Kimber Simpkins
Our group of sweaty, tired trainees sank into the final savasana of the weekend as our yoga teacher trainer quoted Erich Schiffmann’s invitation to trust ourselves without reservation. Despite my exhaustion, my mind perked up as I lay under the heavy blanket. Was it really true—could I just listen to my body and heart and they would unfailingly tell me what to do? Could I learn to trust myself that deeply?
It was easy to see how listening to myself applied to my yoga practice: I’d noticed that no matter how many times I did headstand, with any teacher, with perfect alignment, I eventually tweaked my neck. My body was telling me that headstand, the king of the asanas, was not majestic for me. I noticed my gut instincts about whether someone I’d met would return my phone call were surprisingly reliable—except when my enthusiasm for wanting to know the person better overruled my belly’s quiet counsel. My trust in myself led me to quit my life as a lawyer and seek out a more family friendly and heart-true path, but I didn’t know if it could help me come to grips with the one thing that dominated my whole life: food.
Stuck Between Good and Bad
Ever since I struggled with disordered eating at age fifteen, I’d been hungry, and not because there weren’t plenty of homemade grilled cheese sandwiches to go around. Hunger arose out of my ability to dissect and calculate the nutritional value of every edible item on my plate to the twenty-third decimal place and then to deprive myself of anything over my stingy calorie allotment. My body lodged its complaints with growling and shakiness, which I struggled all day to ignore. Was it a “good” day? Did I eat few enough calories? Or a “bad” day … when my hunger raced passed the finish line of my diet? Had I eaten “good” food or “bad” food? If apples—which were supposedly “good” for you—had around 90 calories, and this diet cereal bar had only 75 calories and more vitamins, wasn’t it “better” for me to eat the packaged thing? No. Yes. No. If I ate “good” foods during the day, I was “good.” If I ate “bad” foods, no matter how many things I accomplished or checked off my to-do list, I was “bad.”
Since my first diet at age twelve, I learned alongside my mom that there was no such thing as being “too thin,” and that even women who looked fine to me might be called “fat,” which seemed to also mean “bad” and “unworthy.” I wanted to be worthy. I wanted to be good. And if eating as little as possible was the route to putting “bad” in the rearview mirror, I would press on the acceleration pedal and eat as little as possible. Dieting was the map to Worthy Body Land. Whenever one diet ran out of gas, I searched for another one, hopefully faster and better.
Well into my twenties, my mind churned with a dozen different diet experts’ opinions about what was and wasn’t good for me, and of course they couldn’t agree among themselves on what was healthy or not. As a newly minted yoga teacher, I tried to eat “well”—a vegetarian diet with salads and fruit every day—but would frequently find myself mindlessly consuming entire bags of Cheetos or a box of drugstore chocolates.
“Chocolates are vegetarian,” I consoled myself.
I did not trust myself around cake. Or candy. Or bread. Or chips. I didn’t trust myself around food. Period. I might eat “bad” foods until my stomach hurt one day, and eat “good” foods to the same painful threshold the next. I hated being caught up in the duality of good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, worthy/unworthy, but my brain rewarded a green smoothie with a big yogic gold star and French fries as an embarrassing failure of self-discipline. Even though yoga was all about bringing opposites into balanced relationship with each other, I found myself swinging on a pendulum of self-hatred on one side and smugness on the other, leaving any equanimity far behind.
What if I accepted Erich Schiffman’s yogic invitation to trust myself? From my practice I knew my body was smart; wise in telling me when to let my wrists rest from too much arm balancing, insightful in knowing my hamstrings could safely stretch a little further in a forward bend, and tender in reminding me to rest, even in the middle of my practice, when the day’s energy had run out with hours still left on the clock.
What if I radically embraced the possibility that my body knew what to feed itself, knew what belonged on its plate, in its mouth, and in its belly? What if I rejected the ideas of “good” and “bad” food and instead let my body find its way to moderation and enjoyment? Perhaps out of all the experts in the world, I’d been ignoring the one I should have been listening to all along: my own body.
Fear snuck in around giving up the expert’s ideas of “good” and “bad.” What if I gain weight … or lose weight? What if I get sick … or get well? I didn’t know. But I did know that what I was doing—listening to everyone but myself—wasn’t working.
I jumped. I took a leap of faith like I’d never taken before, and my body caught me. I’d always heard stories of those mystical people who could savor one bitty piece of chocolate a day and not finish a whole bar for weeks. From my own experience of the hamster wheel of binging and deprivation, I figured those people were masters of an iron-clad willpower that had deserted me long ago.
But my body taught me how to join their magical ranks. And upon my arrival it all made sense. There’s no willpower. There’s only listening to that clear, compassionate inner directive.
