Real Results for Real Bodies Right NOW!

I wrote this piece last summer and posted it on the Innerspace Yoga website. Thought I'd recycle it since it's still timely.

 Today, school has let out in our community. Although it won’t feel like summer in Indy until the race is over next week, here we are at the beginning of June. That means inundations of media coverage surrounding our thighs, our rolls, and our cellulite.  Can a sister get a pedicure this month without having to see reminders in every magazine that swimsuit season is upon us?!?  Worse yet, it means actually having to uncover said thighs, rolls and cellulite.

        While there is certainly no shortage of coverage for improving our so-called beach bodies with slimming exercises and horrible little crash diets (that make us so cranky Shark Week looks like a walk in the park), we want results NOW!  We can get entire virtual albums sent to our iPods fifteen seconds after they drop, we can get dinner for 6 delivered in less that 30 minutes. We can send a man to the moon or send pictures from our phone to the other side of the country, so why the hell is there no way to attain a perfect, or at least suitable body, in ten minutes?

    

All the yoga in the world isn’t going to make me less a product of my own culture; for one thing I still read fashion magazines and I still want instant gratification. I want my Starbucks, my iTunes, and my peace and tranquility NOW, just like the next broad. 

        Well into my thirties I’ve realized in my neurotic, narcissistic mind it’s entirely possible to have peace NOW about my body and its daily aging just like it’s possible to have peace NOW when I’m on the mat in posture. It’s possible because the peace is already there. It’s there next to the dimples on the sides of my thighs, and beside the yellow bruise on my shin, and within the copious, bluish capillaries that weren’t there last summer. The peace is within my quadriceps when I am walking along the edge of the pool as much as it is there when I am using my sizable thighs to power myself up from the floor into Virabradasana.  The peace is within my rounded hips, just as it was there when I cushioned my baby on my left as I walked us through the world until I thought my legs would crumble.

     So if you don’t like the way your body looks in your swimsuit, slap on some bronzer, wrap a sarong around your waist and focus instead on what your body has been through and what it can do, whether you find yourself on your yoga mat or on the beach this summer. You were totally perfect before you even opened up this month’s issue of Whatever and started berating your body. Namaste! Love, kelly.