Rosie Molinary
“My uncle says Puerto Rican girls are F-I-N-E FINE,” he hisses, his hands groping for me in the crowd getting on the bus after school. He is in third grade; I am in fourth grade. Already I have grown ashamed of my body, of my looks, of who I am supposed to be because (as I see it) I speak Spanish.
This is what happens every day after school. A band of boys who have decided I am a target because of my Puerto Ricanness swarm at the bus door when I try to get on it, sticking their hands out, trying desperately to cop a feel of my nonexistent bottom.
I swat their hands away. I cover my body. I say no. It doesn’t get better.
Checking Out
When I finally get on that dark tin cylinder, I look for a window seat on the other side of the bus, so they can’t see me. Finally, I just start missing the bus after school. A teacher sees me and loads me in his car and drives me home. Though I don’t tell him what’s going on, I keep missing the bus or finding reasons to stay after school because it is the only way I know that I can keep myself safe.
Soon enough, I will find another way to keep myself safe. I will disassociate from my body. I will bind it, cover it, ignore it. I will pretend it doesn’t exist. I will not derive pleasure from it. I will unknow it, because what I am learning from the boys around me is that my body is different and, if unleashed, could be dangerous to me. It could put me in harm’s way.
I am so scared of getting any attention for my body that I pull away from it. I fill my brain with as much smarts as I can fit in there. I do as much good as I can. I become the living embodiment of the good girl, because my body, I understand, could be very bad and something must make up for it.
Still, there are moments where my body startles me. On the day of my high school graduation, I put on a dress my mother has sewn for me. It is a white high halter dress that falls to my ankles, modestly showing just my shoulders and neck. Days earlier, a friend chopped off my long curls. My hair falls in a short, bouncy bob. In the mirror, I don’t recognize myself, but I willingly smile at that girl. I imagine she is different from me, and she will be the one leaving for North Carolina to start a new life in college. I startle myself when I realize that I like how she looks. Up until now, I have mostly not even known how I looked.
That night, when a friend sees me, his eyes grow wide. “You look slutty,” he tells me. There is music playing and I cannot make out my friend’s words over the bass. For a second, I think he has told me I look pretty. A woozy kind of proud embarrassment passes over my face. It is one of the few times I have thought about my body, much less felt proud of it.
“What?” I scream in his ear, because this is the kind of compliment I want to be sure I hear. I want to know if he sees the girl I saw in the mirror when I was getting ready. I want to know if she is who I am becoming.
“YOU LOOK SLUTTY,” he says louder, disapproving.
The proud embarrassment turns to two parts of shame: shame for looking slutty, shame for being proud of my body and looks for a second.
The Body as Shared Reality
Even though I ignore my body, it keeps developing. I have breasts I want no one to notice, a curvy figure that mortifies me. I let my tumbling curls hide my face, hide me. Where I live at the time, mine is a body type few people have. I try to believe that I don’t have it either.
In my 20s, the experience of a potent new crush is debilitating because I am petrified by what I feel. When a fondness for a friend turns into something more, I try to talk myself out of it, acutely aware that falling for him would mean I could no longer live in my disassociated world. One night, we find ourselves together in the midst of a volatile situation. As a good girl, I know how to smooth most everything over. When the crisis passes and it is just me and my crush left to talk about it, he moves to me, and I look at him, shyly. My eyes track over his strong face, all angles and searing green eyes, memorizing it.
“You did great.” He slips his fingers under my chin, tilting it toward him. I close my eyes and then reopen them to find him pressing toward me, surprising me with one of our many kisses I will replay for years.
“Go out with me,” he pleads. I want nothing more than to do this, for it all to be this easy, to be the type of woman who can hop into his gunmetal-gray jeep and look out over the city with him, his hand casually draped over my thigh, as we move from bar to club, from screaming at a football game on the television to dancing unself-consciously to Eminem on a crowded dance floor, pushed up against him, breathing each other’s air. But it terrifies me too, the list of possibilities such a decision would create.
“I can’t,” I whisper, placing my hand on his arm and then slowly backing away. My fingers touch the inside of his forearm for as long as I can before the distance becomes too much.
