boring bodies

My best friend Amanda, who in many ways has taught (still teaches) me the lessons that a mother or a sister might have, made this declaration during my sophomore year of college, as we sat around the table with other girls on the brink of womanhood at our beloved Columbia Cottage, drinking boxed wine in carafes and eating Chinese string beans until late into the night:

"Can we not talk about our bodies?  It's just so . . . boring."

Prior to this, I had suffered from some garden-variety body dysmorphia.  Nothing unusual or extreme.  I don't have the will power to starve myself or exercise excessively, and I really can't throw up to save my life (when I have had the flu, I have often actually wished for the ability to gag myself so that my nausea could pass).  But, like most women, I didn't like the way my body looked.  I wished for many things:  rounder hips, smaller waist, more petite and arched feet, thinner fingers, more symmetry.  These were things that would never be "fixed" by losing weight or working out harder.  In fact, the list of complaints I had about my appearance never shrunk, even as my size ebbed and flowed over the years.  And Amanda was right:  oftentimes, when women get together, we fill the silence with complaints and accusations toward our bodies.  If you don't want to participate in this kind of conversation, you risk being left out.

But the one thing I wanted more than for my body to be perfect was to be not boring.

So I decided that body shape and size would not be a pressing topic of discussion for me anymore.  I would own my body and how I felt in it, even if it sometimes felt uncomfortable.  Of course, this was 19-year-old me, still light years away from the drastic things that childbearing and nursing, depression and neglect, trauma and heartache, would do to my body.  And this was also still a judgmental me, now turning that laser beam of criticism away from my own appearance and onto others, compared to whom I was now allowed to feel superior (because they were still over there boringly hating their bodies).  It really wasn't much of an improvement.  I still never felt beautiful, even if I wasn't boring.

But a funny thing happened to me when I began practicing yoga seriously a couple of years ago.  I began to feel beauty and grace emanating from my hands and feet, then from my legs and arms, and finally, over time, from my core - back and belly and chest.  Certain poses were almost too lovely for words, as I watched myself in the mirror.  Who was this lithe creature, whose body seemed to just know what to do?  Who was this woman, whose comfort in her own skin was so amply evident?

I began to love my hands and feet as their ropey sinews gripped the earth.  Then I began to love my arms and legs as they grew firm and strong from supporting me well.  And then I started to love my middle, last of all.  That took awhile.  But that same middle that grew babies and then grew crepey and soft is the middle that can now hold me up in uddiyana bandha.  The back and ribs that are "too wide" can hoist my legs into a playful headstand.

These are the strong hands and wrists that hold my daughter.

And these are the sturdy, strong feet that carry me around all day and play with my son.

And sometime after I started feeling all this gratitude toward my body, something else amazing happened.  I began yoga teacher training five weeks ago, and it has been an intense experience for me so far, both physically and spiritually.  My physical activity has really ramped up - I'm practicing yoga probably four times more often than I was previously.  I was anticipating this, and thought I might drop a few pounds.  Instead, what has happened as I gain strength is that I am constantly hungry!  I feel like a marathon trainer, or like a woman who is pregnant and growing something inside herself.  I think I've gained a few pounds, even.  But, without even forcing myself to, I don't care!  I feel like a gorgeous, functional machine that is having its controls and dials turned.  More output means more input.  I have also become one of those jiggly ladies who takes her shirt off in class and truly doesn't care.  I'm naturally a very hot and sweaty person, and hot yoga classes make a shirt a total inconvenience.  I strip down to my bra and the shirt is better used to mop my face and neck.  As the kids say these days, IDGAF.  Not only that, but I feel lovely!  I have become a person who starts making videos of myself doing asana practice:

And what's more astonishing is that I watch that video and feel love and attraction toward the person I see.  It's thrilling.  It's something that, in 32.5 years of life, I have never felt before.  

"are you happy?"

I stood on the slanted, uneven floor in the doorway of my stepfather's mom's house.  Grandma Gaye is in her nineties now and still lives alone, in a tiny yellow cottage in what was once a hard part of town.  She cherishes her independence, but willingly gave away her truck keys when she knew it was time to stop driving.  She raised seven children (including surprise twins as the last two) and now she cares for the many cats of East Lawrence.

She doesn't hear that well anymore, and we hadn't come for a long visit anyhow.  We were just stopping by after a day at the municipal pool and public library of my youth.  My kids were hot and tired and wanted to touch her many knick-knacks.  Vicki kept finding "treasures" and trying to convince Gaye to let her take them home (this girl has taught me the meaning of "don't ask, don't get").  I was starting to get anxious to get back onto 40 Highway - the long way to Topeka for the evening, but the way without turnpike tolls.  I just didn't feel like spending $1.40 to take the interstate.  I had stopped working for the year and knew that every penny counted.  That $1.40 could buy a bomb-pop at our corner store back in East Nashville.

My tolerance for chatting was low, and I made ready to make our exit.  In the doorway, Gaye grabbed me gently by the upper arm and looked me right in the eyes.  She is quite short, so this meant she was gazing up at me.

"Are you happy?"

The question came out just like Gaye:  straightforward and simple and unveiled.

I was a bit caught off guard by it.  I knitted my eyebrows for a moment, then said, "Sure.  I'm not having the very happiest time of my life, but it's not like I'm miserable.  I sleep like a baby, in any case."

"Okay," she answered, "just as long as you're happy.  That's the most important thing."

No follow-up questions.  No deeper thrust to the conversation. That was all she had wanted to know.  She wasn't trying to make any kind of other point about my life or her opinion of it.

We piled into the car and the kids were asleep before we got to the highway. I continued to ponder her question until we pulled up to the curb in front of Charlie and Leslie's house.  In fact, I continued to ponder it throughout the rest of our trip, and even after we came home.

At each stop along our road trip (and there were seven more homes that welcomed us after Gaye), I told the story of her question and made the same simple query.  Over late-night beers after the kids went to sleep, or Mexican food, or as we sat together on patios and porches, the things I heard amazed me.  It was a question that really cut through the fog and got to the heart of things.

"I'm happy, I guess.  But I'm stressed.  I'm trying to provide for my family, and that means I'm always thinking about the next thing that we want or need.  I don't really have time to think about whether I'm happy."

"I'm not sure that happiness is even the point.  Mom always used to say that the point of life wasn't to be happy.  It was to be useful and survive."

"I don't know when we will feel happy again."

"I'm really happy in my work.  But in the rest of my life . . . I'm not sure."

"I can't even tell you the last time someone asked me that question.  I have no idea."

"I am happy, because I have figured out how to take life on life's terms."

Most people I asked were like me - they hadn't considered the question in so long that they had to really turn it over in their minds for awhile.

I started my 200-hour yoga teacher training a few weeks ago, and on our first night of class, my teacher Liz made a statement that has ricocheted around my mind since then.  She said, "Mental health isn't just being happy all the time.  It's about having the complete depth and experience of all the feelings."  So many of us seem to be searching for happiness, but is it really something else that we're looking for, and we don't know what other name to call it?  Depth, contentment, acceptance, purpose, an end to suffering?

As for me?  I'm really happy right now.  This is a sweet season in my life.  Taking the hallway time has been a really good decision, I think.  The days seem to float by lightly, strung together with a golden strand of friends over for dinner and walking Vicki to school and picking flowers in the alleyway.  But I'm realizing that the goal isn't to make this last forever.  The goal is to learn what needs to be learned from this time, to take what lessons it has for me, and to keep moving forward.  I won't always be this happy, and that's okay.