I Today is Sunday, September 7, 2025 I don't have a title for my teisho yet. We'll see where we go and decide later. But I'm going to start out reading from an article I found in the New Yorker, recent issue of The New Yorker entitled enemy of the good, the pain of perfection. Yeah, it's from the issue dated August 11, 2025 and it's based on interview talking with a couple of Canadian psychologists, one a psychology professor, and then the other a therapist. And he starts with the professor, whose name is Gordon Flett Truman's laughing because Gordon is the most Canadian name ever. So yet another Gordon, and it leads off like this, when Gordon Flett, a psychology professor who has spent his career studying perfectionism, was bringing up his two daughters, he was determined to help them understand that they didn't need to be perfect. As they grew older, they would tease him whenever he was critical. Aren't you supposed to be teaching us it's okay not to be perfect. Despite his efforts, Flett noticed that his elder daughter Haley showed some tell tale signs, highly meticulous. She was routinely deemed perfectionist by her teachers, who graded the tests. She'd stay up half the night for studying for so when she was 10, he gave her a test that he developed with his collaborator, the practitioner psychology therapist, Paul Hua. I guess Paul is pretty Canadian, too, a questionnaire which was designed to identify perfectionism in children, and when he added up her score, he saw that she wasn't a perfectionist at all. He was kind of surprised, and wondered if there was something wrong with his test. However, seven years later, so she would have been 17, then she took the adult version, and her perfectionism was beyond dispute. He was mystified, until she explained that as a child, she'd internalized the message that she shouldn't aspire to perfection. So like any true perfectionist, she aced the test. I Wow, yeah,
it's like somebody with a big ego trying to be a little fading flower of the desert. We all, we all really, we all try to be the person we aspire to be, and in the process, we can get lost and become somewhat inauthentic. But let me go on with this. With this article, the writer says, At first blush, it can be hard to take perfectionism seriously as a source of suffering, the lament I'm a perfectionist carries a strong whiff of humble brag, the kind of thing savvy job applicants say when they are asked Their greatest flaw,
to claim the mantle of perfectionism can become a game of one upsmanship. However, to fled and Hua the idea of perfectionism as a form of admirable striving is a dangerous misconception, one they have devoted three books and hundreds of peer reviews reviewed papers to overturning I can't stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive. Flett told me, as we sat at his kitchen table in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb where he spent most of his life, they don't realize the deep human toll. And Hua the clinical psychologist, has seen with his therapy patients how perfectionism can be personally this is a quote personally terrorizing for people, a debilitating state. It's driven not by aspiration, but by fear and by the conviction that perfection is an. Only quote way of being secure and safe in the world.
This echoes something that the Zen teacher Joko Beck has said about how as children were born into this insecure world dependent completely on our caregivers, on our parents, totally helpless and inevitably, not all of our needs are met. There's no such thing as a perfect parent. I
Yeah, and it's pretty normal for the child to feel there's something wrong with him or her, that his needs aren't being met, and to develop some sort of strategy to try to somehow or other negotiate that What's really terrifying so little kids are so unprotected. I
uh, unfortunately, the strategies that we use as a child to mitigate our situation become lifelong strategies. People are you mentioned somewhere in this article about 95 year olds still trying to please their long dead parents and every there are all kinds of different ways that people go about it. And one way, of course, is perfectionism. If I do everything right, I can cover up the fact that I'm at inadequate. I'm powerless. There are a lot of others. There's the intransigence of You can't make me do it. Just write yourself off. Is no good, and then nothing can be expected of you. There's all kinds of ways that we do and we repeat them. We do it again and again, and we do it without even being aware of it. It's unconscious. So perfectionism is one of the strategies, and it's one that people who are practicing Zen Buddhism are susceptible to. We talk about how we have this perfect, spotless, true nature, and somehow or other, we think we need to manufacture that, because we can't see it. It's not evident in my life. I'm doing nothing but running over people and making mistakes, so we try to do everything right. Zen can really easily slide into a perfectionist performance with a lot of with a lot of damage. I because we have to practice as who we are. There's no other way. We're all of us damaged, imperfect and yet And yet, shining.
