Arising

 

Vinyasa has three parts: arising, abiding, and dissolving. And the dissolving of one thing is the arising of the next. Every day turns into night turns into day. Winter becomes spring becomes summer becomes autumn becomes winter. Waves roll in and slip back out; tides ebb and flow. Every breath is like this. Every life is like this.

Each flower buds, ripens, and blooms, wilts and fades away. The leaves fall to the earth and create the ground for a new plant to grow.

The Sanskrit word vinyasa means “to place in a special way.” It means that everything is connected and the sequence of things matters. It means that every action, thought, or word that arises now is planting the seed for future fruit. “In a special way” means the unfolding of life is logical. If you plant a tomato seed, you will get a tomato. If you plant an apple seed and you wait long enough, you will get an apple tree. And if you plant a hard thought, you will get a hard heart.

“There’s something wrong with my knees.” This thought bubbles up like a lava lamp blob pinched off from the rest of my consciousness, which is still oozing around the depths of my jet lag nap. Deep murky sleep is normal for me after I cross the international date line; but having a sideways furrow across my knees is not normal, and it hurts. My Buddhist studies have taught me that thoughts lead to action and as my mind registers this thought about pain, my body responds naturally. I reach a hand out of my fetal position to rub the tender spot and fall asleep again.

I wake up with my hand still on my knee and look around the room. The furniture makes me think of England. Lolling over onto my back, I stretch my legs straight up to the ceiling. This might not be normal for other people but most mornings you can find me somewhere in the world with my feet up in the air. I’m a yoga teacher and turning upside down is part of the gig. I slowly circle my ankles, which tend to swell on long international hauls and then, just to get a little abdominal work in, I stretch my arms up to the ceiling. Taking hold of the gathered elastic around my ankles, I pull my sweatpants down to my thighs to check out my lumpy knees. With one hand still on my ankles, my other hand reaches over to the British-y bedside table and grabs my red cat’s-eye glasses to take a closer look.

Aha. With my two upside-down legs now aligned side by side, I see a horizontal indentation tracking across both knee caps. I’m only five-foot-four-and-a-half inches tall but these Western-sized legs were too long for the leg room provided by a coach ticket on Cathay Pacific. Fifteen hours of having my knees smushed against the metal dowel lining the seat-back pocket had evidently changed the topography of my knees. Remembering how my flattened breasts always spring back into shape after a mammogram gave me hope that my crushed knee flesh would similarly re-plump, returning to normal soon. Recovering normal is part of the gig, too, when you are a traveling yoga teacher.

People think being a yoga teacher means you are always chill and never grumpy; your mental outlook is radical contentment and your body is outrageously flexible in a sexy way. But that is not the case; not for this yoga teacher anyway. Well, actually, I am extremely flexible. That part is true. But the other parts come and go, depending on how much sleep I get, what I eat for breakfast, how much money I have in the bank, what’s happening between me and my husband, David, or how many time zones I crossed in the last twenty-four hours. Perhaps that sounds quite ordinary and distinctly non-yogic, but without all that normal stuff in my life, I wouldn’t be a very good yoga teacher. How can I help others grow and transform if I haven’t done it myself?

Another thing that many people don’t realize is that yoga teachers are not born as yoga teachers. We are not born standing on our hands or doing the splits—although I did all those things in my backyard when I was a kid and then just never stopped. Many American yoga teachers, like me, are regular people who have had the great fortune to be introduced to the path of yoga in our lifetime.

For me, doing yoga is pure fun. I love twisting and bending, inverting and jumping on my yoga mat. I thrive on the hard work of standing on one leg while keeping my face soft and open. I find bending over and folding in half a delicious release. I especially enjoy the ending of each class when the teacher instructs us to lie down and rest, telling us this is the most important part of the practice. The clean, sweaty feeling I get from yoga is physically global, purifying me inside and out. Every part of my body is opened up and then put back together, reintegrated into a better shape than before yoga. From the first day of practicing, I could feel my inner organs getting toned along with my triceps and quadriceps. My heart got stronger, my stamina improved and one day I discovered that it had gotten easy to lift heavy objects over my head, such as a carry-on bag into the overhead bin of an airplane.

Most surprising is that I began to focus on the immediate experiences I was having in yoga at the same time that I was having them, a bigger view of the practice rather than just being satisfied with short-term goals, such as being able to touch my toes or turn upside down and inside out. I had been studying ballet since I was seven, so I was very familiar with extreme movement scenarios. What was different about yoga is that it isn’t really about the external activity; it’s about what’s going on inside. It’s not about what we do as much as how we do what we do. I began to understand that this is the part of yoga that really matters.

I studied yoga with as many masters as I could get to, including the great yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar, who told me and the other 899 yoga students in class that day, “I’ve spent almost my whole life observing what happens to my sternum when I press my big toe down.” In other words, yoga is about more than moving the body; it is a template for understanding that every thought really does become speech, which turns into action. If the yogi practices with this awareness, she will also become curious and conscious about the results of her actions, making her a better wife, mother, friend, and businesswoman.

Hearing my yoga teachers talk about this eventually led me to the path of Buddhist meditation, where I learned and practiced specific skills for negotiating all the different mind states that arise on any given day. That doesn’t mean I am always successful. It means I am working on it, in just the same way I am still working on becoming more adept at doing the yoga postures. I want my mind to be as flexible as my body, and my heart to be as open as my hip joints. And once you get flexible and strong, you can’t stop the work. You have to keep practicing with more refinement, more awareness, more skill in order to maintain and grow your abilities and your understanding. I know all this and have made it my long-term goal—which in yoga means lifetimes—but like anyone else, I sometimes feel defeated by circumstances.

These days there is a lot of pressure on yoga teachers. We can’t just lead people through a sequence of asanas. We are expected to always act positive, be smart, and to look, if not glamorous, at least extra-good. For one thing, people take pictures of me all the time, usually when I am bending over to adjust a student’s yoga position and my butt is looming large; or when I am exhausted and wearing my funkiest yoga clothes dragged from the bottom of the drawer; or when I am giving a precise verbal instruction that makes my brow furrow into a stern, unappealing expression. And then, of course, these candid cell phone photos are posted on someone’s Facebook page for all the world to share. Okay, okay, that was a little rant about the pressure I feel, but please don’t get me wrong! I love my gig and almost everything about it.

For the last eighteen years I’ve been a full-time yoga teacher and I’m grateful for the various opportunities that have come my way, such as being invited by the popular American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön to lead “yoga breaks” for the nine hundred meditators attending her inspiring teachings or being hired by MTV to stand up in front of a New York hotel ballroom full of rowdy, hung-over sales reps and transform their heckling into five minutes of quiet meditation—and have them actually like it!

One time I even gave a one-on-one yoga class to Prince Andrew, who, like me, happens to be extremely flexible. He was staying with one of my private clients at her posh Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was okay to touch him since he is royalty, but then I just decided that it was fine because, in that moment, I was his teacher and he was my student. It was my job to adjust his posture, so I placed my hands on his ribs and helped him deepen his twist. He was very polite and thanked me for that adjustment, which I thought was pretty nice and normal for a prince. Perhaps the monarchial decorum can be more relaxed when he is on this side of the pond.

My home base is New York City, where I teach yoga at OM yoga Center, the studio I founded in 1998. I’m convinced it was a combination of right time–right place and my particular style of rigorous, intelligent, and fun yoga classes that made my studio an immediate success. Within a few years my teaching career outside the studio also began to rise. In 2007, I was still beginning my international teaching career, but in that year alone, I taught yoga on four continents and in six countries, twelve U.S. states, and fourteen U.S. cities—and I visited my mom in Dallas five times. My recognition was growing and my jet lag was starting to add up.

I slid off the bed and managed to scuff my way over to the window with minimal knee bending. I rubbed my eyes and ran my fingers through my hair, which felt fat and curly, bloated just like my ankles. Even in the air-conditioned hotel room I could feel a bad hair day coming on, and then I remembered why. I was in Hong Kong.

My student Margie had warned me that Hong Kong in June was crazy humid; she stressed the word disgusting. A native of the place, she’d recommended staying inside at all times. But from my high window perched over the harbor I was charmed by the wooden sampans with colored sails, the kind of boats I’d only seen in black-and-white films. I wanted to get out and see magical old Hong Kong. My hotel was cushy but it wasn’t the real world; it was full of ultra-sophisticated Chinese men and women dressed in Western clothes who looked like they never had a bad hair day.

Should’ve listened to Margie. The pungent smells from street cook pots and the sticky, sweet temple incense glommed together into a noxious potion that you could almost see hanging static in the thick, polluted air. I felt sick to my stomach instantly. The 90 percent humidity caused the straps of my sandals to rub my feet raw after walking only half a block. It had been a mistake to wear new sandals anyway, but I wanted to look good for my big adventure in Asia. I’d also gotten my hair freshly cut and colored and picked up a few new summer dresses, like the one that was sticking to my sweaty thighs right now.

After dragging myself up and down crumbly stairways that seemed more decrepit than charming, I finally plopped down on a curb, between lines of hanging chickens and hanging laundry. I slipped off my sandals and put my head in my hands. As a yoga teacher, I’m an expert in breathing techniques. I wondered if it was possible to draw in slow, deep breaths without actually inhaling any of the stinky, wet air. I tried it while David went down an alley, in search of a taxi to take us back to the sanitized refuge of our hotel.

Surprisingly, the South China News reported that the air quality that week was the best it had been in quite a while. I had come to Hong Kong to be a featured presenter at the very first international yoga conference in Asia. Although there were at least thirty-five other faculty on the program, being invited to this inaugural event was significant. It meant that my work was considered valuable enough to be included in the new mix of yoga that was spreading across Asia.

No longer the exclusive domain of Indian gurus, the packed conference schedule offered five days of flowing yoga, static yoga, fusion yoga, couples yoga, power yoga, slow yoga, quiet yoga, and hot yoga. Special lectures would be given on anatomy, breathing, chakras, and meditation, as well as workshops for injury prevention or therapeutics for those who already have injuries. Yoga students could clean their innards with a day-long detox program or conquer their fears by turning upside down.

At the faculty welcome dinner the night before, I was greeted by a sari-clad woman who touched my third eye, leaving a sacred smudge on the spot between my eyebrows. Ushered past a row of red lotus candles, I stepped out onto the terrace just in time for the Hindu puja, a fire offering and supplication to the gods for an auspicious conference. Woozy from jet lag, I plopped down on a silk cushion in the back row and tried to relax without falling asleep to the gentle droning of the monks’ chanting. Following a period of silence at the end of the prayers, our conference host stood up and extended an upward palm toward the apartment’s dining room. “Please, everyone, help yourself to dinner.” Ready to escape the heat, I peeled my sweaty self off the terrace floor, walking through swirls of incense smoke on my way back indoors.

Once inside I started to perk up from the stun-gun air-conditioning and realized I probably needed to eat something. After hitting the buffet, I took my plate of Indian food over to a couch and sat down to schmooze with some of my yoga teacher buddies. For several of us, this was our third yoga conference teaching gig in as many months and we started making jokes that we were a yoga teacher touring band. Hugs, kisses, and a bit of harmless patting ourselves on the back: “Fancy meeting you here.” “Didn’t we just do this last month?” Yes, we did and I realized that attending a party in a far-off land with monks and yogis was becoming a very normal thing for me.

There were also lots of presenters I hadn’t met before from Australia, Thailand, Indonesia. It was cool to see the different ways that people presented themselves, wearing anything from luxurious silk saris to tight jeans and Ganesh T-shirts, or monks’ saffron robes. There were noses pierced with tiny diamonds and ankles tattooed with coiled serpents representing the potential for awakened energy. One woman was heavily draped in layers of white robes, and I thought she must be sweating under all that fabric. Adjusting the straps of my new summer dress, I shook hands with esteemed scholars of Sanskrit, Vedanta, and Tibetan Buddhism.

Finally our local colleagues rang a gong and officially welcomed us, telling us they were honored by our presence in Hong Kong and joking that the air was especially good that week because of all the clean, fresh energy we visiting yogis had brought to town.

It was slightly intimidating to be part of such an all-star yoga-teacher lineup and naturally I hoped to make a good impression. I knew I’d been invited because of my reputation for bringing wisdom and humor into my smart, soulful, and sweaty yoga classes. But my popularity gave me no confidence. On the outside I was friendly and positive but inside I felt bad, grumpy, and agitated; distinctly not yogi fresh. It wasn’t just the challenging climate. The problem was more about the weather in my head; a storm was going on in there. I was obsessing on my body and what people might think about it.

It was those damn mirrors everywhere—in restaurants and subways, along the hallway of our hotel, on all three sides of our bathroom. Every time I turned around, I saw my face, my hair, my belly looking back at me and I didn’t like what I saw.

Riding the mirrored elevator back up to the room after our visit to old Hong Kong the day before, I was surrounded by my reflection, showing me that my body was just not good enough. Frizzy hair was the tip of the iceberg. My appearance clearly did not measure up to the yoginis on the cover of Yoga Journal. “Maybe those models are airbrushed,” I thought, trying unsuccessfully to give myself a pep talk.

Arriving at our floor, I grabbed my upset stomach and dashed to the bathroom. As I washed my hands I saw my mirror image again, front, sides, and back. That meant I could see my butt, which somehow seemed massive. I could see my arms, which looked squishy even though I’d been doing extra workouts with my trainer!

Yogis don’t necessarily need to do other forms of exercise, but for me joining the local gym was an opportunity to work out in an anonymous setting, something I longed for those days. With the recent death of my father I had gained weight, which I knew was part of the grieving process, but I also knew it was time to move through it. To do that, I felt like I needed to be in a space other than my studio, a place where no one knew me and I could be tired and look tired and feel flabby and not care. The very first day I went to the gym I was offered a free personal training session with Smith. The thing is, I knew Smith. So much for anonymity. He had been an OM yoga student for years but it actually worked out well, because he didn’t really want to talk to me either. He didn’t want to get to know me or become buddies. He just wanted to get me into great shape.

Smith took me on as a serious project, offering to give me personal training sessions in exchange for free yoga classes. Four days a week he made me curl my biceps, dip my triceps, run for miles on the treadmill, and cycle standing up. He even had me slithering around on my elbows and dragging my belly like a lizard, an exercise I’m pretty sure he invented but which was highly effective for engaging the triceps and abs. His workouts made me sore for days, which I considered positive, having been brainwashed from an early age to appreciate what my ballet teacher called “profitable pain.”

