When I first got the urge for Mysore practice in D.C., one of my new friends both encouraged and warned me about the teacher I planned to see:

“Oh, he’s old school,” she said, both with seriousness and a joke in her voice.

Immediately a tickle of trepidation ran up my bendy spine. An image of the smile-challenged male teacher scolding and judging my every movement saturated my brain. I saw him throwing out all I brought in as “incorrect method.” I expected a teacher who would punish me.

I rolled out my mat anyway. He rolled in towards me. And as he expertly and gingerly adjusted me he lightly says:

“You’re perfect.”

Say what?

“You’re perfect. I’m just trying to see if I can make you look even taller.”

The funny thing about all this was that by telling me I was perfect, he released my need to be– no small feat– and I became free to learn.

I’m not sure the last time anyone told me I was perfect. I am not sure anyone has ever told me I am perfect. Certainly I never call myself perfect.

Most of the time I am cataloguing all the ways I am anything but. I have a habit of being my own executioner. I spent years as a litigator defending others and yet always expertly building the perfect case against me. I have tortured myself with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I grew up describing my own body as “deformed.” I wrote the title of this blog not without a helping of doubt, thinking, man, people who don’t like me are going to have a field day with this.

Sometimes I still see myself standing at the ballet barre as my dearest Russian ballet teacher shouts at me in a room full of my peers:

“jean-shka! I want to cut off with scissors.” She is wildly gesturing towards my butt.

Deformed, Yes. Perfect, No.

The last place I ever expected to become perfect was in the Mysore room. Yet, it seems to be the place where everyone is (certainly with this teacher; I wasn’t the only “perfect” person in the room, by any means).

But here we all are early in the morning, perfect, and yet still changing and trying to change. Here we all are perfect, yet getting adjusted and urged and championed and even told “No!” and “Not like that!”

Kelly Morris, one of my first pivotal yoga teachers, once told me that contentment in the present moment is expansive enough to house the awareness that some things can and should change. My experience with Mysore practice brought her insight to life.

Everyday I am perfect, and yet everyday, it’s not ok to be and stay exactly where I am. Everyday I am perfect, but then nothing is perfect– not my poses, not my vinyasas (correct vinyasa is really F&%ing hard), not my approach, not my anything. I want to be better. I live in the midst of this fraught dichotomy –the perfection of where I am now versus the complete shitstorm of where I am now.

Gee, that was way harsh. No — I dream, I imagine, what it would be like to practice with seamless, correct vinyasa, without ever stepping out of the “tunnel.”

Everyday I am content with my practice, even as everyday I say to myself “Jean, just put your fucking legs in lotus from pincha already.” Everyday I am content with my life, even as I say to myself, “Jean just make your ideas happen already, f&*ing create something, for crissakes.”

Perfection and yoga are a perfect match, they belong together, in the rarified air where citta vrtti nirodha happens. Within the Void, in the middle, is where perfection and yoga join, a marriage made in heaven. Stop the flow of body, breath, and mind and there you find siddhi, perfection, mastery. Never mind if almost no one can attain that state, let the image of that purity live within me, let me at least have a distant glimpse of that supreme finality. Let me not shy away from contemplating the highest of the high, the purest of the pure, the deepest of the deep.

I need to deny this small, measly self within me that can’t tolerate perfection, I refuse to be too fragile to admit that I am not strong enough or devoted enough to reach for such an unattainable place. Instead I humbly get on my knees and cry out for the strength to fail, and to fail, and to fail, and to fail, as happily and as endlessly as is necessary to take one step towards the lofty mastery of perfection. Let me champion perfection, protect it, covet it, yearn for it, breathe it, know it, risk for it, love it, respect it, fear it, cherish it, tolerate my need for it, lay it all on the line for it. ~David Garrigues

I’m perfect; but perfect me, like everything else, is constantly changing. Perfect me now has someplace perfect to go.

And that’s perfect.