Skin and Bones

I just finished an almost year long Invisalign experience to remedy my crooked teeth. At the beginning of the process, the dentist takes X-Rays of one's teeth and bite to enable the creation of the trays that will start to straighten out the teeth. I'm not sure if anyone has had the opportunity to see an actual X-Ray of their head, but I must say, it was eye opening!! I recall looking up at the pictures, once they were taken, and gasping. I was a skeleton! I had a skull- the very same skull I would hold and turn over in anatomy classes during all my yoga teacher trainings. The same skull we see all over the place on Halloween.

Now I'm not exactly sure what I imagined was beneath my excessively moisturized skin and plucked brows and made up face. Intellectually I'm quite aware of what's beneath my skin. And yet, looking at that image was an immediate and startling reminder of what we are and what we aren't. It is an inescapable truth, when we are looking at our skull, that what animates us has nothing to do with the components of our physical body. Because, underneath the particulars of our visage, we look quite the same. When we take away the essence of our smile, the sound of our laughter, the weight and value of our thoughts, nothing much separates us.

Yoga always teaches us that we are never the things that are impermanent, no matter how strongly we are invested in that idea. What can be changed or eliminated cannot be who we truly are. We certainly cannot be our bodies or our looks because that is merely the costume that is hiding the skeleton. Who we are is wholly dependent on what is left behind when all the impermanent factors are eliminated.

It is that reminder that brings me back home, over and over, to the practice of investigating the permanent and the True. It can either feel depressing or bring us solace that, no matter how we feel about this body we occupy, it is nowhere near the sum total of our worth or the meaning of who we are. I love the practice that reroutes me back towards the meaning of why I'm here, rather than the distraction of what I'm sold. The love and the living out of our truth happens under these skin and bones.