Rewilding The Yoga Body

Recently a fb image of a young, white, lithe yogini balancing in an extremely deep back bend disturbed me. Not because she was just another example of the yoga Barbie -er yoga body –which saturates my yoga feed, but because she was posing in a sun-dappled forest grove accompanied by the hashtags “Fantastic #yoga” and “#rewilding inspiration.” The yoga body  is  a pop culture vernacular term for the privileged, exclusionary icon of corporate culture which is used to sell everything from yoga pants, water bottles, ” natural” foods , wild teas  and hiking boots.

So c’mon. Isn’t rewilding about returning to a more natural, undomesticated state? How can an image designed to keep us buying and  striving to achieve artificial, commercial ideals be associated with what is wild, free and unsullied by human intervention – exactly?

Many ‘rewilders’ see the Paleolithic as a time when earth, its flora and fauna, and humans existed in a true primeval state. And if we look to our stone-age ancestors its pretty clear ‘the yoga body’ just wasn’t in. For tens of thousands of years, painted on cave walls and carved into stone, the female body was depicted as abundantly fleshed – breasts, buttocks and bellies not only large, but mountainous.

I’m not arguing that this is the body ‘au naturale’, it’s an image of its time, place and culture as much as the yoga body is of our ours. I merely want to make the point that equating the yoga body with the wild female body of our ancestors is just a stretch.

Now I have no idea what a ‘wild’ body actually looks like, but I doubt it would look like a tattooed Tara Stiles wearing a loincloth. And I’d wager that any of the programs and retreats that promise to rewild your body in 30 days (yes they are out there) will just leave you working your yoga body ever harder to measure up.

I’m with my pal Jennifer Matsui when she writes “For “inspirational”, forget hot babes doing yoga poses at sunset on a cliff, and think Kabuki she-demon and buzzard pal eating pomegranates under a tree”. Yes, that is probably more like it. Because from Lilith to Kali, to crazed flesh-eating Greek Maenads, African Amazons and medieval witches, the wild woman was licentious, disheveled, abandoned and carnal – she was never about being pretty.

I reject the yoga body’s attempt to colonize the wild. I see it as yet another endeavor of the ‘powers that be’ to convince us that the unruly messy female body and it’s base desires must be tamed. And it obscures the view of the very real and fruitful relationship that yoga and ‘rewilding’ could potentially have. One that could free us the from the tyranny of the yoga body and engender a whole new level of “body positivity” in the process. And I believe that rewilding the yoga body begins by rewilding yoga itself. Returning to its earliest origins, the prehistoric mists of the upper Paleolithic and Neolithic, a time when woman’s bodies were not yet defiled – but divine.

Today it is generally accepted that much of contemporary yoga practice (ritual postures, meditation, mantra’s, mudra’s etc.) are sourced in Tantra Yoga – which predates the Vedic (less women friendly) traditions by thousands of years. But what is less acknowledged is that Tantra takes root in a prehistoric shamanic practice in which woman’s bodies were seen as vessels of powerful forces connected with the fertility of the earth.

Feminist scholar Vicki Noble has written extensively on how this early women’s ‘yoga’ was celebrated in ecstatic rituals of dance and trance. This communal practice was believed to purge disease and enhance fertility in women, animals, and food crops. Noble believes the bio-mystical techniques of these early priestesses became codified within Tantra – and were later co-opted by the Brahmin Priesthood. (For more on this see my post Did Women Invent Yoga?)

In her book Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism Miranda Shaw documents the lives of Tantric women, many of which were esteemed teachers and Buddhas. Called by many names, Dakinis (woman who flies) Vidyaharini (knowledge-holder of magic, ritual , mantras, mudras and meditation techniques) Vira (heroine) the most common term was Yogini (keeper of the occult secrets).

Described in Tantric texts as wild, ferocious and ‘fearless’, these “eternally transgressive yoginis” are described by Shaw as deriving “pleasure from the fact they are untameable”. She writes of “tantric feasts, or communal assemblies” in which yoginis engaged in esoteric rites of dance, poetry and song. Today the remains of their round, open-air stone temples are still found in India “where animal-headed statues of dancing women, stand as a reminder of their ecstatic rites.”

Shaw writes “Discovering the ‘divine female essence’ within her, was the female Tantric’s path.” And because of her biology, a Tantric yogini’s kundalini was much easier to awaken than her male counterparts. In fact according to Noble, the menstruation cycle, female sexuality, birth, and menopause were once seen as explicitly female siddhi’s – natural biological connections to spiritual power.

Today we might consider this veneration of the female body as “essentialist”. Many feminists see this view of a woman’s body as essentially different from a mans or as closer to nature as problematic. After all the whole “biology is destiny” thing has long been used to justify women’s oppression. But Noble urges us to extricate ourselves from the patriarchal view that those ‘differences’ make us ”lesser than” and reclaim our bodies as sources of power.

On this matter, I personally take cue from the “beautiful, passionate and untamed” Vajrayogini who figures so prominently in Tantric iconography and literature. In the Yogini Tantras she announces , “Wherever in the world a female body is seen, That should be recognized as my holy body”. Now that’s body positivity at work.

That’s why I believe there is a better way to resist the forces which seek to denigrate our natural functions and attempt to keep our bodies under control. We must begin with reconnecting with what is essential or authentic to our experience of being embodied – because how else will we know what is artificial or imposed?

Rewilding the yoga body means disconnecting from the artificial construct of “body image” itself, the strictures of race, class, gender that tell us to look, act and feel in certain way. It means entering the true yoga body of our sensations and feelings, to reconnect with the processes and cycles of the natural world, which flow through us. And it returns us to the ancient understanding of our foremothers, one in which our bodies and our biological processes are sacred and numinous.

In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, author and psychologist C.P. Estes coined the term ‘Wild Woman Archetype’ to refer to the conceptualization of the female psyche and soul as rooted in the ‘wilds’ of instinct and uncivilized energy.“ She writes: “These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without.”

Rewilding the yoga body is about much more than donning leather underwear and doing acrobatic poses in the great outdoors -because our bodies are more than’ images’, they are the source of our deepest nature. And I’m pretty sure it’s where we’ll find what we’re really looking for -the lost wilds of our soul.

So no matter how many images of yoga bodies alluringly posed amidst the wild forests or on windswept beaches – come before you – don’t be fooled. They are sirens who will seal you into a cycle of perpetual striving – because you will never measure up. Imagine instead the wild, dancing shamanic priestesses and the untamed transgressive Tantric yoginis. Seek instead to reclaim the “dynamic quality of ecstasy” that Noble writes “seems to especially mark the female-centered yoga experience”.