But going on with this article, she says, I assume it's a woman who wrote this. I don't know why. I think that maybe I noticed that anyway, the author says Flett told me about being asked on a radio show to discuss discuss perfectionism in a segment that the producers explained would be something nice and light for listeners driving home at the start of a long holiday weekend, Flett warned them that they'd chosen the wrong subject, but the bulk of his work explored perfectionism links to depression, eating disorders and suicide. Sure enough, when his listeners were invited to call in, the first person on the line was a desperate sounding man who described the ways his wife's perfectionism was pushing their marriage towards collapse. Then came two sons calling about an alcoholic father who drank to douse the stress of his perfectionism. Flett remembers feeling vindicated as the number of calls briefly overwhelmed the switchboard for.
And skipping further along, says, according to Hua, that's the practicing psychologist therapist. There's one thing that distinguishes true perfectionism from a mere pursuit of excellence, and that is that reaching the goal never helps, whether it's a top grade, a target weight or a professional milestone achievement, he says, doesn't touch that fundamental sense of being unacceptable. Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving. It's an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. Might not feel good, but it feels like home. I
you. So these two guys met when they were both teaching at the York University in Toronto, and together, they published papers and ultimately produced a model that outlined three different types of perfectionism, which are self oriented perfectionism, requiring perfection of yourself, other oriented perfectionism, which is railing against the imperfections of others, and socially prescribed perfectionism, believing that others require one to be perfect.
Yeah, that other oriented perfectionism. Those are the people that are finding fault every way their turn. They mentioned somewhere in this article, somebody who committed suicide and wrote a five page he was he was quite notable figure. Wrote a five page suicide note laying out the faults of other people, and said, This world is not ready
for me. I but I think the most common version is turning the turning the sights on oneself, flogging ourselves because we think that's what we need to do. There
was some thought for a while of having this added to the DSM, the list of all the various conditions, especially psychological we're talking here about psychological conditions, but they resisted it because they felt it was simply I see
if I can get this right so
it was a more a personality style, which was produced by a complex set of forces. People come to it in different ways, and what it's good for is understanding other psychological conditions. The obvious one that occurs to me is anorexia, when I was working as a nurse on the adolescent ward at strong hospital, we typically out of a patient population of 2223 would have two or three kids, teenagers Who are in there being treated for eating disorder. I uh, it's crazy making to see how utterly committed these kids are and continues into adulthood to starving themselves. Why do they continue? No matter how much late weight they lose, they feel they need to lose more. They say that they
mentioned somebody named Hilda Brook who worked with anorexic patients and framed perfectionism as a response to a deep seated sense of inadequacy, writing about a typical patient, she said, all her efforts, her striving for perfection and excessive thinness, are directed toward hiding the fatal flaw of her. Fundamental inadequacy.
A lot of people feeling is it's better to over, under overestimate our flaws than fail to see them in the first place. We don't want to get suddenly ambushed by having them come out. We want to know what's wrong with us ahead of time.
But they say this strategy is fundamentally isolating, leading us to create a brittle Cara pace of a perfect self that doesn't need anything from anyone. Perfectionism estranges us from everyone else and traps us in endless conflict with ourselves. We continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we'd be like without it. Like any ingrained habit, it's very, very hard to let go of. It doesn't go away overnight.
It's really a misunderstanding to think that the way to approach spiritual practice is to somehow become perfect.
This self that we're trying to perfect doesn't even exist. It's not a thing.
Chasing after an idea, and our life is not an idea. It's not a concept. It's not a thing until we can accept ourselves with all our failings, our peculiarities, tendencies. How can we ever love other people? How can we let ourselves be loved? I
one of the things they found with perfectionists is although they were subject to tons of different psychological problems, they really resisted going for help you
here's an interesting case. Often a frustrated desire for parental acceptance has produced a tyrannical task master driven by a false conditional, if I am perfect, then I'll be loved. Hua told me about a 45 year old woman who sought help with chronic anxiety she needed to keep up the facade of perfection, but didn't know where this need came from. After a few weeks, they started to discuss her having been adopted. After a few more weeks, she told him about the conversation in which her parents revealed this information to her. They framed everything with great tenderness and care. She stressed lovingly telling her the story of quote, going to the place with babies and specifically selecting her to bring home with them. They said we fell in love with you. We chose you. Her parents had wanted to make her feel loved rather than abandoned. But the more she and Hua talked, the clearer it became that this framing had led her to imagine that adoption worked like shopping. From that point onward, she carried a subconscious fear that if she wasn't perfect, she might not be wanted anymore and could potentially be returned you. I'm
well, that's enough to just give a flavor of how debilitating true perfectionism can be. But the majority of us are not classic perfectionists. Nevertheless, all of us, get caught up in trying to change ourselves, especially when we take up a practice like Zen, because it does seem to be, doesn't it about living a better life, being more responsive, being more together in some way. I I
want to reread something I've read before from our old friend, Anthony de Mello. It's from a book. When I'm taking this from a book called stop fixing it, fixing yourself. Wake up. All is well.
