Something More Than "Beauty"

When I was eighteen years old I went to treatment for depression and bulimia. I lived  in a residential therapeutic community for almost a year and half. About a year or so into the program I went home for a visit.  While I was at home, I rummaged  through a box of old photographs in the basement. I found  pictures from my childhood and was touched by how adorable I looked.  I took the pictures upstairs and asked my mother, "How did I grow up not knowing how freakin' cute I was?"

My mom looked at me and said, "I don't really know how that happened, Tina." (At the time, I was called Tina. I started using my full name, Christina,  in college, at the urging of one of my mentors, but that is another story for another time.)

A few days later Mom walked into my room and told me she had been thinking about my question. She explained to me, "I was a budding feminist at the time I had you.  When I was a girl, we were raised to be beautiful and to get a good husband. I wanted you to know that you were smart, capable, funny, athletic, independent and confident--not just beautiful. I must have forgotten to tell you that you were cute in my efforts to help you know that you were more than that."

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The first time I remember feeling beautiful was during this same period of my life.   Our group went on  a wilderness expedition in Joshua Tree National Monument. Miles from civilization, days since my last shower, with no mirror in sight, we  set up camp for the night.  I was making  dinner with one of my favorite counselors, Dean. We were  laughing hysterically about something that had happened during the day. The feeling struck me like a lightening bolt-- I felt beautiful. I felt clear of the culture's ideals, free of the shame that had ruled  my life. I felt 100% beautiful just as I was.

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I found that same "free and clear" feeling when I first came to yoga. I didn't feel beautiful  during class, mind you. My first teacher was long, lanky and wore white unitards.  She had that long, sinewy classic "yoga body" so common of the hippie practitioners of the time who  had been tying themselves in knots since around the time I was born and hadn't had a hamburger since before the Vietnam War. I was twenty two years old and probably twenty pounds heavier than I am  today.  I spent most of my first  class feeling short, stocky and let's just say it- fat.  

However,  I remember getting up from savasana, walking down the hill to breakfast after class and feeling beautiful. Radiant, even. I can still recall the calm, tingly feeling I had in my body and the knowing that I had found something important for myself. 
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What I  found was the "Something More" experience of yoga.  I had found the source of beauty that was deeper than the size of my thighs and a connection to who I was that was deeper than my appearance and deeper than what others thought about me.

There is plenty being written these days about the yoga culture of beauty and some pretty wonderful activist and advocacy work is being done to redefine the standards of beauty that govern the industry's image and media presence. I whole-heartedly support this work. I believe the world will be a better place with a more expansive and inclusive ideal of beauty. 

And personally, I am very interested in the part of the discussion that mirrors my mother's wish for me as a child. In the same way that she wanted me to know I was more than my appearance,  as a yoga practitioner I want to  use my practice to stay connected  with the part of me that is "more than my appearance." I want to know myself as compassionate, funny, strong, vital, sensitive and courageous, not just beautiful.  I want my asana to be  about how I feel in my body and not about how my body looks and who validates that as beautiful or not. As a teacher I want to be be valued for my depth, my insight, my knowledge, my clarity, my hard-won wisdom and not for how  good I look in a pair of tights. 

In short, I  want to live and teach from my "Something More."

Clearly, none of this work is easy as so much of life seems perfectly designed to bring us into the realm of our "something less than" or our "something not enough as." Even in yoga practice-- or especially in yoga practice, perhaps-- we  can fall prey to the hungry ghosts of our negative patterns.   It can be very helpful to identify the internal and external forces  that act on us so we can recognize when we have been made a hostage of our self-defeating patterns of thought, feeling or behavior.

I recently had a chance to review the many ways my own "Something More" gets hijacked and recruited to serve my conditioned, reactive negativity. Last week, I  spent three days at a program called Inner Work for Leaders at the Hoffman Institute. I re-connected to what I love about practice and teaching and-- BIG SHOCK-- it had nothing to do with social media, marketing plans,  industry trends or community dramas of who did and said what to who. And certainly, how I look, how much I weigh or what other people are thinking about any of the above was far from my concern. The answer for me is simply not solely in the analysis of the issues at hand but in the direct experience of my Something More.

 And it is clear to me that I must safeguard and nurture those things that connect me to my Something More  for them to remain sustaining to me and to others.  Sometimes we are called to safeguard what is sacred through outer work and activism like ad campaigns, social movements and writing projects.  Sometimes  we are called to safeguard what is sacred  through a refusal to sell ourselves out to the lowest bidder in fear-based and competitive consumer culture. And so on. I suppose, like so many things, the work is different for each of us at different times.

What I do know is this-- the power of the practice is real. The power of intentional community is real. And that effort to share this power is what makes my life worthwhile. 

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.