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Mistakes and Power: Challenging Perfectionism
September 17 @ 1:30 pm - November 5 @ 2:55 pm PDT
About the Event
Do you ever notice that you are harder on yourself than you are on anyone else? Do you carry a relentless judgemental voice within you, a measuring device that has inhuman standards? Are you tired of being so hard on yourself? Would you love to feel safe enough to let go of control, and collaborate with the flow of life?
Join Sarah for an illuminating eight week exploration of the contracts and inherited traumas that keep us locked into perfectionism, and the shame and alarmed aloneness that lies at its root.
Event Details
Do you often find yourself falling short of your own impossibly high standards?
Are there so many things that you’d try, if only you would release the inner pressure to be perfect?
Perfectionism, which seems like an absolute desire for life without mistakes, is actually a combination of predatory aggression against the self (or others), a forceful rigidity that precludes creativity and spontaneity, and an inability to be with the grief of what is true. When we want perfection, we are wanting for something that is unattainable and inhuman. In our perfectionism, we ourselves become inhuman. This desire–for the inhuman–is often a result of having received external shaming, predatory aggression, contempt, or disgust against ourselves or our work (what we create and produce). This can be something that happened in our own life experience, and it can also be something we’ve inherited from our parents or grandparents experiences. Since it is so tied to shame, perfectionism can expertly travel down a family lineage, holding each generation hostage with its promises of safety and beauty.
Control is an attempt to make an imperfect world perfect, to make an unsafe world safe, and to turn chaos into order. While well-intentioned, if we are trying to stop all chaos, then we are also stopping generativity, because it is from the generativity of chaos that all kinds of things are born: spontaneity, expression, surprise, discovery, delight. If we try to stop all chaos, if we deny ourselves our human fallibility, then we are stopping the life force from emerging. There is a physical cost to an immune system that is in the constant stress and aloneness of needing perfection: it is a movement towards death rather than a movement towards life.
Join Sarah Peyton this September for a resonant and warm exploration of the neuroscience of perfectionism: how it has kept us safe and how it keeps us from true safety. Over the course of eight weeks we will work to excavate and release unconscious contracts that keep us in our perfection–which can range from contracts that stop us from being shamed, to contracts that stop anyone we love from being harmed. In order to heal with perfectionism, we must address, make space for, and lovingly accompany the alarmed aloneness and shame that lie at its root. This is because whenever we are truly accompanied, we no longer need perfectionism.
How to Register
Do you ever notice that you are harder on yourself than you are on anyone else? Do you carry a relentless judgemental voice within you, a measuring device that has inhuman standards? Are you tired of being so hard on yourself? Would you love to feel safe enough to let go of control, and collaborate with the flow of life?
Join Sarah for an illuminating eight week exploration of the contracts and inherited traumas that keep us locked into perfectionism, and the shame and alarmed aloneness that lies at its root.
$370.00
If you have questions or need support, please email [email protected]
About Sarah
Sarah Peyton, Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and neuroscience educator, integrates brain science and the use of resonant language to heal personal and collective trauma with exquisite gentleness.
Sarah is a sought-after expert who brings neuroscience expertise together with depth work, self-compassion, and the transformative potential of language. She works with audiences internationally to create a compassionate understanding of the effects of relational trauma on the brain, and teaches people how words change and heal us.
Sarah teaches and lectures internationally and is the author of four books on relational neuroscience and self-compassion: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing, the companion Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-care, and Affirmations for Turbulent Times: Resonant Words to Soothe Body and Mind, and The Antiracist Heart: A Self-Compassion and Activism Handbook, co-authored alongside Roxy Manning, PhD.