Dr. Melody Moore
I grew up in a family, and in a culture, where I came to perceive that what mattered about me and what was lovable about me was the way that I looked. I believed that if I were thin and pretty, I would be loved. And that if I was fat, I was in sin. Yes, sin. I was taught that gluttony was an abomination to God and filled in the blanks from there. Granted, I came to these conclusions based on misperceptions and illusions about what was important to my dad about my mom and to my family about me. Of course I was wrong, but the idea that my worth was measured by my weight was deeply ingrained in my psyche. It would have taken a miracle for me to believe that who I am and the way that I treat myself, and therefore others, are what matter. I was certain that if I didn’t look beautiful, I would not be loved. And that if I was not loved, I would not survive. Ironically, I almost missed out on my life because I was so concerned with my appearance.
This struggle to accept my body was assuredly going to be never-ending. I would never achieve the perfect physical form, and as long as I was convinced that I would not be loved until I was perfect, I would continue to be plagued by a limiting belief about myself. I was too much—too fat, too big, too unworthy.
My own body hatred subsided after I moved away from home to college, which allowed me an opportunity to release myself from my self-induced competition with my mom and sister to out-thin them. My older sister had a fierce battle with anorexia beginning in 1997. She was never clinically treated, and for years her symptoms overwhelmed me with feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear. I have always been the opposite of her, so in many ways her diagnosis allowed me to find more acceptance of my body, not less. It also set me up for a path toward convincing others that they are worthy of a full life of purpose, meaning, and connection. Starting with my own.
Pura Vida
In 2001, my mom chose a yoga retreat called Pura Vida, in Costa Rica, for our family’s annual vacation. None of us had ever stepped foot onto a yoga mat. Who gets to have her first yoga class in the mountains of Costa Rica? This girl. I was fascinated by yoga and a little bit afraid of it. My teacher seemed so patient, whole-hearted, and full of joy. After a weeklong immersion and introduction to the practice, I invited the teacher, Srutih, to call me if she ever came to Dallas. A few weeks later, she called to ask if she could move in with me for three months to help some friends open a studio.
So my introduction to the practice was really through having an in-home yoga teacher. Sharing my home with Srutih meant that I was able to delve into yoga, chanting, and meditation right in my own living room. At the time, I had no idea what a privileged position I was in. When Srutih moved out, I continued my daily yoga practice at Sunstone, the studio she helped to open. I went every day, without much inner negotiation. Clearly, I was still abiding by the idea that workouts must be done every day, no matter what. I had integrated this nonnegotiable attitude from my mom, who prioritized her exercise above, well, everything.
Her mindset was that she would be easier to tolerate after she allowed her body to release pent-up stress and aggression. My interpretation of what felt like a compulsion to exercise was that she valued thinness and prettiness above all else. And, because I was her daughter, I thought she not only valued her own thinness, but mine too. In fact, I fell completely into the delusion that what was lovable and worthy about me was being pretty, which in my mind meant being thin. I was wrong. The miracle of yoga was its capacity to turn not only my body but my thoughts right side up.
It took some time, though. For the first five years of practicing, I only knew yoga to be a workout, and a very good one at that. I loved sweating it out, I loved the feeling of savasana after a long physical detox, and I loved that my body was looking leaner and more toned. I was completely unaware that I was becoming more present to my breath, less reactive, more patient, and more open to experiencing my emotions.
Practice Makes Practice
Yoga eventually had its way with me. It took navigating through a series of styles, studios, and teachers, and staying committed to a daily practice for several years for me to connect to the fact that what had become my way of life had also become my way of living. I realized, around year seven of practice, that yoga was the instrument through which I was finding emotional freedom, spiritual clarity, and certainly body acceptance. It was a gradual process, and a subtle one too. There were moments of poignancy after about a five-year gestation process of what I now can refer to as striving for perfection in the pose. One came to me during a class by a teacher named Lisa Coyle, who dropped this little pearl during a Sun Salutation B vinyasa: “Every exhale is an opportunity to forgive.” While I have no doubt that I had heard many iterations of this concept during what were, by that time, hundreds of hours on the mat, that day something clicked. Yoga then became a spiritual practice. It became a way of living that allowed me to be present.