Having a trainer was good for me in other ways, too. I teach so many people all day every day that having someone else tell me what to do and then making sure I was doing it right was nourishing for me. I was a willing and obedient trainee, completely open to whatever Smith suggested, especially since I thought it was working. But now I wasn’t so sure.

Ever ready to feed my self-critical nature, I went for a closer-up inspection in the magnifying mirror, where I discovered an unwanted line of grayness marching through my honey-colored dye job. The final insult! My roots were already showing and I’d just gone to the salon right before this trip! Arggh!

I was frustrated and mad—mad at my body for not keeping up its part of the bargain, especially since I had done everything I could:

Hair dyed—check

Nails done—check

Facial—check

No dairy/gluten—check

Gym workouts—check

Yoga—check, check, check!

So, why didn’t I look better? Why couldn’t I look exactly the way I wanted to look, even for a little while?

Seeing my eyes in the mirror, I was almost shocked by the guilt, shame, and failure they reflected. Whoa. This intense state of mind was freaking me out.

As I walked back into the bedroom, David felt my vibe and asked, “What’s the matter with you?”

“I feel so fat! I’m wrinkled and I hate my hair.” I spit out the words. “I can’t stand to look at myself.”

“So…that’s why you have been so mean to me lately,” David replied. “You are being mean to yourself, too.”

Too bad I didn’t know then what I know now. I didn’t know that international travel bloats you. I didn’t know that jet lag makes for fuzzy thinking and sleep deprivation kicks up your cortisol, creating waist fatness. I didn’t know that if you just relax and drink a lot of water, things will be different in a couple of days; it’s all impermanent.

I didn’t know that none of this matters anyway. I didn’t know that trying to keep myself looking good—hair dyed, body firm, wrinkles smoothed—wasn’t going to make me any happier. It wouldn’t make people like me better or enhance my career in any meaningful way. It wouldn’t make me more attractive to my husband or bring me a drop of joy. I didn’t have a clue that worrying so much about all that stuff was actually my own personal form of self-torture; that focusing on it so much only made me feel worse, not better. I didn’t know that taking care of myself wasn’t the same as actually caring about myself. I didn’t recognize that my lifestyle tactics were just my habitual way of experiencing what my Buddhist teacher calls suffering.

Turns out that David, like all good husbands, was a better mirror than the ones on the wall, reflecting back both my outer actions and my mental state in a way that finally woke me up. Ugh. I saw this whole scenario as something way too familiar.

For my whole life, too much of my sense of self-worth has been wrapped up in how I feel about my body, a body that has never seemed quite good enough. The other day a guy friend of mine said, “You have such nice, juicy hips. Why do you hide them under tunics and baggy sweaters?” At first I waffled, defensively telling him how much I love the feeling of loose clothing and the boxy, draped silhouettes of Asian fashion. “Sure, sure,” he said, “but I still want to know why you’re hiding your beautiful bottom.” Pressed, I finally blurted out, “Because since the first day I can remember I’ve been told that big behinds must never be seen. And even though that makes me mad and sad and I don’t believe it and I applaud every woman who doesn’t go along with that baloney, I still…” And then I ran out of steam. It felt familiar to get spun up about this topic and then have nowhere to go, because, as usual, I wasn’t walking the talk. I hate admitting it but I don’t have the courage to be the first big butt on my block to not care what anybody thinks of me.

Ever since Gloria Steinem came to my high school in the seventies I’ve known this attitude sucked. Queen Anne High School towered above Seattle, perched atop the highest hill in the city. One of the many brick buildings constructed after the Seattle fire of 1889, it was so old that the steps of the up-and-down stairways were permanently indented from decades of student’s saddle shoes. This ivy-covered landmark building was built in the Classical Revival style, which I suppose was intended to tell everybody from the top of Queen Anne Hill all the way down Skid Road to Elliot Bay that Seattle boasts excellence in classical public education. You could see the school for miles in all directions. Perhaps less a matter of pride was that fact that you could also see the students every night on the local five o’clock news. The opening credits showed protesting QA high school kids burning the American flag outside the lunchroom, while the news show’s opening music played the urgent sound of a Morse code tapper. Up until 1967, the classical education was standard fare but things shifted when Mr. Hall became the principal.

I went to Queen Anne High for sophomore, junior, and senior years and those three years happened to coincide with most of Mr. Hall’s brief tenure. He was a little too radical for the parents but that was one of the main reasons we liked him. We also liked that he banished study hall. He changed it to “free period,” which I interpreted as meaning you were free to do whatever you wanted. By the time I was a senior I had manipulated my schedule to be totally free of anything resembling science or math, but I did like to go to journalism class in the morning, where I hung out with Tina. She was the front page editor of the school newspaper and I was the back page editor and together we drove our journalism teacher crazy. He complained that we were too giddy and giggly. Of course, that just made us laugh more. After journalism, I had my first free period followed by lunch followed by another free period, which added up to about three hours of doing whatever I wanted. Tina and I would usually get in my car and drive to the University district for pizza and then go to the bead store to make daisy-bead hippie bracelets.

Our first year of high school was 1968 and we were still heavily influenced by our parents: hers were strict Catholic and mine were liberal Protestant. Contrary to our journalism teacher’s impression of us, Tina and I were actually thinking girls, and in those days, there was a lot to think about for young high school women.

That didn’t mean we weren’t both excited and flattered to be asked to model for the high school fashion show. Sharing a dressing room at Jay Jacobs, a cool Seattle store that provided the clothes, we took turns trying on skirts and tops and alternately complimenting each other and criticizing ourselves. I slipped a daisy-print shift over my head and posed in front of the mirror.

“That is adorable! You look so cute in that dress!” raved Tina. I also thought I looked cute in that dress but I didn’t say so. That would simply not be acceptable.

Instead I would say something like: “Really? You think this looks okay on me?” And then she would say something like: “Yes, you should definitely model that dress.”

This kind of conversation went back and forth between us, me telling her what she looked good in and her telling me what I looked good in, and we had started to pile up the outfits we wanted to model for the show when we began to notice a lot of noise from outside. The dressing room was on the second floor with a little window that looked across the main downtown plaza toward the monorail. Pulling the curtain aside, we looked out and saw a huge, roiling crowd of people on the sidewalk below. The intense energy was exciting and scary at the same time.

“It’s an antiwar march,” said Tina.

“Oh yeah, I think my dad is down there somewhere.”

“Your dad is in a protest march?”

“Yes!” I was proud of my dad and even bragged about how, as a minister, he willingly wrote conscientious objector letters for any boy who asked him.

Tina was equally shocked when I told her that not only had my dad marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., but so had my mom! This was the same year that reproductive rights for women were recognized as a basic human right. Her Catholicism and my Protestantism clashed hard on this.

“Go home and ask your mom if she would get an abortion if she found out she was pregnant,” Tina dared me.

So I did and my mom told me that, yes, she would get an abortion.

Okay, maybe she didn’t exactly say that. I’d like to ask her about that now but she is too far gone into dementia. Even if I had asked her a few years ago when she could still remember a thing or two, I imagine she would have said, “Oh, Cyndi” in the same way she did when I was in college and I told her that I had done LSD. That particular “Oh, Cyndi” meant she didn’t believe me. She thought I was just trying to shock her, which I was, even though what I said was true.

So I must include the possibility that this memory is not 100 percent accurate. Maybe what happened is that when I asked her if she would get an abortion she said something like, “Oh God, I don’t want another kid!” But whatever she actually said, the message I heard was clear—nobody else can or should tell you what you can or can’t do with your own body.

My mom expressed that opinion often—even though she also criticized her younger, hipper coworker for never wearing a bra. And I believe Mr. Hall wanted his students to contemplate these kinds of contemporary conversations because he used his new concept of free period to bring in controversial speakers, providing a powerful, worldly education for his students. When I was sixteen and seventeen these speakers affected me deeply. I spent one week boycotting Safeway after hearing César Chávez speak about migrant workers, and when Gloria Steinem came to our school, my life was changed forever. Here again, my memory might not be 100 percent reliable. I think it was Gloria. I know for sure there was a remarkable and important woman who came to our school’s free period, and this is what I remember.

She was beautiful and smart and clear speaking. She talked about how the traditional role of women was expanding and inspired us to take advantage of any opportunity. She told us that no choice was wrong except the one that was imposed on us. She said whatever choices we made in the future—stay at home, go to college, get married and have babies, or become career women—were all valid paths for us as young women. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do but I knew that I did not yet want to be a housewife and a mother. I didn’t want to step around toys and tricycles, like I did when I was babysitting. I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to dress in pretty and sharp outfits and go to work with people who respected me and made me feel smart and valuable, just like my mom did when she went to the office every day. I had big ideas and a creative drive and a sense of undirected ambition. I was seventeen and I believed I could do anything I wanted. Since then I have done most of what I’ve wanted, but doing whatever you want and feeling however you want are not the same thing.

Somehow I got stuck in a place where being respected and liked for what I could do was important but still not enough. I never felt 100 percent satisfied with any positive feedback if it didn’t include how I looked, yet being complimented on my looks wasn’t enough either. I didn’t want to be just a pretty face but I wanted to be noticed for my pretty face. I didn’t want to be sought after for my body but I was envious of other women’s bodies that I thought were better than mine. And since jealousy is a bottomless pit, there was always a better body invading my comfort zone. Eventually I learned to control my body through dance, yoga, and politics, but I hadn’t understood that what needed to be controlled was really my mind.

Gloria Steinem knew that the main change we needed was an attitude adjustment, a re-positioning of women within our culture. That’s why she became a Playboy Bunny. Criticized for being too pretty—as if that meant she couldn’t be taken seriously as a force for women’s rights—she turned those comments upside down by getting a job where her uniform was a leotard with a puffy tail and ears on her head. By exposing the sexism of that gig she showed that women can take ownership of their own beauty, sexuality, and brains.

Of course, there’s a reason why she is Gloria Steinem; it has to do with vision, bravery, and a willingness to tirelessly spread the message that no one’s body—women, men, children, or animals—is an appropriate political war zone.

Forty years later, I understand this. I love this. I love Gloria. But back then, I was caught in a riptide that flowed in two opposing directions. One wave was moving forward, taking me and my friends and even my mom toward becoming more confident beings in the world. I set my sights on living a life that mattered to me and felt respect for all women, including those who had a different vision for their future. I was smart and I expected to be treated as an intelligent and worthwhile person, even if I was planning to have a career as a dancer and, hopefully, make a living from how I moved my body through space. And, sure, I wanted a bra when I was twelve, but by the time I went to college, that thing was long gone and I never got another one until I was fifty-five and noticed that my breasts were finally starting to droop. At which point I thought, why not? The imprints from Gloria were still there—I didn’t care if you could see my nipples through my sweaters. But I didn’t want anyone to think that meant something that it didn’t. I was free but I wasn’t cheap.

And then there it was, that other tide, the backward-moving undertow that sliced through my self-esteem and told me that what other people think about me matters. My personal perception problem was so typical that it became a completely normal part of life. My girlfriends and I talk about what is not quite right about our bodies, how we can’t wear this or that because we just don’t have the right legs or waist, or because it makes us look fat even when we aren’t fat. We are all way too good at denigrating ourselves with each other, just like Tina and I did in that Jay Jacobs dressing room when we were fifteen-year-old smart goddesses with tremendous potential to be anything we wanted. Our only obstacle was that we could only really feel good about our appearance—and in turn, ourselves—when it was confirmed by others.

This was no small thing because the seeds that were planted in my mind at that age have grown up into a full-blown adult body grudge. Most all of my friends know this syndrome well and consider it a normal thing for our self-esteem to be based on how we feel about how our body looks. Not on our actual embodied experience, which might be strong or grounded or capable, but how we feel about our physical self—the size and shape of our breasts, the firmness or not of our abs, our dress size, and how much we weigh compared with each other.

Even a woman like me, who has been always been physically active—tree-climber, cheerleader, modern dancer, aerobics instructor, yoga teacher—has spent a lifetime chipping away at my own self-confidence by comparing my body to a fictionalized PR ideal based on celebrities and fashion photos. But even though I know those images are unreal, the imprints are too deep to be easily swept away.

Why do I care so much about such shallow concerns? It’s not as if this is all I have to do or think about all day. I have serious interests, my own business to run, a committed spiritual practice, and thousands of students who look to me for guidance and inspiration. What they don’t know is that in the background there is always a grumbling, rumbling, complaining voice in my head that tells me that my body needs work.

As a little girl, I never really thought about my body. I was my body and my body was me. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters but I was always able to keep myself company because I had a good, strong body that took me on lots of adventures. A typical day found me scaling the apple tree in our backyard, flying down hills on my skateboard, or standing on my dad’s feet as he waltzed me around the living room. Heights and speed attracted me and even though I dislocated my elbows, skinned my knees, and even cracked my head open one time, nothing ever slowed me down. I was born to move.

When I was seven, I was secretly in love with Bill Sutton, who was a drum major for the high school band. Our families were friends, and Bill thought it was fun to have me as his little groupie. When I heard the band practicing in the school field across from our house, I was so excited that I raced across the street without looking and was hit by a car. I ended up with fifty-six deep stitches in my right calf and strict instructions from the doctor not to do anything active for the rest of the summer. That didn’t last long.

Stuck in my room, I turned my bed into a trampoline, which not only stretched my sutures, leaving me forever with a wide silver scar, but also broke the bed frame. My mother had yelled at me to stop bouncing on the bed a million times. But at this point she was grateful I was still alive. Over and over she recited, “That car could have killed you,” followed by a lot of dramatic sighing. She already knew it was a lost cause; I was never going to stay still.

More injuries were in my future: wiping out on a hairpin turn while wearing cut-off jeans on a high school ski trip landed me in the emergency room with a deep gash in my knee. One sexy college night in the southern California canyons, I busted a couple of toes when I tripped literally while tripping on acid. Ballet lessons and modern dance performances led to ankle sprains, sciatica, torn spinal ligaments, whiplash, and lumpy purple bruises in every place imaginable. If I got bumps along the way it was no big deal—I was nothing if not resilient.

My fourth-grade pals decided one day that I shouldn’t exercise so much. They thought I was too skinny. They made me eat seconds on our favorite school lunch of chili and cinnamon rolls and refused to let me play kickball. Instead, two at a time, they took turns holding each other’s wrists to create a palanquin for me, insisting I ride everywhere to avoid burning up even one calorie.

In truth, I wasn’t really too skinny and I certainly wasn’t fat. I was just a very alive little kid with bright energy and a sense of adventure. I wanted to see what was around the next corner or on the highest branch. I wanted to ride the wind and hang upside down, and I had total confidence that my body could always take me wherever I wanted to go.

