Hellchick

04.02.04:: yoga, or how i learned to stop worrying and love my feet
[yoga]

If someone had ever asked me to choose a few words to describe myself throughout my childhood and into my adult life, "graceful" would never have been one of them. I'm the kind of girl who gets unexplained bruises on her extremities. It's not unusual, for instance, for me to be toweling off and find a bruise roughly the same size as the state of Rhode Island on my shin. All nice and purply and bluey and yellowy. Eyyechk. I'm the kind of girl who trips over nonexistent lips in seamless floors.

It's been over six months now since I started doing yoga and it's amazing how much of a change there's been in this regard. I'm not exactly a ballet dancer these days, but yoga has instilled a muted sense of grace and calculated movement that has really changed how I feel about my body. Well, not so much about my body -- I have a fairly normal level of self-esteem about that, with a healthy dash of neurosis -- but more about how I feel in my body.

Part of this is how I look at my feet. You see, I wear a size 11. For you men reading this, it means I probably have bigger feet than you do (a women's size 11 is rougly a men's size 9.5). My size 11 boats have always been a source of embarrassment, albeit a small one, but enough to make me feel like I'm constantly tripping over my own body. As if the whole frame is too big for the person trying to maneuver it.

But I now have a new outlook on my body, and it all started with my feet. When I'm in Uttanasana now, my head nearly touches my feet. My feet feel thoroughly rooted to my mat, like I'm standing on a solid pedestal. And when I'm off the mat and walking through the apartment, I feel like I'm actually stepping, not just falling forward in perpetual anticipation. I find myself standing in the kitchen waiting for hot water to heat or folding laundry or reading on the couch and looking down at my feet, wiggling my toes, and feeling them squish into the floor. My whole body moves more slowly now when I'm just moving around, more calculating. I feel more graceful.

And I've lost an inch off my hips in the last couple of months, which was a total surprise to me!