Beauty Right Where You Are

I was at the gym this weekend, plugging away on the elliptical machine. While I was flailing my arms and legs back and forth, I could hear this heavy beat and saw that there was some kind of hip hop dance aerobics class going on. The instructor had orange sneakers, wore a bandanna and had the most amazing dance moves.  But the women in the class all seemed to be struggling.  They spent a lot of time watching each other and pulling their shirts down over the bottoms. I imagine it would be hard to find your groove when you are watching how someone else does it or while trying to cover your ass.

I gave up on group exercise a while ago for that very reason. When I’m in a group, I get caught up in watching other people, and seeing how strong and capable they seem makes me feel a bit weak and incapable. For me, it’s better to work out alone where I am only fighting myself.

I make an exception to the group exercise rule for yoga. Doing yoga relaxes me and stretches me and makes me feel whole. So when I saw that my favorite yoga teacher Diane was teaching a class that followed the hip hop dance class, I got off the elliptical and joined her class.

The last class I took with Diane was called “restorative” yoga, where we did poses like piling blankets under our arms and legs, laying on the floor and breathing deeply for five minutes. This yoga class, it turns out, was not restorative but, well, let’s call it the really-difficult-advanced yoga class for women who know all the poses and have practiced them for years.

Fortunately for me, I was in the front of the class, right in front of the instructor. So as we moved from one difficult pose to the next, she could point out where I was going wrong, (lift your hips off the floor!) and I then could attempt that in front of the whole class. Restorative!

We moved to our pinnacle pose called Wild Thing, pictured above. The instructor asked “Who knows wild thing and can demonstrate it for the class?”  The swan of a woman who was on the mat next to me raised her hand. I’d been watching her for most of the class, and she was amazing - strong and graceful. Her half pigeon practically flew off the floor. She flowed into the Wild Thing pose, moving from her front to her side, balancing on one hand and her feet. She ended with her body in the air, reaching back and stretching. To me, it looked impossible.

But I tired it, with the modification of keeping one foot in front of me. As I was stretching, or really, as I felt my muscles twitching with pain, I watched the Swan next to me, holding her prefect full wild thing and breathing deeply.

The instructor Diane looked down at me in that wild thing moment and gently said,  “You don’t need to look at anyone else. There’s beauty right where you are.”

Beauty right where you are.

And for whatever reason, I started to cry and moved in child’s pose so no one would see (and so I could rest my wild thing muscles.)

I think I cried because those were powerful words to hear when you’re in a class that feels beyond you. But as the week has gone on, I am beginning to live into the power of what it means to find the beauty right where you are.

We live in a world where we’re constantly looking around to see how we’re doing. We find our place not as how we see ourselves, but how we compare to others. Who has the bigger car, the most followers, the nicer house. Who’s wearing the coolest clothes, has the best hair and smoothest skin. Who has the highest achieving kids, who volunteers at school the most, and who’s the just the nicest person.

It’s exhausting. Because no matter now hard we try, there’s always going to be someone who is richer, thinner, prettier, nicer, better at yoga, than we are.  When our sense of who we are comes from someplace besides ourselves, we’ll never be enough.

Worst of all, we’ll miss all the beauty that is us. If we are spending our time seeing how all we compare with others, we miss the chance to fill ourselves full of the things that give us our beauty - our triumphs, our mistakes, our connections, our lives. Our own, beautiful lives.

There’s beauty right here. Right here, where you are right now. See it?