In grade nine my class went on a week-long retreat to a camp near Vancouver. One night, our teachers had us participate in a personality assessment. It was presented to us as a fun activity of self discovery, and I honestly believe they naively meant it as nothing more than that.

Each of us filled out the multiple choice questionnaire. After tallying our results we were physically separated in four quadrants representing combinations of introverted vs. extroverted and global vs. analytical traits. In our segregated groups we stared or shouted at each other (this varied considerably between the introverted and extroverted groups) and studied our newly branded identity.

For the remainder of the trip, the teachers were left to clean up the carnage of a hormone induced group emotional breakdown. Although this was my first memorable lesson in the process of self-identification, the pressure to define our individuality began sooner than grade nine, and can persist long after our teenage years.

Many metaphors have beautifully described humanity’s quest for personal identification. In Pink Floyd’s concept album “The Wall”, the antihero struggles with the barricade separating his shriveling inner self and the outside world. The bricks were laid by himself and others, forming a superficial but effective external identity – an activity condoned to a less dramatic degree in most of our lives.

But there is a concept that I feel is under-represented. Every posture has a counterpose, and personal identity is no exception. I’ll call it the anti-identity.

Eating Disorders and Anti-Identity

I believe that individuals suffering from eating disorders are attempting to dissolve any visceral and psychological sense of identity that society pressures them to have. Others may argue anorexia, bulimia and other disorders are just another external identity statement – but I believe this condition is defined not by what you are, but by what you are not.

I am not perfect. I am not logical. I am not smart. I am not beautiful. I am not strong. I am not what you think. I am not here. In the end, I am really not here.

The further the condition progresses, the closer to those ends the person suffering becomes. The side-effect is a feeling of success, which feeds the anti-identity and perpetuates the illness.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. It’s potent stuff, and it’s no surprise to me that the incidence of eating disorders is escalating, especially in individual-centric cultures. It’s not a pressure to be thin, but a pressure to harden ourselves against malleability; to build a external manifestation of who we are.

Yoga and Eating Disorders

When an individual is recovering from an eating disorder, one of the most terrifying questions is “When I recover, who will I be?”. The misunderstanding is that the fear is not rooted in weight-gain itself; weight brings emotions, laughter and energy. The apprehension results from the perceived pressure to form an identity, and have other people assess and judge that identity.

For those suffering with eating disorders, the need to find balance is imperative, it’s a matter of survival. Yoga has a lot to say about the Self, and many tools to help a person achieve balance. I was delighted to read that in Vancouver, the leading eating disorder treatment program now incorporates yoga into their recovery program.

Yoga can aid in eating disorder recovery on a number of levels. Benefits like increased presence of body and mind, lowered stress and increased strength are well known. But ultimately, yoga is a powerful recovery tool because it trains a person to lighten their grip of the importance of their “lower self”. By this I mean the formation of traits, physical and psychological, that we internalize and project: the external testimony of who we are.

Between identity and anti-identity, there lies a balance that is rooted in impermanence. We are different every day, and it’s simply not important to waste energy forming or dissolving an external identity. Osho said many beautiful things, and one sticks in my head right now

At the end only that remains which you had brought in the beginning.

It’s been a long journey, and I am only starting to internalize this idea. Now I wake with it. I sit with it on my yoga mat. And I fall asleep with it when my consciousness dissolves into the inky sky blistering with pure starlight.

Today marked day 17 of the 40 day yoga challenge, and day 1 of my husband’s three week trip to Europe. My challenge is now amplified because I’m struggling to quell feelings of envy, and also push against the hollow that’s shaping into loneliness.

It doesn’t help that my dog is whining by the door, wondering when her favorite owner will re-enter our living space. Sorry Tobi – you’ve got 21 weeks in dog-time to suffer through. I guess I’m getting off easy.

But honestly, this time will be good for me. I look around our place and see opportunity – untidy things I can obsess over or random chores that didn’t seem important last week. I’ve got lots of people to catch up with, new opportunities to dive into, hours of sleep to log, lotsa yoga to work through, and now more time now to get dirty in it.

Speaking of dirty. Yoga in the summer.

I love what the summer heat does to my muscle fibers. Like ice cream that’s sat in a bowl for a few extra minutes – yoga just tastes better in the heat. My sticky matt becomes a slip n’ slide, I squish into it when rolling from a squat to an inversion, down dogs lose their grip and become high planks. Okay it’s gross, but getting gross is kind of nice – once a day – for about an hour.

Yoga today was lengthening. We did lots of stretching with cloth bands, and broke apart scar tissue with golf balls. My balance was worse than normal – one of those days I felt like a stool needing a third leg. I hope my visceral balance is not an indicator of my internal stability.

