Our Sexy Selves: Embracing Your Inner Goddess*

This kitteh has a distorted body image.

As a yogi, my awareness is often tuned into my body–but body awareness and body image aren’t the same thing. We have some pretty strong notions of the appearance we should aspire to. These qualities are communicated directly and subliminally to us, but women and girls most strongly, all throughout our lives. The imagery of women as sexual objects is ubiquitous, so much is left out or ignored, or deemed ugly and undesirable. Many things are assumed asexual just by their exclusion from the mainstream–obesity, paralysis, skin pigment disorders–this could be a very long list. The following list, from Tina Fey’s book, Bossypants (I found it on  a blog one of my yoga teachers writes for) captures, in a humorous way, just how unattainable our “standard” of beauty really is. As Fey writes, it is the “laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.” Women should long for:

• Caucasian blue eyes
• full Spanish lips
• a classic button nose
• hairless Asian skin with a Californian tan
• a Jamaican dance hall ass
• long Swedish legs
• small Japanese feet
• the abs of a lesbian gym owner
• the hips of a nine-year-old boy
• the arms of Michelle Obama
• and doll tits

With ridiculous stories such as this one, where major clothing brands are pushing push-ups bras on little girls–this laundry list is, if anything, gaining influence.

Eff these ads.

As a yogi, I’m taught to appreciate my body as it is, right now in this moment. Not to strain toward a particular pose. The truth is that there is no satisfying end to that path, there is always another pose. If you aren’t working just as hard on your internal state, physical practice alone will never lead to nirvana. The challenge put before us all is to seek peace and happiness from within right now.

So what does that mean to me? It means loving my body and the extra 10 lbs I gained on my train trip. Loving the fact that my boobs and butt look great right now, and  loving them just the same if I get super trim again and they too shrink. My weight will always be in flux, something will always seem too big or too small. Because I am human and therefore living, eventually my hair will turn white, my skin sag and wrinkle, my bones begin to ache, and one day, hopefully a long time from now, I will die. No beauty product can circumvent that universal arch.

Ultimately, it means a state of equanimous, non-attached, awe-inspired appreciation for my body, in whatever state it’s in.

The following video makes my cells dance with excitement and anticipation. I probably won’t acheive much of this in this lifetime, but the very fact that the body I’m in is of the same species as the amazing creature in this video, is pretty flippin’ cool. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I do, assuming it didn’t already find it’s way onto your Facebook wall, in which case, you should watch it again because it is SO amazing. 😉

*maybe my future hit pop-yoga workshop? 😉