Love Your Body Blog Part 9: Schmooze your inner demon.

Sit down and get to know your inner demons. How do they like their tea? What’s their favorite: muffins, scones, or doughnuts? Svetlana, my inner demon/gymnastics coach, loves a strong Russian tea, and has a particular weakness for those little packaged madelines you can buy at the counter at Starbucks. Give her a four pack of those, and she’s perfectly happy to settle in and chat for a while. Get out your journal and write about your inner demon. What do they look like? What motivates them? What is stuck up their butt?

Set the stage. Where are you meeting? At a sunny park, a bustling café, or a peaceful living room? You’re welcome to use my cozy little cottage [from the previous post!]. Let your imagination go, and be surprised at what you find out. Once you and your inner demon have taken a comfortable seat, just listen to them for a while, pay attention and write. Ask them probing questions, like you’re interviewing them for the Rolling Stone magazine cover article of the year. Be objective and interested. This is your unconscious you’re talking to; you can mine some really juicy stuff out of it.

Then it’s your turn. Take a deep breath and tell your inner demon what you need from it. I need you to chill out. I need you to be nicer to me. I need you to turn down the volume, and the drama. Dude! Tell them why. Even enlist their help. I need your help in treating my body with more respect. I want to be better friends with my body, and I need your support. Address any concerns they might have. Reassure them, you’re not ditching them, you just need them to tone it down.

Suggest a getaway in an exotic locale… where do demons like to go on vacation? Depending on how long you’ve struggled with your inner demon, they probably haven’t had a vacation in years, possibly decades. They have a lot of vacation days saved up. And no, you won’t change the locks while they’re gone, but they will have to live by a few ground rules when they get back. No more put downs, no more undermining, no more punching bag. Set good boundaries. Explain to them they are entitled to their opinion about things, but that you won’t be taking their advice so much. If they look at you skeptically, assure them that while it might take some time for you to tune them out, you’re set on your path of transformation.

Call a truce. No more war on the body, no more war on your self-esteem, no more war on your well being. By the time you’ve listened carefully to your inner demon, they feel acknowledged and validated; you might be amazed at how reasonable they can be. Tell them you’re glad to have met them, have a good trip, and show them graciously to the door.

Congratulations, you’ve met your inner demon face to face, and lived to tell the tale. But this is just the beginning. Perhaps after this initial meeting you’ll find your internal radio picks up the inner critic station less and less, as if you’re driving out of range of the transmission tower. Some days the station might come in loud and clear, and some days it might be full of static. Be patient. Our old habits of self-criticism don’t dissolve easily. Let them dissolve one drop at a time.

Next post: The anti-demon---your inner best friend

Love Your Body Part 8: Inner Demon Fashion Mistakes

When I first started doing lots of yoga, I pushed myself hard. I shamelessly (but subtly of course) competed with whomever was on the mat next to me, pulling myself harder into each forward bend as if the enlightenment trophy was going to be awarded to the most hard-working yogi at the end of class. If that didn’t take me past my edge, I competed with myself, all to the inner chorus of “Come on, Kimber, don’t be such a wuss. Sure it hurts, but change hurts, baby! Suck it up.” You can imagine the inevitable results. I injured myself. Not just once, not twice, but over and over again. For a while I convinced myself it was the teacher. “That teacher was bad,” I’d say to myself, groaning over my strained knees. “I’m never going back to that class!” Eventually, I ran out of teachers to blame my pain on, and had the late-arriving epiphany… I was hurting myself.

Hearing the story of Buddha and Mara (see Part 7 above), I started to get curious about my inner pushy voice. Whose voice was it? Where did it come from? Immediately I suspected my stern Marine colonel grandfather whose approval I never earned. Or my middle school softball coach who pretended he was a Marine colonel. Or, even more likely, my inner anorexic, in her full glory, skinny as a rail, anxious with hunger, tanned to raw hide perfection, cheeks gaunt, lipstick perfect, glaring at me in utter distaste down her too-narrow nose.

Rolling out my yoga mat, I lay down, closed my eyes, and contemplated. For the first time ever, I called to my inner demon, “Come out, come out, wherever you are….” Never before had I asked the voice to come to me, it had always arrived unbidden, unwelcomed; right at the moment I needed to back off, it would tell me to push harder. I imagined myself at the table of a cozy little cottage, a tea setting with thick mugs and cookies in the center. The faint sound of footsteps crunched on the pathway outside, and I nervously rose to answer the door. I took ahold of the doorknob and pulled the door wide. For a moment, I thought I’d made a mistake. This was not my inner anorexic, or my grandfather, or any character from my past. This woman was tall and thick, dressed in an ill-fitting seventies-style blue sweatsuit tugging at the seams. She didn't look like a gymnast... more powerful, like a hammer thrower. Her hair was pulled back severely from her face into a tight blonde-gray ponytail, her soft cheeks reddened from the cold, and perhaps too much tipple. She barely glanced at me as she strode through the door, intent on warming herself around the cup of tea and sampling the cookies.

I sat down and watched her as she settled into her repast, amazed. Her name, it turns out, was Svetlana, and she was a Russian gymnastics coach. I’d never done much gymnastics as a kid, and as a Russian history major in college, had a deep love for all things Russian. How had she had emerged, fully formed from my unconscious? But there she was.

Slow understanding dawned on me. She wasn’t trying to make me look like her, or be her. Pushing me was her job, that was all. She’d much rather be here enjoying cookies and tea by the fire than standing in a drafty gymnasium yelling at me and furtively taking swigs of vodka from her flask. She had her own weaknesses, failings, and resentments, having nothing to do with me. For all these years I’d taken her voice as the voice of authority in my life, and in my yoga practice, and why?

“Svetlana, thanks for coming to tea,” I said. “Can you please use a quieter tone of voice from now on? And by the way, I’m not going to listen to you as much anymore.” Raising a pale eyebrow, she shrugged her shoulders and nodded her thanks, grabbing one more cookie on her way out the door.

The next time I found myself in yoga class, I felt the familiar urge to pull myself into a deep forward bend using excessive force and insufficient respect for my back. Briefly, the interior of the cottage flickered in my mind, and I heard Svetlana’s sneakers crunching up the path. Her hand rattled the doorknob for a moment. Taking a deep breath, I waved the image away. Letting go of the pose, I settled back into it with a sense of clarity. I would practice alone on my mat tonight. Svetlana could have the night off.

Next post: Calling a truce with your own demons