Now for a cold sauvignon blanc and a starfish pose sleep… why not use the space.

Squeeze, soak, projection and reflection

Sunday morning power class is a notch above my weekday practice. I got squeezed and replenished in a few cycles through the class, turning over the leftover energy from yesterday and making room for clean morning fuel (aka a good breakfast). I ended up taking a late morning tap to round it off, and just woke up.

There were a couple of personal challenges evinced today. One that brought the glow of success, and the other, a realization that I have a bigger challenge to face.

We tried a pose that I had never done before, and I didn’t catch the name, but it involved moving from a standing balance pose to a modified crow out to high plank. Although I didn’t execute it perfectly, I feel with a few more attempts it will be singing (see resonance).

My second challenge came from acknowledging my present limits, deciding to stay on the safe side of that boundary, and then tackling the disappointment that stemmed from that decision. In a particularly challenging series of standing poses, I felt my knee tingle, like a sparkler had been set off inside. There was no pain, but I noticed the sensation and backed off. I couldn’t even attempt a modification with less intensity – it just wasn’t working out.

What came over me was disappointment – but the feeling wasn’t completely internal in its source and target. What arose above being disappointed in myself was the feeling that I had disappointed someone external to me (the instructor?). It sounds ridiculous, illogical, totally un-yoga… but that was what I felt. It’s a left over reaction from ballet, where I felt the teacher had invested in me, and “put” something in me and wasn’t “getting back”.

Photo by Uršula Berlo

So that’s got to go…. and that’s going to be a challenge because, well, I think today I realized that my practice is not completely seated from internal intention, and directed towards internal balance. There’s something like internal projection/reflection going on here. But it’s been acknowledged, so now I’ve got to do something about it. I have no ideas yet but I’ll ponder that in the next still moment.

Last week I set a goal for the 40 Day Yoga Challenge to attend at least one class per week that I do not regularly attend. So today, I attended my first vinyasa yoga class.

Vinyasa is a dynamic style of yoga that emphasizes the flow of movement and breath between the postures, not just the postures themselves. My introduction to vinyasa was fun and thought provoking, so I’ll share a bit of both.

First the fun. I’m realizing that I really enjoy being upside down. Today I got to do 3 types of hand/head stands! We jumped, rolled, stretched and slinked between postures. I also found that the stress on my bad hip was lessened by the fact we didn’t hold the poses for a more than a few cycles of breath.

Islena instructed today’s class. She incorporated two thought-provoking ideas that I’d like to share (or at least my interpretations of them).

Resonance

The first idea is about finding resonance in your yoga practice. This is a place where your body and mind are attuned to the energy in every level of our being, from the atomic to a higher self. This sounded pretty esoteric until she demonstrated the analogy using a gong.

After striking the gong, if there is an interruption (like holding your finger against the gong), the tone is muffled and does not resonate. In yoga practice, if you have discomfort, excessive tension, or pain, you are muffling the ability of your body and mind to resonate from the poses. If, however, you free your practice by expressing your movements and postures at the “right” energy, the internal gong will reverberate with a spectrum of harmonics.

I thought this was a beautiful metaphor, and an alternative the idea finding the “edge”, where you measure your physical limits by monitoring your breath and body’s cues. Here, you seek not a limit – but a sense of harmony. This especially makes sense in vinyasa: as you move from posture to posture, the series of tones forms a song.

Fascia

Islena also encouraged us to focus our attention on the fascia (I never knew I had any of this stuff prior to today!) Reading further on Wikipedia, it’s described as “an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web of tissue that extends from head to toe, from front to back, from interior to exterior.” It wraps almost every other part of our anatomy in its casing. Because in our practice we commonly focus on sensations in the muscles and joints, we neglect to think about the stuff that binds it all together. I had always wondered how organs stay in place when I’m standing on my head!

But it gets more interesting – this stuff isn’t just structural. Again from Wikipedia, it “provides the medium that allows for intercellular communication“. That strikes me as a powerful idea. Each of our body’s cells is pretty much a self contained micro-system. But the fascia is what brings these units to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. I’m going to focus positive concentration on the fascia – I love these discoveries!

Islena’s suggestion to bring our attention to the fascia made particular sense in vinyasa, where interconnected movements are made possible by the physical structure that binds us.

All in all it was a great class, the kind that pushes your practice forward a notch, or three.

After today’s hatha class, I realized that I need to change my goal “To mitigate injury for 40 days” to something more proactive.

The new version is “To let myself practice within my physical means.” That means staying further away from my perceived edge, since apparently I’m a poor judge of where it lies.

Goals and challenges aside – I feel lucky to be part of this day.