Befriending the body: An energy visualization for recovering perfectionists

Hi Friends,

I’m at a higher altitude this week, meeting up with my daughters in Denver, Colorado, and taking a break. (Plus, a Noah Kahan concert). I thought I’d share this body scan, which I need to do for myself now that I have some time off and knowing that it’s very hard for recovering perfectionists to rest without being very intentional about it.

Some of you are new to my publication — welcome! My weekly articles explore perfectionism, the inner critic, and finding more peace and joy in a world that demands too much.

I’d love to hear: what’s your relationship to rest? Does it come easily, or do you have to plan for it like everything else?

In this practice, you’ll learn to release some of the tension that builds up from perfectionist habits. Through a guided visualization drawing on the chakra system, you’ll explore where you may be holding tension or feeling stuck, with the intention of creating greater ease, spaciousness, and joy in your day.

The chakra system has its roots in ancient Indian spiritual traditions and texts and later became foundational to Tantric and yogic practices. While Western approaches to healing tend to focus more on anatomy, physiology, and the nervous system, many traditional healing systems also attend to the body’s subtle energies and the felt experience of balance and flow.

Give yourself a full 25 minutes of quiet time to reset and reconnect with your body. I find that allowing yourself to be guided by visualization can help give the overthinking mind a much-needed vacation while inviting the nervous system to settle.

Researchers who study perfectionism have a handful of ways to categorize this complex experience, with labels such as perfectionistic self-presentation, socially prescribed perfectionism, excellence-seeking, and failure-avoidant perfectionism, among others.

No matter what form your striving takes, perhaps the most pervasive toll of perfectionism is this:

It’s hard to be happy when you believe there is always room for improvement.

Over time, the strain of perfectionism can sap your energy—or what some traditions might call your life force. We don’t often pay attention to the subtle experience of energy in the body, yet many healing traditions offer practices for easing tension, restoring balance, and helping us feel more at home in ourselves.

The first step in my EVOLVE Method is E, Embody the Present Moment. Before anything else, this asks you to notice what’s happening in your body and settle your nervous system enough to actually be there. The last step is E, The Energy of Excellence, which comes full circle to releasing stuck energy and finding flow.

Meditation is one path in, but it isn’t the only one—and for many people, sitting still with a racing mind can feel like the hardest way to start. A guided body scan or visualization can be a gentler on-ramp.

Decades ago, cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson, founder of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, coined the term relaxation response to describe the physiological counterpart to the stress response. Practices that quiet mental activity and support slower breathing can help evoke this restorative state, often within about 10–20 minutes of practice.

So consider these 25 minutes an invitation to do something recovering perfectionists often find surprisingly difficult:

Nothing.

Nothing to accomplish. Nothing to improve. Just notice, imagine, breathe, and allow.