Several years ago, Rock and I went to our favorite spa in the world:
It was five days and four nights in Catalina, Arizona filled with healing desert air, massages, whole, organic foods cooked to order, yoga of every variety, and rest.
It was also a place where I experienced perspective. I was a crossroad about some treatments for my health issues and I hadn’t known what to do. While at Miraval, I took a challenge course, where I did things like climb a telephone pole, walk a tightrope
and had to trust people, way skinnier than I was, to belay me on my big jump down from big heights while I was at a big weight.
The adventure allowed me to see the solution that I was looking for.
Adventure does that. It helps gateways to open up your mind that simply ‘thinking’ cannot.
Edwin Friedman, a Jewish philosopher, addressed the idea that you will know things through ‘risking adventure’ that you cannot imagine with the limits of your mind. Because your mind anticipates fear and writes that into the equation of the thoughts you’re having and will stop you from accessing possibilities. But adventure requires that you face those fears and therefore, allows you to access something within you that is greater than you anticipated.
The example that came to me in trying to explain it to my coaching clients was the difference of imagining you were jumping out of a plane, and actually having the experience of jumping out of a plane. Your mind can imagine only so far about the idea of throwing yourself out of a plane, but actually jumping out of a plane? 
Now, that was going to confront a whole lot more than you could imagine AND it was also going to access a whole corridor of your strength that you couldn’t imagine either.
What the challenge course helped me to do was to get out of my perfectionistic thinking about the health options I had before me, because it required me to access a higher thought and a deeper surrender.
Because perfectionism can really tap two extremes in us: The performance end of the spectrum or the procrastination end of the spectrum.
When my adrenal glands were healthier, I’d let my perfectionism drive me to stay up all night doing my work projects or cleaning the baseboards with a toothbrush or both. I’d sleep a scant few hours, miss time with my husband and friends, just to get all my work done perfectly so that no one would reject me and so I could meet some ridiculous internal standard that I had.
But when I burnt my adrenals out on my perfectionism, what I was left with was the internal standard but no ability to meet it. My body in its depleted state wouldn’t let me. I became paralyzed and afraid of making the wrong decisions, on the chance they weren’t perfect so instead of doing something, I did nothing.
Risking adventure helped me to break the cycle and to surrender my idea of the perfect health solution and it got me moving in a direction that ended up leading toward greater health.
When I returned home from our time in Miraval, I received one of their quarterly newsletters. One of their sage teachers had written an article starting with this wisdom,
“In order to pick up the right solution, you need to be willing to lay down the perfect solution.”
Risking adventure, helped me to lay down my perfectionism and embrace a peaceful solution that was right for me at the time. The forward momentum continued on in a three-steps forward, two-steps back kind of way and I got some really great results — and wisdom along the way — that I couldn’t have anticipated all those years ago.
If you’re feeling driven to perform or you’re feeling stuck in procrastination, maybe today is a good day to lay down the perfect solution — and the perfectionism that’s driving it — by risking some adventure so that you can pick up the right solution?
The peaceful, peace-filled solution…
Today is your day.
It’s time for you to start living the dream you have for you life. Waiting for the perfect solution, the perfect person, the perfect weight, the perfect spouse, the perfect child, the perfect weather, the perfect circumstances or the perfect finances
is an illusion.
This is your life.
You don’t have to live it perfectly.
You just have to live it.
“What is life for? It is for you.” –– Abraham Maslow
Sending you love,
Stacey