We are not what we wear. We are not our waistlines. We are not the wrinkles around our mouths, we are not the dark circles around our eyes.
This is what I keep telling myself, over the years, over and over. Yet, if I am honest (and I have tried very hard to be honest, always), it’s tough not to mind.
It’s tough to not to care when someone tells you that you have put on weight or that you look ‘prosperous’ or asks if you haven’t been hitting the buffet line a couple of rounds too many. (Tough also to say which is worse, if it’s a loved one who says this, or a complete stranger. With strangers, one has the option of sudden violent reflexes, I suppose.)
It’s tough not to dread what greets you in the mirror when you take off your clothes. It’s tough making up new excuses not to join your classmates at sports when you were a kid, because you know you have no eye–hand coordination to speak of.
It’s tough not to take it personally when you are an adult and have finally lost some pounds after joining a gym and taken countless hours of shit-talking from a trainer who looks like he’s barely out of puberty, only to have your mom and your friends ask if you are taking drugs or become anorexic because you’re suddenly so… skinny.
It’s like the story of the farmer and his son and the donkey they are taking to the market to sell. There’s no pleasing anyone. Tough luck, if you even try. Perhaps that’s the moral of the story.
It’s tough but we deal. We may look like a whale (or a waif) but we won’t wail about it. We get by. There are ways.
But perhaps one of these ways aren’t found in twisting your limbs around yourself until you resemble that cliché — a human pretzel. (And as your own sweat drips profusely all over your body and slides into crevices you never knew existed, you are reminded of what a pretzel tastes like. Salty.)
I have only myself to blame, I know.
So the personal trainer wasn’t enough for me. I had to join a class. And it’s not even ‘proper’ yoga, as one of my friends pointed out. This one had tai-chi and pilates exercises incorporated in the workout too. And pop songs instead of the usual Zen chimes and gentle sounds of South-American waterfalls. Such rubbish. Such brilliance.
Does it matter that it’s not ‘proper’ yoga, I ask, when I can barely catch up with the rest of the class? See other students, moving from one pose to the other like a slender and supple vegan panther. See me trying not to land on my ass for the umpteenth time attempting what the teacher calls a ‘Crow Pose’ (which, for little novice me, more closely resembles a ‘Raise Your Butt into the Air and Knock Your Head onto the Hard Wooden Floor Pose’).
Naturally I am completely addicted to this by the end of my first class.
My friends often tell me I have a competitive streak in me, one a mile long and then some. I refute this every time, of course, and refuse to believe them.
Yet when I find myself stranded in a weekend training camp to become a certified instructor, barely six months after my near-death experience in my first class, together with other participants who have years of real yoga practice under their belts, somehow I can’t help but wonder if my friends aren’t right, for once this time again.
My fellow trainees are so much better than me at this. The teachers – one Japanese, the other Australian – are merciless in their exactitude, in their requirements for precision in our poses. For such a flexible pair of ladies, I tell myself, they sure are inflexible about my wobbling thighs and my inability to touch my damned toes.
Muscles ache, some possibly sprained. Sweat-drenched bodies, our towels soaked beyond hope. We collapse on our yoga mats and nothing has ever felt this good. This feeling of accomplishment, of the camaraderie that we have built. We met as strangers, but now we are brothers and sisters. It doesn’t matter if I cannot bend the way they can bend; what matters, they tell me, and the teachers agree, is that I try.
I am working at making myself better. We all are.
I have had many ups and downs since that weekend, that amazing experience. My body isn’t made of stone; flesh will grow and will decay. It will change; it must. We are none of us exempt from this simple truth.
So it is with me. I get fatter; I get skinnier. I exercise and then I don’t. I eat a healthy diet, and then I don’t. Maybe change is nothing more than a series of cycles, repeating. Seasons.
What I will always remember from my instructor training are these two memories: The first is of Riyo (the Japanese teacher) telling us never to be afraid or to apologise for seeking perfection (in our poses, in our breathing), even when we know perfection is impossible – it’s the work that means something. Our work, our effort, our constant seeking to improve.
The other comes at the end of the session, when Kylie (the Australian teacher) is sharing her thoughts about our progress. She turns to me last, and looks me in the eye, and tells me, despite my obvious lack of experience and flexibility, she has not seen many people with my willpower and my determination to succeed.
Her observation still colours everything that I do today, whether I make it or whether I do not. It’s intention that counts. The will and the determination.
It’s the end of yet another dinner party. We have eaten some tamago-and-seaweed pizza and other delicious Japanese fusion dishes that purists avoid with a vengeance. (My friends and I, we are irreverent diners; neither gourmands nor food snobs, we just eat whatever tastes good.)
I make the mistake of patting my round and non-alcoholic beer belly, and groaning. I’m so fat, I say. The moment the words leave my mouth, I know. I’m going to regret this.
And so begins the litany from one friend on how not fat I am, that I’m too skinny for my own good, then another chips in that it’s just my face that’s scrawny, Kenny does have some blubber above his belt, and yet another suggests reverse liposuction to, you know, move the wobbly stuff on my body around, from where it’s not wanted to where it is.
Words can’t hurt you, you know. Not when they are said with love.
Actions, however, are a different matter altogether.
My best friend grabs me by the waist and hugs my love handles. As though on cue, the rest follows suit, some sort of flab-induced crowd hysteria. I protest in vain, then give in and let them have me, or at least, have at my fatty bits.
Devil is laughing his head off. He knows the feeling; he does this all the time at home too. So this is my body; it’s imperfect and will always be imperfect. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Smothered in my friends’ lustful and mirthful embraces, I know a body is not what we love; it’s who the somebody in that body is that matters.
This is the body we have, and this is all the balance that we need.