perfectionism, escapism, and spirituality

Meditation and yoga are the two activities that truly saved me during the early days of my sobriety.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that somatic exercise and mindfulness practices are super effective ways to manage emotions, process trauma, and make peace with general overwhelm that comes from existing as a human being in the 2020s.

But in my personal all-or-nothing human experience, these practices also assist me in amplifying the tendencies of my perfectionism and my escapism.

To be fair, my personal issues have nothing to do with the ancient practices themselves.

Rather, the perfectionism issue has to do with me being a flawed human being using these practices to try and somehow feel less flawed.

Me climbing a jungle gym at an abandoned school and finding a single sunflower growing underneath.

I started to use yoga and meditation to feel, manage, process, and release emotions so that they don’t have to burden anyone other than myself (and at certain points in my journey, a patient therapist). Years ago, this felt like a major breakthrough.

But recently, it’s not the yoga and meditation that has led me to a breakthrough. Rather, it’s the absence of these practices in my life that’s forced me to become a bit more grounded and honest with myself.

I found my way to yoga by accident. I’d been aggressively jumping rope in my apartment when I overdid it (shocking, I know), and pulled a muscle in my back. I searched on YouTube for stretches and landed on the earthbound angel herself, Adriene Mischler.

Yoga with Adriene was so helpful in dealing with anger, emotional confusion, and the fear that comes with deep and sudden transformation. Sometimes I practiced yoga multiple times a day because it helped me release the discomfort of my overwhelming emotions.

Furthermore, I learned how to identify bodily sensations and how they corresponded with my emotions. And after living outside of my body for seemingly my entire life, I started to feel healthy and embodied.

For four straight years, I did not go a single day without a yoga practice. I became so dilligent about protecting my sobriety that I created a time-intensive spiritual routine to fortify myself from outside influence.

I did not want to regress into the mental state I’d held prior to getting sober — and was willing to go to pretty extreme lengths to avoid it.

My routine looked like this:

Morning pages/journaling for 40 minutes upon waking (I still do this every day), make a gratitude list (also still doing this), practice yoga, practice meditation, eat a high-protein breakfast, walk my dog for 30-40 minutes, pull a tarot card. And then finally start the work day as Sunlight Oracle.

As my disciplines started to deepen, so did my rigidity.

While I’d started keeping a vegetarian diet early in sobriety, that eventually evolved into veganism about a year later. This choice, which I do not regret because it taught me how to cook and eat really well, was based on a deep spiritual conviction that I bolstered with my meditation.

I’d chosen to transform my spiritual interests into a career so I could do spiritual activities all the time. I was all in. And I started to meditate simply to amplify, perfect, and bolster my mediumship practice, rather than to find sanctuary and refuge.

My beloved meditation time was no longer for me, but for all of the clients I wanted to serve. Meditation became work and my livelihood depended on it.

I lived like this for four and a half years.

But three months ago, I moved back to my home state of Illinois and I’m no longer in flight — I am on the ground. And people, places, and things are very different here on planet Earth.

Soybeans in central Illinois, near my house.

For instance, I am now a home and soon-to-be-farm owner (WTF?). There are one million things to do, pay for, fix, and none of them have to do with the Spirit realm, mediumship, or meditation.

There isn’t a single vegan-minded restaurant in the tri-county area and to not eat meat is basically to declare yourself as a member of the communist party (I’m exaggerating for humorous effect here).

It’s an election year and people are projecting their political leanings in their front yards, and every one feels very fragile. Climate change is destroying the homes of my friends in North Carolina and Florida. And all of this seems to be occurring at exponential speed.

I did my morning pages this morning, but I haven’t meditated or done yoga or gone for a walk, and I don’t know what I want to eat for breakfast or if I want to eat at all or just make another cup of coffee. I’m surprised if I do yoga 2-3 times a week right now.

While I was shaming myself for breaking from my routine upon moving here, I have also come to see the glaring benefits of stepping out of the spiritual light and into the shadow of earth.

Life, to me, appears to be an ongoing cycle of both healing (pain) and dealing (with pain). Healing is what I was doing with the elaborate spiritual practices, and now dealing is requiring me to be present here, on earth, and to be a human being. And also… to book a therapy appointment or 10.

I turned the volume up as far as it could on my spirituality, and now that I’ve turned it back down a bit, I can think. But isn’t thinking/thought what meditation is supposed to help us transcend?

Is this what they mean when they say ‘Everything in moderation’?

Who am I asking these questions to?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this line from the new Billy Strings album, and I find it relevant to this ongoing tug-of-war between physical and spiritual:

“They say heaven knows the road is slow, but how the hell would heaven know?”