i have tried writing about three things in the last 15 minutes but can not pick one. Does not speak well about my focus or presence today. The first topic was on anger - and how it escapes me in the most crucial moments, the second one was about body image - an issue i constantly struggle with and the last one was friendship and how I sometimes can not find that one friend I can call or message to say whatever I am thinking about without feeling like they wouldn't understand.
So maybe i shall write about all three in not so much detail - at least that's what i say now, let's see how that turns out.
Anger. A few years ago, I was talking to a teacher of mine about how something at work had irritated me and she asked me "nayana what do you do when you're angry?" and i said to her "but I don't get angry, that rarely happens" and she was shocked initially and then she smiled and she recognised that anger manifests in me in different forms. She finally said to me "But of course you have Anger in you, you just don't recognise it as anger when it expresses itself". Which is true. I get angry, but it doesn't sadly come out as anger - it often comes across as immense sadness, as a feeling of being wronged by a situation or a person. She then advised me to take up a sport that will use that anger as fuel, so i can find a healthy channel to let it out. She also presumed that maybe growing up, being angry was such a bad thing, or maybe I noticed that in a relative and was so shocked by how much hardship it caused to others involved, that I told myself that i would never do that to others. Maybe that is true, but maybe it is not.
When i was 21, I was in a relationship with a very gorgeous man, who loved me dearly. But i was the epitome of everything a woman should not be in a relationship - jealous, possessive, angry, moody, unpredictable - and extreme versions of it. Ok, now this makes me sound really bad - I am sure i had redeeming qualities, but it has been 10 years and I can honestly now look at those times and say i wasn't the perfect person to be with. And yet he stayed with me. When we parted ways, which I initiated, I was burdened with so much guilt at having treated this man, who loved me so dearly, so horribly, that i told myself i would never ever be that person again. I wanted to be genuinely work on aspects of that relationship that had to do with me and mistakes that I had control over to correct, for the lack of a better word.
Thankfully it was also the same time as me re-discovering yoga in life. The groundedness and awareness that yoga built in me, gave me the clarity to look back and realise how I had not been my highest Self in that relationship and also gave me the tools to build myself closer to this Self that i wanted to be. It has taken several years of self practice and the guidance of teachers to be someone that i am proud of - I can now confidently say, I will never be blinded, small-minded and so oblivious to how another person is feeling or how affected they are by my words & actions. It's another one of those gorgeous learnings yoga has brought me. And I am eternally grateful.
But this also then meant that Anger became (maybe yet again, if i had buried it once in my childhood) as the emotion that belongs in the dark world of emotions and one should never cross over to that side and should restrain themselves as much as possible. So when my teacher made me aware of that, I realised I did feel anger, but usually immediately hid it and shoo'ed it away. Because for me dark was not divine.
When i did become aware of dodging my dark emotions, I started paying attention to moments when they might surface, and started noticing how my body and mind would react. Usually my body would grow super hot (which is true for most of us) and my mind would stop working logically altogether, an air of righteousness would fill me. Almost in the next second, something in me would recognise that all of this is happening and would try and step away from it as fast as it can. This usually involved closing my eyes for a bit and taking deep breaths or looking away and focusing my energies on someone or something else. But all of this would happen so unconsciously and so fast that I would not have enough time to recognise the first emotion as anger at all. Depending on how the situation ended, i would view it as frustration or irritation or as sadness or something to be upset by. Hence never see the Anger, now deeply hidden, in that situation.
What I have managed to do now, is to consciously recognize those changes and those stages that my mind and body undergo. I then have an internal dialogue with myself on why I am angry, what about the situation is making me angry, do i need to let the anger come up sustainably so it can serve a project or a cause, so shall I try to manage it internally within myself and spare others from my wrath. I also try very hard to judge how much of that anger is rooted in me and what i would view as an attack on my idea of self or my ego, and how much of that anger is justified, meaning that the other party has really done something reprehensible or horrible enough for me to react in that manner.
I am yet to get to a place where I can comfortably let other people know that something they have done or said has angered me - but i am working on it. My mind now takes me back to Awakenning Shakti and Sally Kempton again, because Sally describes this letting anger come out and play out constructively as a force of the Goddess Kali and Durga. Using it effectively can bring about many good changes. Denying it's existence will mean you end up denying a shade of the goddesses to yourself and hence make creative change & learning unavailable to yourself as well. There is some good meditation work there that i plan to undertake.
