion is solitary, and the perfectionist is already alone with the judge. A therapist is a second person in the room, one who can notice the judge with you, name where it came from and help you test whether its warnings are still true.

I suggest considering therapy, not another retreat, when the inner critic is running your practice instead of the other way around, when silence keeps bringing up old grief or memories you cannot settle, when your functioning is slipping at home or at work, or when you realize there is no one you can tell the whole truth to. Meditation can be a wonderful companion to that work. It is rarely a replacement for it.

The client with the four-hundred-day streak did not quit meditating. He stopped tracking it. He began bringing what he noticed on the cushion into the room with me, including the morning he sat for twenty minutes and spent every one of them rehearsing an argument with his father, who had been dead for six years.

That was not a bad sit. It was the first honest one.

The practice was never the problem. The scorekeeper was.

 

 

Martha Fernandez, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of CEREVITY, a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians built for high achievers. She is the author of Wired to Burn: A Therapist’s Guide for High Achievers Running on Fumes and writes about why successful people are often the loneliest.

 

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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