YOGA + MOVEMENT
IS BODY HATRED
Sneaking into Your Yoga?
W
estern culture can make it difficult to love our bodies. Inherited hierarchies and divisive dualism pervade the language and mythology. Spirit and body are separated, and body — with its messiness and mortality — falls into something that must be feared and controlled. When I studied Eastern philosophy and religion, I thought
“[L]et’s hold the principle of ahimsa, or non-harming, as the central tenet of our yoga practice to help balance our relationship to our physical bodies.”
I would find a clear model of nondualistic body celebration. But the culture giving us the amazing fruits of yoga is also entrenched in a desire to suppress and overcome the physical body. Yoga history is littered with stories of extreme asceticism and excessive purification rituals. Yoga cues — whether as self-talk or from teacher-to-student — contain the dust of a thousand years of somatophobia, or fear of the body.
BY TRACY VACURA (SHE/HER)
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MNYOGALIFE.COM