Beauty, Value, and the
Feminine Roots of Yoga
Nita Rubio
“No,” I said.
He asked again whether he could have a drink and hang out with me. My friend and I were on a run to grab more beer from the trunk of our car.
We were on our first summer break after graduation, celebrating with our boyfriends. We felt free and grown-up, yet rebellious. It was a good time held through youth’s lens of having all the time in the world at your fingertips. Not a care in the world—except for boys who wanted to drink your beer (and perhaps more) and refused to take no for an answer.
That guy asked us for a beer at least ten times. We knew we were saying no to both giving away our precious cargo and to the subtext of coming along with the beer to “hang out.” It was incredibly annoying and invasive. We weren’t playing some coy game.
Finally, I said something that I had said hundreds of times before—something that always seemed to work: “We have boyfriends.” That was it. It was the kryptonite that loosened their vice grip. As if we had used a wooden stake on a couple of bloodthirsty vampires, they simply shrank back into the night. All I could feel was relief.
My friend and I went back to the party with beers in hand and climbed onto the roof of the vacation house with a dozen or so others to watch the band. I felt distracted and agitated. The feeling did not go away. I sat there for some time with the anxiety running like bees just under the surface of my skin. Something just wasn’t right, and I couldn’t shake it. Then the answer came in like a lightning bolt: I had to belong to another man for my “no” to be taken seriously—for it to be accepted and honored. My word wasn’t enough.
Spontaneous Awakening
Letting someone know I had a boyfriend (sometimes true, sometimes not) was a sentence I had used many times before to get rid of unwelcomed attention. However, I had never once before thought of it in this way. This was like a mallet on my brain. I realized how deeply these men, the culture, and I believed in the men’s sovereignty and authority over my own.
This unveiling defined an irreversible change in how I saw myself in the broader cultural context. For the first time, I saw that part of how people perceived me was based on deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted gender stereotypes. Thus began my journey to heal my own relationship to my body and to extricate the ways I had self-objectified, the result of my own enculturation. Being objectified and self-objectifying had created a deep rift between my mind and body.
Coming Home
Several years later I entered a cozy and modest apartment in Silver Lake, California. An altar to a Yoruban goddess named Oshun was in the entryway. Also in the apartment were altars to the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the Tibetan goddess Tara, and a few others I didn’t know at the time. I had come to study the Tantric Dance of Feminine Power and this was my first class.
At this time, more than fifteen years ago, “Tantra” was not the common word it is today. Hardly anyone knew what Tantric tradition was, including me. I was mainly interested in the other parts of the class title. Dance. Feminine. Power.
My first pilgrimage to this movement modality felt like a sacred oath. I felt like I had finally found an open door to what I knew only in very rare moments in my life: Women Are Magic. No wonder I was nervous.
It turned out in order to access this magic in my body, I would need to confront (and still do) everything in my mind that worked against walking in the world liberated from all my own self-deceit and self-hatred. I would need to stand in my own inner power in a world that did not want me to be liberated from these things.
From the Inside Out
This movement modality was originated and developed by my teacher, Vajra Ma. It is a practice of the subtle body. There are no techniques, dance steps to learn, or mirror to watch yourself in. The movement must come from deep inner feeling.
The subtle energy expresses itself and shapes the body into gestures and full body mudras (postures that seal the energy in a certain configuration within the body). Through my continued education in the traditional lineages of Tantra, I learned that it is precisely this type of meditation and inner communication that the ancient yoginis used to develop the yoga asana practice.
I was taught that asana practice was originally used as medicine. The medicine was to be used in certain ways, during certain times in a female practitioner’s life, and in tune with the moon, to which we are inextricably linked. I loved learning about the relationship between the wisdom of the female body and the wisdom of the cosmos—that this relationship to the deep wisdom within the female body and the deep wisdom of the movement of the cosmos were not separate things and that a woman can find her place among the earth and the stars in an incredibly real and nonconceptual way.
The most important thing about this practice is that it was fluid and dynamic. The internal energies, the menstrual blood that we are tuned to in our cycles, and nature are all fluid. It is movement that is the hallmark of the feminine roots of yoga. As you learn to move with the internal energies, you learn how to move with life’s flow. Beauty emanates from here because it is deeply rooted from within.
Beauty—but Not Like You’d Think
Reverence of beauty is not a new thing. Beauty has been exalted for thousands of years, according to the surrounding cultural and political mechanisms that define a society’s norms and moral values. This has also crept into current spiritual pursuits. Those with the looks, money, confidence, and right affirmations will secure their place and hold court in the popular club. As they do, they push the “are we good enough” buttons of the rest of us who desire to be included.
