The studio where I practice has an enormous floor to ceiling mirror. Subtract five points.
I’m not the only person who has experienced something in the range of displeasure to disgust looking into it. I overheard a longtime student - an attractive woman in her 30s - say that she always chose her spot to avoid the mirror. The women around her commiserated.
If I was going to survive at this studio, something needed to change.
Jessica became my teacher. This beautiful yoga instructor wedged personal yoga practice between her classes. Looking through the window, one could watch her sitting inches away from the mirror, staring into her own eyes as she practiced. Long curly blond hair, always hanging free, large earrings adorning her dimpled cheeks. Jessica stared as though the very act had created the beauty - the act of not being afraid to love herself.
And so I began to practice in the front row.
At first I closed one eye and looked through the other. Then I opened both and stared mostly at my feet. And then I just pretended to be Jessica - began, for an hour or so during practice, to look into my own eyes. I did this for three months.
I don’t practice by the mirror anymore. That’s headstand zone and I’m staying out of it. I moved to the back row, where I really belong.
But I’m no longer afraid to look in the mirror. Even if I don’t look like I’m 20 or whatever it is the media tells us we should look like. My belly isn’t concave. My yoga pants are not sexy hot. My arms look suspiciously like my grandmother’s.
But now, when I look in the mirror, I just see Diane practicing yoga.
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