Finding Refuge on the Yoga Mat:
How Modern Practitioners
Need to Say No To Our Culture
and Yes to Ourselves
Dr. Judith Hanson Lasater
All I remember about my first yoga class is the ceilings. That was because we spent a lot of time lying on our backs on our blankets. We would lie down and rest between every pose; the room was dark and the teacher’s voice was muted.
I was in the Student YMCA-YWCA across the street from a large university, and free attendance at this class was a “perk” I received as a new employee of the “Y.” I was finishing up my thesis for my master’s degree and needed a part-time job. I was fortuitously drawn to apply at the “Y” and thus here I was, stretching and breathing with a room full of other university students several evenings a week.
At that time, yoga was an exotic endeavor. There were no special mats or props and certainly not any “yoga clothes” to be found. We began to use small, inexpensive thin rugs for our practice that we had purchased from a chain store full of imported goods. We didn’t tell our families we were going to yoga classes. I once did try to tell my family, and I was asked why I wanted to lie on a bed of nails.
There were a number of differences about practicing yoga in those days, and the differences were marked from how practice is now. First, much of the practice was done with eyes closed. We barely noticed the person on the neighboring mat. We were continually instructed to focus inwardly. Thus it was not easy, nor encouraged, to be competitive with others or with ourselves. Competition was not part of the culture of the class. No one seemed to notice what anyone else was wearing. I wore tights and a leotard because I had some stuffed at the back of a drawer in my apartment. These were left over from my dancing days. And that is what my teacher wore, so it seemed appropriate. But, most importantly, there was no standard of how the pose should be performed and certainly no standard or expected way we as women should look while doing yoga. There was literally no body shape standard at all.
After ten months of practice, my husband and wife teacher team moved across the country and asked me to take over the large yoga program. In the innocence of youth, I said “yes” and my yoga journey began in earnest. Now teaching was my only job; two classes every a.m. and two classes every p.m., Monday through Friday. I was living in leotards. And that’s when it happened.
I began to fast once a week. Over the next few months, I began to fast a lot and to limit and avoid food. My average-sized body began to drop weight until I was just a few pounds above 100. One of the most interesting things that happened was the amount of compliments I received now for how “skinny” I looked.
I became obsessed with weighing myself twice a day. I developed anorexia without ever hearing the word. I had internalized the belief that my worth and “being skinny” were the same thing. I was so obsessed that I even took a bathroom scale on my honeymoon. Food became my enemy. I avoided social situations where food played a prominent part. I was not nourishing my body with adequate food and, by extension, was not nourishing myself in an emotional or spiritual away. Despite the size label on my jeans or all the compliments I received, I was full of self-loathing.
When I think back to those early days, I see the irony. The very first precept of practicing yoga is not “Thou shall wear a size 2 jeans and be able to practice scorpion pose for the rest of your life.” Yoga practice begins with ahimsa, “non-harming.” How sad that I had not understood that in my early years and, in fact, was harming myself through attachment to my beliefs about how my body should look from the outside. I was not really practicing from a place of deep compassion for myself. I didn’t even know what that meant.
The Beginning of Loving My Body
It was years later when I would begin to learn to focus on reducing my anxiety in general, to look inward to find the inner goodness and inherent wisdom existent in all human beings, even me. As I began to practice “savasana of the soul” through meditation and restorative yoga, I began to feel freer about my body in a healthy way. I stopped reading or even looking at fashion magazines. I tried to go a whole day without looking in a mirror. And when I did, I tried to remember to look myself in the eyes and say out loud “I love you” to myself.
I developed the habit of thanking my body every night before sleep for what it had allowed me to enjoy and accomplish that day. My yoga mat truly became a place of refuge. Just being on it became a refuge. I began to listen to my true hunger and eat when it appeared. My body responded by sleeping better and reshaping itself in a way that was both effortless and comfortable. I felt at home in my skin for the first time since childhood.
Yoga practice, transplanted from the culture of India into the modern West, has been transformed by the culture in which it lives. And this ability to adapt is part of why yoga has stayed alive for thousands of years. Yoga melds with the culture in which it is. Its roots are Indian but its expression is formed by the practitioner’s culture. Gradually, yoga began to be accepted in the culture and was “discovered” by athletes and actors and prominent people. Just before this happened, I founded Yoga Journal magazine in 1975 with four others, and so I became unwittingly part of sometimes perpetuating an image for the reader to copy.