Over the years, I battle this intense attraction. I am terrified of my feelings for him, overwhelmed by how much there is to lose, so I play it as safe as I can. We kiss, and I walk away. He shares intimate details of his life that he has never told anyone. I do not match his candor. He senses my withholding, and confronts me. “Why are you so damned closed?” he asks one Saturday afternoon.
I can’t answer him, so I do what I have learned how to do when things get hard: I leave. The distance I create is our living metaphor. As I drive away from him, tears stinging my eyes over the truth that creating this space is both the last thing I want to be doing and the most important thing I can do, I am overwhelmed with questions. If I really share my heart with him, will I lose it? And how could I ever let him get to know my body when I am scared of it, ashamed of it, do not even know it myself? Could I be good enough to have him forever? Is it even “good enough” that I have to be, or is it “true enough”? And if it is true enough, how can I be true to someone else—to his soul and his body—when I have not even learned to be true to myself?
Over time, I confirm that what is essential about me—what he loves about me—does not come from my body. What is essential about me is the way I work ceaselessly for my passions, the way I feel and live my compassion, how I embrace my history and heritage, my self-sufficiency and independence, my surprising edge and developing confidence. But while I am not my body, I begin to understand that my body is my vehicle, my system for enjoying and experiencing life. Really inhabiting the body is a shared personal reality; it is both expression and sensation. I have not yet synthesized this lesson. I know I want to be the embodiment of this way of being, and so I start hungering for how it might come to me, how I might come to it. I do not yet know how to feed the hunger.
Inviting the Sensation
More years pass by me. I explore love and run from it for many of the same reasons. As an impassioned high school teacher, I live out my disassociation with my body in whole new ways. I work too hard and too long. I don’t feed myself well. Life keeps handing you the lesson you need to learn until you learn it, my later self will come to understand, but I am not there yet so I keep giving and not replenishing, keep acting as if I don’t have time to care for my body when actually the opposite is true.
Eventually, it catches up to me. My body gives out, and I yield to an epic sickness that forces me to sit at home for weeks in order to heal and recover.
I realize I do not know how to teach in a different way, that teaching high school is my addiction, and I figure out that I have to do something different professionally if I am to physically make it. Running away is still the only real tool I have in my toolbox when things get hard.
I start over from what feels like rock bottom. I leave the career I thought I would have until I retired. I start a master’s degree program in Fine Arts that forces me, finally, to claim my voice. And I find yoga, which leads me, finally, to settle into my body.
Something Greater
Yoga comes to me in an e-mail. The college where I work as an administrator is offering a weekly lunchtime yoga class. Because I am still prone to work rather than taking that lunch break, there is a knowing that comes over me when I first read the e-mail.
I need this, I tell myself with an absoluteness that startles me. Consciously, I cannot figure out why it is I need yoga, but subconsciously it feels like the truth. I am not sure if I think my hips need it or my heart, but even though I know nothing about yoga, even though I don’t know anyone who practices it, I need to do it. I sign up before I can convince myself that I need that hour to work more.
I show up for my first yoga class in soccer shorts and a concert T-shirt. I grab a spot where the sunshine bounces into the conference room and sit on my teal mat, smiling greetings to each person who enters, anticipating the class. I have no idea what is to come, how by just trying not to work one hour where I would normally have squeezed as much productivity out of myself as I could, I might be led to something else entirely, something greater than just a little break once a week.
As I piece together my practice, week after week, I become more confident of the flow and poses. I close my eyes. I breathe. I don’t care if I am good at any of it because whatever I am doing, however I am doing it, feels good and that is enough. I don’t even have to be the good girl and follow every single instruction or suggestion the teacher gives. I take the modifications. I breathe when it feels right to me. I don’t make myself work so hard if all I want to do it is rest in child’s pose. I close my eyes for the entire practice and forget anyone else is there. On that mat, every single Wednesday, it is just me and a gentle, guiding voice. I am in charge of my body and what it is feeling, and what I realize is that as it releases something physical, I release something emotional too.
