Perfection Is Not the Point: What a Silent Retreat at Kripalu Taught Me About Leadership, Stillness, and the Nervous System

This year for my birthday I didn’t throw a party. I didn’t plan a trip with friends or post a carousel of reflections on social media.

Instead, I went silent.

I spent five days at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health—an immersive retreat rooted in meditation, yoga, nature, and quiet. No phone. No laptop. No talking. Just the, intentional act of being within a community dedicated to slowing down and looking inward. At the risk of being cheesy, It was an opportunity to connect with myself, my breath, my body, and the rhythms I’ve long been too busy to notice.

Let me be clear: it was not peaceful trip. At times it was, but this felt like work.

For the first four days, I was anxious. I was quiet and engaging in sitting still and moving through yoga poses. This structure didn’t feel freeing—it felt jagged. My nervous system, wired from years of professional pace-setting, caregiving, and culture-critiquing, simply didn’t know how to calm my nervous system.

The entire experience felt like being a dusty rug taken outside and beaten. You just surrender to the process and let all that dirt you've been holding on to fall away. (Well, a lot of it anyway)

The Embodied Wisdom of the Pause

When I teach or write about leadership, whether in the context of youth development, nonprofit transformation, or ecosystem-based change, I often emphasize presence, relationships, and systems-thinking. But what I rarely emphasize enough is the body.

Leadership is not just cognitive. It’s embodied.

At Kripalu, I was reminded that no meaningful leadership model can exist without attention to the nervous system. You can talk about trauma-informed practices, systems change, or equity all day long, but if you’re doing it from a dysregulated place, if your body is in survival mode while your mouth is preaching liberation, there will always be dissonance.

So many of us are operating from a sympathetic nervous system state, fight or flight, even as we say we’re here to listen, hold space, and build futures. And to be honest, I live it too.

I’ve built programs, run workshops, and written chapters while holding my breath. I've preached the importance of reflection while skimming past my own signals of burnout.

Silence forced me to stop performing presence and actually live in it.

The Pressure Cooker of Perfection

One of the clearest lessons I took from my time at Kripalu was this:

We are living in a pressure cooker culture. A culture that tells us that we must always be optimizing, responding, doing more, being more, fixing ourselves, and producing solutions; especially if we’re in leadership roles.

But leadership is not a constant sprint. And trying to lead from inside the pressure cooker does not make us stronger—it makes us brittle.

Perfectionism, I realized, is one of the most insidious and socially sanctioned forms of violence we do to ourselves. It disguises itself as ambition, excellence, care. But perfectionism isn't about high standards. It’s about fear. It’s about earning love, safety, and respect by never slipping up.

At Kripalu, I shared this reflection with my retreat cohort:

“Perfection is not a destination—it’s a myth.”

If perfection doesn’t exist, then everything I do in pursuit of it becomes distorted. Exhausting. Ultimately harmful. Not just to me—but to the people I lead, teach, serve, and love.

This realization hit me hard, because I’ve spent much of my career working with people and organizations who want to “get it right”—especially in strategic planning or youth leadership development, where the stakes feel so high. But as I wrote in Ecosystems of Youth Leadership Development, the best programs don’t aim for perfect outputs. They aim for real relationships, transparency, and deep grounding in values. They treat people not as projects, but as human beings.

If we want to lead ecosystems where youth thrive, where communities heal, where staff are supported—we have to dismantle the systems of perfectionism embedded in ourselves first.

The Leadership We Need Now

Too often, leadership is portrayed as mastery—mastering knowledge, mastering outcomes, mastering control.

But real leadership, especially now, in a time of cultural fragmentation, political volatility, and ecological urgency, requires something far less sexy: the courage to slow down.

Tricia Hersey, an advocate and leader in the radicle rest revolution has often said that the most effective ways to fight against broken systems (racist/capitalist) is to take the time to rest whenever you want. To always be well rested, and to be empowered to rest because you say so, your body says so, your community says so, your ancestors say so.

We need leaders who can model stillness, not just strategy. We need leaders who don’t panic in the absence of immediate answers. Leaders who understand that not every silence must be filled, that not every gap is a failure. Leaders who can regulate themselves before regulating a room. In a recent coaching session, my client spoke highly of a supervisor who in even the most chaotic of situations "always was able to make you feel safe, calm, and you could tell they were operating from groundedness and compassion, not fear." These are the supervisors we should all strive to be. But we cannot get there without slowing down. While there are many factors while play into a supervisor having a supporting grounding presence, I happen to know that this particular one was a strict student of mediation. They had taken classes, and studied the art, informing their own practice for decades.

And this applies not just to boardrooms and nonprofits. It applies to classrooms, youth programs, movements, and families. Because leadership isn’t just a title—it’s how we show up in relationship.

So, What Was Gained?

By the end of my five days in silence, I felt more human. I had slept deeply. My breath had found its rhythm again. But more than anything, I felt grounded. Not in a heavy way, but in the way you feel after a long hike to the top of a moutain. Like something stagnant had moved.

Here’s what I gained—and what I believe every leader deserves to experience:

• A regulated nervous system: The baseline from which integrity flows.

• A reminder that I am not a machine: Productivity is not my worth.

• A new relationship with imperfection: One marked by grace, not guilt.

• The understanding that pace matters: Fast is not always better. Rest is not the opposite of leadership—it’s a precondition for it.

Closing Thoughts: Silent but Not Small

Kripalu didn’t fix me. But it held me.

It reminded me that underneath the noise of our culture, under the grind and performance and urgency, there is a wiser voice. A slower voice. A voice that knows we are enough, even when we are messy. Even when we are not producing.

A name tag that says "In Loving Silence"