He's talking uses the term the kingdom of joy, and he says people have a vague idea as to what this thing is, and they read books and consult gurus in an attempt to find out what they must do to gain that elusive thing called holiness, or spirituality. They pick up all sorts of methods, techniques, spiritual exercises and formulas. Then, after years of fruitless striving, they become discouraged and confused and wonder when it went wrong. Most often, people blame themselves. They think if only I'd practice those techniques more regularly, or if I had made more fervent or more generous, then I might have made it but made what they have no clear idea as to what the holiness or enlightenment that they seek is but they certainly know that their lives are still unhappy. They still become anxious, insecure and fearful, resentful and unforgiving, grasping, ambitious and manipulative of people. So once again, they throw themselves with renewed vigor into what they think they need to do to fix themselves and attain their goal. Suppose there is a way of getting rid of all of that. Suppose there is a way to stop that tremendous drain of energy, health and emotion that comes from such conflicts and confusion. Would you want that? Suppose there's a way we could truly love one another and be at peace. Be it. Love People ask me all the time, what do I need to do to change myself? If you're one of those people, I've got a big surprise for you. You don't have to do anything. Fact, the more you do, the worse it gets, all you have to do is understand the trouble with most people is that they're busy trying to fix things in themselves that they really need to understand. Really need to see, we really need to experience directly, that we need to not turn away from and bury. We need to live with without deploying our strategies, whatever it is. He says, stop fixing yourself. You're okay. Don't interfere. Don't fix anything. Simply watch, observe these things in you that you struggle to fix. Just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change. Most people have never stopped to consider this simple fact, their efforts are going to get them nowhere. Their efforts will only make things worse. As things become worse, when you see fire used to put out fire, effort does not lead to growth. Effort, whatever the form it takes, whether it be willpower, habit, a technique or a spiritual exercise, does not lead to change. At best, effort leads to repression and a covering over the root problem. Effort may change the outward behavior, but it does not change the inner person. We can't self direct our change. I. We can't form a picture of what awakening would be like and then somehow conform to it and waken up. It's like what Roshi told me, John, you have to trust the process to give yourself to awareness. It's what the purpose of a practice, of a Zen practice, is just awareness of the breath, awareness of the question. Have to see when we close down, not to immediately run off into some sort of strategy. He says, Just think, what kind of a mentality it betrays when you ask, What must I do to get holiness? What sacrifices must I make, what discipline must I undertake, what meditation must I practice in order to get it think of a man who wants to win the love of a woman and attempts to improve his appearance, build his body, change his behavior, and practice techniques to charm her. And so it is with spirituality and holiness. It's not what you do that brings it to you. What matters is what you are And what you become.
As long as you're focused on fixing yourself, there's that basic dissatisfaction. You're kind of trying to divorce yourself from yourself, and any spiritual practice is compromised when we're not willing to be with things the way they are. Zen teacher John Tarrant says, What if this is it now? John sumedho, the teacher in the Thai Forest Tradition, says, right now it's like this. It's
Joh ko Beck says, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. We're messy. Life is messy. You we're all damaged goods. Trees that have grown in strange ways because of causes and conditions, because of the way our childhood was, because of the people we've lived with and associated with, because of all the expectations we've internalized from others because of the society that we live in. We all have this relative Source self, what de Mello likes to call the me. And we all have true nature, the eye, the one who sees, the one who experiences.
I ran across in my preparations to a psychologist who studied at the Naropa Institute. Is actually he was a student of Trungpa, the Tibetan teacher, Trungpa, Rinpoche, and niropa was a, actually a college that was founded in Boulder, I believe.
And he studied psychology there. So comes at it both from a Buddhist perspective and from i in the perspective of working with ourself, trying to improve, making small improvements, seeing what our problems are.
