The Beauty and the Beast /Confession of a yoga teacher

 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