When I tell people I am a yoga teacher, I often register an evaluation of my appearance that is then politely suppressed. The assumptions of what a yogi should look like are so ingrained culturally that it's hard not to go there. But every now and again there is a break-through comment, usually from a stranger, who says with faux innocence, "You don't look like a yoga teacher." It's a conversation stopper--an awkward nod to a body not deemed fit enough or thin enough to teach. 

It also reveals a limited notion of the essence of yoga. Asanas (the physical postures) are only one of the gateways to enter the practice. They're the most tangible and accessible way because the body is dense and its sensations are present and stirring. 

B.K.S. Iyengar was one of the first yogis who placed the body front and center as the vehicle to enlightenment rather than its transcendence. The tradition of yoga, much like Buddhism was saturated with ideas of renunciation. It's relatively recently that yoga has been re-envisioned as a method of embodiment. It was Iyengar's unique ability to connect alignment and energetics that pointed the world toward the seismic potential of physical practice. 

Asana falls under the first layer of the subtle body system annamaya kosha which loosely translates as the food body or physical sheath. Annamaya kosha is the material nature of our being and the most heavily invested with our identity. Most of us come to yoga having all kinds of desires about what we'd like our body to be and do. We want to be strong or flexible, fit or thin. We want less pain, less stress, less isolation. We go to class and maybe we get some of those things, or at least the promise keeps us coming back. 

And then years pass and we change. Our original impulse to practice transforms into something deeper. We start to touch on a shimmering whole-bodied animal experience of ourselves. When that happens, the notion of a yoga body separate from the body we already have becomes outrageously irrelevant. 

What I have accomplished in my personal practice is not gymnastic, it's a very direct conduit to the inseparable nature of the body and mind. What that looks like is not obvious or easy to explain. In fact, the yoga body paradigm collapses when we move from an objectified self to an embodied self. Our physicality in this unified state feels more like a galaxy than a thing and much more difficult to pin down aesthetically.

So the next time others tell me I don't look like a yogi, I will have an answer at the ready and I hope you will, too. We will say thank you because, whether or not they intended it, they have honored our inner transformation.