Saturday morning, pt 1

This morning I did my usual Saturday morning things ending up at a coffee house drinking chai and reading, then writing in my journal.

This morning I chose Kino MacGregor's Sacred Fire book. I had a friend in town this week and he read it and so it was on top and when I looked to see which "random" thing I would look into it spoke to me. And as I said I "randomly" opened it to a page to see what came up, this time only I did it twice.

The first thing I opened to and was moved to read the whole section on was about her battle with her body image. The second thing was the drive she got from getting her authorisation from Guruji. So both of these things have been mulling around in my head since then, so this entry could involve both of them or lean toward one or the other, and I'm not sure which one is the most prevalent in my mind! In fact, it stirred up more things than I thought it would.

First of all, body image. Now I know most people think of this in terms of being heavy. But my body image issues came from being a super skinny kid who actually got shit from other kids at school about it. I was skinny, like bones showing through my skin. I never felt unhealthy though and I sure ate a lot, I guess I just had a fast metabolism and you could see it. But from the negative stuff I heard about it a lot in school it created a weird thing inside me, this already shy and introverted young fellow, and so I shrunk even more. Causing myself to have a concave chest cavity from slouching to such an intense degree.

I was skinny until I was 30, until just after I began practicing ashtanga yoga. Then I got even skinnier. My partner at the time even threatened if I lost any more weight he was going to leave me and many people would think I had AIDS. Yes, he said this. But because I already had so many issues with my self esteem I never thought it was a bad way to speak to me because I spoke much worse to myself at that time.

Then I began gaining weight, it was as if the yoga had broken me down to the bare bones, no pun intended, minimum and then built me up differently into a whole new version of the old body and I began to feel more confident and happy within my own skin, something I'd never felt before so I just didn't think about it.

Until I left Ashtanga, and I've written tons about that already so it won't be in this post. But when I was practicing only Kundalini Yoga and the occasional Anusara Yoga class I got heavy, and I didn't notice it because I'd always been so skinny and felt like it was more the way I was supposed to be. Plus I was surrounded by all the Sikhs in the Kundalini Yoga world and the majority of them were a bit portly, so I felt like I fit in for the first time in my life.

Then when I slowly made my back into the Ashtanga practice and went to Mysore I found out I was in fact pretty fat for me and that this was inhibiting my body from doing much of what was asked of it in the Ashtanga practice. But also my spine was less mobile again so the extra body weight I was carrying only served to help that mobility not come back so easily.

Not sure that I still carry much of this stuff around with me, being too fat or too skinny doesn't seem to compute much when I look at in this context, but the idea that I constantly look at my body from different angles when I pass the mirror does seem to compute. I do this. I'm not sure why, but I am sure it comes from a lifetime of worrying about being one or the other, and so my idea of my body is dysmorphic. I always think I'm too fat and because of this I always wonder is my belly pooching out further than my chest from the side, and tend to look when I'm in a big mirror. It's really something odd because now finally I feel better in my body than I ever have, and for the first time on a trip to India Sharath mentioned how good I look . So hmmmm, where does this come from?

Is it something I should worry about? Or is it something that is just a part of the process as I learn to have a healthier relationship with my physical self? I feel good, so does it matter how I look because I do believe how we feel manifests in how we look? And yet when a student here in Germany mentioned how I'd lost my belly a couple weeks ago and I'd been happy teaching and feeling good and not even thought about my belly, but now boom, it all came back to me that oh, I'm fat again?!? How easy it is to fall back into an old pattern!

But then this leads me into the teaching part of my morning, so I'll write a second entry on that I think...