I had this experience on my recent bra shopping trip. As I was at the register ready to buy my new bra, the salesperson asked me if I had looked for a bra with padding. I laughed and said to her, "My goodness no! I'm already a double D, I don't think I need padding!" She smiled and said, "Well, it's actually because of how self-conscious women are of their nipples. They want to make sure they are never showing." Whoa. OK, I didn't even know that. I told her a funny story about my recent trip to India where I tried on a new silk salwar and couldn't help but notice that my nipples were very attentive to the material, and I just laughed and wondered how my very sweet and deferential tailor Shiva might be scandalized. But it never occurred to me to feel particularly ashamed or embarrassed - isn't that just a part of a woman's body?

We know that pain is an inevitable fact of life. But the truth is that we can differentiate pain from suffering. Certain events of our lives—a miscarriage, a lost job, a heartbreak, a sleepless night—are indisputably painful. And yet we can learn to bear these challenges with grace when we are offered opportunities to just be with them—not to try to change them, not to push them away, not to fear them, but to simply accept them as a natural part of the ebb and flow of life itself. Just as joy comes and goes, so does despair. This is a lesson that we can practice again and again, until we find that our natural reaction to pain is witnessing it, accepting it, and creating a spacious container to soften its hard edges. This takes practice and determination, but it is indeed entirely possible.

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.

But then, with Ram Dass, feeling so deeply loved and valued in my own process, I get to be in a completely different and profoundly humble role. I get to do even more of the deep inside looking that I already demand of myself and ignite in my students, but it’s different with him. With my beloved Ram Dass, I feel like a little kid. There is no pressure, only opportunity.