When your self-consciousness 'hits the fan'
Swift motion caught my eye, as I opened the door to my dorm room at Kripalu, yoga retreat center (closed for now due to covid-19). My roommate for the week, a lovey and hilariously funny woman, several years, perhaps decades, my elder, whom I’d met on this retreat, was the source of that sudden movement. My brain processed that she had just gone from standing on her bed to sitting, rather abruptly, but I could not puzzle out why. I detected what seemed to me a look of shame in the color of her cheeks, an expression of “you caught me” dancing upon her face.
The day before, we’d practiced vinyasa yoga in one of the program workshops. My roommate, who had been coming to Kripalu for decades and was no stranger to yoga, had never before tried this style of physical practice. She found it to be more active than the more gentle forms to which she typically gravitated. Not knowing what to expect, she had worn her usual uniform, a light wool sweater. She had felt physically uncomfortable, due to the body heat she generated through a somewhat vigorous movement, and attributed that discomfort to her choice in wardrobe. And yet, she otherwise enjoyed the experience and wanted to return for more. Thus, on this morning, she had decided to dress more practically, swapping her signature sweater for a tee-shirt.
The problem: exposed upper arm flesh. My roommate was concerned that revealing the fullness of her arms in a yoga class would be unsightly. She imagined others turning their eyes away in disgust. To test the waters, she had dressed in short-sleeves and stood on her bed in order to see her reflection in the wall mirror. As she raised her arms skyward, her hands made unexpected contact with the rotating ceiling fan at the exact moment I had returned from the hall bath and opened the door, resulting in a hasty retreat to her seat.
“I wanted to see if my arms would jiggle when I lifted them up,” she confessed. She burst into a fit of laughter, “And then the fan struck me down on my arse, a sign from above. A direct message from God, to knock some sense into me; admonishing me for being absolutely ridiculous.” She paused, then declared, “You have just witnessed a divine act, “ and we belly-laughed together, allowing tears to harmonize a chorus of giggles unleashed at the absurdity and revelation that our bodies carry all of this.
This took place a few years ago, and I am reminded of it as I read Sonya Renee Taylor’s, The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. We discover our bodies as babies initially with marvel and wonder. Through systems designed to perpetuate shame and oppression against our bodies, we internalize messages that our bodies are problems that need fixing. But to an individual, it wasn’t always this way (childlike wonder), which gives hope that it need not always be this way (global transformation). I imagine Sonya would tell my roommate that her feelings of body shame came about through these systems and structures designed to make her feel exactly as she did, like she had to apologize for her body. As we awaken to these difficult truths, we invite change; we mandate it. I’m painfully reminded, when I hear an onslaught of stories of hate crimes against the AAPI community, of the rhetoric and policies harming trans people (not new, but brought to light on International Transgender Day of Visibility), and so many more, of the dear price our humanity pays when we do not.
Back at Kripalu, my roommate and I linked arms, our beautiful and miraculous extensions of our hearts, and set off to practice, unapologetic. An everyday divine act of radical self-love.