If I close my eyes and sit quietly now, I can remember how it felt to be me then. My body was my best friend. We had so much fun together every day and just as with my other friends, it wasn’t about looks but about feelings. I don’t remember ever feeling too big or too small. I felt good. I felt right. I felt free and joyful and full of movement. I didn’t know then that it could ever be different.

My yoga students are sitting on blankets with their legs bent in an extra-challenging version of a crossed-leg position. Their right ankles are balanced on their left knees and their left ankles are placed directly below their right knees, in a pose called Agnistambhasana, or Stacking Fire Logs. A few people like this position, but for the most part, they look at me like they just sucked a lemon. Time for me to give them a big-picture view.

I ask, “Have you ever disliked someone that you didn’t even know? Maybe a person at your office that you’ve seen from a distance and, for no reason at all, you just don’t like them?”

People nod, a sheepish admittance that they’ve all been there.

“And then, did it ever happen that circumstances put you together and you ended up really liking each other a lot? Maybe even becoming great friends?”

A few eyebrows go up and heads nod as they get the message: Stacking Fire Logs might not be your friend right now, but maybe if you relax your idea about it, that could change.

I talk about this all the time when I’m teaching yoga. Since every body is different it just makes sense that some people can naturally do certain poses, while other ones seem completely impossible. You might be desperately struggling to lift your leg an inch off the floor while the perfectly ordinary person on the next yoga mat has somehow managed to toss a knee over his shoulder without any drama at all. I want to encourage people not to solidify what they think they know about themselves and any one pose; to instead rethink their relationship with the ones they’ve already labeled as enemies.

Many of the students are regulars at my New York studio, OM yoga Center. They’ve heard me talk about this before. Maybe the reason they are smiling at me is that they recognize this is a lesson I’m trying to teach myself.

By sixth grade, my body innocence had started to shift along with my hormones. I got some new ideas from 16 magazine, and Donna Reed’s wispy daughter, and especially from my friend CeeCee Carlott and her big sister. The main message was that if I wanted to fit in, I had to pay vigilant attention to my appearance.

I did my best to get the right look, but somehow I was always out of sync. At eleven, I still had a girl’s un-curvy body although I was dying to be like voluptuous Barbie. Then, just when my teenage body started rounding, the “in” look was all about flat-chested Twiggy, with her boy hips and boy hair. I could never quite hit the target, but I was already a slave to the junior high message—no matter how my body looked, there was always room for improvement.

Boobs were a good place to start. CeeCee and I had been trying to get our boobs to grow ever since we found a True Confessions magazine stuffed under the couch cushions at Gil Larkey’s house. We knew for a fact that it belonged to Gil’s grandmother, who was our number one audience—in fact, our only audience. A sensuous, slouchy kind of lady with bedroom hair, her suggestive vibe was a total turn-on to us pre-sexualized tweens. Stuff that our moms would not want us to be doing just cracked her up, like semi-risque dances involving bumps and grinds and flow-y scarves, or dramatized versions of the illicit love stories from True Confessions that might include kissing each other on the lips. The back of the magazine had a cheesy ad for a bust enhancer, some kind of gadget that you hold between your hands and squeeze. We really wanted to send away for one but, of course, we didn’t have any money. We also didn’t have any breasts to enhance but by the time we were in junior high, we understood the principle of how the thing worked. Who needed the gadget? We figured out that we could join our hands in prayer and push, push, push in a rhythm that engaged our chest muscles. Results were inconclusive, which meant it was worth it to keep trying.

By 1968, we were in high school and the tide that undercut our natural little-girl-body joy was in full force. No longer were we having fun exploring our bodies and movement and feelings. Now we were clearly focused on the goal: We wanted our chests to get bigger and the rest of us to get smaller. Before school we drank Instant Breakfast instead of eating something and after school, we sprawled across our parents’ living room floors running rolling pins up and down our thighs just in case the rumor was true and that really did make your legs get thinner.

As the daughter of the minister of a big downtown church in Seattle, I had the added pressure of upholding the purity quotient of my entire generation. There were comments from some of the older church members when I started rolling up my waistbands in seventh grade—a popular method for shortening your skirt. Fortunately my mom was a pretty cool minister’s wife, telling the church biddies, “A short skirt is not a crime!”

Millie’s fierceness did not tolerate anyone criticizing me, her only child. I might step out of the good-girl box in little, insignificant ways, but that only made her more proud of me for being a kid with chutzpah. In the meantime, she counted on me being reliably afraid of the things she and my father had brainwashed me against, such as older boys and motorcycles. As soon as she was able to convince my dad that I was old enough to stay home by myself, my mom went back to work as an executive secretary.

Each morning, before getting in the car to go to work, she stood on tiptoes, the back of her feet lifting out of her high heels, to hide the house key on top of the garage door ledge. Each afternoon, when I got home from school, I stood on the tiptoes of my saddle shoes. Just able to touch the edge of the key, I would flip it off the ledge and catch it as it fell down, to let myself into the house. My mom never suspected that her good-girl daughter brought her boyfriend home with her most days. My basement bedroom was next to the garage so it was easy to hear the car coming down the driveway. Over the three years of high school Mick and I got pretty fast at disentangling our limbs, smoothing our clothes, and composing ourselves before she stepped into the house. Because my mom thought I wouldn’t want to do anything that a non–good girl would do, she just assumed that I wasn’t doing anything with my boyfriend that she would not approve of. And on Fridays she was right.

That was payday. My mom’s contribution to the family money scenario was buying the groceries for each week. I would help out by going to the store with her and then loading up the backseat with paper bags full of Rice-A-Roni, Pop-Tarts, iceberg lettuce, and Neapolitan ice cream. Then she would turn to me and say, “Well, I still have a little bit of my paycheck left and you know what? This money is burning a hole in my pocket!”

She would drive us out to the Northgate Mall, famous for being the first retail shopping mall in America (and less famous for being the mall parking lot where my dad taught me to drive). We’d make a beeline for the fabric store, where we walked side by side down the middle aisle. Rows of fabric on our right and left, we each ran a hand along the top of the end bolts. Walking slowly, if we felt something we liked, we would stop and unroll it, running it through our hands with as much relish as if it were food. Textiles nourished us. If we liked the color, we might buy it. If we liked the texture, we might buy it. If we liked the texture and the color, we definitely bought it. We didn’t have to know what we would make out of it. We just bought fabric the way other people might buy shoes.

We loved having new clothes that nobody else had. In fact, that was our policy. The feel for fabric was in my mom’s fingers. She intuitively understood how it folded together and ended up in three-dimensional shapes and she could do this with or without a pattern, even on short notice. When I got an unexpected invitation to a girls’ club party, my mom and I agreed I absolutely needed a new dress. We dug into our fabric stash and pulled out a couple of yards of blue-and-green madras plaid and half a yard of plain turquoise cotton. Exactly one hour later, my mom put on the finishing touches with the iron-on hemming tape—only to be used in this kind of fashion emergency—and I slipped on a groovy new tent dress that no one else would be wearing at that party.

Millie and I had new outfits almost every Sunday, including mom-and-daughter dresses, with an après-church matching sports shirt for Daddy. I was always proud of the clothes she made for me, except for one time when I was about twelve.

When Mom made me a Carnaby Street–style shift with bust darts and paraded me around church, I thought I would die. Right at the front of the sanctuary she said, “Show Mrs. McHargue the new dress I made you!” I slowly spun in a circle wishing I could corkscrew right down into the floor, sure that everyone was staring at my non-breasts. As far as I was concerned, my mom might as well have screamed to the whole congregation, “Look at little Cyndi’s chest!”

Even though I had been squeezing my pecs since a year earlier, when they actually started to bud, it seemed so embarrassing. I didn’t know if I wanted them or not. But what I did want was a bra. My poor friend Carol had just been given her first training bra as a Christmas gift and we all talked about how embarrassing it was for her to open it up in front of the whole family, including her big brother! That was horrible, but at least she ended up with a bra, which definitely increased her coolness quotient among our little crowd.

I also wanted pantyhose and kitten heels and ruffled collars. I liked being a girly girl just as much as I liked climbing trees, but I just didn’t understand curves. And already I was resentful that anyone would notice me for my body or judge me by my looks. I didn’t know that was called objectification and I didn’t know how to recognize mixed messages. I just knew that getting attention for how I looked was the way to be accepted, and at the same time, wanting that kind of attention was not an acceptable way for a good girl to be.

In eighth grade my friends threw me a surprise party, and my mom redeemed herself by buying me a new pair of jeans, taking them to her sewing room, and tapering them to a perfect fit. Like today, skintight jeans were essential if you wanted to be cool. This was long before the invention of jeggings and stretch denim, so everyone spent hours sewing up side seams to make their jeans super tight. We even left a little opening at the bottom of the seam to solve the problem of how to get your feet through your pants. But I had another problem with my jeans. My hips were bigger than my waist. Jeans that might fit my waist would never have fit my thighs and vice versa. Without my mom’s waist tucks, my pants would be the right size at the hips but the waistband fabric would have stuck out like a hulahoop.

Clearly I must be a freak if pants fit me like that. I had no idea that boys’ jeans—which was the only style that was made back then—don’t taper in at the waist. I became obsessed with the part of me that went out because it seemed so big. And everybody knew big is not what you want your body to be, right?

Little did I know that one of the hottest icons of that era had exactly the same problem. Thirty years later, I found myself standing on a round pedestal in the Armani dressing room on Fifth Avenue. It was shortly before my second wedding and I’d lost about twenty pounds, which was good except that my waist was still considerably smaller than my hips.

Kneeling at my feet with pins in her mouth, the in-house tailor told me, “Don’t feel bad that your hips are bigger than your waist. That’s why I have a full-time job here. Everybody has this problem. Even Sophia Loren! I have to take in her clothes all the time. She is always telling Armani, ‘Dahling, I refuse to wear your clothes any longer unless you make them fit a real woman’s body.’”

In high school, I finally began to understand that some curves were good, but unfortunately, those weren’t the ones I had. I’d learned that guys like breasts but also that they didn’t think mine were big enough. Neither did my drama teacher, who suggested falsies for the bodice of my Hello Dolly! costume. At the same time, my dance teacher was not so subtly encouraging me to diet, since, “You know, my dear, the stage adds ten pounds.” I was five foot four, barely weighed one hundred eight pounds and size small was baggy on me. Yet evidently I was too big in some spots and too small in others—talk about a lose-lose situation. The relationship with my body was just not much fun anymore. A source of wrongness in so many ways, my body was no longer my friend.

Looking back to the time of Sophia’s heyday, I wonder why I never had the opposite thought—that my waist was extra tiny and my hips were average. But it never occurred to me to think that. Along with my girlfriends, I’d already developed a typical American female’s critical assessment of her own body, and it always came up lacking. To me, curves was just another word for “fat.”

That thinking was still with me in 1984. It was Larry Kirwan’s birthday and we were all at St. Marks Bar on Eighth Street and First Avenue to help him celebrate. Larry Kirwan and Pierce Turner had a band called the Major Thinkers, which was Cyndi Lauper’s opening act on her Ready-in-Five-Minutes tour. I danced for both bands and Pierce wrote the music for my dance company, called XXY Dance/Music. We were all starving dancers and musicians with no money ever but loads of ideas and energy and joy.

When I think back on that time it seems like we were always either in that bar or Blanche’s on Avenue A or the Holiday on St. Marks between First and Second, and I wonder how I ever managed to do all that dancing, but I seem to recall that hangovers were part of the creative process.

Just say that we were pretty comfortable hanging out in bars and when one of us girls came up with the idea of taking her clothes off as a birthday present for Larry, we instantly decided that we would all do it!

We huddled together in the ladies’ one-seat, one-sink bathroom with walls painted black and started undressing. We bumped butts as we reached down to pull off our pants and knocked elbows turning around to unzip each other’s dresses and the whole thing had us in hysterics. And then, one by one, we got qualms. Even though we were all in our late twenties with gorgeous dancer bodies, we each had one area that we didn’t want to expose. We certainly were not prudish. But about half of us wanted to hide her boobs and the other half wanted to hide her butt. The girls with bigger breasts wanted to keep their bras on because even though big boobs are always popular, my chestier friends were all critical of their breasts—too floppy, too low, you get the picture.

That surprised me since I’d spent my entire adolescence and early adulthood wishing I had bigger breasts and secretly hoping they could still grow in my twenties. I tried not to hate my friends with big boobs but I was definitely jealous of them and part of me was glad they didn’t like their breasts. Did I subconsciously feel that if they didn’t like their bodies it somehow made my body better? Or it made my own negative body image acceptable?

That night I didn’t mind showing my small, perky breasts but no way was I going to go out there bare-assed, even though my underpants were practically nothing. It seemed like we were all more comfortable with exposing the part that we thought was small and firm. Anything round or squishy must remain under cover.

We paraded back out to the bar in our bras and high heels, panties and Doc Martens, high on the outrageousness of it all and a little bit turned on, too. I’m sure on some level we knew we were wielding a kind of power, feminine sexual energy power, but mostly I think we related to our bodies in terms of what size or shape seemed to be in style. Rather than a source of power that I could be proud of and take ownership of, exposing my body was more like giving something away—Happy birthday, Larry!

I guess we took too long in the bathroom, though, because when we arrived at Larry’s bar stool, he was gone. He was barfing around the corner on St. Marks Place and missed the entire display, which made the whole thing kind of fall flat. We got plenty of unwanted attention from the other patrons, though, and we scurried back into the bathroom to cover up. It occurs to me that on some level we really did know what we were doing. The magical power spots of our bodies, the seats (no pun intended) of our female energy were what we had to give but even then, half drunk, half stoned, and half delirious with youth and East Village craziness, we knew that we weren’t willing to give it all up. I’d done practically everything else in a bar—snorted coke, danced on the bar, sung at the top of my lungs, fondled, been fondled, and gotten famous for being an excellent mooner, so why not just take it all off? But the inhibitions had limits.

Maybe we knew we were hot, but we didn’t know we were magic. We didn’t know that our natural beauty and sensuality were more valuable than the size or firmness of any particular square inch of flesh. I’d like to think that we were making some kind of conscious statement, but really it was just a spontaneous expression of that uncontained time in my life—full of raw, organic, sexual, youthful, highly stimulated life energy. But as fun as it all was, there were still feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, and negative self-esteem hiding under the covers of every hot night with a guy in the band.

When I told this story to my old friend Mary, she told me that these days she is jealous of her own ex-body. I laughed, sort of. Honestly, I think she and I both feel a little bit sad that we weren’t more proud of our beautiful young bodies—bodies that we would kill to have today.

