Posts tagged attachment

It’s not really about how it looks.

We are visual creatures, and we make sense of most everything in our world through our eyes, if they function, that is.  We make split judgments and categorize details into our mental rolodex, often without conscious awareness.  When we first ventured into yoga, who didn’t look around to see how a pose was to be done, right?  In our newly formed yoga minds, it’s all about the form and shape of the pose.

Over years of practice and many teachers reminding me to skeptically reconsider my attachment to form as the indicator of success, I’ve definitely evolved my thinking and try to assess how my practice and poses feel.  One instructor teaches blind students, and I’m continually amazed by pondering the experience of a blind world of yoga.  How many poses would be extremely challenged without sight, and yet, how liberating to be drawn away from the common task of comparison and judgment that we bestow upon our visual assessment of our yoga practice?

My recent toenail debacle has been a lesson about detaching from form.  Once the pain relatively subsided, the challenge has been my mental disturbance at knowing that my toe is definitely not right.  I’ve looked at that toe every day for 30+ years and it has never looked like this.  That hard cover at the tip of my big toe should definitely be attached at its base.  And I am paining myself by obsessing over this horrible incongruence in form.  Luckily, I am a relatively rational person who understands that I can walk and bend my toe joint.  I only have a minor amount of swelling and really, it’s just a bad surface wound that needs to scab and heal.  Yes, my toe will be ugly this summer, but I can save on pedicures and freak people out, which actually pleases me just a little bit.

The external form of my toe, just like a lot of my yoga poses, actually has very little connection to my health and well-being.  That’s not to say that I can’t see and appreciate a beautifully performed back bend or a lovely pedicured foot.  But pretty toes are not indicative of a healthy foot, just like a lovely arch in the back does not necessarily mean the body is safe and healthy.  How we feel and the actions we take are of much higher significance than the external view we present to ourselves and others.  Just take a look at this toe, and then consider that I’ll be practicing with John Friend in 5 days, to see how it’s not really about how it looks.