I love these women!

Have you seen this? I just found out about this woman, Sally Pugh, who’s teaching a yoga classes in the Bay Area called Yoga for Large Women (and here’s an article about the class – go read it!). I hope she won’t mind my swiping this photo from her website ... I just found it so incredibly beautiful and inspiring, I had to share! It makes me feel happy all over to see “non-traditional” yoginis moving and stretching and feeling good in their bodies without having to worry about what other people might be thinking about them.

Someday I hope to be comfortable enough with my own body image to be able to post a photo like the one above without adding the disclaimer that I am not nearly as large as the women in the picture. I mean, so what if I was, right? Would that make me a bad person? Would you stop loving me then? What if I was even LARGER than those women?

Well, I’m not. But I do have issues about being in, and being seen in, this body. Issues that I am learning to enjoy working with, and even having a sense of humor about.

The other day in the Shambhala Sun I read this story (urgh – there’s only an excerpt, not the whole article) about the Dalai Llama’s recent work in education – he is helping to create programs for “education of the heart,” teaching school children about emotional values like caring, compassion, peacefulness and tolerance. Somehow this yoga class seems to me to be about a similar kind of education – helping women learn how to extend themselves the same compassion, tolerance and loving care they already know how to give to the people they love.

I was hoping to be able to go to that yoga class on MLKJr. Day, but she wasn’t teaching that day because of the holiday. Then it occurred to me, maybe I’m not fat enough to go to that class – maybe my presence there would make the other women feel self-conscious. Then having that thought made me feel self-conscious, like maybe I would feel out of place in that class too, just like I now feel out of place in my local classes full of skinny rubber-band-bendy kinds of people (even though many of them are my friends, including a couple of teachers, even).

It keeps bringing me back to the idea of generosity, though I’m not sure I understand exactly what it is that’s causing my mind to link the two ideas. Maybe I’m just not being very generous with myself – or with my friends. A more generous person would extend those people the benefit of the doubt that they really aren’t secretly looking at me and thinking, “What a pig!”

It also has to do with ego. Isn’t clinging to a certain image of myself (which I know is not accurate, anyway) kind of non-generous? Wouldn’t it be more natural and relaxed and generous (I can feel myself becoming obsessed with this concept) to stop thinking so much about what I think other people might be thinking of me, and just live my life? Do yoga, if I want to – wear a unitard – eat a whole serving of pasta at the employee appreciation luncheon, because I didn’t have breakfast and I’m really, really hungry and going to be working late too, rather than just have a couple of bites in hopes nobody will think Aha, so that’s why she never wears her shirts tucked in!

In other news, I realized on my way to work this morning that this weekend marks the 10-year anniversary of my leaving my ex-husband. A friend of mine wrote yesterday about some milestones in her life and it got me thinking ...Ten years ago I packed up my cat, clothes, books, CDs, some kitchen stuff, a red lamp, one table, one chair, and one oak armoire – all I could fit in one trip in my old Accord hatchback – and took back my own life. It was so important to me to get out that I left everything else behind; I didn’t even take anything to sleep on – I bought a crib-sized mattress at the thrift store and slept curled up on it on the floor for five months before I finally bought a real bed again.

Maybe I’ll write some more about this milestone. Or maybe not. One thing I can say is that I’m grateful to my 31-year-old self for having the guts to do that, even though I had no idea at the time how I was going to pull it off. It was the beginning of the stripping away of who I thought I was, and the discovery of who I really am – which is to say, nobody. Meaning, everybody – everything! When everything you thought you knew about yourself falls out from under you, not just once but time after time after time, and every time you keep on finding yourself still standing ... It’s pretty powerful just to realize: I’m still here!


Listening to: Gladys Knight & the Pips: You're the Best Thing That's Ever Happened To Me