I was in an abusive relationship. I was beaten, starved, drugged, screamed at, and humiliated. I was told that I was fat, ugly, and disgusting. I was tortured, neglected, and deprived of love. I was abused, physically, emotionally, and verbally.
I remember a pivotal moment a few years ago when I realized that I was in this abusive relationship. I was sitting on my yoga mat in my yoga teacher training course bending forward trying to touch my toes. I couldn’t go very far before the pain in my hips radiated upward and then tears started to run down my face as I sat there in shear agony. I kept thinking “How can I be a yoga teacher if I can’t even touch my toes!” I looked around and saw my classmates able to touch their toes and it only made me want to reach farther and to push deeper to get there. The pain didn’t stop me. It was actually a pain I knew quite well and had learned to endure, ignore, and suppress. It was the pain inflicted on me by my abuser. She was sitting there with me on my yoga mat in the omnipresent way that she has existed in my life for so long. It was in that moment that I realized that I was in this abusive relationship with myself.
I remember when the abuse started: I was in junior high. That’s when I first starved myself because I thought I was too fat. I also remember, around that same time, getting ready to go to school when my hair wasn’t just perfect. I would fill with rage and start crying. Then I would start hitting my face and slapping it and scratching it. I would bang my head up against the wall and hit myself with my hairbrush. My face would redden and swell and blotches would form. I would look back in the mirror and hate myself even more then run to my room crying in defeat.
I existed like this for most of my teenage years until I found a new outlet – school. I hadn’t cared too much about it until I hit university and then I started to thrive. I finished my undergraduate degree, then my master’s, and even my doctorate degree. It was during the latter degree when I discovered caffeine, sleep deprivation, alcohol, and anti-anxiety meds.
My body kept trying to tell me it was suffocating under the pressure. But I kept telling it to shut up. It was getting tired; but I had things to do. I started sleeping less and drinking more coffee so I could keep up, learn more, and be good enough to be a doctor. My heart was racing and pounding all the time and I felt anxious. My body was shaking inside, shaking with fear that it could not perform under these circumstances. It was so scared of dying and rightfully so. Instead of nurturing it, I told it to shut up and fed it anti-anxiety drugs and drank more wine to fall asleep.
During that same period of my life I was running a lot - training for the university varsity hockey team that I played for in the winters and the competitive ultimate team that I played in the summers. It was too much for my body but I made it run harder, faster, longer, and more often to be good and fast enough. I was in so much pain that I could barely walk or even sit for too long. My body was trying to tell me that it needed a break. It needed to rest, again. But, I didn’t listen. Instead, I fed it ibuprophen and when that stopped working, I fed it Vioxx, the drug that was later taken off the market because it was causing cardiovascular complications. The headaches and dizziness I felt from it were of little consequence to me. I was disconnecting from my body.
In fact, I became so disconnected that I lost a sense of my own body. One time, after being tagged in an old photo posted on facebook, I starred at the photo for almost a full minute trying to find myself among the group of 4, but I couldn’t see myself. At first I thought I was mistakenly tagged but then I noticed that I was the one standing there right in the middle of the small group in a thin, muscular body. At first I was upset that I no longer looked like that, upset that I lost that discipline, that determination, and that drive, and upset that I was fat, ugly, and disgusting, yet again.
But then I realized that I was looking at a photo of myself during the summer of pain, the summer of Vioxx, the summer when I would walk home from the sports fields in absolute pain hunched over because my low back and hips were locked, the summer when I would wake up early the next morning and go for a run, ignoring and further aggravating my pain and continuing the cycle.
My body was speaking to me – yelling actually - but I didn’t stop to listen. I never stopped to listen. I was living in a body that I didn’t know and couldn’t hear, a body that I took for granted, beat up, intoxicated, food deprived, pushed to extremes, and hated. I was living in a body I called fat, ugly, and disgusting, despite evidence to the contrary.
I remember another picture that haunted and confused me. I was in Mexico with a group of friends for the weekend. We were all wearing our bathing suits, hanging around our beachfront house, and in and out of the water all day and night. I remember feeling good in my body and comfortable in my suit and skin - a rare but welcomed occasion. Someone took a picture with a digital camera and when we all gathered around after to see it I only looked at myself. I remember thinking “yup, I look good. Not fat, not ugly, not disgusting. All good!” But then I remember the confusion I felt a few months later when the picture came back to me framed as a memento of the weekend. When I saw the same picture again, of a different mind, one less comfortable in its skin, I screamed “OMG! I’m so fat! I’m so ugly! I’m so disgusting! How did I let myself be seen like that! How was I walking around all weekend in that body!”
I was confused. I was confused about how I saw one thing one day and another thing another day. I started to question my mind, its perceptions, and its sense of reality. I started to wonder about the truth of my mind compared to the truth of my body. While on my yoga mat I heard my teacher say “listen to your body”. I didn’t know what that meant, at first, but then, in the midst of my pain, in the midst of my tears, I embodied that wisdom. I heard my body speak! I understood the message of the pain and I stopped! I stopped reaching for my toes, I stopped pushing, I stopped yearning, I just stopped and I woke up. I woke up to bear witness to this abuse and to the complexity of it. I woke up to bear witness to a relationship that was dysfunctional but needed to be reconciled and needed to be mended because we were stuck with each other, at least for awhile. I woke up to the opportunity to come back to my body, to live inside of it, to befriend it, to explore it, and to reconnect with it. I woke up to hear the soft whispers of my body’s delicate voice asking to be cared for. I woke up to a wisdom and intelligence so deep it turned my tears of pain into tears of joy and awe.
“Listen to your body”, she said.
And now I do. My body had been speaking to me for so long but I am now able to hear it. I am now able to hear its story, to experience its life force, to understand its wisdom, and to see, and be, its beauty.
