Yoga, Fatphobia and Disordered Eating - Part 3
Content warning - this post contains mentions of sexual abuse
We come by it honestly…
The above phrase is something that I say a lot in my yoga therapy sessions with clients. Whatever patterns that we have cultivated over the course of our lifetime didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Or appear because we are terrible people, or irreparably broken, or not smart enough or whatever other narrative we feed ourselves in secret. No, these patterns came into being because they serve a function in our life, usually some kind of protective function related to survival. It is usually when they stop serving us in the way that we previously required, that we begin to notice something is amiss.
Our patterning around food and eating is no different.
This is true on a micro and macro level. In my previous post, I was writing about the micro or individual level but today I want to look at this topic from a more macro level - the larger, societal level. We live in a world that wants us to believe that, if we just all stopped using plastic straws and drove electric cars, then our environmental crisis will be solved. Getting us all to focus on this micro level encourages us to ignore the larger issues, like the fact that the US military is one of the largest polluters in the world. Again, food, eating and body size are no different. The world has something to say about your body, especially if you are a woman. Extra especially if you are a fat woman, a Black woman, a disabled woman, a trans woman, or any combination of these.
For me, as I have grown aware of my own patterning around food, eating and body size, I have had to reckon with a heartbreaking reality - my body has been public property my whole life. I have internalised the message that I have no right to ownership of it. A lifetime of stares, comments, catcalls, men exposing themselves to me, pressing their erections against me in a crowded subway car, groping, molesting, raping. Sometimes violent, but more often so remarkably casual that I am considered the crazy person for speaking up. The cumulative effect has been profound.
In spiritual practices, one big concept that we are instructed in is how to let go of our identification with our material, physical body. In Zen, 13th Century master, Eihei Dogen, famously said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualised by myriad things. When actualised by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realisation remains and this no trace continues endlessly.”
Sounds pretty amazing, right?
In Yoga, we have ideas around bhoga and arpavarga (being driven by sensual pleasure and being driven by a desire for liberation). Samyoga is asking us, what are you linking to? It is the cause of suffering and the solution. Choose wisely!
But what if you have never been allowed to own a self? What if the world has made it clear that this body is not your’s? No matter which choice you made - bhoga or arpavarga - it was wrong. YOU were wrong. We live in a world that demands that women appease the male gaze or suffer great consequences. If you then work towards that appeasement, you are called vain, superficial, not serious, “asking for it.” At some point in my adolescence, I decided that I would not follow those rules of how to dress, shave my body hair, etc. Endlessly, boys and men called me a lesbian, a dyke and other things intended to hurt because I was not trying to please them. And it still didn’t stop the grabbing, threats, and violence; the continual reminders that this body is not mine.
What does it mean to let go of something that you have never had?
Melissa Febos wrote a gorgeous article in The Yale Review about this disconnect that girls and women often experience as it relates to food, eating and body size. Here’s a snippet:
Though I felt gigantic, I wasn’t. It was not the first time I mistook the feeling for the object, and not the last. This is what happens when you give your body away, or when it gets taken from you. Its physical form becomes impossible to see because your own eyes are no longer the experts. Your body is no longer a body but a perceived distance from what a body should be, a condition of never being correct, because being is incorrect. Virtue lies only in the interminable act of erasing yourself.
Melissa’s article is a beautiful description of the adviyā or misperception that many of us develop about our own body. It is an avidyā that we come by honestly because it has been systematically taught to us and to learn it seems to offer the easiest path to survival.
How is erasing yourself different from forgetting the self in order to be liberated? Of course, it is mountains and rivers away from the true meaning but I hope you understand how it might easily get confused. Finding compassion for the confused, hurt child who struggled to understand how her internal experience was so different from the harsh external experience is an important step on our path of healing and is not separate from moving towards an actualisation of the myriad things.
