All my life I have struggled with fatness.
Baby fat, teenage fat, grownup fat. It comes and it goes. Fat itself is
not so bad. It's how we torture ourselves about its pinch-ability, its
rolls, the way it slows us down and makes our thighs rub or our shorts
ride up. Oh, fat and the shame of it!
There is little point in asking why.
Polynesians thought it was the greatest. Fat princesses were a prize. In
earlier colonial times fat meant prosperity. Scrawniness ascribed the
dearth of society, poverty.
Yet fat means hunger, and it is our souls
that are hungry, so we feed our faces because we can get at them more
easily than massaging the woes of the deep interior heart.
Fat, we think, means we must exercise; we
must starve out those subcutaneous layers, rich and laden with sin. We
must become light as air and open as space, leaping like gazelles all
about town and showing bone-protruding skin at the midriff to prove it.
Fat. How we hate it. Or is it a guise for something else that we hate?
Do we hate that our mothers were too busy,
or too drunken, or too shattered by depression to come and hold us? Do we
hate how our fathers were never fathered themselves, so didn't know how to
share - in a look, in a touch, in the winsome sadness in their eyes that
they knew how you felt? Did you hate how they could not come and hold you
for they were too busy grasping at prosper fat? Do you wonder?
How can we no longer be the failed calf,
the sacrifice? How can we reach a sense of satisfaction with ourselves as
we are? Yoga, in its gentler forms, speaks a subtle language that fills
the heart with luxury. It is a dance that allows us to feel graceful no
matter what we weigh. It is a rest that reassures us that we truly have
been exhausted, and with good reason. Yoga is a path to balance, through a
heart beating regularly and rhythmically, through lungs breathing clean
and fresh and in synchronization with the body's stretching.
I cannot say that yoga has relieved me of
my discomfort with the "extra" folds and fleshiness of my body.
I cannot say that I feel as comfortable with it as without it. I can say,
though, that yoga has transformed me into a person whom people can love
easily. And that the joyous mystery which I exude is not only healing my
yoga students. It is healing me.
My practice of yoga gives me a sense of
safety in the world. The poses inform me of happiness. I am gradually
losing my anxiety and its concomitant need to run away into an oblivion
created by rich food eaten immoderately. Through yoga I may choose to lose
my plush armor, simply living in the present, knowing that each moment
gives me more than enough.
____________________
Portia Brockway first
practiced yoga at the age of three under her father's instruction. She is
a hatha (physical) yoga instructor, a writer and an artist living and
teaching "yoga in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA (at Yoga In Harvard
Square). She may be reached at
617-864-YOGA (9642) or visit her website at: www.yogainharvardsquare.com
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