Mirror Mirror on the Wall, I don’t like what I am seeing at all…

Awhile ago, I attended a yoga class as a guest teacher at a week-long retreat. I showed up late, due to traffic, and tried to sneak my way into the room. The room is a converted garage, one whole side the doors that roar open and then hang from the ceiling, the other side all mirror. The conversion is ostensibly a dance studio, as the owners of the center are a dancer and her artist husband.

I had conveniently forgotten about the mirrored wall.

It’s been two years since I attended/taught at this annual retreat, and in that time, I’d put it out of my mind that one whole wall is mirrors. So I was shocked—to see myself, the room, all the other people. They weren’t staring at me—mercifully, I entered in the main door as they were all facing neither the mirror nor me, doing Warrior II. However, I was facing me.

And I did not like what I was seeing.

The participants were mostly women, and mostly young. At 36, I don’t consider myself “old,” but I am clearly not an undergraduate in college. I have never been as slender as most of the women in that room, but my age + being disconnected from my body (related to recent over-busy-ness in my life) + heat + size suddenly overwhelmed me.

The mirror showed me my body—stout, short and plump. But what the mirror really showed me is something far deeper. It showed me how much I try and pretend that I don’t look like I do. The mirror showed me I am not who I think I am.

That is the pain, the suffering, the struggle—my own misconception, self-deception about what I look like.

Especially when traveling (I just finished a five week teaching tour in France and England) or in a new situation (new people means even though I know this studio, it’s still a new situation), I feel self-conscious. That’s nothing new. It just so happens it’s happened a lot lately—five weeks of it happening nearly every day, a few times a day, followed by a 10-day visiting residency of two teachers of mine. In other words, I got really overextended.

Hanging out over the cliff like this, physically and emotionally overextended, my legs dangling, everyone can see my thighs, my arms. Everyone can see my belly, my hips, bulging out in different places. I am raw, wide open, revealed and I don’t like it.

Or, I don’t like myself.

This is, underneath it all, what I am hiding from myself. I am hiding a dislike – a dislike that keeps me from practicing yoga by telling me that I don’t deserve it, hidden as some kind of coercion to not pay attention to my body’s needs. The layers are thick and contorted, and I do a lot of meditation and practice to unpeel them.

When I get busy, I fall for what is on the surface. But one surface—a mirror—reveals what is below the surface.

My first reaction is aggression: hate myself, swear to go on a diet immediately.
My second is sadness and dejection—a reaction to my own aggression.
Then their battle shuts me down completely, and I begin to tune into others’ bodies, judging (positively or negatively) and comparing.
Until I am so checked-out that I have missed the point altogether.
This isn’t about my weight.
This isn’t about my shape.
This is about me fundamentally succumbing to self-hatred.

This is about me telling myself:
Do not look at the self-hater behind the curtain.
The self-hater’s body is not the source of her indignancy.
Where she gets her high-mindedness from is fear, not from being right.

What happens if I were to really see how much I am spiting myself, pretty much constantly? If past experience is any proof, and I suspect it is, I find liberated energy and even, if desired, motivation to lose weight or at least be more connected to my body.

The mirror this morning didn’t show me my body. It didn’t even show me me. It showed me how I am treating myself—and I don’t mean on the level of what I am eating or how I am exercising.

Immediately, in a single flash motion, the mirror showed me my whole samsaric cycle of self-deceiving self-hatred. Luckily, my whole self dangling out there, staring at my pudgy center looking back at me, I could see it for once.

Let’s hope I can keep seeing it long enough to help heal what is truly unhealthy here: how I  don’t truly see myself on the most basic, fundamental level. How that leads to, inspires, triggers a self-hatred that I don’t see, either. How blindness does not help me at all.

Mirror, reveal my blindness, as shocking as it is, until I can see myself differently.

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Ed: Sara Crolick