The thing is, I didn’t even know I had a bad attitude toward my body. It wasn’t that obvious, in large part because it was the same attitude that all my girlfriends had about their bodies. Nothing had changed from the days when Tina and I had been high school models. Not one of us would ever say right out loud “I look good in this outfit” or “I love the shape of my body.” Your friends might tell you that you looked good, but of course, since everyone said that to each other, it wasn’t a reliable compliment. It was simply the accepted way for women to talk about themselves with each other. All of this behavior was so normal that it took many years for me to realize the harm I was doing to myself. It was pernicious, and yet so subtle, that it didn’t make me stop eating or become anorexic or bulimic or addicted to exercise. I just felt like an un-cool person with a wrong-shaped body who wasn’t crazy about mirrors.

Touring as a backup dancer with Cyndi Lauper required serious creativity in the area of body, hair, and clothes. We girls really did just want to have fun, and to prove it we wore tomato-red bangs or hot-pink hair swirls to match our combat boots and layers of petticoats. The show was called the Ready-in-Five-Minutes Tour because we were always late. One reason is that Cyndi and I liked shopping.

“Hey, Cyndi.”

“Yeah, Cyndi?”

She showed me a handful of ruffles. “I can’t wear this, but I think it would be cute on you.”

I don’t know how she found this vintage place in the country outside of Philly. There were piles of old clothes everywhere, the kind we liked, with lots of ruffles and plaid and white petticoats, old-fashioned bathing suits and boy shorts. Heaven! Our policy was to never wear only one skirt at a time. A good look was at least three skirts over a pair of pedal pushers or boy shorts, with a camisole on top and only one very long earring. I piled so many taffeta skirts on top of multiple crinolines that I felt like a Michelin man. Even though I thought I was fat, I was so skinny that almost everything vintage was too big for me, but if there was something there that would fit me, Cyndi would find it.

“Here—try this skirt on over that bathing suit. Adorable!”

Cyndi Lauper was an expert at unearthing cute, kooky items and generous in sharing what she thought looked good on me. We had a few hours between arriving at the venue and when we had to be back for the sound check, which we thought was plenty of time. But back at the arena, it took a while to get all those layers on just right and if the show started late because we had to put on more eyeliner or change the shoelaces in our Doc Martens, that just made the audience even more eager. The manager had to deal with the union guys but since he was also the manager for Lou Albano of World Wide Wrestling fame, we didn’t worry about it too much.

Basically, I didn’t worry about much anyway, except, of course, my hair and my body. My favorite haircut was Little Lord Fauntleroy on one side and almost shaved on the other. Running down the middle fell one long strand that went all the way to my upper lip. Believe it or not, it was a pretty sexy look on me.

In fact the whole experience of being on tour was sexy, especially the hot affair I had with the bass player. He was very into his look—always wearing sunglasses onstage and minimal shirts that showed off his hyper-muscular arms and chest. I wasn’t the only person who got to see his naked chest, but I was one of the few who got to see his naked eyes after the gig. He also had a high-maintenance rock ‘n’ roll hairdo. He was very willing to spend an entire day sitting in a chair to get those long black braids down to his waist.

But most guys I know aren’t like that. I know some of my men friends don’t always agree with me, but it seems to me they are not obsessed with their bodies in quite the same way that we women are. By the third date, I knew I was crazy for David but I was pretty shy to show it. And since I’d only been separated from my first husband for a week, I was very out of dating shape and didn’t really remember how things went in that department. Near the end of the date, when I couldn’t help myself anymore, I bravely reached out and touched his hand. He seemed to like that. As I gently stroked the hairs on his big fingers, I asked him if he had a hairy back.

“A hairy back?!”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How can you not know if you have a hairy back?”

“Who knows that? I mean, how can I tell if my back is hairy? It’s behind me and I can’t see it.”

That was so cute. I was really falling in love with him. I didn’t care if he was hairy or not, and honestly, I could hardly wait to find out for myself how hairy his back was or wasn’t.

So I said, “Well, don’t you ever stand backward in front of your full-length mirror and then swivel your head around so you can see your back and check out your butt?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Most guys I know are all like that. They might have a beach ball for a stomach, firm and very round, or a blubby spare tire situation. But they just don’t get too worked up about it. And body size, shape, and furriness is rarely an obstacle to lovemaking with the lights on. To them, sex is like a trendy nightclub—a-see-and-be-seen event. Although mostly guys want to see you and it’s only us women who don’t want to be seen.

My friend Jeffrey told me that his girlfriend constantly berated her body and eventually it just wore him down. He asked her, “If you really have such a horrible body, what does that say about me, your boyfriend? If I like your body—but you hate your body—what do you really think about me? Do you even like me?” The whole drama upset and confused him, when he just wanted to feel loving and close to his girlfriend, who he thought was beautiful.

One day my husband grabbed me as I stepped out of the shower. He ran his hands up and down my body, clearly liking what he was seeing. He said, “When are you going to write an article called ‘I Hate My Body but My Husband Loves It and Wants Me to Let Him Play with It’?”

Another wakeup call from my husband-as-mirror. This I-always-think-I’m-fat thing may be a women’s issue but it’s our husbands—and everyone around us—who get the fallout. My husband looks at me and sees a beautiful, luscious woman but then he looks in my eyes and sees a person who is dissatisfied, judgmental, and not that much fun to be with.

I think Jeffrey’s question is valid for all of us. If we don’t love ourselves, can we love our husbands? Are we telling them we are unlovable? Does this attitude create a loop of un-lovability?

Most of my yoga classes begin with some kind of breathing exercise. I might invite the students to equalize their inhalation and exhalation to balance active and receptive tendencies. Some days we practice sharp exhalations and passive inhalations as a kind of purifying breath. The most basic, and yet most advanced, breath work is simply cultivating breath awareness, which naturally brings one’s mind into one’s body, creating a harmonious sense of presence and grounding. Pretty much everybody feels better after a few minutes of doing that, even if they didn’t feel bad before.

“On your next exhale, unfold into your first Downward Dog of the day. Stay steady here for a few breaths. Take a moment to experience what your breathing is like, right now, in this upside-down position. Can you take interest in the sensation of the breath? Not the concept of the breath, but the actual texture of each inhalation? The warp and weft of each exhalation?”

I let a few moments pass as I walk among the students, moving between the rows of mats. I’m not touching anybody yet. It’s too early for that. If I’m asking them to check in with their experience as it is, without manipulating anything, I don’t want a hands-on adjustment from me to imply that anything about them should be different right now.

Today I’m offering a specific exploration, one that I’ve been drawn to a lot lately and I hope the students aren’t getting bored with it. I didn’t know that someday soon I would meet Louise Hay, a wise woman in San Diego, who would tell me: “We only attract people to us that we can help.” I just had to trust that since they kept showing up for class, they must have been getting something they need from this experience.

Along with touching and not-touching, part of skillful yoga teaching is working with the rhythm of silence and non-silence; I start talking again.

“I’m sure I’m not the only woman here who steps on the scale every morning to figure out how I should feel about myself that day.”

Mark, a longtime student of mine, pops his Downward Dog head up and gives me a dirty look.

“Okay, I get it. Why am I leaving out the guys? I know you do that, too.”

He affirms this with a grunt. I continue.

“The thing is, we are using the scale as if it were a mirror. We allow that little box to tell us how we should feel about ourselves today. If we like the number it shows us, we feel good and if we don’t like the number, we have a little dark drama moment.

“Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t believe that the information we receive from external feedback is fixed and real. But we do, so we meet that by allowing our response to be equally solidified. We see a precise number on our digital scale and we accept it. ‘That’s how much I weigh and now I feel this way. Period.’ We look in the mirror and based on what it reflects, we accept that this dress does not look good on me. Period.

“But, have you ever weighed yourself before you went to bed and then again as soon as you woke up in the morning? Isn’t it funny that you lose weight overnight, even though you’ve just been lying in bed for hours—and then you gain weight again during the day? We’re made of water so, of course, any kind of accurate feedback loop is going to need to be more fluid.”

Okay, I’ve ranted long enough. Their arms are getting tired and they are ready to move. A good yoga teacher knows what to do by looking at the students. My living, breathing dots of awareness are starting to fidget, so I tell them to move into plank pose and exhale their knees, chest, and chin to the floor. Inhale into baby cobra, exhale child’s pose, inhale, and round up into Vajrasana, Basic Goodness Pose.

“Does this resonate with anybody or am I the only one who has this mirror-scale issue?” They crack up. We’re all on the same page.

“The good news is that we’re here. Yoga offers us a different mirror—the reflective surface of the breath. Come back into Downward Dog and sensitively walk your feet to your hands. Slowly round up to standing, feeling every single vertebra as if you were doing a walking meditation all the way to the top of your spine.”

The students stand at yogic attention—calm, centered, bright, open—waiting for the next instruction. I can tell that for that moment, no one is feeling fat or thin or wrong in any way. They are not unsatisfied and neither am I. For the moment, we are in the middle of our experience, no need to lead or follow.

People often ask me if I fell in love with yoga as soon as I took my first class. I was eighteen and it was 1971 in southern California, so naturally my hippie college offered yoga classes at the traditional crack-of-dawn time slot. It’s more likely that I fell in love with the yoga and art teachers who took us on a retreat to the Joshua Tree desert and taught us about purification and Indian art. It was a fun time to be young; the birth control pill was easy to get, and HIV/AIDS was unknown. I was crazy in love with my life as a full-blown vegetarian-cooking, TM-meditating, hitchhiking-to-Berkeley, Siddhartha-reading, hash-smoking, orgy-making hippie. Since I frequently partied half the night anyway, I thought it was kind of relaxing to take a yoga class before going back to the dorm for some sleep.

Clearly, I wasn’t as serious about yoga as I was about dancing. Eight years later I tightened the ribbons on my toe shoes one last time and graduated with honors from one of the most respected university dance departments in the world. I tucked my MFA under my arm and moved to New York City as the token performance artist recipient of a fellowship to the Whitney Museum of American Art. I ditched my dance shoes and pink tights for bare feet and sweatpants, taking contact improv classes from influential movers such as Simone Forti and Danny Lepkoff. Studio rental was about three dollars an hour, but since the Whitney gig paid only sixty bucks a week, I started teaching yoga to support my dance habit.

For next to nothing I shared an apartment with another dancer on Avenue B and Fifth Street in the East Village, and I soon became a fixture in the downtown modern-dance world. Eventually I was invited to perform my own choreography in theaters around the world, which brought my work to the eyes of video producers. My first commercial gig was choreographing the music video of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” for which I was paid one hundred twenty-five dollars. It was 1983. My hair was blue, and I still taught yoga on the side.

In 1984 Cyndi Lauper’s video won the first-ever award for Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards and that brought me more work. Over the next few years, along with my choreography partner, Mary Ellen Strom, I choreographed music videos for many artists, including Rick James, Simple Minds, and Apollonia. We did spots for Sesame Street’s Children’s Television Workshop and choreographed the videos for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. We were super excited to perform live with Cyndi Lauper on NBC’s short-lived Friday night version of Saturday Night Live, especially since the show was hosted by Steve Martin. One crazy night, while we were in San Juan choreographing some videos for Latin pop star Chayanne, we even threw together a dance segment in about fifteen minutes and performed it live on the popular Puerto Rican TV show Sabado Grande. This was all a lot of work and great fun, but not much money or, really, much of anything meaningful to me. I considered myself a serious dancer, dedicated to making art, but after a while that felt empty, too.

My last dance concert was at the famous Saint Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on Second Avenue and Tenth Street, which is also home to the Poetry Project, Danspace Project, and Incubator Arts. Founded in the midsixties, Saint Mark’s was host to artists such as Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Anne Waldman, John Giorno, and Sam Shepard. It was Philip Glass who first introduced me to his guru, Gelek Rimpoche, and by the early nineties I had a new love, the Buddhadharma. Yoga and dance had flip-flopped for me and I was now completely passionate about my yoga practice with the result that all my dancers were adept yogis.

The concert at Saint Mark’s was called The Beat Suite. It opened with a dancer in Parsva Bakasana, Side Crow Pose, which means that she was basically curled up sideways into a ball, one hip balanced on her arms with her feet hovering off the floor. If that wasn’t challenging enough, she stayed like that for five minutes, now and then slowly coming down out of the pose and shifting to the other side. It was an expression of the stability and strength that I was beginning to experience from my meditation practice.

The highlight of The Beat Suite evening was a group of short dances choreographed to songs written by Allen Ginsberg, known as the poet laureate of the Beat Generation. Allen was also a student of Gelek Rimpoche and a longtime resident of the East Village. We ran into each other on the street all the time and he’d always give me a big sloppy kiss that practically left my whole face wet. As my dharma brother and fellow downtown artist, he was happy to let me use his music for my concerts, sometimes even showing up in person to sing his songs and play his harmonium while we danced.

The concert opened with Dunderhead Hoover, a solo I performed while telling a Buddhist fable I found particularly inspiring. The story goes that a not-very-bright young man (aka a “dunderhead”) had a yearning to become enlightened. He had been enrolled in his uncle’s monastery but, unfortunately, he was not smart enough to grasp the teachings and in the end was kicked out of the school. Then his luck changed because the Buddha himself just happened to be walking by and saw the poor fellow crying by the side of the road. He brought the young man to another monastery and gave him the job of sweeping the temple floor. A simple job, for sure, but Buddha added one particular element. As he moved the broom back and forth, the dunderhead was told to recite these words, “Sweep the dust and sweep the dirt. Sweep the dust and sweep the dirt.”

In the teaching of the story, dust represents the concept of attachment, and dirt refers to aversion. The moral is that if we can sweep away our desire to hold on too tight to what we like as well as our urge to push away things that we don’t like, we will find ourselves in a place of equanimity, awake and clear.

The happy ending of the story is that the dunderhead became enlightened through repeating these positive phrases, along with right motivation and true commitment. It shows we have the potential to become enlightened, too, because we all have Buddha Nature or Basic Goodness at our core. Our practice is not a magic pill to bring us to enlightenment, but a process of creating the causes and conditions for that awakening to happen if we do the work.

Each time I repeated these phrases to the audience at Saint Mark’s, I swung my body across the stage, rolling and bounding up, again and again, stage right to stage left to stage right, hoping to embody the notion that conscious repetition can result in creating new imprints. This is the basic notion of all practice—whether it is yoga, meditation, or sweeping the floor—and the path that can lead us from negative habits toward positive patterns of thinking and behaving. I liked that idea a lot but didn’t know myself well enough to see the negative ruts that I had already created and was constantly solidifying with my repetitive self-judgment.

