On duendes, reification and the paralyzing power of destructive thinking

[et_pb_section admin_label="section"][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="left" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid"]One day recently while we were sitting in our house visiting with our neighbor kids, I asked one of them to come outside with me to water the plants. They usually love doing any little chore I ask them, so I was very surprised when they said no. “Why not?” I asked them. They huddled for a moment amongst themselves and then one of the older ones answered. “Hay duendes atras en tu corral, Molly. No queremos salir, tenemos miedo.” Well, this was certainly a first. They spend an awful lot of time in my backyard, but today they decided that there were goblins or elves back there and those goblins were scary. “No es cierto, chicos!” I reassured them. “Don’t worry, there are no goblins in the backyard.” But they insisted. In fact, one of them was so afraid that she wouldn’t even leave through the front door, the door she had entered without incident just moments before, and in fact hundreds of times before. But today there was a new narrative – and it included malevolent little creatures just waiting to get them the second they wandered outside of the confines of the house. One of the older girls often acts as “the brave one.” Finally she insisted to the others that, although yes, there were definitely duendes in the yard, she was not afraid of them and would continue to do whatever she felt like doing – damn the risk of being caught or bothered by one of the presumably evil elves. The others, while not quite as sure of themselves, revered her bravery and decided that they too would take a chance in going outside, despite the threat the goblins posed. The littlest one, however, could not be convinced, and at some point I had to be firm. “Listen, there are no such thing as elves, and you have nothing to be afraid of.” It only seemed right that someone, someone with more life experience, would tell the truth. It was great that Alejandra was showing her fearlessness, but in fact, her fearlessness was in response to a threat that did not actually exist. As the adult in the group, I saw it as my duty to quell their fears, not just because they were braver than the duendes, but because the duendes , in fact, were not real. It occurred to me that the amount of fear they each expressed about the elves was exactly in correlation to their own size and how close they each were to their own reality of the elves. While I can’t say that they believed me right away, they did seem to take some comfort in the definitiveness with which I disputed the reality of the duendes, and in just a few days, the talk of these evil elves all but disappeared, like little goblins in the night. The whole thing struck me as really funny, but also as a stroke of luck. Since way back in August, I had been trying to think of an example of something that we insist is real, when in fact it is nothing but a distortion of our collective consciousness, and how when we continue to talk about it as if it is real, we give it power, and in many cases, that power is ultimately fear inducing and destructive. I had been rolling this over in my mind since the summer when I happened upon an article in a yoga magazine where a prominent teacher was talking about learning to love her belly. She talked about her insecurities about her body and her curves, and then about her own journey to acceptance. To highlight this achievement of acceptance, she included a photo of herself, kneeling on her bed in profile, wearing tiny undies and covering her breasts, her newly accepted belly on display. The thing is, the photo looked like a Victoria’s Secret ad, and the offending belly looked like the tiny pooch we mostly equate with “sexy,” especially as her blond hair tumbled down over her shoulders. I was confused and irritated, especially with the accompanying comments. “Thank you for your bravery and honesty,” “Thank you for showing your vulnerability,” “You really helped me to accept my own body,” and others in the same vein. It was still in my mind a couple hours later as I sat by the pool at my hotel, and struck up a conversation with a veteran who talked about how much she believed yoga might help her with her own struggles with arthritis and PTSD. “I am sure yoga would help me, but I just never feel comfortable in yoga classes. I don’t know why.” Well, I sure know why, I thought. Because the photos you see of people doing yoga tell you that the practice is not for you. That yes, it may be a practice of self-acceptance, but that acceptance is for bodies that yours will never look like. I kept thinking about the article and kept thinking of all the things the teacher could have, and in my mind, should have talked about. If she had the platform, and people looked up to her and her knowledge of yoga, maybe she should be offering a completely different narrative- one that is much truer to yoga and that talks about how false thinking causes suffering. I could have written a much better article, I thought. While I understood that what the teacher was trying to show – just how deeply this idea of our own imperfection runs, so much so that even someone who in fact perfectly matched our culturally defined idea of beauty could feel insecure – I also thought she should have used her platform to open up a new narrative - one where we fundamentally reject the argument itself, not simply “learning to accept ourselves” despite our flaws. This line of thinking reminds me