I started training as a yoga teacher earlier this year, not because I dreamed of a new career that pays even less than being a writer, but only to expand my own practice. In my journey to healing I had embraced mindfulness and merrily trotted down a path of woo-woo soulful healing vibes, and my yoga practice deepened beyond a stretching class into a beautiful, expansive space where I felt good inside my body. That was a huge revelation after a lifetime of punishing my body. I had to find out more about this “activity” that can lead to healing for athletes. I felt like I had found the secret workout to help our minds and hearts as much as it helps our bodies, and I needed to know more. So I signed up for Yoga Teacher Training (YTT). It’s the first structured education I’ve participated in for a long time, and being in classes, taking exams, and finishing assignments has been oddly fun.
Anywho. My favourite class is a weekly philosophy lesson taught by wise lady called Julie who seems to be fluent in ancient Sanskrit and has read and interpreted the teachings of the Buddha and Krishna along with Jainism, Hinduism, and all of the sages and gurus who brought Eastern philosophy to the Lululemon West. Julie’s classes always come out as a stream of consciousness from a woman who has lived a life and found the answers, dropping pearls of wisdom almost by accident as she rambles through the branches of yoga.
What I love about the teachings of yoga is that they are always applicable to the situations in your own life. A few of them need to be stretched to fit your modern applications, but most of the time, an answer can be found in the ancient wisdom, and sometimes it’s just bang on.
Our class last week started with a return to basics and a reminder: “Yoga is the presence of living in absolute truth,” Julie started. “You have to see beyond your perception of reality. Take off the filters you see things through, and see them as they really are”.
Yoga is the presence of living in absolute truth. You have to see beyond your perception of reality.
It reminded me of a favourite quote from Tara Brach - this feeling is real, but is it true? It’s something that I grappled with when I tried to depart myself from a life inside of diet culture and the belief that if I am skinny, I am good. While it may feel very real and the anxiety inside my brain telling me I’m uncomfortable with ‘losing control’ of my diet, none of it was true. I lived inside a filtered view of health where I was so deep inside of diet culture that I could no longer perceive reality. The reality that my weight is not my worth. The reality that a strict diet does not make me healthy. The reality that changing my body size will not ruin my life.
At a workshop I put on with the wonderful Renee McGregor in the Lake District last month, Renee asked participants to look for evidence. Where’s your evidence that being thinner will make you happier? Where’s your evidence that being skinnier will make you a better athlete? Where’s your evidence that a controlled diet will bring you more fulfilment? Where’s your evidence that skipping one workout will ruin your next race? Where’s your evidence that there’s anything wrong with your body right now?
I had reviewed my own evidence countless times. I was running slower than I ever had, I couldn’t keep muscle mass, I never felt healthy, I was depressed, losing my hair, had no menstrual cycle and had actually started gaining weight. I had no evidence that my diet and exercise were going to give me what they promised. They were so far only delivering the opposite. As much as the diet culture I lived inside of tried to convince me that the things I was doing were completely right, I had zero evidence. It was time to take off the filter.
You can justify anything you need to if that brings you comfort, and accepting my evidence wasn’t anywhere near as easy as I’m making it sound. But through yoga (or mindfulness or anything else you’d rather call it) we try to remove the filters and perceive reality. We try to remove everything that obscures our views of the truth. The culture that we operate inside of, the thoughts that we create ourselves or are inflicted upon us.
With every thought inside my head - even just the tiniest thought or habit - I had to challenge them with what is the evidence of that? This feels real, but is it true? Where did that come from? How does that serve me? And on and on I picked apart the ideas and thoughts that had controlled my life for so long. I began to see the elements of the patriarchy that made me feel my worth was directly tied to my body shape, the elements of capitalism that kept shifting the goal posts for what a woman or athlete is meant to look like. I began to see how competition in sport exists not just on the race course, but outside of the events in how athletes look and live throughout the year. I began to see how I was taught as a child to shrink and not take up space. And that showing remarkable discipline was only ever a positive virtue.
Removing the filters you see your life through takes dedicated time and work and can be really disruptive - you may literally find yourself dismantling the truth you clung to, and that which the people in your life still cling to. A lot of the time it feels easier and more comfortable to stay inside the filters you’ve always been in. Yoga/mindfulness asks a lot of practitioners when it tells us to perceive an unfiltered reality. It demands you to be enduringly inquisitive about everything you perceive, and constantly scratch at every surface until you’re satisfied that you’re looking at the truth. In the end, hopefully, you will feel empowered because you now know what you know, and you can separate what you think from what is true. And being empowered with the truth is a lifeline to getting out of the thoughts that are holding you back.
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