I recently participated in an instagram challenge for twelve days. Twelve days, twelve poses, twelve days of dreaded hashtags. It’s ironic, considering I’ve been known to say that I would never, ever particate in said challenge. Alas, I was drawn in by the possibility of free leggings. Okay, okay, I also was hoping that it would encourage me to spend some time on my mat everyday in the midst of the busy holiday season. . . but really it was the leggings. I’m weak when it comes to leggings. Spoiler alert, I didn’t win the leggings. I did win some lessons.
I set myself some rules first. One of the rules being that I needed to actually practice yoga that day and not just snap a picture of myself in a pose and call it good. Second, I could only take two pictures. I had to post the best of the two. This lead me to my first lesson.
I hate taking pictures of myself in yoga postures. All the good work of drawing my awareness to my inner landscape and all that yumminess completely fell apart when I knew that a picture was about to be snapped. My focus would become external and all of a sudden I was thinking things like, “is this my good side?” and “suck it in, suck it in!” My alignment and form became secondary and asthetics became the goal. My balance got all screwed up too.
I hate looking at pictures of myself in yoga postures. I have a long and complicated relationship with body image, but that’s another blog for another day. Suffice it to say, when I looked at the pictures, I wasn’t thinking “wow, look how strong that warrior 3 is!” I was thinking more along the lines of “is that my low belly pooch just hanging there?” Now, it could be said that herein lies the lesson. I should learn to look at pictures of myself and love my body, love myself and blah, blah, blah. I get it. I’ve heard it. That doesn’t work for me. What works for me is losing the mirrors and the cameras and being more fully in my body as often as possible. I think we’ve become too obsessed with our own image these days anyway, but I digress. I don’t practice yoga in front of mirrors or cameras. Ever. I know that they can be a fabulous tool for alignment. I’ve heard this anyway. Nope, not for me. It just pulls my awareness out, away from where I’d like it to be. I rely on my own inner awareness of my body’s position in space. I also rely on really good teachers to help me out.
I also learned that while image can be a powerful thing, it’s a ridiculously small piece of the whole. The image of my tree pose is like reading one word of a really great short story. I love words, they can be powerful. But on their own, they don’t really do much for me. You can’t see my whole practice, stumbles, triumphs and all, from one picture. You can’t see how happy I felt in child’s pose that day, or how smooth my sun salutations have gotten. You can’t see the hip opening work I did, to prepare the bent leg to be as open as it is in my tree pose. What if Adele only sang ‘Hallo’ and then you didn’t get the rest of the song?
I worry that, as teachers, when we post pictures of ourselves in advanced poses (which I didn’t do, another reason I selected this particular challenge) we may scare off people who want to try yoga but look at these images and think, “I could never do that.” I don’t want to take away from those practitioners who post pictures of themselves in advanced poses. They have a beautiful practice and every right to show glimpses of the work that they do. Maybe, on the flip side, they draw people in by inspiring them. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of inspiring I want to do.
I did have some fun with the challenge. My daughters got involved. The youngest often posed with me and the oldest became my photographer. It kind of became a family activity and I always enjoy when my family and my yoga interweave. I learned quite a bit about myself, which is the whole purpose of this crazy journey anyway. But I think on the whole, this was my first and last instagram challenge. Probably. Until the next time I’m lured in with the possibility of free leggings.