I am in charge of me, I come to understand as I forward fold and Warrior and backbend. And my body and what it feels is not something I should fear. If I don’t like something, I don’t have to do it, but I don’t have to hide in order to not do it. I can just decide no or yes at any given moment. My body is not separate from me, nor is it me. It is the vessel that I have been given to experience this life, and I have been denying myself part of its expression.
A Whole out of Parts
As I become less afraid of physically feeling my body, as I come to understand that feeling my body will not slay me, I find myself wishing for one pose every class. Please lead us to Pigeon, I silently chant every class. And when she does, I settle into it not with the ease of the bendy back poses that are like second nature for me but with an internal scream. What I understand as I fold over my shin is that what I am asking for with Pigeon, what I am eager for, is feeling my body. After a lifetime of desperately trying to feel nothing in my body, I am begging for the most physically sensational pose to make up for lost time, to awaken my knowing.
Emotions flood me and tears rush to my eyes as I hold the pose. I think of darting, like I always have. And yet, what I realize as I breathe in and out, and release more deeply into the sensation, is there is nothing I need more at this moment than this pose. Moreover, I cannot just power my way through. I have to be in this pose to transcend it; I cannot run away to escape it; I have to breathe into it. I have to experience what my body feels and needs and has to say. For the first time, really.
When I do that, everything changes just a little bit, and when I string together practices like that, days like that, the whole landscape changes, the continent shifts. My walls tumble, my boundaries shift. I am no longer bound by how my body—or someone else’s experience of my body—might betray me. I am informed by how my soul can take care of my body and my body can do the same for my soul. I am a collaborating force, emboldened by both sensation and expression.
That is the gift of yoga. It teaches you what you most need to know. For me, it is about making a whole out of parts that I thought could exist separately. Yoga heals what is most broken, tends what most needs tending, leads you to forgive what most needs grace, and encourages you to face what most needs consideration. The mat becomes a personal laboratory, the poses your proof.
Soon, the weekly yoga class in the college’s conference room is no longer enough. I sometimes close the door to my office and lead my body and soul to what it most needs from the mat. I find yoga classes outside of the workplace. I realize that I can give myself this gift any time. I do not have to wait for someone to lead me into my body. I can do that for myself.
Making the Connection
Once I have been physically emboldened, I find I am more personally possessed. I realize my body does not have to scare me, that no one will ever control my body but me, that the boys by the bus door are long gone from my life, and that, even if they weren’t, I now have everything I need to chase them away. I do not have to run from anyone. I do not have to run from my body. But I can run. And I do. I cycle. I push up. I learn to swim. I surf. I dance. I paint. I write my truths. I let myself fall in ridiculous love, despite its inherent risk. I travel. I Namaste. I live with all of me.
Yoga helped your body image, someone might conclude and, absolutely, it has, but it is so much more than that. What yoga did was connect my whole body, helping me reimagine myself so that I was no longer the disparate parts of a body and a soul. Yoga served as a catalyst toward personal unity for me. It taught me to not be afraid of any sensation, that I could breathe through it all and get to the other side, that I have everything I need inside of me. I had never been afraid to do the mental and emotional work before but had always been afraid of feeling the sensation of anything. Yoga taught me that sometimes inviting the sensation is the best thing you can do for yourself. All you need to do is connect with your soul and breathe, because you already have everything you need deep within.
I file this little piece of information away: it will always be easy for me to disassociate from my body. When things get hard, I will choose my default, which is to go all cerebral and whole heart with no body awareness in sight. So I create a world that is sensitive to the fact that I have in me the ability to disassociate, and I do what I can to ground myself from it happening and to catch myself when it does. And because it took me so long to figure it out, to mend, to create a world where all of me can live, I do what I can to empower others to create a world where they can be their whole selves—so that we can all be ready for the love of our lives which, as it turns out, wasn’t that crush from years ago, but me.
Rosie Molinary is an author and educator who empowers women to embrace their authentic selves so they can live their passion and purpose and give their gifts to the world. Rosie is the author of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance and Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body image, and Growing Up Latina. Rosie teaches body image at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, offers workshops and retreats for women, and speaks on self-acceptance, body image, media literacy, the Latina experience, and social justice around the country. www.rosiemolinary.com. Author photo by Deborah Triplett.