 |
OPEN MIND OPEN BODY The Yoga of Connection |
|
|
|
Week 14: Ending the War Against Your Body A member of our online community recently asked how yoga can help you accept your body. Part of the Yoga of Connection is the mind-body connection, which includes realizing (as I heard a yoga teacher say recently), "The soul loves the body." I practiced with this idea, this simple phrase, and realized anew the many ways I act as if my body is the enemy. This topic has come up on the discussion board several times since the beginning of the year. In my experience, one of the most useful concepts from yoga philosophy is that of the "enemy image". This is especially helpful for thinking about how we create personal wars against our bodies. An enemy image is a perception of a person or group that says, "This person, or this group, is fundamentally bad, wrong, destructive." The ego loves nothing more than to engage in a struggle, and the best way for the ego to feel important is for you to set yourself up against another person or group (also known as the "out group"", as in outside the circle of acceptability). So we build these enemy images to keep us feeling engaged and important. It's easy to see this dynamic played out on the news, in politics, in our everyday conversations as we align ourselves with this group, or this style of yoga, and not with that group, or that style of yoga. We create enemy images of other people - the "types" of people we cannot stand, who are deluded and destructive, and the individuals who seem to exist solely to make life difficult for us. They must be destroyed or controlled. A lot of the practices I've shared with you this year so far are meant to show how destructive and false these enemy images are. But an enemy image that we haven't talked about yet is body image. So many of us actually make our own body the "out group". Think about how ridiculous and destructive this is. We make our own body the thing that must be destroyed or controlled, in order for us to feel safe. We all have a body image, and most of us, if we look at that image, will see that we have an enemy image of our body, at least some of the time. In one online discussion thread, the enemy image that seemed most common is the belly! The big, bad enemy belly, that represents everything about ourselves that is unacceptable. (Those of you at war with you belly might be interested in a book and video by Lisa Sarasohn, both of which focus on learning to honor your belly as a way of practicing self-acceptance.) There are so many other ways we create enemy images of the body. It may be a subtle hostility we hold toward an injury that refuses to heal. We think of the injury as something to conquer, get rid of, overcome. We don't think of it as part of ourselves that needs lovingkindness; we don't think of it as our body's way of trying to protect us. It may be an illness that we treat as an enemy. We go to war against the illness. We feel like our bodies have betrayed us by getting sick. We may make an enemy of the body by making the body a "project" - trying to make it more flexible, stronger, thinner, or younger-looking. Trying to root out every imperfection or symptom (or smell or noise) of the body in the name of being healthier. When you hold this kind of enemy image of your body, your body no longer feels like a safe home to rest in. Since there is no way to escape the body (in this lifetime!), that makes your entire experience of life "unsafe", uncomfortable, and a betrayal. The practice of yoga - in particular, asana - can teach us to befriend every aspect of our body. It can, but it doesn't always. It depends on how you approach the practice of asana. If it is a self-improvement project, your practice of yoga will reinforce your enemy image of your body. For example, if your enemy image resolved around weight, it would be particularly destructive to design a yoga practice specifically to lose weight. If you use your asana practice as an opportunity to compare your body to people who are more flexible or stronger or more experienced yogis (or whatever you mind can find to point out something wrong with you), the enemy image is strengthened. If your body is something to control by the mind, through endless refinements and perfections of alignment in poses, the enemy image rules again. So your assignment this week has two parts. First, figure out what your most powerful enemy image of your body is. Is it a part of your body (stomach, legs, etc.)? An experience in your body (injury, illness)? A quality of your body (weight, age, ability)? A natural function of your body that for some reason you believe is unnatural, unhealthy, or needs to be tightly controlled (noises, smells, even sexuality)? A "failure" of your body (to do headstand, to become pregnant, or anything you want your body to "achieve")? Or is it something else? Then, practice a lovingkindness meditation for your body, including every aspect that has been distorted into an enemy image. Second, practice asana and observe how your mind treats your body in this practice. Are you critical? Are you caring and compassionate? Are you self-disciplined and self-controlling? Are you comparing the present experience of your body with some previous experience or ideal experience? The spotlight of your attention has to go to the ego (and how it directs your thinking), and not the body. So in your practice, find that part of you (often called the witness consciousness) that can observe how the ego treats the body. Notice with compassionate awareness. Simply try to be open the dynamics of how your treat your own body in practice, especially through your thinking. Use savasana to again practice a general feeling of lovingkindness for your body.
|
|