In great traditions such as yoga and Tantra today, the current barometers of being rich, white, popular, and thin have infiltrated the field, further perpetuating patriarchal paradigms that being beautiful, successful, and, yes, a consumer gives you value and worth as a human being. This is a long way from the roots of yoga and Tantra. The further away from the roots we get, the easier it is to forget what truly informs our value not only as spiritual practitioners but as human beings.
Interestingly enough, beauty is at the root of our source as human beings. It is at the root of yoga and Tantra—and it is a great teaching. But today its corpse lies in the shadow of spiritual branding and all externally based systems of value.
In the Tantric cosmology, we all come from beauty. This beauty is not one based on a standardized list of perfection. Nor does it reference an ideal. This beauty is based on feeling. Beauty is an experience. Feeling is the precise wisdom that beauty holds. When we encounter beauty, we come out of the stream of thought and are completely in the moment. Think of the times you have gazed upon a magnificent sunset. You don’t say such things as “Oh, that was a magnificent sunset, but the one I saw back in 1982 was much better.” We don’t compare this beauty. Its beauty comes from resting in its inherent nature.
As a teacher of the Tantric Dance of Feminine Power, I have seen hundreds of women experience their own beauty in this way. Their experience comes from a radical acceptance and even a reverence of the intelligence in their own bodies. They have become something more than a list of bullet points of perfection. By being completely immersed in the naturalness of who they are and how they feel, they liberate themselves from the stream of critical thought and encounter the source of their own beauty within. And it has energy and movement! This is a huge contrast to a lethargic two-dimensional pouty image in a magazine.
The Tantric Dance of Feminine Power was the ignition for my passion that arose for deep feminine beauty and authentic power. I found these roots of the ancient yoginis every time I entered the dance. All of the profoundly simple guidelines of the practice ensured that I was continually drawing on my inner wisdom, meaning I had to feel all the deep internal movements of my body. The more I did this, the more awareness developed of the immensity of territory within myself, terrain that had nothing to do with how I measured up against any model of frozen perfection. There were experiences within my body that affirmed my value again and again. The criteria of value were based upon the simple fact that my body housed a cosmology of wisdom. This wisdom was in harmony with my mind and with an intelligence that infuses all beings and things with a vibrational dance that tells us we have more in common than our limited sufferings of the “I.”
The Community of Women
It was not merely my own inner experience that produced these transformations. My journey was deeply guided by and tied to the other women’s journeys in the classes.
Comparison and competition between women is a pervasive disease. I cannot recall a time before my awakening that summer break when I was encouraged to feel what another woman was feeling. I cannot remember a time when I had been in contact with women who felt themselves from the inside out and did not act out their beauty hand-in-hand with some kind of neurosis (such as compulsive shopping or disordered eating). I cannot remember a time when I saw real images of women’s pleasure or saw women experiencing their own erotic connection to themselves and life at large.
No, all the women I knew, including myself, were trying to fit into the perfected form of happiness that was based on an externally identified sexuality, as an object of desire. The act of “witnessing” (instead of watching) the other dancers, an important part of the Tantric Dance of Feminine Power, was and continues to be a profound experience for both myself and the many students I have had throughout the years. I call it “letting go of the pretty.” This is code for letting go of all the ways women view themselves from the outside in and the knee-jerk reaction to being “perfect” as dictated by the dominant culture.
Women in my classes are encouraged to allow asymmetrical movement, facial expressions that distort the face (I mean, come on, do we really think a woman’s face in deep pleasure looks like the ones we see in the movies?), and movements that “don’t seem to make sense.” The outcome is deep and esoteric. Women begin to tap into a wildness that has nothing to do with the “girls gone wild” fast food and violent sexuality we’ve been spoon-fed by media conglomerates.
Our wild nature does not lie in the gestures created by a culture that wants to turn women into the ultimate consumers by constantly telling them they are not thin enough, sexy enough, or desirable enough. Our wild nature lies in the joyful experience of being a creature of nature—and remembering that we are nature. Our wild nature lies in the recognition that we are unowned, alive, and tremoring with the pulsations of life—not some emulation of a perfected life with a frozen grin. We are blood and bone, fire and grit, saliva and sweat, encased around a pearl of such exquisite softness that it puts to shame those who look for the holy grail elsewhere.
When freed from the patriarchal gaze upon our bodies and experiences, women tap into a self-reference and freedom that are innate and natural. One of my most memorable moments is when a longtime student quietly declared that she had never experienced herself as her own guide before.
Betraying Myself
All this existed in that first class I attended years ago. I witnessed a woman in her dance. She began in deep stillness, deeply connected to her womb (the seat of Goddess in the Tantric tradition), and, oh, I felt her! After a brief minute she had gone so deeply internal that I could not recognize her face anymore. She was moving and shape-shifting. The twitches in her face revealed that it was this internally sourced path of ecstasy that shaped all of her gestures—gestures that I recognized to be the root of the yoga asanas as we know them today.