of Alejandra’s proclamation about the duendes. She wasn’t afraid of them and would not be intimidated by them. But in this proclamation of courage, she unwittingly asserted their reality. Around the same time this summer when I was rolling this would be article over in my mind, I was sitting at the restaurant of one of my dear friends here in Mexico. She asked me what I wanted for breakfast and when I told her I’d like just a plate of fruit she responded, “How can you be so big when you eat so little?” And in that little statement, all of my own conditioning came together to create an outsized, albeit internal, reaction. I remember feeling my face flush with shame and then anger. I lost my appetite altogether and decided I just wanted to go home. I had a meditation scheduled for that night, but in that moment, I no longer wanted anyone coming to my house, and in fact, I decided that I was ashamed of my Spanish and could not give the meditation that evening at all, because I might have to give it in both English and Spanish and who the hell did I think I was anyway? Self-doubt flooded my body and mind. I went home and lay in my bed. Sasha came in to comfort me. “Molly, if you want, we can start exercising more.” His words, meant to be reassuring, were like daggers to my fragile sense of self. How much more could I exercise? How much less could I eat? I knew that if I wanted to lose weight I could, but that it would have to be the singular focus of my life. I already exercised all day every day – yoga, swimming, biking, walking – and ate only pure unprocessed food that I made myself. I didn’t care about losing weight, I thought I was happy and fit. But in that moment, my conditioning cut through all sense. Unless I was thinner – meaning unless I made an obsession with my physical body the center point of my life – I would not be truly worthy, and all of my other gifts, including my focus on learning and speaking Spanish, would be irrelevant. This narrative, one in which we our essential worth is inextricably tied to our body expression, is so deeply culturally ingrained that it has created both individual and collective samskaras – those mental impressions, not unlike neural pathways – that, through a focus on the physical body, have the ability to erode and call into question our very value itself. What could I do? I could focus on weight loss, or like the teacher in the article I read, I could learn to accept my body, conventional narrative be damned. But maybe there was another option. Maybe there was something else I could do, as a community leader and as a yoga teacher. Maybe rather than simply learning to “love my curves,” and rather than proving through photos and words that my body was strong and beautiful exactly as it is, I could fundamentally reject the narrative itself. I could opt out of conversations and perpetuation of the very idea that a particular body shape and size can be equated with essential worth. This would definitely be more in line with yoga philosophy, and a much more radical notion than the one of self-love despite the constant message of my own worthiness in exact proportion to my body size and shape. The sage Patanjali, in his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, talks about five types of thoughts and describes them as being “klishta” or “aklishta,” “colored” or “uncolored.” It is suggested in the sutras that even the awareness of our thoughts being “colored,” (also said to be painful or impure) will help us immeasurably in our quest for inner freedom. The five types of thoughts themselves include “pranama,” or correct knowledge, “viparyaya,” or incorrect knowledge, “vikalpa,” fantasy or imagination, “nidra,” or dreamless sleep and “smirti” or recollection. While we could talk about any of these and how they affect the way we approach life and how they can be shaped through our dedication to our yoga practice, in considering the collective damage we do through our illusion of a “perfect” body, it seems that exploring pranama, and its correlate “viparyaya” makes the most sense. Vipayara is said to be false knowledge formed by perceiving a thing as being other than what it really is. (Swamij.com) This makes me think of a similar concept, shared with me by one of my students, Jason Benchimol, who also happens to be a professor of philosophy. When I asked him about this very topic, he wrote, “it sounds like you are talking about reification, or the tendency to treat as, or 'make' real that which is not actually real.  To reify something is essentially to treat as, or 'make' real that which is not actually real. “ He continued, “If this isn't resonating, then perhaps the problem you are trying to address has something to do with the way our ordinary manner of talking about certain (non-real) things implicitly 'bestows' upon them a kind of reality (in our minds, at least) that we rarely notice, and hence rarely bother to question. The sentence "I've learned to love myself despite my ugly belly" seems to logically imply the sentence "My belly is ugly". For better or worse, the logical implication is 'hidden' in the original sentence, so unless we are actively looking for it, we are unlikely to think to raise any questions about it. Language has a way of 'duping' us into thinking that certain things are real before we ever have a chance to raise any deeper questions.” Patanjali also teaches us that there are there are three ways of gaining correct knowledge (pramana). They are through perception, inference, and testimony or verbal communication from others who have knowledge. In