My next topic was about body image. It is a topic I have struggled with. In fact as I sit and write this article (after a very hearty Italian meal) i feel fat, bloated and undesirable. The last word is what I have a problem with. I feel so much of modern advertisement is focused on the perfect woman with the perfect hair and perfect cheekbones and the slender waist and legs that it immediately shuts out and alienates the rest of us with big hips, broad shoulders and big calves and many other such "imperfections". In India a lot of it comes from the "no boy will marry you if you're not pretty, fair and slender".
It hurts me that so much of our self worth as women is driven by that desirability factor. That we feel the need for that validation and will never believe in our inherent beauty until someone else sees it and shows us what they see. Why can't we ever see ourselves like that in the first place? As a divine being that is capable of the most powerful thing on this planet - creation. Why do we not ever see that there is beauty in every body and not by recognizing that the world is doing itself a disservice and we are definitely doing ourselves a disservice. There's a bunch of other topics in within this topic of desirability and what we as women do to compensate for our lack of sex appeal and beauty. But that's for some other time.
I am to blame as well. There are rarely times I look into the mirror and say to myself "hello gorgeous, you look beautiful" because i will always be not good enough for myself. I ask for forgiveness from my body on a daily basis post my yoga practice, because while she has made available to me a very lovely practice, at other times of the day I only see her imperfections. I feel this in spite of having a very conscious practice of self love and self care - if I didn't I would be in pieces. Which should not be the case.
One of things I want to do with my yoga teaching practice is to make women aware of the inherent Goddess in them - in fact of all the Goddesses from the fairest of them with the most demure attitude to the dark skinned one with the most ferocious fangs - which ties in very well with my topic above on Anger. Dark doesn't always necessarily be opposite to everything divine. In fact an artist called Naresh Nil re-depicted some of the favourite Hindu Goddess as being dark-skinned instead of fair and faced some criticism for it, but to me they look beautiful. There are still stereotypes with slender waists and gorgeous hair, but I will take what i get - at least it started a conversation,
Sometimes I wonder if I had a daughter what would I teach her and how would i make sure that she doesn't grow up feeling less than someone else - a man or a woman. In fact I do not think my mother did anything wrong as well, I was brought up in a very secure and loving household where my brother and i were treated equally. But growing up there's always other external factors (some billboards, to movie stars, to your relatives) that constantly tell you to match up to certain standards of beauty and when you see that you are far off from what is considered "beautiful", the only thing you can label yourself as being is not beautiful. Once you have assigned that tag to yourself, it is very hard back to walk up that steep hill of self loathing to arrive at the chateaux of self awareness and self love. Especially in today's world of Instagram based definitions of a perfect relationship, a perfect holiday, a perfect OOTD and a perfect body, I do not know whether I would be a good enough mother to a daughter. So i hide behind my decision of not wanting any children - my own or adopted. Again a topic for discussion some other time.
I am suddenly out of words for what more I could say about body image and how I struggle with it, how it is still constant work, how it is moving forward 2 steps and sliding back 3 every single attempt, how being in France for a month with all the gorgeous food hasn't really helped with this feeling beautiful work- my dress was tighter today and I told myself off in a million different ways as I stared at my reflection in the mirror as I dressed up to go eat an italian meal. I can only think of Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love when her character solves the weight situation while travelling in Italy by buying bigger pants. That I think is a big act of self-love. My terrible self-image of myself would not let me do that, I am already devising means to trying to lose all the weight i have gained over the last two months once i head back to India.
Like i said, it is constant work. I'm ready to do it, because the other side of it looks beautiful - where my sense of confidence, courage, self and being is not attached to whether i fit into an M or an L.
Looks like i never got to writing about friends and how terribly i miss one sometimes, thankfully i do have one. Even though he is always very far away from me, he is also the one I can say the most random-est of things to without fear of being judged. However even with him sometimes I tend to hide things, therefore burying those emotions or thoughts or ideas deep inside to be found sometime else or to be stashed away forever- who knows?
I shall write about that sometime else.
Bonne Nuit.
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