She was transmitting power, and I received healing from that power. It was an overflow from her deeply felt experience into the room and into all of us who witnessed. I was astounded. Little did I know this would begin a deep healing and dissolving of all the ways I viewed myself and other women through the lens of patriarchal gender norms and stereotypes.
Why did this particular woman shock my system and awaken this process within me? She was awake and alive. She was intoxicated with the power and feeling of her own body. It had nothing to do with me, yet it had everything to do with me. It was then and there that something wilder, more primal, and more courageous beckoned me. It was this transmission of power that opened the door for the shadow of my own self-betrayal to emerge and be offered up at the altar of Woman for healing.
For years I had been betraying myself by constantly criticizing my belly, hair, skin, and more. Betrayal was etched into my bones every time I looked in the mirror and deemed I wasn’t worthy of everything that perfection said it would grant me. Interestingly, every time I looked in the mirror it was my belly I focused most of my critique on. I say this is interesting as now, through Tantric practice, I know that the belly, womb, and vagina are considered potent places of power for women. These places of power had received my most intense judgments. I was betraying myself by shutting down deep belly feeling and trading it for trying to make myself smaller both literally and figuratively. I cannot even remember how young I was when this started. It seems to have always been there, which is a frightening thought.
Like a fish that doesn’t recognize it is swimming in water, it’s only in hindsight that I realize the profundity of what was missing in my life, the circle of women who could reflect my own experience of my body, spirit, and mind. I’d certainly never seen “real” female bodies. I had been trained, through the prolific repetition of images of Photoshopped “perfection” in media and celebrity culture, to not see or to reject real live women with an immediacy and efficiency that is alarming.
My value system was entirely based upon this process of weeding out those who didn’t measure up to the cultural standard of beauty. If I wasn’t doing that, I was spending my time comparing myself to those who were left, trying to see where I fit—vying for space. Using the criteria of digitally altered body “perfection” led me to further disconnect from my body and to create relationships based upon fragile and vulnerable ground. After all, how could the ground for relationship be stable when it’s based upon seeking external approval and admiration? That is a breeding ground for endless pain.
Coming into Wholeness
My journey with body image and healing is one of Desire and Union. It was the embracing of the female reverent lineages of traditional living Tantric streams that provided a container and a context for actually becoming an embodied, rather than disembodied, woman.
Interestingly, it wasn’t the frozen, symmetrical, balanced, and well-known yoga asanas that helped to heal my relationship to my body. It was specifically the shamanistic and feminine roots of yoga, the inspiration of female practitioners illuminated by authors Vicki Noble and Miranda Shaw, as well as my fortunate opportunity to sit with teachers such as Vajra Ma and Parvathi Nanda Nath who live this fluid yoga of beauty and power.
Asana is translated as seat. In the Tantric tradition, this seat is a seat of power. It is to be able to rest in the natural ground of one’s being and find the unlimited source of life’s flow, grounded through being in your body. This life flow is called Shakti, which is power, energy, and it is moving. Practiced in this way, each asana gives you the chance to come home to your body.
Unfortunately, the asanas as we have come to know them have become distanced from the primordial feminine energy that is Shakti. She is hardly referenced, and what has entered in her absence is rigidity and sterilization of an originally ecstatic practice of the female yoginis and shamans.
Do I still practice the asanas that are prevalent in the West? I do. But what comes with me to the mat now is my already intact sense of wholeness and value based upon being in a lineage of women who have found sovereignty within themselves. I bring my womb and breasts to the mat. I bring the blood mysteries within myself. I bring my love for Goddess as She has been known since the beginning of time. I bring the sense of resting in myself and resting in each asana as the seat of power.
I see with a discerning eye how the images of women, even in yoga, continue to push the “good enough” button. Does this button continue to get pushed in myself? Yes, oh, yes. It’s a button thousands of years in the making. It’s a beast. But I love the beast too. This is also Goddess. I bring my devotion to Her to the mat as well. She was there in the roots of yoga. I see Her now showing up for women in my classes, giving them choices to enter their “imperfections” and their own “beasts” and say, “This is me, also.”
Yoga is a rich experience for me now. I taste it all, digest it through my own ecstatic experience, and allow my body to be a vehicle of intelligence. To become inner-referenced rather than externally defined is one of the greatest joys I have known.
Nita Rubio (Nisha Bhairavi) is a yogini in the Kaula Shakta Tantric tradition. She is a master teacher of the subtle body movement modality, The Tantric Dance of Feminine Power®. Embodiment, traditional Tantric lineage practice, feminism, and ritual intersect in Nita’s offerings. Joyfully teaching for over seventeen years, it is her great passion to weave these traditions without diluting their potency both in the classroom and personally into a continuous stream of Feminine Wisdom in Action. www.embodyshakti.com. Author photo by John Colao.