I had to bring the same principles I’d learned from stretching on my mat to sitting at the table: listen, trust, respond, feel. Listen to whether I was hungry or full, and to what I was hungry for. Trust my body’s signals and enjoyment. Respond to what it’s asking for and feel what’s happening in my body moment to moment. I dumped all the ideas about what I could and couldn’t do, what was allegedly “good” for me and “bad” for me, what I was supposed to do and not supposed to do, and let my body lead the way, the same way I would if I was taking my body into a difficult pose. I had to treat my body like it was the expert instead of all the diet gurus I’d carried around with me in my head.
Our tendency to divide food into good/bad categories isn’t self-made. We tend to put a lot of faith in the “cult of the expert”: where we look to someone with degrees, experience, or fame to tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. Sometimes their information is appropriate and accurate and sometimes not. The problem is that we tend to believe experts over our own experience, substituting their advice in place of the experience of listening to ourselves and tuning in to what is right for us. We do this when we take on a new diet … first buying into the belief that thinner is better and healthier, and then that someone else has the secret to what our body should or shouldn’t eat in order to make it look the way we want. And out of our fear and longing, we pour money into the pockets of the diet industry—more than 61 billion dollars a year. Even worse, with the 95-percent failure rate of weight loss diets,9 the vast majority of the time we end up right back where we started, with an extra serving of self-hatred on the side, still convinced it’s our own fault for not finding the right expert and the right diet.
Buddha told his followers to not simply believe him, but to try out the teachings themselves and see if his guidance tested true in the crucible of their own experience. I’ve heard many teachers repeat this same sentiment in yoga class: there’s no requirement that you believe any particular dogma or doctrine in yoga. You only have to believe what you’ve experienced in your own mind, body, and heart. But in our scarcity-based culture it becomes very tempting to claim to have or know all the answers, and sell books or workshops or programs to hungry people seeking those answers.
When I was one of those hungry people, I went looking for experts to show me how to feel full after and between meals, as well as how to treat my body with more love. Ayurveda, the traditionally Indian form of medicine, sounded intriguing, and I found an Ayurvedic cleanse offered at my local yoga studio. Many aspects of the cleanse were satisfying: I loved kitchari, the traditional curried lentil and rice stew eaten every day; massaging my body every day with sesame oil was magical; adding ghee (clarified butter) to my cooking made my life better; and water soaked almonds turned out to be a yummy treat I still savor. The practices I learned supported my concerted effort to listen to my body’s needs and pay attention to what it wanted and enjoyed. Our workshop leader phrased everything as an invitation, allowing us to try things out and see how they felt in our bodies.
But when I opened a book a friend recommended about Ayurveda, it was full of lists of “don’t eat this, eat this” and “this food is terrible for you, but this food is good for you.” Things that my body loved—avocados and popcorn—were suddenly on the “bad” list. I shut the book and put it away. Nothing like a list of dos and don’ts to trigger my old eating disorder mind-set.
Looking around my yoga community, I saw that following seemingly “healthy” vegan, gluten-free, or other diets could turn otherwise rational humans into obsessive debators of “clean” versus “junky” food, the near enemies of my dearly departed “good”/”bad” dichotomy. The desire to eat well and take care of our bodies can take a destructive turn when we stop listening to what our bodies need and instead listen to some idea in our heads about eating only organic, sustainable, fair-trade, free-range, angel-grown foods. A term has been coined for this newish eating disorder—orthorexia—where one feels the need to eat “better” than others, strives for an ideal purity of the body, and ends up depriving the body of essential nutrients. Unfortunately, orthorexia is a sad direction our yoga practice can take us in if we ignore the body’s needs and wisdom in favor of abstract ideas of purity and perfection. We seldom like to acknowledge it, but yoga can be used to heal or to harm ourselves.
To finally exorcise the ghost of my eating disorder, I had to resolve to stop treating food like grace and sin, reward and punishment. I had to let food just be food, and learn that eating food, whatever its nutritional qualities or quantities, should not be an excuse for self-flagellation, denial, or even a feeling of lofty superiority. Just like how I was learning to treat my body on my mat, my meals needed more equanimity and mindfulness and less judgment and fear.
Body Shame on the Mat
As healing as yoga was for my body and mind, I also found myself sometimes triggered by teachers around my eating disorder during yoga classes. One Tuesday night found me in class with a young teacher I knew from my training, who led fun, energetic classes. The lights were low and the room warm: my body was already looking forward to savasana. We were all in pigeon pose, bowed over the front edge of our mats when I heard her say:
“What am I going to do about these thighs?”
Did my teacher really just say that? Out loud? I wondered if my inner critic had parachuted out of my ear and climbed up into her mouth. And wait … if she thinks there’s something wrong with her thighs … what does she think about mine?
Her body’s beautiful, I thought. I wish I looked like her.
