Present Perfect: A Mindfulness Approach to Letting Go of Perfectionism and the Need for Control

Thomas Hurka observes: “the perfectionist ideal is a moral ideal…it is an ideal people ought to pursue regardless of whether they now want it or would want it in hypothetical circumstances, and apart from any pleasures it may bring” (1993, 17). Restated, this means that we should strive for the sake of striving—not because it feels good, but just b

A sand mandala is a meditation on impermanence, as well as on perfection as completion rather than excellence.

Accept and change: accept that at any given moment you are doing the best you can do and, having learned from the experience of this given moment, try to change and improve the next moment to the extent that you can.

When there is no audience and nobody to narrate for, the narrator goes away and the experiencer steps in. Be patient. Your mind has been talking for years. It won’t stop on a dime. Give it time: maybe a few hours, maybe a whole weekend. A meeting with perfection is worth the wait. In the state of wordless awareness, you’ll discover that there is no

a mistake is either a mismatch of expectations or an accident. That’s all!

perfectionism, as the central feature of OCPD, is also characterized by such traits as excessive concern with details, an extreme devotion to work and productivity (at the expense of leisure), excessive conscientiousness, scrupulousness, thriftiness, inflexibility and rigidity in the issues of morality and ethics, reluctance to delegate tasks, and

Approval-hungry/validation-hungry perfectionism parallels the so-called conscientious compulsive variant of OCPD (Millon and Davis 2000). Conscientious compulsives tend to be hard working, dutiful, and ever eager to meet others’ expectations. They fear “that failure to perform perfectly will lead to both abandonment and condemnation” by others (200

you don’t like the way reality is right now, change the future. You see, acceptance isn’t approval, it’s just an acknowledgment of what is (more about this below). If you don’t acknowledge what is, what will you be improving?

constantly strive to meet everyone’s expectations and you essentially live in fear of others’ disapproval of you.