Wellness Minutes
Looking for a short mental health podcast you can actually fit into your day? Wellness Minutes is designed for busy people who know stress, burnout, and overwhelm—but want quick, practical ways to feel better.
Hosted by an Indian Clinical-Community Psychologist based in the U.S., each short episode ( under 7 minutes) offers guided practices and bite-sized wisdom from psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality. Whether you need fast stress relief, a quick mindfulness break, or simple coping strategies for burnout, this podcast gives you tools you can use right away.
Think of it as your pocket-sized wellness companion: short, calming, and grounded in evidence-based mental health practices. Each episode is an invitation to pause, breathe, and bring more balance into your everyday life—no matter how busy things get.
Wellness Minutes
Perfectionism is holding you back more than you realize
Perfectionism has a way of silencing our voices. After a lengthy break from recording, I found myself trapped in an endless cycle of waiting for the "perfect episode" before returning to the microphone. The pressure to create something extraordinary after such a long absence kept me silent far longer than necessary.
Today, I'm breaking that silence by embracing imperfection. Drawing wisdom from a beautiful lesson my mother learned while studying Madhubani painting—the deliberate practice of leaving something imperfect on the canvas as an exercise in humility—I explore our complicated relationship with flaws and mistakes. This traditional teaching reminds us that perfection belongs only to creation itself, while we humans are designed to learn through our imperfections.
Mindfulness and self-compassion emerge as essential companions on this journey. When we approach our imperfections with awareness rather than judgment, we transform potential shame into opportunities for growth. Even as I notice the pauses, background noises, and verbal stumbles throughout this recording, I'm choosing to share it as an invitation for you to sit kindly with your own imperfections. What might happen if we stopped waiting to be perfect before beginning? What if those very flaws we try to hide are actually our greatest teachers? I'd love to hear your thoughts on your relationship with imperfection and how it has shaped your life journey.
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Opening Music by Jeremiah Alves from Pixabay
Closing Music by Aleksandr Karabanov from Pixabay
Thank you for listening,
much metta,
Dr G
Welcome to another episode of the Wellness Minutes. This is just a friendly reminder to pause and take a deep breath. I know it's been a while since I recorded a podcast episode, so I don't even know where to begin. When you return to a conversation about wellness after a very long break. There's so much to say about the time that has passed and it can be a little daunting to even begin that conversation. Begin that conversation. So let me start with one thing that I chose to do when I decided to record this episode. Let go of perfection.
Speaker 1:Difficulty in recording an episode after such a long gap was to make sure that that episode was really worth it. I didn't want to just record anything that would be mediocre, and I realized I was putting just so much pressure on myself to come up with a really good episode, something that's worth your time. I still care about doing that and I also realized that I may not do it perfectly, and that's okay, and I hope, by accepting my own imperfection, I'm also somewhere sending this message out in the world that imperfection is okay. We keep striving for perfection and that's where our growth lies, but perhaps perfection is a process, not a destination. Years ago, when my mother was learning to paint Madhubani paintings. Her teacher taught her the fine art of leaving something imperfect on the canvas. It could mean a flower petal that was left unpainted, or it could even mean a little smudge in one corner of their painting. That smudge was meant to encourage you to practice humility. Remember that only creation is perhaps perfect and perhaps, if you believe in God, only God is perfect. We are sentient human beings, completely capable of making mistakes, and those mistakes are what help us learn. So I feel grateful for the different teachers I have met in my life who have taught me so, despite their profound imperfections.
Speaker 1:What are some things that expose your own imperfection and what is your relationship with imperfection? Have you ever wondered about that? I know I've done a bunch of episodes about mindfulness and self-compassion and I realized that mindfulness and self-compassion are such necessary companions to our relationship with imperfection, with imperfection. It's only when we meet our imperfection with true awareness and self-compassion that we can actually learn from our challenges and grow into better beings in the process. So I hope today's episode got you comfortable with the idea of imperfection, or at least got you thinking about it. Sitting with all the imperfections in this episode. I just re-heard my episode, noticed the number of times I seemed to fall silent. Suddenly there were so many sounds in the background. But I'm offering this to you as an invitation to sit kindly with your imperfections too and know that you have so much to offer the world, even if it's imperfect.