Acceptance: How I Finally Learned I Am Enough

I never speak to others the way I speak to myself. You are not fast enough. You are not outgoing enough. You are not fair-skinned enough. But as I sit with myself in this time of social distancing, I realize that I am all I have – and I owe myself more love, kindness, and care. Thankfully, with the help of an evening meditation ritual I am beginning to untangle this faulty wiring.

The amygdala is the part of the brain that registers emotions. It triggers the fight-or-flight response by recognizing stressful conditions. We are programmed to identify negative inputs three times more often than positive inputs; this bias towards negativity is our survival mechanism. As the amygdala fires activity diminishes in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes high-level decisions. We cannot think clearly. We have irrational thoughts. We are not our complete selves.

This sums up my childhood and adolescence. The stress of perfection paralyzed me and I still pay its toll. Take singing for example. Whenever my voice cracked on a high note I turned into a khappa kukur. (The literal translation is “rabid dog” but the meaning in Bengali is “to see red.”) Despite all my talent and training I struggle at times to find joy in the activity.

My mother did not help. The perfection she demanded fueled my internal angst. Only after her passing did I realize her actions were out of love, to help me grow. But the damage already was done. The false narrative I am not enough had been written. If I wanted to be loved, I had to earn it.

Me and my mother before a singing performance in the 1990s

It took me years to become more self-aware: my distress was self-inflicted, it was in my head. But fortunately, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In other words, I had a choice.

I chose to get out of my mind and into my body. This is how I welcomed meditation into my life. The goal of meditation is not to have a clear mind. In fact, research shows that our minds wander almost half the time. The real work is in guiding the meandering mind back to the body. We grow stronger every time we refocus our attention from the mind to the body, from the cerebral to the somatic. All it takes is practice, not perfection.