And this is, this is something I actually transcribed from a podcast I was listening to last night. The title is the discovery that there is no problem with Bruce Tift. And the podcast is called 21st Century vitalism. Not sure the name of the guy who hosts it, but he asked some good questions. And this is something that Bruce Tift said,
in our thinking, in our emotional experience, for different reasons, we carry a certain anxiety, or even conviction that there's a problem. It probably comes out of evolutionary biology, because life isn't safe. People like to feel safe but sorry life isn't safe. But if somebody can train themselves to bring their attention over and over again to sensation level experience, they might, they may find that there almost never is any evidence of a problem. What does he mean by this? Says, If I stay in my experience of my stomach being knotted up or my heart beating fast, and just stop right there, where's the problem? It may be uncomfortable, but it's in motion. It's not permanent. It's got no meaning to it. I'm never going to find, in my opinion, shame or humiliation or abandonment or rejection. Those aren't sensations. What are they? They're they're thinking, they're making pictures. There's jumping out of this moment and deciding how it is, evaluating, judging, I'm no good.
Anytime we're struggling, we're going to go to our go to tool. Whatever it is for most of us, it's thinking the hammer that's perpetually in search of a nail, but there is this different way, just taking it in, not judging it, not leaping to conclusions, being able to sit with it and see what happens, being curious about it. He says, the more we can keep our attention into that very basic level of embodied experience, I think almost every time we're not going to find any evidence of a problem. And so the more we make that a habit, a practice, a discipline, as much as possible, the more we start having this confidence sort of seep into the texture of our ongoing experience, where we actually start having a sense that I'm not a problem. Life isn't a problem. I don't like to be in pain. I'm going to die. My partner is bugging me all those things, but where is there actually any evidence of a problem? So I think that for very practical reasons, it makes sense to train ourselves to stay in our immediate experience, our embodied experience, talking about feeling it in your gut, seeing how it plays out for you, seeing what happens, how it rises and falls, seeing that we're okay, we survive. Mark Twain said, I'm an old man, and I've known many, many problems, most of which never happened. I It
says so, I think that for very practical reasons, it makes sense to train ourselves to stay in our immediate experience, our embodied experience with the practice of unconditional kindness. Because I think this generates this type of workability or confidence, unconditional confidence, maybe even some humor, some clarity, things like that. It can be so wonderful when we accept our flawed nature. I de Melo says, I'm an ass. You're an ass. What can you expect of an ass?
Let's not try to compete of who's the biggest ass. I
he finally finishes off. So I think what we discover by attending to and participating in our embodied experience, from a Buddhist point of view, could be sort of understood as an approximation of openness. I've got that. When I transcribed it, I put it with a capital O, openness, or on another level, just one among many expressions of openness, not closed off, not trying to approximate. It a way of being letting it be organic, letting it develop. We have to work so hard to make so called progress. We have to work hard to come to realization, which is totally worth doing. We have to work hard, to soften, to become more available to other people. It's not that we don't have to work hard, it's that we don't have to be perfect. We don't have to do it right all the time. We don't have to chastise ourselves. He uses this word kindness, which I've really become sort of enamored of. Recently mentioned in a talk the teacher Ajahn Brahm, who coined the term kindfulness, we have to see with that non judgmental, compassionate attitude, and then things begin to change. Think my first experience of this, which was really life changing, was when I stopped drinking. So that's 35 years ago. I
AA, of course, is well known as a 12 step program, and those first three steps come into all the 12 step programs are incredibly powerful, and they go like this. I'll just read them through. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. And two, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And three, we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. That God term can be problematic for some people, but that's why they say as we understood him, we could say that this moment is our Higher Power. Things right now as they are. I think what was so powerful about it, and I was just I was in a pink cloud for months. Was I it, then I realized it's okay. My life was unmanageable. I can't control my drinking. That's okay. I don't have to try to do something that I can't do, that can't be done. There's a saying in AA progress, not perfection. We can heal. Healing is not an overnight process. Things might suddenly change in a flash, but the hard work, the change comes slowly over time. Roshi Kapleau said, the man doesn't make the enlightenment. The Enlightenment makes the man. Excuse me, that completely backwards. Very good. Kensho doesn't make the man. The man makes the Kensho. We can, we can have an early opening, some sort of experience. If we give up there, if we rest on our loyal laurels, it's actually kind of unfortunate. We really need to come to terms with our karma, with who we are, with all the little things we do that get in the way, have to learn to deploy kindness towards ourselves and, of course, towards other people. Instead of trying to be perfect, we can begin to be a source of help. Begin to matter to other people. Take care, take care of ourselves and take care of others. It's really the promise of any spiritual practice, whatever it is that we do, going to be here, going to be living in this moment, not in a pretend moment. And for that reason, we're available. We have the potential, in the words of CS Lewis, to be surprised by joy. Okay, this is a busy morning. Have gone on long enough wandered about, we'll stop here and recite the four vows I.
