This morning as I
finished my shower and begin to apply lotion on my body I looked at myself
naked in a full length mirror and an overwhelming emotion hit me. I realized
that for years and years, actually all my life, I have fallen into this trap
like millions of women of judging my image and feeling bad about myself. I stood front of the mirror and took a
picture of my body for the first time ever. I found myself vulnerable and felt
this strange compassion towards myself.
I spent my whole life trying to fit
into the “skinny and fit” image. I am no different from any other women who spends their life trying to fit a certain body image in order to feel sexy and wanted. The
constant pressure of staying fit and young, the false need to compete with
younger, skinnier girls just finally came to an end. I begin to cry very intensely and felt resentment,
sadness and guilt for all the years of beating myself up and for being
judgmental of other people because of my poor self esteem….
Yes. I have
always managed to stay in shape and “watch what I eat” but inside I have struggled immensely. This is not an easy confession, considering that I come across super
confident and self assured most of the time. This morning I knew that I have to
change my whole outlook on this subject and realized that I have been living sort of a lie. I
have a 19 year old daughter and the idea of her having to live with these
social pressures just terrifies me and feel an urgency to change the way I think. I wish we as women would STOP competing for men’s approval! We end up not liking each other as women and as a result we end up feeling threatened by each other.
As cliché as it
sounds, you are beautiful just the way you are ! I mean it! This is such an
old story, I know that I am not talking about anything groundbreaking, this is just a very
personal experience that’s now fully blown surfaced.
We look at the
images of skinny supermodels, strippers, and even porn stars and compare
ourselves to them on this very superficial level. We feel less, we feel ugly
and fat. We dislike ourselves. We do not realize that on a spiritual level, on the pure soul level how damaging
this can be. We ignore our true inner beauty, we forget to smile and see how
beautiful the shine in our eyes can be.
Even in the yoga
industry which is extremely commercialized these days, one can feel insecure
and out of place. If you look around we as yoga teachers, mostly female yoga
teachers are obsessed with our image on a very materialistic and superficial
way. I myself have fallen into that, and concerned what would my students think of me, would they question my credibility as a teacher if I was overweight. These are such unrealistic (yet not unfounded) but true concerns for a lot of
women. I am sure we all heard things like this: Wow you look great, you look
skinny! I could go on and on about
this for days, but I just wanted to share this pretty strong personal
experience that hit me out of nowhere this morning.
I want to change how I
think, I want to be more compassionate and understanding towards people who struggle about their
image, and I want this realization to stay with me forever. And for all the men out there, remind
your ladies how beautiful they are and how much you love them just the way they
are!
Trust me, there is no better reward then when you make someone
shine!
Namaste!
Gizella
