Keeping things real with yoga. By Meg Jackson
The middle way
U
p until yesterday you’d
have thought I had the best
fingernails ever to grace a
yoga mat. They were painted
beautifully, shapely and
smooth, with cuticles smoother than an
Ashtangi’s Chaturanga transitions. They
were always just the right length – long
enough to make a satisfying click on my
laptop keyboard, but not so perilously
pointy I’d puncture a student mid
Downward Dog adjustment.
They were fake. Looking at my paws now,
you’d think I’d been given a manicure by
Edward Scissorhands. They’re so stumpy it
looks like I’ve been munching on them for
breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last three
years. Their surface is rutted, scratched,
uneven and stained. Thanks to having been
suffocated by their acrylic masks over the
last 12 months they’re as strong as a bit of
wet tissue paper.Manicured life
But I loved how they made me feel. There
was something about having flashy fingers
which made me feel like I’d got it together;
that I was just the right amount of glamorous
combined with taking good care of myself.
As if having terrific talons showed the world
that I had it all under control; that my real lifeom mind
was as manicured, curated, and controlled
as the ends of my fingers.
So here I am – showing my stumpy little
digits as God made them. And I guess I could
be over-complicating my addiction to that
Shellac-induced-high, but it has made me
think about what else is going on in my life
that actually isn’t as I want the rest of the
world to see.
The truth is that my real fingernails are
bearing the brunt of all the things I’ve been
doing to portray something that just isn’t
real. But if I give them a chance to breathe
and grow and get strong, they’re going to be
just fine. This healing can only start when I
stop pretending and allow myself to get real;
and that takes courage.Getting real
We’re taught when we’re on our yoga
mats that the practices are there to
fundamentally change the relationship we
have with ourselves and the world around
us. Challenging our bodies with asana,
and our minds with meditation, allows us
to start removing the barriers we’ve put
up to stop us connecting with that core
of awesomeness which is at the centre of
ourselves and everyone else.
Yoga is trying to teach us that we spend
so much time worrying about the stuff thatpeople see from the outside, that we’ve
forgotten that true connections in life
happen when stuff gets real.
We’re eyeball-deep in a culture that
screams at us every day that we should only
be presenting the best version of ourselves
to the outside world, regardless of how
we’re feeling on the inside. That we should
count our worth in the number of vacuous,
meaningless clicks on a social media post;
the digits in our bank account; or the words
in our job title.Living yoga
Let’s not think that the yoga world is
blameless either. You don’t have to look too
far to think that your worth as a yoga student
(or teacher) is based on the length of your
hamstrings, the depth of your back-bend,
how many days in a row you’ve meditated,
and how much of the Bhagavad Gita you can
rattle off at the end of Savasana.
I know that for me to have a long-term
relationship with yoga, I need to bring it
into my real life. That means using the
insights the teachings and practices it gives
me to take a long hard look at the way I’m
living and the patterns I’m falling into, but
at the same time remembering that living
my yoga isn’t the same as you living your
yoga, or Bendy ‘oooh look there goes my