Our intention when we started YJ was to support others in learning about yoga—the poses, the breathing, the meditation, and the philosophy that underscored all these practices. In short, we wanted to make the practice of yoga accessible to a wider audience.
So, one day we met at my house and decided to turn our local newsletter, “The Word,” into a magazine. Although none of us knew anything about publishing a magazine, we just moved ahead.
The cultural context of the time had been influenced by the political and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s. More and more people were beginning to find ways to stay physically active, look at different ways of eating, to live in harmony with themselves and the earth. We at the first meeting of YJ were part of this process. We were “questioners” and decided to communicate with others like us.
The Power of Yoga Visuals and Our Self-Worth
Of course magazines are, in large part, a visual art. The writing is important but what draws us to a magazine are the visuals, especially the cover. We on the staff of YJ became part of creating and popularizing the images of what a “yoga body” looked like. Our covers were always young women, thinner and thinner through the years. Ads in the magazine became more and more expressive of a specific body type.
We had no intention of creating a certain “body type” or “look” for others to emulate. Rather, in the beginning we were simply influenced by the accepted wisdom about magazine covers: use an attractive woman. So we did.
I remember the first time I read the phrase “yoga workout” and I felt shocked. I wanted to yell out loud to the world, “No! Yoga practice is a work in.” It is to serve as a pathway into our very self, to help us gradually step away from our thoughts about ourselves so we can be ourselves. Practicing in a way that is concerned with how we perform the pose and how it looks from the outside is anathema to self-knowledge.
Personally, I realized how much I was unconsciously manipulated in my aesthetic choices by the wider culture. I did not realize that in rejecting the cultural standards of beauty, I had simply substituted another one; the Yogic Ideal.
It was then that I realized that I had become part of the problem; I had internalized the normative body image of the yoga world, simply using it to replace my old one. I was unconsciously confusing discipline and control, clinging to the belief that I was healthy because I practiced yoga when actually much of my practice time was spent with an unacknowledged deep repugnance for my body. During my practice I was always telling my body what to do, never listening to what it wanted to do. And so I was desperately attempting to “fix” myself with yoga.
Food Is Not the Enemy
Even with a cursory perusal of the yoga community in the United States today—the ads, the magazines, the clothes, the attitudes—one comes abruptly face-to-face with rigid attitudes of behavior, beliefs about food, and the strident judging of those in the yoga world who actually dare to eat “the wrong” things.
A perfect example of this was a small gathering I planned for friends at my house; we were all to bring a poem to share after dinner by the fire, either a well-loved poem or an original one. My concept was a “yoga teacher salon” where we could connect outside of our role as yoga teachers.
When I sent out the invitations, I asked for the recipients not only to RSVP, but also to tell me of their food preferences. I received detailed lists of what could not be eaten. But one response was refreshing in its kindness and stimulated an awareness in me about how I thought about food. This particular person wrote: “My friend and I would be happy to come. We normally eat vegetarian, but would humbly accept whatever food you offer.”
I certainly would never have said that if I were invited to dinner. I was much too attached to my strict list of what I didn’t eat, what I did eat, what time of day I ate it, my ongoing list of “good” and “bad” foods, and especially which foods were “rewards” and which were good for me so therefore I “had” to eat them. The sweet reply that I received opened my eyes to how we take for granted the belief in withholding as a form of goodness and power.
It seems to me that we have supposedly taken up yoga to learn to live with open hearts, not just open hamstrings, to become freer in our thinking and acting, to hold all beings as precious and a gift. Even ourselves.
I am not saying that I am not particular about choosing to eat the food that I believe is best for me. Of course I do that on a daily basis. Rather, what I am hoping to raise here is the awareness of our attitude behind the choice. Are we adaptable? Are we present? Are we kind? Sometimes, perhaps, we judge ourselves harshly if we step outside of our food rules. Additionally, I believe that we judge others just as harshly for their food choices, “healthy” or otherwise. Are we aware that we may punish ourselves within our judgments and in other ways when we believe we have been “bad” about food?
These days I am eating in a way that is based on listening to my body, noticing what makes my mouth water, noticing when true hunger arises from my body. Then when I eat, I sit down and just eat. I savor every bite, I bless the people that grew the food, and I stop when I am full, even if there is one bite left on my plate. This process has helped me stop obsessing about food, and, for the first time in my life, I feel free around food.
Making Ourselves Better
Women particularly tend to easily fall prey to the tyranny of “looking the part of yogini.” It was important to me that I really looked the part, both in body and in clothing.
