What your yoga teacher thinks about your body.

 "This is the only area of my body that I actually like"  " I can't come to yoga, yoga is for hot young girls"  "I was about to come to your class, but then I realized I only had a big frumpy tee shirt and I couldn't do it"  "I could never wear those short shorts, I don't have the right body" and so on and so on.

We are so incredibly hard on ourselves.  Think about it, how many times so far already today have you said or thought something nasty about yourself.  We are so incredibly hard on ourselves and it gets in the way of us living our biggest lives.  I see this all the time from where I stand in the yoga room.  I hear you when you call me and ask "is appropriate for a woman with a body like mine to join your studio." I hear you when you say "I could never wear that kind of top, nobody wants to see that." I see you when you can't bring your eyes to meet your own in the mirror and I am right there with you.

My husband will tell you there is nobody harder on themselves than me, and the truth is I practice not being mean to myself every day.  It is a challenge I take on every morning and some days I succeed and many days I fail.  Seven years ago, my therapist told me I had to stop saying I was fat, she told me I was no longer allowed to talk about being ashamed of what I ate, and I listened.  I'm good like that, tell me to do something, and I'll do it.  And do you know...it helped! I practice this every day, and again some days I succeed and other days I fail, and on the days I fail, I remind myself of the language I am modeling for my daughter and I tackle the challenge all over again the next day.

Anyway, back to you.  I want to tell you the truth.  I want to be honest with you, I want you to know what I think about your body.  I am a yoga teacher, I see you, I am looking at you hot stuff and I want you to know.  YOU ARE PERFECT!  Seriously though,  I was teaching last night.  The class had 14 very different bodies in it. Some men, some women, some young and some older, all different shapes and sizes and can I tell you what I literally thought as I looked at those 14 people, working to lock their knees.  "Every single one of these bodies is beautiful"  I said that, in my head and it was so true. I can tell you that I have seen EVERY bit of you in the yoga room, and I have seen every single body type stretch themselves into Pada-Hastasana and I have never once seen anything other than the perfection that is the human body.

Today, I teach two classes, but in-between I am home with my beautiful baby girl. She is so chunky and so delicious and she is sound asleep in her crib.  I happened to turn on the news and listened to both Michelle Obama and Donald Trump speak, and among so many worries I have, I am worried about the health of our little girls souls.  And it calls to me to continue to work to empower women and girls to find their biggest selves.  We can not be productive, vital, passionate beings when we are consumed with our calories, and the numbers on our scales and fit bits.  Learn to listen to your body, learn to appreciate the strength in your thighs, the power in your belly and empower yourselves to be in love with yourselves.

There's no should in Yoga.

 When deciding to live a BIG life, the fist step is to realize that it isn't going to happen later.  The life you want to have has to start now, and living in the now creates an amazingly beautiful life!

There are always choices,  I can look at the picture above a list a million "shoulds"  My body should come down more, my leg should be straighter, my stomach should  be pulled in more, those outlets shouldn't be there, I could go on and on, but living in the should and focusing on how things should be and shouldn't be hold us back from the possibility of greatness.  In this moment there is a whole lot of perfection.  Let's start with that little lady in the yellow dress, she IS absolutely perfect, that purple mandala IS stunning, me, I'm alright. But this is it, this picture captured one moment in time, it was very different from the moment before and we had no idea what was to come next, but by staying present in this moment, we create a space for greatness to fill the next moment.

This is our practice, when we do yoga we are literally creating space in our bodies, but we are also practicing making space in our minds.  In the time we are practicing our Hatha yoga, it is very easy to live in the world of shoulds, this teacher should  hold the posture longer, this teacher should  crack a window, I shouldn't sit down, but this takes us out of the moment and fills our minds with clutter.  Staying present, creates space in your mind and in that space we can find our truest capabilities.  Have you ever noticed, that right before you do a posture, you tell yourself the story of that posture "I always fall out of Standing Bow, I just don't know how to stay in it"  You have filled your space with some clutter from your past, making it nearly impossible to ever move forward in that posture.  If before we move into a posture, we take a moment, take a breath and move within that breath, there is room to grow!  There is room to move your posture to a new level and the stillness created in your mind leaves room for JOY!

So what is the trick, how do we stay present?  We practice! Yoga is a great place to practice staying present, but you can do this anywhere. Start to take notice to your busy mind.  Notice when your mind starts the should and the woulds and filling with decisions you made yesterday, when this starts to happen remind yourself that the moment you are in is perfect, focus on your breath and give that moment your 100% participation.

When I think about what my BIG life should be, I am constantly reminded that the life I want starts in this very moment and by staying present I create space for newer and bigger things.  That's it for NOW!

Taking Up Space

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be small, like invisibly small.  I took pride in being quiet and aloof and even took up the challenge of seeing how many times people would interrupt me before I just gave up talking all together.  I was a smart girl, it didn't take much for me to get good grades,  but I figured out how to just get by, how to not stand out and how to do just enough to not cause any trouble.

This quest for being small manifested in the way I treated my body.  It was years of abusing myself, of restricting my diet, of experimenting with diet pills before I really figured it out.  By the time I was in my 20's I had mastered it, every time I stepped on the scale I was one pound closer to being invisible.  I was anorexic and bulimic, and numb.  I went through the motions of life, not enjoying much of anything and definitely not awake to all of the wonder in a moment.

My eating disorders was taking over, there was no space left for me to be me, I was lost and my body was giving up.  In 2007, my body decided it was done and I found myself in a puddle of tears on the bathroom floor.  I was sick, I was exhausted and I was starving to death.  With the help and support from my family I took the first steps I would take towards recovery.  I spent the next year, in doctors offices, therapists offices and nutritionists office, I was in some sort of office three evenings a week trying to bring myself back.  After nearly a year of just talking, my primary care physician gave me the clearance to start working out, she suggested yoga.  I found Bikram Yoga.

Bikram yoga is the thing that woke me up.  I stood in front of a mirror for ninety minutes a day, and created shapes with my body that took up space!  I found appreciation for myself in those 90 minutes, I found passion, excitement, calm, relaxation.  I found myself in that sweaty sweaty room.  I remember not long after starting my yoga practice, walking my dog, it was about 3:30 am ( I still wasn't a good sleeper...these days I would never be awake at 3:30!) for the first time in what felt forever, I saw the stars, I smelled the grass, I felt the wind and I said out loud "this is it, this is what I want every day"  I had one moment of joy, of being alive and awake and just happy.  It took a lot of work to have that one single moment, but I was going to continue to work each and every day to have more and more moments like that!

Flash forward nine years later,  I am the healthiest version of myself.  I no longer have the estrogen of a 90 year old woman, but I am the mother of two extraordinarily perfect children.  I am no longer the lonely sad, little girl, but I am married to my best friend, who challenges me to continue to grow.  I am no longer holding myself back, but I am the co-owner of Bikram Yoga Doylestown, the studio where I see transformations in all of my students and where, with the help of my sister and brother in law all of my dreams are coming true.  And now I am on the quest to keep getting bigger! I want a big life, a powerful life, one where I make things happen, where I help people become stronger, and bigger and better versions of themselves.

In yoga, we create space.  We create space in our spines, in our body and most importantly in our mind.  With space there are possibilities of greatness.  I will continue to use yoga to create space for myself, I will continue to take up more space.  What would you do with more space?