What do you think when you look at yourself in the mirror?
Magic mirror
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
What do you think when you look at yourself in the mirror? Do you like what you see? Do you wish something would look different? How far would you go to change something in your physical appearance? Be on a diet, practice sports more regularly, change your move and eating habits, get a treatment, get a plastic surgery?
I was always vain, whoever knew me as I was growing up, caught me dancing in front of a mirror, making faces or simply admiring how my new dress fitted me so well. However, when getting into my early teens, the mirror stopped being as nice. I always had a certain belly fat (even when I was a child with such skinny legs) that didn’t bother me until I was 14 years old. At 16 I got varicose veins (due to taking the pill, story that will be featured in another article), at 18 I moved out of my hometown — Évora — to study in Lisbon and gained 7 or 8 Kg. I sill can’t recall the time I realised I had cellulitis. I remember how I thought my waist wasn’t slender enough and my breasts were too small, which made me use those “push-up” bras with padding. I used to feel that without them I was nobody. I also recall not buying certain clothes because it would make my thighs look wider.
A set of factors (such as my mother’s death, Yoga and other factors that I will eventually write about in other articles) made me reach my 29th birthday with a total acceptance of my body. I can’t tell the moment when the mirror stopped being a beauty critic as it didn’t happen overnight.
Yoga was definitely one of the factors that positively contributed to change my relationship with my body. A Yoga characteristic is that the yogi should be aware of its body during the practice. What many teachers refer to when they say “listen to your body” is indeed the best tool to maintain the balance between challenging the body a little more without abusing it and cause injuries. This focus on the capacities and limits of my own body, during the one hour and a half of each practice, make me reconnect with this amazing instrument that nature offered me.
Yoga completely changed my goals regarding physical activities. I quit doing abs only to achieve a flat belly but rather to strengthen my core and evolve within the practice. I let go of the desire to have thinner and toned legs and instead focused on having stronger and more flexible ones. Little by little I ceased to want a body that looked like a certain way and started to work on my body to be able to do certain things. Things such as lifting and carrying heavy stuff or to be (in a far away future) an energetic elderly lady that won’t need help for day-to-day tasks.
Yoga taught me this lesson but that doesn’t mean that we all need to practice Yoga to learn it. We only need to have more awareness of our bodies. When you bend to tie your shoe, get down slowly, notice how far can you reach without bending your legs or curving your spine too much. If you cannot reach the shoelaces then bend the legs the necessary bit to reach them. And once you’re down there, listen to your body. You can do this with other movements, or even while you’re at the gym, or doing cross-fit. Even when you’re showering, you can focus on your skin has it responds to the water temperature.
When you develop a trustful friendship with your body, its appearance reflecting on the mirror doesn’t matter anymore, what matters now is how you feel inside it.
…who is the fairest of them all?
How many times did you hear a girlfriend say “I wish I had a body like ________”? — Fill in the blank with the name of an international famous woman known as a “hot chick”. — How many times have you thought the same? — I speak here directly to women as my personal experience doesn’t allow me to understand as well how men view this issues of self body acceptance.
A couple years ago, I was talking to a girlfriend and she said: “oh if I had _______’s body…”. The sentence ended here as it always does. It’s a sentence that always remains suspended. Remains suspended because whoever says it doesn’t really thinks about its conclusion. The “if” is a subordinating conjunction, which means that, in this context, it suggests a hypothesis. But no one goes further and explain what would happen if they “would have that body”. Much to my friend’s surprise I decided to ask: “what about if you had ______’s body, what would happen? What would be different?”.
My friend is a regular girl with a healthy body mass, she doesn’t have any mobility problem and practices sports and dance. Despite not having anything wrong with her body, she doesn’t have what our society considers a “perfect body”.
Thus, what would a “perfect body” serve her for? What for would it serve each one of us? Would we all be famous actors or supermodels? What about those that don’t want to have a job related with physical beauty? Is having “a perfect body” synonym of happiness? Or does it mean to have the perfect love life? We don’t need to think much to understand that that isn’t true, even though that’s the message we receive from social and mass media all the time. THAT IS NOT TRUE! And we all know that in the end of the day. Also, with a few “clicks” we can tell that most of those who already have “the perfect body” are obsessed to maintain it, or the majority of them think they haven’t achieved it yet. Hum… this just looks like one of those endless searches for an unachievable ideal.
Notice that no one is saying that we should stop doing exercise nor that we should eat uncontrollably because physical shape doesn’t matter. It does matter and it matters that we are healthy, strong, flexible and prepared to run to catch the bus or to carry those boxes while moving to another house. So that in the future we have energy and health to play with our grandsons or to be the next Iron Nun. It really matters that we feel good in our body, that we respect it and love it until death do us part.