And suddenly the practice I found so comforting felt unsafe. Her comment awakened the old voices that told me I wasn’t good enough. Heading home after class, I reminded myself that she didn’t usually say that kind of thing and that she probably didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Maybe I’d missed the context somehow? Most of her teaching was about accepting yourself as you are, so she must have had an off night. I was trying to talk myself down. I didn’t want to give up an otherwise wonderful class.
Since I’d begun my yoga practice, I found spreading my toes on my mat to be an incredible way to reconnect with my body after years bent over law school textbooks. Before yoga, I had basically ignored my body until it started screaming at me in the only language I listened to: immobilizing back pain. On my mat, one teacher showed me how strong and flexible my body was. Another showed me how to do handstand, a superpower I’d never gotten the hang of as a kid. Another teacher showed me that I wasn’t breathing into my back body at all … wait, I have a back body? I found muscles on my side waist that I never knew were there, sore for the first time from twisting poses. I patiently learned to open my hamstrings and let my fingertips reach the earth—without reinjuring my back.
Yoga helped me find balance and notice where my body was in space … resulting in fewer pratfalls and bruised knees from what I had always felt was a subtle hostility directed at me by the sidewalk. Slowly yoga was teaching me to trust my body and know that I could depend on its deep strength and wisdom. The message seeped in a little bit with every breath: I didn’t need to wage war against my body. The teachings on compassion even gave me hope that I could make friends with it and see the good in this warm, alive being I inhabit.
Almost all the messages I heard in yoga were body affirming: supporting and inspiring a sense of peace and well-being in me and toward my body. Almost all.
Recalling my teacher’s gaffe, I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d been triggered by diet talk or body shaming around her. I’d heard her talk about being on charcoal and clay cleanses, which sounded like drastic diets. From other teachers I’d heard comments like, “Today, we’re going to work off all those holiday treats,” or “Five more times for that extra slice of pizza you had last night.” Once in a room full of two hundred yogis, I heard the teacher punctuate a student’s demonstration of a difficult pose with, “And that’s why you keep off those extra five pounds.”
It’s an inconsistency for sure. On one hand the yoga teachings echoed loud and clear: you and your body are good, whole, wise, and don’t need fixing. On the other hand, the same body-shaming language I’d heard from gym teachers and aerobics instructors and softball coaches who thought they were military sergeants sometimes crept into the instructions of how to engage your thigh muscles and draw your shoulders back. This inconsistency stretches back to the very roots of yoga. In fact, the hatha yoga we practice today arose in part out of the desire to perfect the human body (and spirit) and achieve immortality. The impulse to learn from an expert how to perfect the body has been part of the yoga tradition for centuries.
This contradiction is embedded in many traditions: seeing wisdom and divinity within each individual versus constraining all wisdom and divinity solely within the priests, texts, and icons. Throughout yoga history and throughout the history of many traditions, conflicts have arisen between institutional religions that reserve divinity and their more mystical counterparts. It’s the belief structure version of dictatorship versus democracy: putting the power of feeling connected to the divine into the hands of one versus recognizing that power in everyone.
We see this in yoga class when a teacher takes power away from the students with statements like “I can show you the way. I know the truth. Listen to me. All the teachings come through me. If you want to perfect yourself, follow me.” It gives power back to the students for the teacher to say “The truth is you already know the way. Everything you need to know is already in your heart. Listen to your heart and body. Let any teachings you hear help you move closer to yourself. You are already perfect. Follow the wisdom of your own heart.” Many yoga teachers end up sharing a mixture of both of these messages, intentionally or unintentionally.
There can be real wisdom in listening to the “expert” and then trying things out to see how your body—the true expert—responds. It’s the role of the teacher to take what they’ve heard from experts and teachings and offer the best to their students and let the real expert of their own bodies decide. Every body is different and responds differently to different foods and exercise and experiences. Our role as alive beings in sensitive animal bodies is to listen to those bodies, to pay attention to what they have to tell us over long years of growing and changing, and even observe the effects of billions of years of evolution on our bodies and hearts.
As students we must know that our teachers are imperfect and struggle with the same difficulties we do. We must be aware that while yoga practice can tend the seeds of healing, it can also water the seeds of self-cruelty and forgetting to listen to our own wisdom. When I go to yoga class nowadays I like to check in with my expert-in-residence. Does my body feel safe in this space and trusted by the teacher? If yes, then I let my body’s enjoyment lead the way. The inner voice that reminds you that your body is trustworthy is the true expert within. You’ll never regret finding teachers and classes that remind you over and over to listen to your loving internal guidance.
Kimber Simpkins is a longtime yoga instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area, body image coach, and the author of Full and 52 Ways to Love Your Body. Her journey from private body hating to public body loving has inspired students and readers all over the world. Find out more at kimberyoga.com. Author photo by In Her Image Photography.
9. DM Garner and S. Wooley, “Confronting the failure of behavioral and dietary treatments for obesity” Clinical Psychology Review (1991): 11:729–780.