Through this attentiveness to the rate and pace of my inhales and exhales, I learned to be so present to the moment that I had no choice but to let go of what had been or could become. On my mat, it was impossible to time travel back to the past or forward into the future, when I was so alive and attuned to that very particular, once-in-a-lifetime inhale or exhale of breath. And just like that, I started paying attention to what else yoga was offering me, what other nectar I had drawn from the practice. I became invested in learning how what I had cultivated on the mat could be carried over into my life off the mat.
I realized that the time I had dedicated to being on the mat had allowed me to release years of tension, conscious and unconscious, physical and emotional. My yoga practice offered me tools to ground, center, and find balance. More than anything, my practice allowed me to recognize the connections that I have to everyone around me and to the universe. My practice became the place where I felt closest to God. Not the understanding of God that I had formerly been introduced to as one who punishes gluttony, among other sins, but God the source of love and the wisdom that creates and connects and conspires in each of our favors. As my practice became spiritual, I became a seeker. Not only did I seek to feel more into the subtleties of asana, but I began to pursue the purpose of my life as well. I integrated the capacity to rely on my own breath to determine when to modify and whether to intensify, both on and off the yoga mat. A decade into daily practice, there came to be a fluidity in what was “on” and what was “off” the mat. As I recognized the delight in letting go of perfecting a pose in order to find the feeling inside of it, I came to live in alignment with that realization. And then it happened: a realization that I am holy, connected, supported, and worthy. Not at year one, or five, but a decade later. Because practice makes practice.
Behold the Body Temple
In my seeking, I found that yoga had made me feel whole. I found that through the connection of my mind to my body through the breath, I had actually been repairing the severed cords between my heart, head, and gut. Through seeking to find alignment in each physical pose, I had also been learning how to find alignment in what I was feeling, doing, thinking, and saying. Yoga had brought me into my integrity. I was not in parts, I was not in conflict, I was not creating tension for myself, my psyche, or my body. In fact, I was in balance. At least, I was able to use my core resources to come back into balance, again and again, after coming too close to the edges and too uncomfortable with misalignment. Not only was I in balance with myself, I strove to be in balance with the flow of the universe, with the grace of God. As I found courage, I learned to surrender to this grace.
It was actually a side effect, not a conscious objective, that I was not viewing my body negatively or putting much emphasis, if any, on my external appearance. Because I was not seeing my appearance as needing to shift or change, be thinner or more beautiful, the natural progression of self-love was that I let go of the illusion that my worth was measured by my size. I did not purposefully set out or even consciously determine to create a positive body image through yoga; it just arrived as a byproduct of all of the other gifts that the practice bestowed. As my yoga practice became a prayer, my body became a temple. I began to honor it as the keeper of my sweet soul, and as the guardian of what had become a recognition and a celebration of the light within me.
I realized that I felt good about my body after going to Hawaii with my bestie, Chris, who turned to me on our last day and said, “You know, it has been really lovely and so easy to be around someone who doesn’t say anything negative about their body. I don’t think I have ever been around a woman, especially in a swim suit, who is not pejorative about her weight or size, or about other women’s bodies.” He recognized what I knew. I had completely let go of picking apart my appearance. I used the mirrors at some yoga studios to reset alignment from time to time, but other than that, I didn’t ever stand in front of a mirror and, part by part, examine what needed to shrink, expand, or change. He was right—what he witnessed was my truth.
Through yoga, I found that I really liked who I had become, and in so doing, I had stopped emphasizing how I looked. I recognized, through my practice, that my emotions served as the best compass for my happiness. My yoga practice literally had transformed the lens through which I saw myself, my capacity, my lovability, and my worth. Through yoga, I was able to feel whatever emotion was arising in my body without immediately wanting out of it. I was able to tolerate feelings and even to welcome them. For probably the first time in my life, I was able to be with whatever feeling came, without fear that it would kill me. And so I learned to trust myself. I needed this trust in order to feel safe. I needed to feel safe in order to feel like I would survive. I needed to survive in order to trust that I could thrive.
