Have you ever practised yoga with a mirror in the room? Most hot yoga studios have and use mirrors in the practice room. I've recently begun teaching in a studio with mirrors, and have become aware of how practitioners use or don't use them in their practice. From checking alignment to checking their hair, the mirrors sometimes create a distraction during class. I've been thinking a lot about how we can better utilize this tool, but I've also wondered if the mirrors actually prevent a deeper experience of yoga or not.
I remember the first time I thought about yoga in front of a mirror, I thought, like most people, "cool! I can check out my alignment". Then of course, my teachers set me straight, "a mirror takes you out of the inner practice, and makes your relationship with the postures external". As a result, I've often discouraged eager students from practising regularly in front of a mirror.
A few weeks ago I attended a Bikram yoga class. For those unfamiliar with Bikram, it is a series of 26 postures practised in an extraordinarily hot room... in front of a mirror. I was resistant to the idea of the mirror, it was going to take me out of my practice - how could I create an internal relationship with my body if I was experiencing it through the mirror?
But, isn't that how most of us perceive our body all the time? We are continually fed images of men & women with "perfect" (albeit photo shopped) bodies and there is an unwritten cultural expectation of normal beauty. We use mirrors daily to make sure that our presentation to the world falls within what we perceive as acceptable beauty. And, if we don't feel that we are beautiful enough, we create stories of imperfection, we lose confidence and fight an ongoing battle with self esteem. We might limit food intake, over exercise, or fall into depression in at attempt to create an ideal of beauty in our mirrors. Much like using the mirror to create the perfect posture, we use mirrors every day to create perfect beauty.
So - back to the Bikram class. I decided to approach this yoga practice with the mirror in a different way. Instead of using the mirror to check alignment (unless instructed to do so by the teacher, as there are often cues in the class to use the mirror to check postures), I allowed myself the time in front of the mirror to get real with the stories I'd created in my head about my body. I allowed the thoughts of, "my ankles are small for my body", "my belly is flopping over top of my shorts, and it looks bigger than my boobs right now", "I thought my shoulders were more defined than that" - and also allowed the thoughts of "my thighs look hot right now" and "my hair is looking pretty good all sweaty like this" to run through my brain. I began to realize that the mirror was an unflinching reminder of my stories. Stories of how I feel I do or do not measure up to an arbitrary cultural norm of beauty. The mirror was the figurative... and maybe to some, literal... elephant in the room.
Thing is. When we walk away from the mirror, we do not walk away from the stories. From the external awareness of our physical form. So, even when we practice yoga away from a mirror, we are still working with an external interpretation of our body. When we move our foot in a certain way, or reach up toward the sky in a posture - we align ourselves knowing how we look externally, in the mirror. We think of body parts as we perceive them being part of our body, separate from our mind. It is the separation that we are seeking to dissolve on the mat.
David Deida, who I've mentioned in this blog, offers practices for men and women to feel into their body. He suggest working with the breath, creating a cycle of breath with an inhalation that flows into the belly, down to the pelvis and then exhalation that travels up the spine to the crown of the head. He suggests using this breath through intimacy to allow one to fully experience the internal sensations present in the body.
It is interesting when one starts to seek the experience of sensation using the breath. Taking Deida's practice out of the bedroom and onto the yoga mat can illustrate how we often experience our practice from our external perception of the body. For example, being aware of our hand in space doesn't often come from the sensation experienced in the hand, but rather from our awareness of how the hand is to look at.
Instead of thinking of the hand in a specific alignment, what if we just took our breath and our awareness of sensation alone to the hand. And felt what it felt like to BE in the pose, in space. What would this do to our practice? We can find our safe alignment, and then feel into the pose. Use the breath, and really feel the sensation of the pose, and then feel beyond the body experiencing our practice from a deeper understanding of union. When we recognize that the mind is in the body, and that the breath unifies the external with the internal we can become aware of stillness, yoga.
So, mirrors or not. We come to the mat with deeply engrained stories, patterning of thought that will influence our perception of how our body creates our physical practice. We can continue to experience asana in this way, but if we want to go deeper, and begin to use yoga as our spiritual practice, our time of the mat must also be a practice of letting go of what we think we know about our bodies and ourselves. We must cultivate a deeper awareness through feeling into the experience and as a result, creating an internal experience of yoga.
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