Are You Really "Perfect As You Are"?

When I first began practicing Buddhist meditation, I was confounded by the phrase, "You are perfect as you are." It seemed to me that this concept would allow all of humans to lapse into accepting and being complacent with aspects of ourselves that we really shouldn't accept - demonstrations of hurtful anger, for example, or stealing or lying, or even child abuse or murder. 

Over the years, however, I have come to understand the nuances and complexities of this idea, and to embrace the fundamental truths it contains. This is how I would explain them, to the best of my ability.

• You have to start where you are: You cannot be someone you are not. You cannot be enlightened or act in enlightened ways if you haven't dealt with the baggage of your life. You cannot bypass the work you need to do. So embrace yourself and all your imperfections as your starting point. 

• You are not alone, in fact you represent the human condition just like every other human being on this planet. Others might be good at hiding it or faking it, but don't be fooled - we are all much more messed up than we think! So take heart in the fact that 7 billion people share your predicament. 

• If you resist who you are, deny it, or fear facing it, you will continue the path that brought you here in the first place. When we oppose parts of ourselves we do not like, we create a war within, and we cannot effect change from this place of self-denial and self-hatred. You must replace self-hatred with self-love.

• But self-love and self-acceptance is not enough. We need to add the crucial ingredients of awareness and resolve. Awareness lets us see ourselves clearly - we drop the veils, we see our patterns and dysfunctional habits, we see the harm we generate, and we don't shy away from naming those habits honestly. 

• Resolve (also called aspiration) is the "fire" to recover our innate ("essential") being. Without aspiration, we stay stuck. You might have come across friends or people who have spent years in psychotherapy but seem mired in a story of childhood wounding and present-day suffering. In Buddhist psychology, it is not enough to see your patterns. You must also remember and reclaim your intrinsic capacity for awareness, wise action, and love. In other words, the choice is yours: you can stay tossing and turning in the waves of your life, or you can seek to find the ocean within that has space for everything - the storms and the calm, the highs and the lows, the joy and the sorrow. In Buddhism we bring resolve to the journey of finding the ocean within.

So, "You are perfect as you are" does not mean you behave, act or think in perfect ways. In fact, in Buddhism it is assumed that you don't. We all experience suffering, therefore we all also participate in the creation of suffering - our own, and others. "You are perfect as you are" just means you have all of the power and capacities inside yourself to become free. The Buddhist path is the path of remembering your innate qualities and capacities, and inhabiting those more and more as you bring presence and awareness to your life. Meditation, psychological inquiry, and the sacred teachings are the fundamental tools we bring to the path of freeing ourselves for our own benefit as well as the benefit of all beings.