Yoga is a practice, it is not a perfect, and there is no perfecting it. However, in the letting go of that attempt, for me, there became what yoga teacher Tias Little has called “a striving for imperfection.” In surrendering outcomes of poses, there opens up a possibility for feeling, blossoming, and awakening. I had so many years and layers and levels of defenses built up around me from childhood, it took me a decade to break them down to the point that I felt fully alive to the awareness that I could breathe. I did not need to be reactive; I could witness my own behavior. I could stop comparing myself to others and hold myself with so much kindness and compassion that there would be no space for shame about my body, my past behaviors, or anything else. Yoga brought me into a sense not only of being connected to myself but to everything around me as well. Most of all, yoga brought me back to God.
Giving It Away
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”—Rumi
I was so full of gratitude for the practice that I began to feel like I was out of balance by not giving it away. I was taking and taking and not giving, and I finally had to find a way to share with others how I had benefited from the practice of yoga. This was especially poignant because, as a psychologist who specializes in the treatment of girls and women with disordered eating and negative body image, I had done years of deep listening. I had been given extraordinary training and had a sincere wish to be helpful. But I knew that only offering psychotherapy to a client who has severed the cords between their mind and their body, often to the point of near death, was not enough to help them thrive.
If I could help them out of their heads, out of their thinking, and into their bodies, into their feeling, they would build a container for themselves that would allow them to trust what they feel. This trust would allow them to rely on their gut wisdom to honor their emotions and to respond to their hunger. Not all of those who struggle with eating disorders are striving for their idea of a perfect body, but everyone who struggles with disordered eating is acting out their emotions through their self-perception and/or their food behavior. Bringing yoga into treatment would allow a reconnection of mind and body, and body and breath, and through breath, gut and intuition, in a way that I knew would be healing.
My clients had overemphasized their appearance as being a measure of their worth to the point of, in many cases, the brink of death. In attempting to help them trust themselves enough to actually experience emotion, in the moment, as it arose, no matter what, I had to find a way to incorporate yoga, the physical practice of asana. Emotions are physical sensations stored as peptides in cells in the body. Those who struggle with disordered eating have become severed at the places where the mind and body connect. Those with anorexia do not eat when they are hungry; they starve because it is a way out of feeling. Those with binge eating disorder or bulimia do not overeat because they are hungry; they overeat because they are trying to soothe themselves through what they do not think they can tolerate feeling. Eating becomes a way of soothing, and body hatred and distortion become a way of defending against discomfort. Yoga is a tool by which we can develop the capacity to sit with and through discomfort, and eventually even “greet it at the door laughing” to paraphrase Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House.”
To bring clients more fully into their whole selves, to help them stop seeing themselves as individual pieces and separate parts to be perfected, I envisioned and created a collaboration of yoga, holistic nutrition, and psychotherapy called the Embody Love Center. At our holistic treatment center for those struggling with disordered eating and negative body image, clients experience integrated treatments that can bring them into what I believe is a possibility for self-acceptance and true self-love and respect. Through yoga, clients are able to feel the ground underneath them and know support. They are able to witness and experience themselves as capable and whole, as acceptable and worthy. They are able to tolerate what they feel, and they are able to integrate their breath with their movement. One client (who is now a yoga teacher) shared with me after an early experience with yoga that by feeling her breath in her belly, she could feel hunger for the first time in a long time. To us both, her ability to sense and to honor her body’s hunger signal seemed to be a miracle. Yoga had yoked her body to her mind, and from there, she had a chance, finally, to survive and to thrive.
Yoga offers us the capacity to be, to accept, to allow, to make room, to grow, to feel, to love, to let go. For me, this practice of imperfection allows me to be fully in love with the moments that life offers and fully accepting of whatever way that I arrive to them. Yoga has allowed me to live inside a body temple and to offer the same experience to others. I cannot imagine a more holy, more sacred, or more beautiful practice of living.
Melody Moore, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in recovery from eating disorders and negative body image through integrated treatment of psychotherapy, holistic nutrition, family therapy, and the healing practice of yoga. Dr. Moore founded the Embody Love Movement, a nonprofit whose vision is to create a world where all see and treat themselves, and therefore others, as lovable without condition. www.embodylovemovement.org. Author photo by Alayna MacPherson Photography.