the discussion of what a “good” or “beautiful” body is, we might notice that this is in fact an abstraction made real. What proof do we have? For starters, we can see that a standard of beauty is completely tied to specific cultures and time periods at a minimum. We know that there are other countries and cultures that value very different ideals of beauty than we. For example, the super skinny body that we fetishize in contemporary American culture is very different from what was idealized in the eighteen hundreds, or what might be considered beautiful halfway around the world. In fact, as I was mulling this whole idea over, I recalled a time when I was out at dinner with two friends and colleagues, one of whom was part of the queer community, and another who was a longtime member of an intentional community for caregivers. I remember ordering food with them and being refreshingly surprised that they just ordered their food, instead of agonizing over what and how much to eat, and then talking about it and making apologies for their choices or plans on how they would make up for their dietary transgressions. They laughed when I expressed to them my delight in their ease of ordering and eating. I realized that I was the only one of the three of us who was so accustomed to those kinds of conversations.  I realized further, that it seemed like communities who were already marginalized seemed less affected by the ideal. It occurred to me that perhaps because I was the “closest” to the ideal, I was under the most tyranny. The others, although not unaffected by the prevailing narrative, were less subjugated to it. It reminds me again of the duendes. The littlest kids were most scared of the imagined elves, perhaps because they were most like them. So what does all this mean for our yoga practice and for our own understanding of and participation in the conversation about food, weight and body image? I feel like everywhere I go, every yoga retreat or conference I attend, there is the same conversation. What to eat, how to eat, how we are going to make up for “eating too much,” how our bodies have changed, how we can learn to accept them. I’m tired of this conversation. I’m tired, at 49 years old, of still being blind-sided by simple observations about how much I eat or how my own body has changed. And I’m tired of reading about people who have learned to “accept their body.” While I am happy that they have apparently found some reprieve from their own suffering, I’m tired of the underlying notion that there is something to “accept.” When I was with the kids talking about the duendes, at some point I had to stand up to allay their fears and appease their suffering by telling them that their idea was quite simply not true. Not that they should learn to be brave in the face of the evil elves, but that the elves themselves do not exist. It would be wrong and false of me to allow them to suffer more by pretending that the duendes were real. I feel the same way about the conversations about food and body image. Perhaps, as leaders in the field of contemporary, or Americanized yoga, we can do the same. Rather than posting photos of ourselves and how we now “accept our body,” we can reject the narrative in the first place. We can practice ahimsa, we can reduce suffering, but we can at the same time, practice and offer other tools, including the ability to discern colored from uncolored thoughts, and to seek and promote “correct knowledge.” If one way that we come to correct knowledge is through “verbal communication from those who have knowledge” then it is surely our duty as leaders, ones who are believed to “have knowledge,” to provide verbal communication that is truthful. In fact, then, it is our duty to refrain from even the conversation about weight and body image. To begin to break down the destructive narrative that creates self-doubt and unworthiness in the first place, we must stop engaging in the conversation, stop saying that something is real, when we know it is not. We need a powerful, self-assured community to create the internal and external revolutions most needed now to create the kinds of real change this world needs. Our energy is depleted and squandered on this obsession with body image. If I need the kids to feel empowered and self-assured to help me clean up my yard, I would be much better off insisting that duendes don’t exist at all, rather than telling them they don’t have to be scared of them, that they won’t hurt them or that I can protect them. If we need people of all ages to feel confident and valued so that they can best contribute to our collective evolution, we would all be much better off refraining from a false conversation, a specious argument, than by reassuring and soothing ourselves by deciding to accept ourselves in spite of our perceived physical flaws. Our yoga practice is powerful, when approached with discernment. It has the ability to dig out the root cause of our suffering, rather than just soothe the symptoms. Let’s choose a radical shift. Let’s reject false knowledge in favor of a collective consciousness that is far more intelligent, far more discerning. Let’s not waste our energy on fearing or chasing duendes, nor on simply“loving ourselves” or learning to “accept ourselves.” As a community, let’s give this gift to ourselves and others during this season of giving: a radical shift in conversation, a healthy and wholesome relationship to food, and a deep and abiding love and wonder for our varied physical expressions.         [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]