This was my professional dancing swan song because, for one thing, it wasn’t fun to perform anymore. My old love of movement was overshadowed by needing good reviews and making sure that influential people from the art world were in the audience so that the necessary fund-raising work could continue. But it was more than that. My mind had turned to the dharma. I wanted to practice meditation every day. I wanted to teach yoga full-time. I was starting to be as interested in what was going on in my mind as I was with my body. I was already stepping onto the path even though I didn’t know where it would take me or how hard it would be.

Wake-up calls like the one I got looking at my gray roots in the Hong Kong bathroom mirror can be destabilizing. Right away my mind started racing—could I get a quickie dye job in the hotel; how long would it take; how much would they charge? These thoughts spun around and around, a mind tornado of criticism, and soon enough, everything else felt wrong, too. When my husband asked, “What’s bothering you?” it was like a ray of sun piercing a cloud. He cut through the thunderstorm in my head, and for a moment anyway, my hard heart melted. I really didn’t want to be cranky to my husband just because I needed a dye job. How ridiculous!

I didn’t have a solution but I was starting to know I had a problem. Where do you go with that? Perhaps it is ironic that I was in the land of Buddha, on a breezy ferry ride back from Lantau Island, home to a ten-story-tall Buddha sitting in lotus and smiling gently to remind me of the blissful peace that comes from within. But instead of feeling peaceful, I was suffering.

Even at the time, it felt arrogant and whiny to glorify my feelings by calling them suffering, when there are so many less fortunate people in the world. But in his first public teaching at the Deer Park, the Buddha himself said that everybody, everywhere suffers. When I first heard Gelek Rimpoche speak about the Buddha’s view of suffering, I was in my mid-thirties and didn’t relate to that teaching at all. Even though I had a short temper, a frustrating dance career, a week-to-week-paycheck life, and an alcoholic (now ex-) husband, I really didn’t think I was suffering. And, of course, I was right. In the grand scheme of things I was affluent, healthy, surrounded by friends, options, and lots of laughs. Suffering, I thought, is what happens in India and Africa or maybe Appalachia.

But as my studies in Buddhism deepened, I learned that the “suffering” the Buddha was talking about might more accurately be translated as dis-comfort, dis-ease, a constant background of dis-satisfaction. “If only this one thing were different, I could be happy, free, find love, relax” is one version. Or alternately, “If only I could be happy, free, find love, relax, then this one thing would be different”—which is just the opposite side of the same coin.

With permission from Gelek Rimpoche, I’d begun integrating Buddhist kinds of ideas into my yoga classes. My unique approach to yoga is an organic blend of all my practices and interests, which include dance and Buddhist meditation. After teaching full-time for a few years this work clarified into a method I began to call OM yoga and which was the basis for my book, Yoga Body, Buddha Mind. The Buddhist teachings of wakefulness, compassion, impermanence, appreciation for this precious life, and the importance of making friends with yourself—these were the lessons I brought into my yoga classes at OM yoga Center.

So, instead of asking when the beauty salon at the Hong Kong hotel opened, I started asking myself different, deeper questions: Why I am so freaked out by these little gray hairs? I have never been one to hide my age, even now that I’m over fifty. So what was the problem? Why should I feel bad about myself for being myself? Is my happiness so delicate that its very existence depends on the color of my hair? Do I really care what other people think about me? Or what I think other people think about me?

Asking myself these questions is a form of svadhyaya, or self-inquiry. I tried to contemplate these issues without engaging in any story line, but honestly this whole hair-dyeing thing was making me feel claustrophobic. I remembered one of the definitions of suffering, or dukha: sitting alone in a dark, cold room. That’s just what I felt like—isolated and stuck, in a place with no way out.

Every time I thought about my gray roots I was reminded of a hair-coloring tip I’d learned from one of my yoga students after she stood on her head in my sixth-floor walk-up apartment on St. Marks Place. Even though she was the VP of a major record label, she liked slumming it down to my little place for the refuge of a private yoga class. We worked on her inversions against my closet door. After ten deep breaths, she came down out of the pose and rested in Balasana, Child’s Pose. As I gave her a grounding hands-on adjustment I noticed a dark smudge on the mat.

“Ooh, there’s a little schmutz on your mat, Nina.”

She sat up and laughed, rubbing her fingers along the part in her hair. “That’s my secret for when my roots start to show. I cover them up with mascara until I can get a hair appointment.”

Very clever, I thought, but when that memory came back to me, I knew I didn’t want to go there. It’s not that I had a problem with coloring my hair. Turquoise, jet black, lemon yellow, and a bold sunset of fire engine red, orange, and gold melting into sienna—this is only a partial list of colors I’ve dyed my hair over the last thirty years. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been a big topic of conversation, but that’s because I’ve lived my entire adult life in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood where artistic expression includes all body parts. Even after I hung up my leotard and became a professional yoga teacher, I still had a peacock-tail color wheel hiding under my ponytail.

I don’t know when my goals shifted but eventually coloring my hair was no longer about looking different but about looking the same. All my friends colored their hair, except for one who defiantly let her gray hairs go wild. Ugh. Those witchy strands were coarse and crinkly and I thought she looked messy.

But the mascara trick depressed me. I intuitively realized that the answer to my problem was not to do something more. It wasn’t going to be about fixing anything or adding on, even if it was only a little brown mascara. The accumulation approach to life is like trying to overcome obstacles by dressing them up instead of meeting them head-on. Ironically, it is also the best way to perpetuate a problem.

Maybe that was another thing I’d learned from meditation, which is a reductive activity. It’s a practice of letting go and doing less; an undoing rather than a doing. Just as we can consciously practice developing the qualities we want to become, we can also consciously let go of whatever it is we don’t want to be anymore. And what I didn’t want to be anymore was a fake brunette with blonde highlights who spends hundreds of dollars and hours to maintain the facade. I was going to the salon every three weeks and it wasn’t working anyway. When I thought about having to dye my hair forever just to keep the nagging voice away, I felt trapped. Maybe that was a tipping point.

What if I tried something radical, a completely opposite approach—what if I actually let my hair go gray altogether? I’d first considered the idea a few years back and brought the idea up to my hairstylist. Her response: “Well, you know, you will look a lot older…” That was disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. After all, why would she encourage her clients to stop using her coloring services? I decided I needed to ask around a bit more.

So I told my husband I was thinking about it. He liked the parts about saving money and about me feeling more authentic. Being a guy, he said, “Let’s do some research.” So he and I started a game called GA: Gray Alert. Whenever we saw a woman with totally gray hair we whispered, “GA” and then gave a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. We saw lots of older hippie women who had the same hairdo they’d had since 1971 (thumbs-down) and we saw elegant women with stylish cuts (thumbs-up) and we saw cute, gray-haired Barbies with ponytails and bangs (me up, him down). My research showed that the messy, witchy look is a result of scraggly hairdos, no matter what age or color.

And I also discovered something else important. There aren’t a lot of role models for women my age to be inspired to look our age, to feel our age, to even act our age! Helen Mirren, Kathleen Sebelius, Emmylou Harris, Donna Brazile, Jamie Lee Curtis are a few, but there aren’t many others.

And what about aging in yoga? Isn’t that supposed to be one of the realms where seniors are venerated and the wisdom of the elders is appreciated? So where are those gray-haired yoga teachers in Yoga Journal? Well, there are some but they are in their eighties and nineties and Indian and male.

When I was studying dance and on the way to my professional dance career, I was in love with Isadora Duncan, who didn’t ever care what anyone thought of her and lived by the motto “Truth Is Beauty.” She was my role model in every way, including wearing toga-like clothing and Greek sandals. I aspired to be free of cultural restraints like Isadora, but I just couldn’t ever do it. In the end, Isadora was alone and sad and broke, which was not how I want to end up.

Yet the message of our society seems to be False Is Beauty and I don’t want to go there either. When my movement interest merged with my spiritual quest, I fell in love with yoga. Fortunately, this is also an area with inspiring, brilliant female role models, but now that I thought about it, did any of them have gray hair?

Then one day during this contemplating-going-gray phase I found myself in a van that was taking me to the Denver airport, after I’d finished my teaching at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park, Colorado. I looked up at the seat opposite me and there she was!—my new role model, Angela Farmer. Exquisitely beautiful, she has long, wavy silver hair that is magical and completely natural. We introduced ourselves and after a little small talk, I screwed up my courage and said, “I love your hair. I’m going to stop dyeing my hair and let it go gray, too.” Her husband, Victor, right away said, “Oh, you must! It will be gorgeous!”

That pretty much clinched it for me, and I decided to go for it. It was a big letting-go of what I thought I needed to do to be happy, of a habit that had become a burden, of a way of thinking about myself. I reminded myself that’s what yoga is about—letting go of whatever prevents us from being our most authentic self—and it helped me stay committed to my decision.

I made a plan: stop coloring my hair in November, and then two months later, go to India. I was already signed up for a “Footsteps of the Buddha” pilgrimage through Nepal and northern India. Could there be a more perfect time to stop obsessing on one’s hair color or body? By the time I got back to New York I’d have a couple inches of gray. Then I would get a super short haircut and take the first step toward doing less and being more real. Just thinking about it made me feel better, it really did.

I didn’t tell anybody about my hair project but I just stopped getting it dyed and went to India. And you know what? Nobody noticed the gray roots coming out anyway.

“Congratulations to everyone for figuring out to come to yoga. It’s such a brilliant system for aligning our skin, muscles, and bones and leading to radiant health!” I love saying this so much that my arms fly out like I just stuck the landing off an Olympic balance beam.

“So, what do we call it when we do this thing we call yoga?”

“Practice.”

“Yep, and that really is what we’re doing—we’re practicing for later; for the other parts of our life when we’re not ‘doing’ yoga. Everything we do creates imprints, so when we practice yoga we have the opportunity to consciously choose what we are imprinting.

“Everyone, please close your eyes and take a moment to think about what you want to cultivate.”

Many students already have their eyes closed but I can tell they’ve been listening. With this little assignment in mind, they all sit up a bit straighter, place their palms down on their knees and gather their minds.

I love looking at them. There are so many different kinds of people in the class—seventy-two-year-old Nanette, wearing bracelets up to her elbows, is on the mat next to twenty-two-year-old Nate, a long-haired martial artist who looks like Jesus. There are short, tall, thin, and zaftig bodies of all ages and colors and nationalities. Trying to be invisible over in the corner is the movie star who just got married to Daniel Craig, although right now she doesn’t look anything like a Bond girl. Which is another brilliant thing about yoga class. It is a great leveler. No one is in a business suit or hard hat, even though I happen to know there are many top-level executives here and that guy in a black leotard and tights who looks like a retired Merce Cunningham dancer is actually a construction-site foreman. Right now everyone is just sitting on the floor in some relaxed variation of sweatpants and T-shirts. The honesty and vulnerability of each person touches me deeply.

Even though most of the students had to zoom to get here on time, negotiating the subways and schlepping through the highly populated neighborhood of Union Square, by now they are relaxed and open to what I’m saying. They know that the little talks I give at the beginning of class help them let go of the stress of their day and drop into an earthy sense of composure.

“So, what is it that you want to practice?”

They are very willing to participate.

“Being present.”

“Mindfulness and compassion.”

“Not pushing myself.”

“Being with the breath.”

I feel a teacherly sense of satisfaction about their thoughtful answers.

“And, have you noticed that everything shows up in your body—agitation, contentment, hunger, joy, lust, restlessness, boredom—and that’s just in the first Downward Dog, right?”

The students get little Mona Lisa smiles on their faces when I say this because, of course, we’ve all experienced this.

“Turns out that the body is the perfect vehicle for getting to know yourself better, which means that these poses give us lots of chances to practice whatever we want. We can shift away from uncomfortable feelings such as agitation and boredom by noticing the feelings arise and then do what they always do—pass. When we engage in that process we are also developing mindfulness and compassion at the very same time.

“Let’s try it. Come on up into the first Downward Dog of the day and then just stay there.”

I had to say that last part really fast before the students started wiggling around in their Down Dog Poses. It is a common habit among all yogis to tinker with positions, especially at the beginning of class. It can feel good to move hips side to side or tread the feet in place to get the kinks out. But I’m giving a different lesson right now, one that is about making friends with whatever arises—which really means making friends with yourself.

“Even if you are dying to adjust the position of your hands and feet or anything else, stay still for just a few breaths.”

I caught some of them just in time. I can feel that they are itching to move, but at the same time, people are willing to try something new. They’ve developed a confidence in what I have to teach them.

“We all have a tendency to want to fix things but right here, right now you have a chance to take a naked look at your situation without managing it or changing it in any way.

“Notice the adjustment that you want to make and notice if that is the same one you always make when you first come into Downward Dog. And notice if you really need that adjustment or if it is just a habit.”

As I look at the sea of Downward Dogs, strong legs and arms diagonally reaching away from each other, creating a V-shape with their bodies, I can feel a settling spread through the room.

Because I want to model the notion of friendliness through my teaching, now I tell them, “Okay, go ahead and make whatever adjustments you want even if it is the one you always make. It’s okay to do something just because you like it—as long as you are making a conscious choice and not being a slave to habit.”

After a few breaths in this position, I ask them to take a rest by sitting down on their cushions.

“At the same time that what we do on the mat can be considered practice for when we are off the mat, we are also living the practice right then and there. It’s not the same as if we were knitting a sweater that we will wear later or making a cake that we will eat later. In yoga we are wearing the sweater at the same time that we are knitting it, and, yes, we are actually making our cake and eating it, too.”

The studio has thirty-eight people sitting on cushions and yet it is so quiet. The space feels empty and full at the same time. The students are still and entirely engaged. I notice how I’m getting the benefit of the yoga goodness just from watching them; even their breathing practice makes me feel more centered. I think once again how brilliant yoga is.

January is a good time to go to India. It’s cool in the morning and the evening, and the hot middle hours are perfect for napping. There I was in Uttar Pradesh and it was true, I couldn’t have cared less that my long brown hair had short gray roots. I felt relaxed and content, bouncing along miles of dirt roads in a rickety bus with Gelek Rimpoche and my fellow travelers, all good friends from my meditation group. I was almost glad that I had a wide, squishy bottom. At least it provided the comfort of a padded seat!

We were told that this region of India was the most poverty stricken and riddled with bandits and Maoists, who very likely might accost us so we kept moving as long as it was daylight. Through the bus windows, I watched people huddle together around the village radio or get their beards shaved in open-air barber shacks. Women led bony goats behind them on the dusty roads home, sometimes squatting on their haunches to chew some betel root or take a pee right out in the open. It wasn’t just being in another country; it was like being in another century.

