I bought a unitard!

Don't be frightened. I promise not to wear it in public. (And no, that's not me in the picture.)

I've been really, really, really feeling the need to move my poor little agued body lately, which has caused me to start thinking about (only barely actually doing) yoga again. Remembering the days when I used to go to an occasional yoga class, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I stopped going was because I was never really comfortable in my yoga outfit. I've always been more of a leggings-and-a-tshirt kind of gal than a unitard gal, mostly in a vain attempt to camouflage my fat gut, but tshirts aren't the greatest for yoga – they fly up over your head in inverted poses and get twisted around under your armpits and bunched up under your back a lot, too. Not comfortable.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the Five Wonderful Precepts, and especially the second precept, generosity. It's slowly been dawning on me that while I've always felt like I was being kind to myself and protecting myself by indulging my at times extreme (especially in the winter) hermit-like tendencies – doing something positive, in other words – another way of looking at it is that I've been withholding my gifts from the world, refusing to share, and depriving others of whatever good I might have to offer, all because I'm over-identified with my own ideas about "who I am" (e.g., a sensitive person who is easily overwhelmed).

I think my life will feel fuller, funner and more real if I can learn how to gently let go of that idea and let myself respond more freely to situations as they arise. Singing (loudly!) and dancing at Glide last week is a great example of what I mean – if I had been clinging to my shrinking violet personna that morning, I wouldn't have had that experience, and I'm so glad I did have it. I don't remember if I wrote about it, but I spent some time chatting with the man who happened to sit next to me, and I know my presence there and my willingness to share myself lifted him up a little bit that day. I realized I want to keep opening myself up like this; it feels good to me, and I think it feels good to other people, too.

I've been so delighted lately with so many simple gifts from other people – my dad singing a duet with himself on his music-mixing software at Christmas, a little drawing my niece gave me, someone at work bringing in homemade cookies to share. None of these are "professional" quality offerings, but to me that only makes them all the more precious. A few months ago my favorite horoscope advised me to "do more things badly" (I think he was quoting SARK). I've tried to take that advice to heart and give myself permission to go ahead and DO things, even if I don't do them perfectly. Last week, the same horoscope had this to say:

Let me clarify your situation for you, Cancerian. Up until a short time ago, you'd been wandering through halls of mirrors, metaphorically speaking. Then you spied a hammer on the floor, got seized by a rash impulse, and proceeded to smash a lot of glass – again, metaphorically speaking. That was the first step to finding your way out of the labyrinth. Now you're ready for the next step: actually escaping. As you head out, I advise you to be careful that you don't cut yourself on all the shards. Liberation is near enough; there's no need to rush. Walk calmly and carefully towards the sound of the heartbeat you hear in the distance, metaphorically speaking.

So, what does all this have to do with wearing a unitard? Actually, it has a lot to do with it. Becoming more willing to be seen has been a theme of this blog for as long as I've been writing it. I've gone up and down in terms of how much I've revealed here over the years, but in general I'm pretty comfortable being "seen" in this format. That has been very liberating. But I'm kind of tired of living so much in my head all the time. So now I'm tackling the physical – my actual body, and being more willing to get in there and connect with actual people in the actual world – and I am tackling it in a unitard.

Because if I really am going to get out of my head and into my body – into the world where other people live and are available to be met and known – I definitely want to be comfortable doing it. In a way, hibernating alone in my house all winter is not so different from wearing a baggy tshirt to yoga class – I might feel like I'm protecting myself, but the reality is, I'm only preventing myself from being able to fully enter my own life. And preventing others from entering it, too. That's not generous. That's the opposite of generosity.

Fear is the opposite of generosity. And I guess I'm feeling less fearful these days than I have sometimes in the past. I like it.

I have a friend who's fond of quoting a statement from his recovery group: If you think you're going to wait until you feel better before you change your actions, you'll be waiting forever. It's acting different that allows you to start feeling different (also known as "fake it 'til you make it"). It seems like this works with generosity/fear as well – the more generous I act, the more generous I feel, and the more my fears recede. I like that, too.