On body image, self-criticism, and finding your way back to yourself.
I want to be honest with you before I start.
I haven’t got this figured out. I don’t look in the mirror with peace and acceptance every morning. Some days I avoid it entirely. Some days I catch my reflection and feel that familiar, heavy slide into self-criticism – and I stay there longer than I’d like to admit.
That cycle is real for me. I know it well. I’m not writing this from the other side of it.
What I do know – the only thing I know – is what feeds the demons. And what nourishes my soul instead.
And that distinction feels worth writing about.
I’ve never been a typical girly girl. I’ve always felt more myself with mud splatters and bruises than make-up and extensions. That’s not a judgment – I genuinely mean that. I’m just not built that way. But the world has a hat it would like you to wear anyway. Particularly if you’re a woman. A very particular hat, in a very narrow range of sizes, with a message stitched into the lining about what your body should look like and what it’s worth.
That hat gets heavier as you get older. Perimenopause has been teaching me that in ways I wasn’t prepared for. My body shifts and changes in ways I didn’t choose and can’t control. Things feel unfamiliar. The reflection I see doesn’t always feel like mine.
And in those moments – and there are plenty of them – the mirror is not my friend.
Back in 2018 during my yoga teacher training, I came off Instagram. Quietly. Because I could feel – in my own scrolling, in the way the yoga world presented itself online – that it was making things worse, not better. The image of yoga that lives on social media has very little to do with what yoga actually is. It’s aesthetic. Performance. A very particular kind of body doing very particular things for very particular approval.
And when you’re already in a cycle of self-criticism, you don’t need more images to measure yourself against. You need a way out.
For me, the way out isn’t through the mirror. It’s away from it. It’s stepping out of the reflection and into the body. Into the breath. Into the moment of actually being in this skin, rather than standing outside it, judging it.
That’s what yoga gives me. Not confidence, exactly. Not acceptance in any neat, packaged sense. Just – contact. With myself. When I breathe and I feel it. When I move and she guides me. Not towards some better version of this body. Just here, in this one, right now.
It doesn’t fix anything. The criticism doesn’t disappear. But when I’m in my body – really in it – there’s no space for the voice that tears me apart in the mirror. They can’t exist at the same time.
Yoga didn’t teach me to love what I see. It taught me to feel what I am. That’s a completely different thing. And on the hard days, it’s enough.
We live in a world that assigns value to the size and shape of bodies – men and women both, though in different and relentless ways. That message is everywhere. In what we see, what we scroll past, what gets praised and what gets quietly made to feel like less.
Most of us have absorbed that hat so thoroughly that we don’t even notice it anymore. It just feels like the truth about ourselves. Like reality, rather than a story we were handed.
I’m not going to tell you the answer is yoga. It might be for you. It is for me – most of the time, when I can get myself to the mat. But the practice underneath it is something more transferable than that. It’s the choice – however small, however momentary – to step away from the reflection and back into the living.
To notice what feeds the demons. And choose, just for now, something that doesn’t.
I haven’t got it sussed. I just know the difference. And some days, that’s everything.
What feeds your demons? And what – even quietly, even imperfectly – nourishes your soul instead?
With warmth 🎩
Karina
If this resonated…
Noticing what feeds the demons – and what nourishes you instead – is some of the most important work there is. If you’d like to explore that with someone alongside you, I’d love to have a conversation.