Each time we got off the bus, we were surrounded by begging mothers holding their babies in their arms and crippled lepers leaning on sticks selling Buddha tsotchkes. Everyone was poor and dirty and very thin. Barefoot children chased after us chanting, “Om Mani Padme Hum, No Money Go Home.” That made us laugh but it was hard not to feel guilty about our affluence. We all bought the Ganesh medallions and wooden statues and the incense, but over time it also become hard not to be annoyed that they didn’t seem to believe us when we said, “No, thank you. I do not want another Buddha sticker.” We knew that these thin, dusty people were desperate and that we were their best hope for making some rupees that day.

Back on the bus, those uncomfortable thoughts were jostled away and I sat staring blankly at the vast Indian countryside. I watched women in red and gold and turquoise saris walking across the fields carrying vases on their heads. The saris blew in the breeze, making a poetic picture of elegance that belied the women’s poverty. I looked at those pretty clothes and started to think about what I would wear to the dinner buffet that evening at one of the Lotus Nikko hotels along the pilgrimage route where we were staying.

Although I was dying for a drink, some chocolate, and a strong cup of Starbucks, I told myself it was just as well that the hotel vegetarian buffets did not offer anything fattening and rewarding. Rimpoche warned us against eating dairy or salad or any fruit that didn’t come in its own jacket. No sugar, no dairy, no alcohol, no meat—hmmm…maybe I could lose some weight on this trip after all.

Unconsciously I slipped my hand under my jacket to feel my belly. Was it still round or was it getting a little bit flatter? Every day I would check out the lay of my body-land. It definitely felt like my thighs were getting wider from sitting on this bus for so many hours. I gave myself a site-appropriate version of a familiar pep talk: “I’m going to be more disciplined with exercise on our fifteen-minute breaks. Too many snakes and piles of shit for sit-ups in the grass but maybe I can jog around the parking lot.” I was hoping I could wear my new elegant Indian kurtas from FabIndia when I got back to the U.S. And I was hoping…what?

As I was squishing my belly fat in my hand and thinking about how much I hated my stomach and my wobbly butt, I suddenly realized how insane that was. Here I was, surrounded by people who were so thin that they regarded fatness as a sign of success and health. The children were thin. The police were thin. The hotel waiters were thin. Even the oxen were thin. And here I was hating my body and obsessing about my tummy roll and what I was going to wear as I schlepped through the dusty streets of India on a spiritual quest!

It took a few days for me to put two and two together, but eventually I recognized a certain ironic resonance between my inner drama and what the Buddha himself had experienced. Born into a royal family, given the name Gautama, and raised by a loving family and many servants in a luxurious palace, in his youth the Buddha had been showered with every privilege and sheltered from the harsh realities of the outside world.

As you might expect if you have a teenager, eventually he got bored. One night, when he was still a young man, Gautama snuck out of the palace grounds to have a look at the real world. What he saw shook him to his core. Instead of the beauty and lush comfort of his life in the palace, he saw people who were sick and suffering, others who were old and struggling to walk, and even a corpse. He had never seen the full spectrum of life and was both moved and confused. Soon after, he left his royal life and went out into the world to try to make sense of what he had seen.

The path that he walked was the same journey that our bus was following, twenty-six hundred years later. We visited the palace grounds and ruins and walked out the East Gate just as Gautama did when he went on his own pilgrimage to find truth. After leaving the palace, the young prince met others who were on a similar quest for understanding. Like me, he began by studying and practicing yoga.

I’d read in Karen Armstrong’s book Buddha that Gautama actually practiced many of the same yoga postures and breathing exercises that I teach my students today, which I thought was pretty cool. By all accounts, he became the most accomplished yogi around, so motivated by his desire to be the master of his body that he surpassed all his teachers.

Eventually Gautama joined other extreme seekers who lived in the forest, engaging in punishing ascetic practices such as fasting, standing on one leg for many days, and threading needles through their tongues. These yogis believed that the source of all suffering is the body. After all, isn’t the body the part of us that gets sick or injured, that grows old, dies, and ultimately dissolves? Isn’t the body where desire comes from and doesn’t desire lead to craving, which is the source of discontentment and unhappiness? The path to transcendence, they reasoned, must be total rejection of the physical body. Through self-abusive disciplines, they were trying to deny the impact of physical sensation and move beyond hunger and cold and pain. This was body hatred at its most elegant.

Here, too, Gautama excelled. He slept on nails and ate only nettles, turning green and becoming so thin his body was nearly all bones. Fortunately, a young woman named Sujata noticed Gautama as he was practicing in a bamboo grove beside the Niranjana River. Moved by his emaciated form, she offered him something to drink. Some say it was rice milk or lassi—a kind of smoothie that must have been very tempting out there in the parched Indian countryside. To the shock and disdain of his colleagues, Gautama drank it. I like that it took a woman to get the future Buddha to eat something.

The river where Gautama had been sitting when he accepted Sujata’s gift was dried up on the day we visited. To get to the sacred site, we had to walk quite a ways along narrow elevated footpaths through rice paddy fields. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Chandra showed up. A thin young man who spoke English quite well, he became my guide and told me the story of Sujata and Gautama. He really was a first-class gentleman in secondhand clothes and it was nice holding his hand as he steadied me along the parts of the path that were crumbling away. I knew he would ask me for money at some point but I fell a little bit in love with him anyway. He told me he was in school and he liked practicing English and he clearly liked making new friends. He gave me his email address and asked me to be his pen pal. When we got to the actual site there wasn’t much to see—a fire pit, a sacred tree—and I didn’t think I was experiencing anything profound. But when I said good-bye to Chandra and got back on the bus, I burst into tears and cried for half an hour.

The story Chandra told me echoed in my mind. Fortified by the nourishment offered by Sujata, Gautama recognized that torturing the body wasn’t the way to relieve suffering, after all. I can only imagine that he must have felt much better after having that drink, more clear-headed and physically energized. Though he had tried to make himself immune to pain by fasting and self-denial, he was starting to figure out that being trapped in a cycle of extremes only leads to more confusion and unhappiness. Though the story happened a long time ago, something about that body obsession and resentment felt immediate and real to me.

We left the dried-up river and rode to muddy Bodhgaya, the town Gautama put on the map by getting enlightened there. That place didn’t feel extra sacred to me, either, with all the cheesy colored lights and pushy pilgrims elbowing their way into the nonstop flow of the crowd circumambulating the temple, until we were ushered to a private area reserved for high lamas such as Gelek Rimpoche.

Rimpoche gathered us together in a quiet spot under the massive branches of the fourth-generation Bodhi tree. We were told this was the very spot that Gautama had chosen to sit down, cross his legs in lotus position, and meditate. By now he had figured out that freedom from suffering wouldn’t come from rejecting the body or rejecting any part of himself. Gautama was committed to staying under the tree for as long as it took to understand the true source of happiness.

Rimpoche told us that for forty days and nights, Gautama meditated under the Bodhi tree. Eventually he had a powerful realization that all the obstacles he ever experienced were in his own mind. He realized that thoughts are not solid, which means they can be changed. He discovered how to let go of the thoughts that generate fear, aggression, and hatred and how to transform that energy into love and compassion.

Armed with this new and profound understanding, Gautama stood up and walked away from the tree, into the forest. He ran into his old colleagues, who immediately recognized Gautama’s fresh sense of clarity and wakefulness. They called him Buddha, which means the “one who is awake.” They asked him to be their teacher. I could tell that this was all very real and alive for Rimpoche. I was moved to be sharing this experience with my own Buddhist teacher. As we left the sacred spot, I picked up two fallen Bodhi tree leaves and slid them between the pages in my dharma notebook.

By the time we had traveled to the next site, the one where Buddha gave his first teaching, I had a respiratory infection from breathing in the polluted air and cremation smoke near the Ganges. Stuffing some tissues in my pockets, I schlepped to the restaurant where our group was having lunch. I sat with my feet tucked under me because I don’t particularly like having mice run over my toes while I’m eating. The night before we’d stayed at the Varanasi Radisson, a real hotel with real food, which was a nice change for us pilgrims. I promptly forgot that I was in India and had room service bring me my favorite meal of a chicken Caesar salad and red wine. Now I was curled up on a rickety folding chair with a drippy nose, an upset stomach, nervous toes, and a bad mood. I felt distinctly uninspired and unenlightened.

Then everything changed. After lunch, we entered the Deer Park and saw Buddha and his first disciples sitting in a circle. They were actually statues, but life-size and painted with lifelike colors. You could see the drape of their saffron monk’s robes flowing down their legs with their feet poking out. You could see individual strands of hair and fingernails on folded hands. As I looked at them, these beautiful statues did what statues sometimes do—they threatened to come alive. And right then, I got it. Lightbulb flash! All this stuff we’d been studying, all these places we’d been visiting, it all really happened. Buddha was really a real person, just like you and me, only way more disciplined. I get the message, Rimpoche—if he could do it, we could do it, too.

My bad mood lifted and I felt buoyed by these precious teachings that Buddha gave at the Deer Park, which have been passed down in an unbroken lineage to my own teacher. I was filled with gratitude for all that I had learned from Rimpoche. It is said that the chance to meet the teachings of the Buddha in one’s lifetime is as rare as the likelihood of a tortoise swimming in the vast ocean and just happening to pop its head up as an inner tube floats by.

We gathered around Rimpoche to hear that same first lesson that Buddha gave his colleagues-now-disciples.

“Everyone experiences discomfort. Even when you are just sitting still, doing nothing, you may still feel aches and pains. And even if you don’t, if everything is fine right now, you may still recall past slights and get stuck in a bad memory, or find yourself experiencing fear of the future. When we relive the past and worry about the future, we miss out on our life.” Rimpoche reminded us that in this way we are all alike—this is part of what it means to be human.

The good news is that once we recognize that we are creating our own discontentment we can change it. How do we do that?

When Gautama accepted the smoothie from Sujata, he took the first step away from the extremes of his own life—attachment to the lavish decadence of his royal home versus the intense aversion to all physical comfort—and toward a more healthy, more friendly middle path. Sweep the dust and sweep the dirt.

A famous Buddhist story, which illustrates this point, tells of a musician who asked the Buddha, “How should I practice?”

Buddha replied, “How do you tune your instrument?”

The musician answered, “Not too tight, not too loose.”

The Buddha said, “Exactly like that.”

My body has been my instrument for so long. I wondered if I could stop hating it once and for all. Could I apply this map for liberation to my own life? Sweep the dust and sweep the dirt. I wanted to find a middle path that was less dissonant, more harmonious, more in tune with what I’ve been teaching my students.

The word suffering doesn’t come up too often in yoga circles, but the word sukha gets bantered around a lot.

My students all know the pose called Sukhasana, or Easy Pose. Once again I throw them a pop quiz:

“Who knows what the word sukha means?”

“Easy.”

“Space.”

“A sense of ease.”

The last answer reminds me of learning the sewing term ease in my high-school tailoring class. Our teacher taught us how to use a long, loose stitch to create a little bit of give in the shoulder seams of the formal white shirts she required us to make. Without that built-in “ease” or extra space in the shoulders, our sleeves would have ripped as soon as we tried to hug someone.

“Sukha doesn’t exactly mean ease, but you’re on the right track. The Sanskrit word kha, which means ‘space’ or ‘sky,’ was originally the word for ‘hole.’ Picture people riding in an ancient cart that rolls along on big wooden wheels. In the middle of the cartwheel is a large hole through which the axle is threaded. If the inside surface of the wooden hole had a smooth finish, the riders would have a comfortable ride. The prefix su– is translated as ‘good,’ as in wholesome, high, evolved, desirable, or even strong and stable. Sukha then refers to a good axle hole, but since we don’t ride in oxen-drawn carts these days we can think of sukha as wholesome space.

“How many people are comfortable right now, sitting in Sukhasana? Who feels like they are in a wholesome space?”

I look around at the group. Most hands go up but not all. The pose is a basic cross-legged position, knees out to the sides with one ankle placed in front of the other. Everybody who practices yoga on even a semi-regular basis will be familiar with this pose. It is obvious to me which people like it, who hates it, who has a workable relationship with this pose, and who hopes we can go on to something else soon. I especially want to help the students in that last group.

“If your pelvis is tucking under or you aren’t able to sit up tall or your back is hurting you in any way, please place at least two cushions under your seat. You’ll notice right away that you can sit up with much less effort. Now put a yoga block underneath each knee so your legs can drop down to gravity without straining your inner thigh muscles. How does that feel?”

Most of the people who were uncomfortable before are nodding to let me know this is working well for them. But there are still a few who resist doing what I’ve suggested. They are so used to feeling the opposite of ease that they don’t even know it could be different. I recognize that habit, too.

I haven’t allowed myself enough ease—to grow or to move—either in my body or my mind. If my practice is about creating the causes and conditions for sukha to arise, I’ve been stuck doing just the opposite. Instead of allowing some looseness and give, I’ve habitually sewn narrow, unyielding stitches around my definition of a good female body. This tangled-up attitude toward myself is isolating and lonely. No wonder I can’t find a way to hug myself, to embrace who I am, as I am, right now.

“The opposite of sukha is…”

“Dukha!”

“Right, which means…?”

“Suffering?”

“Well, actually it means poor axle hole but that isn’t really that relevant to us so, yeah, over the centuries it has been used to indicate suffering. If the inner perimeter of the hole were irregular or rough, if there were grooves or splinters inside, then with each turn of the wheel, the cart would jerk or thud. The riders would have a bumpy ride. You can imagine that this led to bruises and motion sickness and crabbiness among the passengers.”

I can see that some of the students love this lesson, while others are getting uncomfortable and frustrated and bored. That’s okay. Part of practice is not running away from discomfort but learning to work with it. In fact, that’s exactly what this lesson is about.

“Okay, one more—what does asana mean?”

“Pose.”

“Seat.”

“Ground.”

“It’s a combo of all of the above. Asana means to sit with what comes up when you put your body is this particular shape. Our bodies are sort of like carts; they are the vehicles we live in as we move through the world.”

There might have been some eye rolling at that corny metaphor but I bravely continue.

“My friend Enkyo Roshi talks about dukha through the example of a grocery cart. You know what she means, right? We’ve all gotten that cart with the wobbly wheel. You keep trying to straighten it out but it doesn’t cooperate and there you are in the grocery store fighting with a full cart of groceries, getting mad and thinking, ‘Why do I always get the lame cart?’”