Paradoxically, I wonder if we are using our yoga practice as a way to avoid the state of yoga? Are we using our yoga practice as just another distraction from our own unhappiness, in the same way a child uses a new toy? So our yoga practice begins to serve two unconscious processes: we can use it to feel good about our body and ourselves, and we can almost simultaneously use yoga practice to punish ourselves when we feel we have not lived up to our ideals.
Most importantly, how can we be dedicated practitioners of yoga and simultaneously refuse, with the softest energy, to be captured by our thoughts of judgment about how we should look when we practice? The way we answer this question will not only shape our practice, it will shape our lives.
What is enough? What is enough food? What is enough flexibility? Money? Time? Yoga? Love? I want to practice so that I become enough for myself first. One of the most powerful phrases about spiritual practice I ever heard was about how the biggest mistake we make in spiritual practice is holding the belief that we have to be different. But immediately when I hear or read this phrase, my mind says “If we don’t practice, nothing changes, but if we try stridently to change, we miss the deep practice of being present with what is.”
This mysterious paradox can be understood by clarifying the intention with which we practice. If we practice to be different or better, then we practice with aggression and from fear, be they ever so subtle. But if our intention is to turn inward, accept our goodness, live in the miracle that each of us is, we find that strangely we aren’t ever different, we never really change.
In other words, if our intention changes away from control and accomplishment, we find that we grow into ourselves even more, we shine out of ourselves even more, we practice from the inside more and more. And one day we realize we have changed, not from force but from love. Then we have become the yoga, and this not only changes our life, it changes the world around us because others sense it in us.
One way to think of this shift is to consider the yamas and niyamas, elucidated by Patanjali about 2500 BCE in his Yoga Sutra. The yamas and the niyamas are sometimes called the “ten commandments of yoga.” The first yama is the most well known and I mentioned it before: ahimsa: non-harming. Other yamas are such things as telling the truth and refraining from stealing. My favorite of the niyamas is santosha: contentment.
Usually the yamas and the niyamas are taught as practices; we are to do or not do them as is appropriate. But I like to think of the yamas and the niyamas not as prescriptions but rather as descriptions. In other words, a person who is fully integrated acts in ways that are described by such words as nonharming, being content, living without greed, and refusing to use sexuality without compassion and awareness.
If we imagine that the yamas and the niyamas, which precede Patanjali’s introduction of asana, pranayama (breathing exercises) and meditation, are descriptions of a person who lives in harmony with him/herself, then our time on the mat or meditation cushion becomes not the creator of those qualities but rather the expression of them. In other words, this is how an integrated person acts: he/she does not harm, does not steal, is not greedy, and so forth.
When we practice in this way, the mat becomes a sacred place, a place where we remember our connection with the whole, whether we define that connection in the language of a mystic physicist or as a mystic sage would, it ultimately makes no difference. Let us no longer get lost in how we look, but settle into who we are. Let us practice with an attitude of commitment but not seriousness and clinging. Let us find enjoyment and celebration on the mat for all our so-called shortcomings and faults right alongside all of the things we like about ourselves.
This is to practice in a way such that we truly cannot harm. To practice in this way is to invite growth instead of forcing from ourselves the “right” things for all the “wrong” reasons.
I used to joke “What are they going to put on my tombstone? We miss her so much because her hamstrings were so loose or her waist was so small?” To practice yoga is to seek health of the deepest sort. Yoga practice may help us become more flexible and to stabilize at a healthy weight and shape. But even more important is to cultivate the health that is defined by the expression of compassion and presence, a healthy state in which empathy for self and others is the default response to all events and all situations.
To become obsessed with how we look and how we appear to others is so human. But it is also human to observe those thoughts and to hold them gently, and with a sense of self-acceptance. Whatever form we express or body we have, we all have our roots in the same “spiritual earth.”
So start today. Forgive yourself for everything. Embrace everything. Start anew on your mat in the morning. And remember, we believe that life is strong and love is fragile, but really it is the other way around. Life hangs by a thread and love holds the Universe together. Finding a deep self-acceptance is not easy, but it is the only way home.
Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD, PT, has taught yoga since 1971 in virtually all states of the United States and on six continents. She is a founder of Yoga Journal Magazine, President Emeritus of the California Yoga Teachers Association, an advisor to three National Institute of Health studies on yoga, and the author of eight books. Author photo by Lizzie Lasater.