My body led me to a profound connection with Source. When my body started to break down, that\u2019s when I needed to really refine my practices. I really get the message that \u2018I am not my body\u2019. I have no problem operating on the astral level. It\u2019s easy. But in order for me to keep my body healthy? Now\u2026 I have to be more careful.<\/em><\/p>\nThrough injury, it seemed that she felt liberated from the near-mystical requirements of asana and diet that her sub-culture taught. But another theme emerged as well. The subject told me that she had begun intense asana following a difficult breakup, and the practice seemed to renew her libido and love life. She described what she called her \u201cvanity\u201d at the time: hair extensions, emerald contact lenses, her Sex-In-the-City “Mr. Big” boyfriend, her globetrotting, her designer handbags, Caribbean junkets. “I was hot”, she said. I was \u201cliving the life.”<\/p>\n
On one hand, practice brought physical elation through extreme effort and purification. On the other, glamour blossomed in the shala and under the grow-lamps of fashion. Both experiences renovated her self-image through very different sorts of embodied performance. Meanwhile, pain crept in: bursitis in the knees, a painful elbow, the ankle injury that eventually forced her to quit.<\/p>\n
Before I was attuned to the objectification aspect of the story, I had asked her: \u201cHow did your transcendent attitude towards the body \u2014 that things should be opened, reduced, purified\u2026 that you could live on coconut milk, almonds, and crystallized ginger while pushing yourself so hard in asana \u2014 how did that dialogue with your experience of pain and injury?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized I am not my body\u201d, she reiterated. \u201cMy true essence is not dependent upon this physical flesh-coloured spacesuit\u2026 I had to injure myself and gain forty pounds in order to release my identification with my body… There was a lot of ego I had to let go of…\u201d<\/p>\n
I came to hear two identifications released through the story. They are interwoven, but worth distinguishing. It sounded like the injury released her identification with the ideal of a transcending and impervious body. Then, it sounded like her shift in appearance released her identification with a certain kind of objectified beauty. This second identification is more relational, more socially constructed than the first. For her, \u201cI am not my body\u201d seemed to leverage a double release: 1) My vulnerability to injury does not define me, and 2) I will no longer be objectified according to a projected ideal. I will no longer conform to what anyone thinks my body should be. I am not what others need from my body. My body is not a display.<\/i><\/p>\n
The release of objectification shifted the subject\u2019s interpersonal experience. She reports: \u201cI don\u2019t look at other people for their externals like I used to. I really get<\/em>\u00a0namaste<\/em> now: \u2018the divine in me greets the divine in you\u2019. I truly get that now. No bullshit. This has given me compassion.\u201d She laughs broadly, with a relaxed wisdom.<\/p>\n______<\/strong><\/p>\n3. Body objectification — and adjustment — in the yoga studio<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take this feminist lens wide-angle for a moment, zooming out from the personal. I wonder: what percentage of physical yoga practice and economy depends upon the projection of postural ideals that objectify the flesh? Beyond all of our growing sensitivity to individual needs and capacities and the increased emphasis on modifications and accessibility, how committed do we remain to the form and aesthetics of our postures? I\u2019m sure we would like to say that we are dancing for ourselves alone, but are we not always looking, always seen? Who are we performing for? Others? Internalized others? And who is shaping our bodies? According to what ideals? Are those ideals safe and therapeutic, or do they enhance the forces of external or internal objectification?<\/p>\n
It makes me think of adjustments. Of how 80% of the student population of modern postural yoga consists of people with female bodies. And of how the top strata of teachers is predominantly male. And of how much emphasis there is upon the practitioner conforming to the posture — so much so that teachers for decades now have felt free to invade the posture with a \u201ccorrection\u201d, despite the clear potential for injury. I\u2019m thinking of how the most dangerous adjustments are all generally those that increase binding, folding, twisting, or backbending pressure. In other words: the adjustments that press for submission. I\u2019ve never heard of an adjustment to a student in the Warrior series of postures causing injury — the student is generally expressing too much power and freedom. But when the student is pressed to be smaller, more compressed, more tangled and twisted and submissive in form, the risk of injury rises.<\/p>\n
Where does this presumption to intervene and correct come from? Could it be continuous with the long-standing impulses of patriarchal culture that cannot view bodies, especially female bodies, beyond the economy of ownership, beyond what they should do, beyond what they must eventually do, which is to submit? T. Krishnamacharya was an outstanding modernizer and innovator at the cusp of yoga\u2019s global surge, famously progressive in inviting women to share in the heritage of practice. But as much as culture changes, it hangs on. What are we to make of the fact that at least two of his most accomplished students have risen to their well-deserved fame despite aggressively adjusting and correcting the bodies of mostly women — by many reports helping them to “open”, but also as though they should conform to some ideal of mobility, adaptability, thinness and grace that will likely injure them to reach? To study with these leaders and be adjusted by them seems in part to say \u201cI surrender to your vision of what my body should be.\u201d Actually, it may be less personal than that: \u201cMy body surrenders to your idea of what bodies mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slavoj\u00a0\u017di\u017eek says somewhere (who can keep track?) that capitalism requires flexible workers. Likewise, patriarchy demands flexible women.\u00a0It makes me wonder if I am not my body<\/em>\u00a0might at times be the shadow-statement of a wish for stronger boundaries, uttered by those who yearn for fuller agency. I am not my body =\u00a0You are not my body<\/em>.<\/p>\nSeveral years ago, I stopped adjusting my students physically. Not only because I realized that my (substantial) asana training was insufficient to the physiotherapy-level interventions that it encouraged me to perform, but also because I realized I was unclear about why, beyond preventing injury, I wanted to intervene into the space of another person\u2019s body at all. What did I want my student to do? Why? How did I want her to express herself? Why? I even stopped giving verbal adjustments for the most part. I still remember the moment that I approached a female student to give a very benign suggestion regarding femoral grounding in the back leg of a standing posture, and then I stopped in my tracks, realizing that I didn\u2019t feel I had the authority to interrupt her process. I didn\u2019t know what her history with authority was and how she might respond to an exchange she found critical, regardless of how relaxed I was in my approach. I flashed on something larger as well \u2013 that this person is inheriting two centuries of vigorous attempts to reclaim bodily agency, and do we really need another man in the world telling women what to do or how to look? (Of course, this is all in the abstract. In that personal moment, it’s just as likely that she would have benefited from the attention and direction. But I had to take a pause.\u00a0She is not just the body I am seeing. She is not a body for me to interfere with<\/i>.)<\/p>\n
When I teach now, I no longer look at a posture as something to do, nor at the student as someone who should do it. I see the posture as something to try, and the student as someone who might find it interesting, with or without the potential benefit of my experience, which may or may not apply to them. However they engage the posture, it will be with their<\/em> body: the body that they are, the body they live through, a body I am not, a body that does not exist as I experience it but as they do, in a way that I will never fully know.<\/p>\nRealizing that you can never fully know someone — because you are not their body, which means you can neither possess nor change them — is at the root of being able to love them while glimpsing your own strangeness, and while keeping the bullshit to a minimum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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