Someone calls out, “Let’s blame it on the cart!” And everybody gets a good laugh. I’m glad. A sense of humor is a key element of ease.

“You’re right. Dukha is really not about the cart; it’s more about the negative emotional disturbance that comes up in our mind when we feel like things are not fitting together. And it only gets worse when we start to feel like we get caught in that same situation over and over again.

“That’s actually what we’re practicing here in our asana class. We’re consciously tying ourselves up in knots and then sitting with whatever arises. If you stay steady, relax, and pay attention to what’s happening, then—theoretically—you can make skillful choices, right?

“So if your hips hurt in Sukhasana and you don’t help yourself by sitting up on a cushion and creating some ease, well, then you’re actually practicing Dukhasana! And, what’s the point of that? We don’t need to come to yoga to practice creating more suffering—we’re already really good at that!” More smiles and it seems to have worked; there is definitely a more spacious vibe in the room.

I like thinking about the people in the wooden cart, riding along the dirt roads full of potholes and muddy ruts. Just like my students, they would all have different ways of dealing with their bad axle-hole day. I imagine some of the people would curse with every jostle and others wouldn’t even notice. There might even be some people who like the reliability of the bump; it might be uncomfortable but something about it is familiar and that is safe.

Both of these approaches are end games and I wonder about how the middle path relates to this. It’s ironic, but integrating give and ease into any situation actually creates strength and stability. That’s why I feel so destabilized right now. I’m starting to become aware that the seams I’ve habitually sewn to hold my life together may be too tight. I’d like to put my arms around myself but I’m afraid things will rip apart.

Walking down Broadway one night after yoga class, my friend Mary listened to me talk about how the practice of yoga helps people connect deeply with themselves and enables them to truly feel comfortable with who they are, as they are.

“So,” she says, “does that mean you are a fraud?” That’s why she’s been my friend for so long. She knows me so well. And honestly, I’ve wondered that myself, although I remember someone wise telling me that all teachers feel like they are frauds.

Even though they are imaginary, I get inspired when I think that there would surely be a few jolly folk in the cart. These are the ones who, realizing the journey won’t be forever, get a little kick out of the whole ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, nodding to one another with each jagged turn of the wheel, “Yep, there it goes again.” Riding on the bus in India was like that for me. I didn’t mind the bumps and constant horn honking and near head-on collisions. The dukha I felt was coming from inside me.

Maybe up until that point I just wasn’t hurting that badly. Or perhaps my years of practice were starting to make a difference. Either way, I could no longer ignore that grouchy inner voice that starting nagging whenever I felt defeated by my body. It said only nasty stuff like, “These pointy shoes are killing me!” “Why are my feet so big?” “I hate the way this hat looks on my head.” “This belt is making my fat stomach squish out of this top.” “Why can’t I look good in this outfit?” The voice got especially persistent and annoying whenever I got frustrated, which generally meant I was trying to make permanent something that by its nature is meant to change and evolve. And by something, I mean me.

Having gray hair might be one of the ingredients that created the causes and conditions for some new awakenings after returning home from India. Every day I meet a woman who tells me how much she loves my gray hair and how much she wants to let her own hair go gray. She says that she thinks I am so brave but she is not yet ready to be that brave. But having gray hair doesn’t feel brave to me. What it feels is good and liberating and natural and healthy in so many ways.

I’m no longer strengthening the imprints that tell me I’m wrong or need improvement—at least in my hair department. That might not seem like a big deal but it is. Those old neurological synapses with the grouchy inner voice have dissolved and new ones have formed around positive feelings toward my silver locks. It might not seem like a big deal and in the grand scheme of suffering, it is a Cadillac problem. But for me it was a significant step toward self-acceptance, and in that way, I guess it was brave.

That little bit of motivation started turning my thought wheels in the opposite direction. I remembered what my meditation teacher told me, that being kind to others has to start with being kind to ourselves. And isn’t that the very first teaching of yoga, ahimsa, which means non-harming of self and others? How could I turn this thing around?

One day, a few months after arriving home from India, full of my habitual frustration, discontent, and grumpiness about my body, a space opened up in the thicket of mental brambles and this thought floated in: “You already have everything you need to be happy.”

Bingo! All of us experience moments of insight that pop up out of nowhere. Maybe it was a matter of time and practice…drip, drip, drip, the bucket fills. Or maybe something more ordinary like boredom or exhaustion or jet lag slows us down long enough to notice.

What I wanted had been there all along, but I was too busy creating my own dukha to notice it. I see that tendency in my students, too. They might be sitting nicely in a pose but the space between their eyebrows has a deep crease that tells me they are in pain. When I ask them about it, it’s almost like I woke them out of a nap. A typical reply might be, “Oh yeah, this position always kills me. It’s been like that for years. I just don’t have good shoulders.”

When I suggest that they loosen their grasp and use a yoga belt to allow the position to be held with less stress on their shoulders, it comes as a huge revelation! What a good idea. Here’s a way to do the same thing without struggling and I could have been doing it that way all along. And, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with your shoulders!

That day, in the snap of a finger, I saw that I had gotten it wrong all these years! I was always getting mad at my body but, in fact, my body has been fine. It’s my relationship to my body that is hurting me, and my mind that is the real troublemaker. The truth is, although I’ve always had a perfectly fine, healthy body, I have thought and felt that I was too fat or too soft or too thin or too little here or too big there every day of my life. Simply put, I am addicted to hating my body and, really, to hating myself.

Clearly, it’s my mind that needs to change, not my body. Instead of looking outside myself for a better diet, a more effective exercise plan, a face lift in a bottle, or an ultra-enthusiastic bra, I needed to examine my habitual ways of thinking—this addiction that has so defined my own self-image. I began to wonder who I would be without it. The first step to finding the answer to that question was to take a closer look at the problem.

What’s the real reason I hate my body? I’m starting to understand that I’ve been basing my happiness on a specific condition, a condition that is not only impossible to achieve but is also a moving target. Like all forms of conditional happiness—more chocolate, shopping, money, alcohol—running after a “perfect” body can only result in hamster wheels of confused, desperate, and repetitive activity. Just like any other form of craving, there is no end to it, and no lasting satisfaction is possible.

This insight had been trying to get my attention for a while. Just like yoga students who stay in a position for years without even noticing, I hadn’t even realized I was miserable but now that I did, I saw how long I’d been this way. I saw all the ways that I had tried to feel better by changing my body, looking everywhere for answers except for inside my head.

Does any of this feel familiar? I know I’m not the only one who has been living with a hardhearted attitude toward herself. I know this because I hear it every day from my female yoga students. When they are not on the yoga mat, these smart women happen to be busy working as corporate executives and college professors and magazine editors and clothing designers and retail shop owners and app inventors and personal assistants and athletes and chefs and grandmothers.

These students ask me for advice about their bodies and their confidence, as if—because I am a yoga teacher—I know a secret they don’t know. Well, the one thing I know for sure is, at this point, I’ve tried everything. I went to a chiropractor/nutritionist who tried to sell me a giant tin of protein powder, and then while I was facedown on the table, she asked me if I would hire her to teach a workshop at my yoga studio. I had a consultation with an Ayurvedic doctor who told me to chant “RAM RAM RAM” all day and then gave me some orange powder to eat that made my skin so hot I had to go home and lie naked on my bed with the air conditioner on full blast. I called him to see if that was what was supposed to happen, but he never returned my call.

I’d even bulked up while teaching Sweet and Low, my low-impact aerobics class, and Sweat Like Hell, my special gym dance class with hand weights and ankle weights. These classes were packed every night. Most of the other teachers at Crunch wore belly-baring, short-short outfits and I’m sure many students were drawn to them because they wanted to look that good, too.

That was not the case with my classes. I often had students who were thinner and more buff than me, but my classes were sold out because I taught a great workout and knew how to have fun. Every exercise had a name, and after a while, I started to put them down on paper in a book called Sweat Like Hell, or A Girls’ Guide to Perky Boobs. The book was an exercise program, but even then I started it by encouraging readers to take a moment to acknowledge what they liked about their bodies: their thick luscious hair or their creamy skin or elegant collarbones. Here is a quote from the chapter called “It’s My Mother’s Fault.”

Another phenomena handed down from mothers to daughters is cellulite. Many women have cellulite. Why is it that it’s not thought of as a sexy, womanly thing like round hips or soft breasts? That’s what I really want to know. Because I feel like hating cellulite is just another way that women have been taught to hate themselves. You know the routine: Monday I hate my stomach; Tuesday I hate my thighs; Wednesday my arms; Thursday my butt; Friday my butt even more; Saturday I hate my whole body; and Sunday I hate myself for hating myself.

But here’s the good news. It turns out that men don’t really even notice cellulite. I told my girlfriend that and she came to the conclusion that guys have gotten so used to seeing cellulite on all the women they’ve been with that they just think it’s normal. That makes sense, right? Just like we are used to seeing a round squishy thing on the front of their bodies. No, not that thing. I mean their belly, gut, spare tire, which we accept as normal and love them anyway.

I go on to remind readers that we can’t change our DNA, suggesting that “We don’t really want to be somebody else. We just want to be more deeply fabulously ourselves.” Too bad I didn’t take my own advice, as usual.

Then I follow this self-help pep talk speak with exercises specifically designed as solutions to the target areas we blame for our discontent.

The Schwahanga—leg lifts that firm up the outer upper thigh (sometimes called saddle bags, but I liked the word schwahanga because that is the sound they make when you walk).

The John F. Kennedy President’s Fitness Club of America—also known as V-sits. It turned out I wasn’t the only one in the classes who first did this kind of sit-up in 1965 as part of JFK’s fitness plan for America. I learned them from my seventh grade gym teacher who had us lifting our legs and our backs up to a 45-degree angle, turning our bodies into human V shapes. We did our JFK fitness routine to the Beach Boys’ hit California Girls, and when it got to the part about the Northern girls keeping their boyfriends warm at night, we Seattle girls would pop up into the V-Sit and get semi–turned on, proud that we could keep boys warm at night even though I, for one, had no idea what that might entail.

The International Grandmother’s Exercise targeted upper arm flab; The Slut with Good Alignment toned the inner thighs; The Superwoman firmed up the back muscles; and then, of course, there was the Perky Boob Series.

One of the most detailed exercise solutions was the Party Position, which began with a description of the topography of the butt.

The Butt Map

Butt Proper: The peak or summit of the butt

Butt Waist: Where the two meet

Leg Butt: She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken

Side Butt: Should be your side but instead it’s more butt

Side Leg Butt: aka The Schwahangas

Side Butt Waist: More commonly referred to as Love Handles on men’s bodies but called “no waist whatsoever” on women.

You get the idea. Although I thought I was being positive and encouraging, unconsciously I was working off the Joan Rivers/Phyllis Diller model of always making fun of your body, not realizing that is one of the most insidious methods for promoting low self-esteem.

My boyfriend at the time made a copy of A Girls’ Guide to Perky Boobs and gave it to a literary agent, a friend of his that he hoped might give me some advice or even want to represent the book. The agent hated the book and said it wasn’t funny. And in the end, he was right. It might have been a cute and fun way to get through your exercise routine, but, at the same time, it planted pretty mean seeds. Maybe it was just that very thinking that prevented my body from being how I wanted it to be, because even teaching lots of exercise classes didn’t get me the results I wanted for more than a minute.

My students also ask me what they should eat. I never want to tell them because I know each person has a different makeup and we should each have different diets. Not only that, but as life changes, our diet should change, too, right? Based on that theory, over the years I have tried a wide range of diet explorations: macrobiotic, vegetarian, fruit juice fasts, food journals, calorie counting, fat gram counting, no cheese, no wheat, no sugar, no eggs, more protein, more sparkling water, much too much celery, and the completely unsuccessful mindful-eating diet based on the notion that if you paid attention to what you eat, you’d eat only good things in appropriate quantities. Further experiments in fasting, cleansing, colonics, saunas, and detox teas rounded out my quest for reliable digestion and smooth thighs, because, no, I didn’t feel okay about my cellulite.

But mostly I ate like a normal person. I’ve never been drastically overweight and I’ve never been drastically underweight. I’ve never had a food addiction or an eating disorder. I exercise regularly but I’m not a gym junkie or a body builder. I’m a normal-sized woman with a normal-shaped body. And the other thing that seems to be very normal about me is that my opinion of my body is out of touch with reality and out of balance with what else I could spend my time on.

My friend Jeni told me she has always felt like she was fat, too. In fact, her father used to berate her and physically beat her for being overweight. She grew up believing that her weight was a strike against her, even influencing whether people liked her. Now Jeni is forty-nine and she likes her body. She has figured out how to be the weight she wants. She is married to a nice man and has two children. Her life isn’t perfect and she isn’t happy about everything, but it’s not bad.

Recently Jeni and her husband, Dan, took a trip to Israel. Years before they met, Jeni had lived there and she wanted to introduce Dan to her old stomping grounds and her old friends, including her former fiancé, Ari. Jeni felt good about being married to such a great guy, but still it was nervous-making to see Ari, especially since he was the one who broke off the engagement. The good part was that she suspected he had ended the relationship because he didn’t like how fat she had been back then. Now that she was in good shape she no longer felt ashamed about her body. Even though she was shy about seeing Ari, she felt a certain level of confidence from knowing that she wasn’t fat anymore.

As soon as they all met up, Ari’s new girlfriend whispered loudly to him, “I thought you said she was fat!” She probably didn’t care that her stage whisper was loud enough for Jeni to hear because she didn’t know that Jeni understood Hebrew! So! Jeni’s suspicions were confirmed—Ari had broken off the relationship because of her weight.

Later that day, Jeni and Ari took a walk together, just the two of them. He told her it was great to see her and that he was glad she was happy. He said, “I always knew you would leave Israel and go to live in America. That is why I broke up with you. I didn’t want to leave Israel. Anyway,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to marry you now. You’re much too thin.”

Jeni was shocked to find out that Ari preferred a little bit of juiciness in his women. Like me, she had a tightly frozen idea of what was a good and desirable body. It never occurred to her that the idea she had about how she should look was not the same as Ari’s. She managed to finally change her body into what she wanted only to discover it didn’t match his idea of an attractive female figure at all. This gave her second thoughts about her suffering and her efforts. Was it worth it? Who was she trying to please anyway?

