Yoga with Melissa

1 Hour Restorative Yoga to Let go of Guilt | Perfectionist Series | Yoga with Melissa 514

01.17.2020 - By Dr. Melissa WestPlay

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Restorative Yoga

This restorative yoga class will support you in letting go of guilt and shame through long-held restorative inversions, side bends, forward bends, twists and savasana. You will need all your yoga props including a wall, blankets, a bolster, blocks, yoga strap, eye pillow and sandbags. Don’t worry if you don’t have some or any of these props, modifications will be given.

When you have perfectionist tendencies you feel intense dissatisfaction and regret after you make a mistake. It feels as though you let yourself and everyone in your life down. You tend to feel self-conscious emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, self-disgust and shame. Those painful emotions tend to linger and cause depression, anger and worry. Not only do those painful emotions linger, but they also prompt perfectionists into compensatory striving to make up for their mistakes and imperfections sending us into a vicious cycle of perfectionism that looks something like this:

make a mistake -> feel shame -> strive harder to make up for the imperfection -> set a more ambitious goal that is harder to reach -> memory of the past mistake creates performance anxiety -> make another mistake -> feel guilt ridden, withdraw, snap, maybe self-medicate and withdraw again.

This class will be about post-mistake recover skills and letting go of guilt and shame.

The good news is that as perfectionists, we can practice post-mistake recovery skills that will allow us to:

* Be more self-forgiving

* Learn from what happened without self-loathing

* Make room for self-acceptance

Guilt, shame and embarrassment are emotions that we feel when we think that we are under an unpaid obligation. We will feel guilt when we think we did something that we should not have done. We will also feel guilt when we think we did something we should not have done.

However, whatever you did or did not do was your best course of action at the time. The question remains, why should you feel guilty about your best? Maybe you are feeling guilty because somebody expected you to be more than you could be. The truth is, that nobody is entitled to that expectation. That is someone having an expectation to you not being you. Shame and guilt are toxic emotions. They cause us to hide. At any given moment in time, you are doing your best and therefore you are succeeding.

Letting go of guilt and shame is a matter of releasing the feeling of UNDUE RESPONSIBILITY. Sometimes your best is not good enough for a successful outcome. You can take the time to recognize that you did the best that you could in any given situation. Once you conclude di dnot do anything wrong, you can let the feeling of undue responsibility go.

Perfectionists are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and more prone to guilt. So we can make a conscious decision and intention to not taking on guilt trips.

A guilt trip is when somebody else sells you on a particular should or shouldn’t and then you head off on a journey of GUILT AVOIDANCE.

Remember that pattern we talked about earlier?

make a mistake -> feel shame -> strive harder to make up for the imperfection -> set a more ambitious goal that is harder to reach -> memory of the past mistake creates performance anxiety -> make another mistake -> feel guilt ridden, withdraw, snap, maybe self-medicate and withdraw again.

Just because somebody else thinks you should or should not do something does not mean you must do it. You do not have to take on anybody elses shoulds or should nots and make them into your own.

If somebody is trying to shame or guilt trip you into doing something or not doing some...

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