Every Body is Perfect
Standing in the circle at last night’s yoga class, the idea that every body is beautiful settled more deeply into my soul. There we were, standing naked together, a nice baker’s dozen of us. We represented every size, shape and color, and ranged in age from mid 20’s to early 80’s. In every body, I easily found something I genuinely found to be beautiful. Yet, there was something else I knew: The minds living inside those bodies did not necessarily appreciate how beautiful they are.
I knew that because, after teaching naked yoga for many years, I regularly hear men talk about their insecurities about their bodies. I also knew that virtually every man has these insecurities, and that, for a host of reasons, we all tend to focus our minds on things we feel insecure about. As a result, we often run around focusing on the things about our bodies that we feel do not fit the social “ideal,” when we would enjoy our lives a lot more if we focused on the parts of our body that we really love, or at least the parts that we like the most. This brings me to the most challenging parts of yoga… the mental part.
As I have said before, yoga is about a lot more than the physical exercise we get while strengthening and stretching our muscles. It is also about learning to direct the focus of our minds to help create a more positive experience of living in our bodies. We can’t do that without learning to direct the focus of our minds, which is, by far, the most difficult part of yoga.
In yoga, we not only learn the alignments of the poses we are doing, we learn to direct the attention of our minds to things that are helpful. We learn to direct our gaze via what yogis call a drishti (a focal point) to help with attention and balance. We also learn to focus our minds on thoughts that are helpful to balancing our mental and emotional states, with the goal of making the limited time we have in our beautiful bodies during our lives that much more enjoyable.