It seems that it’s not just bodies that change; even our ideas about bodies change. I learned this at my mother’s waist, literally. As a little girl, I would look up at my mom from the perfect vantage point of her waist, and observe the work required for her to get dressed up. I watched her hold the top of her side zipper with one hand, and then carefully tucking her luscious fleshiness into the side seam, she started zipping up. She held her breath so she wouldn’t pinch her skin as she squeezed into the blue brocade satin dress she’d made for herself. Just like the ones that Elizabeth Taylor wore, it had a bosomy, tight bodice; a tiny, unforgiving waist; and a slim skirt that hugged her generous hips and thighs. What an hourglass! Stuffed into her ultra-feminine cocktail dress, I thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world, and so did my dad. My mom, on the other hand, probably couldn’t breathe and certainly couldn’t eat anything, but she had the fifties look down pat: velvety skin and soft arms with no muscle definition in sight. A woman was meant to be pliant and squishy, not hard and tight like a man or, heaven forbid, athletic, which was code for “lesbian,” which was code for “non-feminine.”

Those days are long gone. The trendy shape for bodies changes all the time but my mom never really changed that much. She got heavier as she got older and was always on a diet in the hopes of getting back to that hourglass body of her sexy thirty-something years. And I wonder, am I stuck in a time warp, too? Just as David and I noticed in our GA research that the worst-looking gray hairdos were the shags from the seventies that had never been updated, could it be that ideas about what shape is physically attractive can also become stuck in the past?

Collette was in the pedicure chair next to me, and her long, wavy, glittering gray hair was so spectacular that I just had to ask her about it. Isn’t it funny that now I am jealous of women who have hair that is more silver than mine? She told me she’s never dyed it. When she had brown hair she never got compliments but now she always does. Collette has better things to do with her time than get her hair colored, and anyway she doesn’t want the chemicals.

Collette had a confidence that I admired. Our talk about hair led to appearance led to bodies. She told me, “Women wax and wane naturally like the moon. We just haven’t figured out that five pounds this way and that is not worthy of drama.”

Collette has a sixty-year-old musician friend who’d always had flaming red hair—at first naturally and then with assistance. After some years, inspired by Colette, she finally cut her hair as short as she could stand in order to let the gray grow in; the same method I’d used. Two years later, she recorded a new album but when she saw the cover she started crying.

“Why?” asked Collette. “Is the music no good?”

“No, I just can’t believe how old I look.”

That same afternoon, Collette’s thirteen-year-old daughter came home and asked her why the super skinny girls with big boobs are the most popular. “Well,” Collette answered, “it depends on why you want to be popular.” Her voice got quieter as she told me that this was new. Her daughter and all her friends, suddenly, just in that month, had decided that they are all fat.

Collette went to bed that night with a heavy heart, in between her sixty-year-old friend who feels old and her thirteen-year-old daughter who feels fat.

I never saw Collette again but I’ve thought of her so many times. Just as I want to help my students feel ease in their lives, I had that same impulse to ease her heart, too. Not only do I feel that impulse, but I’ve actually taken a vow to do that very thing.

Twenty-five people on their best behavior are sitting on the floor in a misshapen circle. It’s misshapen because nobody wants to sit right next to me. They’re scared of me. Not because I’m scary, really, but because they don’t know me yet. When they look at me, they think, “I’ll have what she’s having.” They want to be a yoga teacher like me and that desire is so strong that they get intimidated by my very presence.

Of course, I know that and I also know it’s a temporary phenomenon. We will all get to know one another very well as this four-month OM yoga Teacher Training program unfolds. Everyone in the circle has just told us their names, shared their yoga backgrounds and, at my request, tried to articulate why they want to take this yoga teacher training.

“I’m a sixth-grade teacher and I want to teach yoga to my kids.”

“My anxiety attacks went away since I started yoga.”

“My dance career is ending and vinyasa yoga satisfies my movement jones.”

“I can’t stand working as a lawyer one more day!”

My heart feels soft and open to each one of them as they bravely start sharing their stories. I make an effort to let them know that they have been seen and heard by me by doing my yoga class party trick. My eyes go around the circle again while I repeat each person’s name. A couple times I hesitate and have to rummage around in my memory. It’s a shared moment of suspense…Will she get that person’s name? The student in question waits and I can see that he or she will feel bad if I don’t remember the correct name, and I manage to pull it up. It’s New York so the names run the gamut from Yuki to Ishmael to Renate, Parker, Peyton, and Luke.

Now there are only three people left and…oooh…What was her name? Aha! I remembered it and the next one and the next one and I did it! A round of applause as I laugh and say, “It’s because of the headstand! Headstands develop mental clarity!” I laugh again and they do, too. My good memory is a victory for all of us; the first real bonding moment. But the truth is, it’s not just the headstand that helps me here; it’s my bodhisattva commitment. I am always looking for ways to help them feel acknowledged, especially important in this first meeting. I want them to feel happy and safe right away.

“Again, I welcome you all to OM yoga Teacher Training. We will get to the poses soon enough, but let’s lay the groundwork for being here in the first place. The name of this training program is Joining Heaven and Earth. Has anyone been curious about that title?”

Still feeling shy, a couple of them nod but most just sit and wait for what I have to say next. “Heaven means your vision. Each one of you has a passion for yoga that has developed into a vision of sharing your beautiful practice with others. Am I right?” More nods.

“When you are imagining your future or how you would like your world to be, you might find yourself looking up at the clouds; that’s heaven. The opposite of that is the grounding quality of earth, which is about making things happen now.

“It’s wonderful to have a positive goal but without earth, it remains just a dream in your head. On the other hand, if you only have earth and no heaven, you might be good at tasks, like fixing the sink, but that will never evolve into a long-term goal or big vision: perhaps starting a plumbing business or inventing a better pipe. To be balanced, whole and effective, earth needs the vision of heaven and heaven needs the action of earth.

“Humans are the only beings who can bring heaven and earth together and you’ve already started doing that by showing up here today. You had an idea of being a yoga teacher and then you took steps toward that goal by filling out your application, sending in your money, keeping up your yoga practice, and showing up here today—on time, in appropriate clothing, with all your textbooks. Congratulations!”

Some of them are already taking notes and feeling inspired by this talk, which is relaxing them and helping them lose their self-consciousness.

“Now I have one more question for you: What is the reason for becoming a yoga teacher?”

They look up from their notebooks with blank stares.

“Okay, I’ll give you a hint. It’s not to get famous.” I know some of them think I’m famous because I write for Yoga Journal and teach at many international yoga conferences. But that’s a pretty small pool for fame. So I tell them about how I recently attended a Halloween party dressed as the great yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar. With fierce cotton eyebrows, the red line of a Brahmin dividing my forehead and a Nehru jacket, I thought my costume was obvious, but at that non-yoga party, the getup was a flop because not one person had ever heard of Mr. Iyengar. So, no, it’s not about getting famous.

“And it’s definitely not to get rich!” I know some of them think I’m rich because I have a big, beautiful yoga studio but that’s just because they don’t know how much it costs to run a business in New York City.

“So, what is the reason to be a yoga teacher? Some of you have already said it…”

“To help.”

“Yes! That’s right. The only reason to be a yoga teacher is to be helpful. That’s the whole gig, and you know what? Sometimes it can be challenging! There will be people who come to your class who don’t want to do what you ask them. Some have attitudes. Some people even have B.O. And sometimes a person comes to your class that you just don’t like. But here they are. They have come to your class to learn yoga and find a sense of balance and well-being and your job is to help them. All of them, without exception.

“That’s why I consider teaching to be a practice, just like doing yoga is a practice and meditating is a practice. But when I am practicing yoga on my mat, I’m doing it for myself…and that’s the difference. The practice of teaching is really to benefit others andso we can think of teaching yoga as a bodhisattva practice. Does anyone know what bodhisattva means?”

Silence. Most of them are still too shy to answer and I’m pretty sure none of them are familiar with this word. Yoga teachings don’t typically include this concept, so I backtrack to something they might have heard in a yoga class.

“Okay, does anyone know what the word ahimsa means?”

Hands fly up. I call on Luke, who is pleased that I still remember his name.

“Nonviolence?”

“Yes, non-harming of self and others. This is the bottom line of yoga practice, the very first principle. And did you notice that ahimsa is a ‘non–,’ a renunciation? That is where we start: from a place of not wanting to ever harm any living being. Then if we water that notion, like a flower, our heart opens and our motivation starts to blossom outward, shifting from non-doing to doing. Non-harming evolves into a purposeful activity of being helpful, and suddenly we see so many opportunities. When we have that feeling, it is like waking up to life a little bit, right?”

A few of the students are restless. They’re not ready for this level of understanding yet; they want to get up and do some Sun Salutations. But most of the teacher trainees are on the edge of their cushions, knees tucked under their chests listening to me as if they were being read a great novel. They know this is the juice, this is the inside scoop on teaching right from the horse’s mouth and they are drinking it up. They’ve stacked up yoga blocks to make desks on the floor and they’re furiously taking notes.

I try to wake up the spaced-out people with a playful threat: “You should all be taking notes. You will actually be tested on this.” I pause to let them all get organized for the big reveal.

“Bodhi means ‘awakened,’ and sattva means ‘existence.’ So bodhisattva means…”

Yuki blurts out, “Awakened life!”

“Yes! A bodhisattva is a person who is so awake in the world that they see the suffering of others. They dedicate their entire life to relieving this condition. Doesn’t that sound like a good aspiration for a yoga teacher?”

I can tell that they like learning new exotic words like bodhisattva but they are also getting freaked out. I reassure them.

“Don’t worry. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to be a yoga teacher and you don’t have to take a special bodhisattva vow to participate in this course but I offer you this model as an inspiration. A bodhisattva does what it takes to be helpful to all beings everywhere, all the time, no matter what.

“Different people learn in different ways: hearing, visuals, reading, touching, and doing. So you are here to develop your language, your hands-on adjustments, your voice, your eyes, your understanding of people, and your compassion. Because when a student doesn’t understand what you are trying to teach, the bodhisattva says, ‘I will dig deeper into my tool bag to find a way to communicate and help this person.’ We are not really teaching poses; we are teaching and reaching people. And this is what it means to be a yoga teacher.”

The room goes silent. The students are contemplating this, trying to put the pieces together. Others are clearly moved. In the gap, I realize how much this all means to me. Sandwiched between my students and my own dear teachers, I experience a feeling of warmth and gratitude.

Remembering that, like the tortoise in the ocean finding an inner tube, it is a rare opportunity to meet these precious teachings in one’s lifetime, I inwardly recommit to the bodhisattva path. Not just as a yoga teacher, but in every moment, I vow to be helpful to every being I encounter in my life—all those beings I know and love, those I know and don’t like so much, and all those many, many beings I’ll never even meet.

During a recent dinner at the ultra-hip Bowery Hotel restaurant, our friends Mary and Allen asked if I was writing anything new. Popping a Parmesan-stuffed olive into my mouth, I said, “Yes, but the subject is top secret.” Unable to resist that tantalizing tidbit, they begged me to let them guess. I sipped my Gavi while Allen, a genius inventor, tried to guess. “Is it about space?” “Is it about global warming?” David and I chuckled knowingly because it was clear that as smart as he was, Allen was never going to guess that I was writing a book about how women hate their bodies. Then Mary said, “Is it about women and bodies?” She smiled like a Cheshire cat as I quickly passed her the onion foccacia.

Mary and I have been complaining to each other about our bodies since we were naturally slim twenty-somethings with unwrinkled knees. Now that we are fifty-somethings, it is safe to say that we have become even more obsessed and distressed about our bodies. To say the least, we do not like to be naked with the lights on anymore. Not that we ever did.

This seems normal to me. But just because something is normal doesn’t mean it is a good way to live.

I’ve spent my entire life working with my body and I enthusiastically advocate fitness and healthy eating. But having firm abs has not brought me joy. And you know what? I’m sick of it! I’m sick of feeling bad about myself because my body does not match an external notion of perfection.

Now that I see this syndrome in myself I see it everywhere. And I feel sad about it. I feel sad about Collette and her daughter and her friend.

I feel sad about Jeni and all the men everywhere who can’t convince their women that they are beautiful.

I feel sad for all the women who are playing the broken record that says, “I don’t have the body I want and I don’t want the body I have.”

I feel a little less sad about my friend Jane, because at least she has a good sense of humor about it all. She told me she is going to create a yoga class called Yoga for When You Are Feeling Fat and I have no doubt it will be a huge success!

I feel sad about the women who tell me they are sick of dyeing their hair but they don’t think they are brave enough to stop.

It took only an instant for me to feel bad about myself when I first saw my gray roots but it took a year to transform those feelings into something positive. My long gray hair flows beautifully around my shoulders and reminds me of the untangling of imprints that had to happen for me to be able to say, “I’m way less of a fraud now, Mary.”

As a yoga teacher I know that ultimately the best way to give a good lesson is by manifesting it with full radiance. I feel sure that if I can apply the principles of meditation and yoga to my addiction to hating my body, things will begin to shift. Space will open up, appreciation will arise, and I’ll probably get into a heck of a better mood.

If practice is supposed to be personal, if I really want to be a bodhisattva, if I really want to help others, I’ve got a golden opportunity here. So here goes:

I vow to stop trying to change my body and, instead, start to change my relationship to my body.

I vow to stop obsessing on losing weight and start focusing on losing self-aggression.

I vow to hold a healthy urge for self-improvement in my right hand and a strong sense of appreciation in my left hand and slowly, sensitively, bring my two hands together in a prayer that transforms good enough into goodness.

With a strong commitment it won’t be hard because I know that basic goodness is already there, inside me all the time, if I just look in the mirror a little more closely.

I want to do this for my friend Mary, for all my students, and for every woman everywhere who is walking through life, accomplishing great things, giving to others, creating our world, and all the time hating her body because it’s normal to do that.

This is the story about how everything I learned about my body was wrong. It is the story of how I lost trust in my own strong, clear arms and legs, the goodness of my curves, and the tenderness of my open heart. It’s about how I gave up my power without even knowing I had it.

But it’s also about how yoga and meditation gave me refuge, showed me a map, and reminded me that everything arises, abides, and dissolves. It’s about how I recognized my own form of suffering and made a commitment to go for happiness instead. It’s how I got off the bumpy bus and onto a path of ease. This is the story of me and my body and how we became friends again after so many years of fighting.

Well, anyway, I hope it is. But if I can see everything so clearly, why is that grumpy inner voice still whispering in my ear, planting hard thoughts in my mind? I’ve made progress but I think I need more medicine, bigger guns. It’s time to get some help from those who have gone before me because I need some real tips, not the kind that cover up but the kind that cut through negativity and turn it into positivity. I’ve frozen the flow of this vinyasa long enough. I’m ready to plant new seeds.