I’ve spent my life avoiding mirrors. I prefer to hide, even from myself. I don’t care about my looks. Sometimes I wish I didn’t look as beautiful as I do. Sometimes it has caused me trouble in life, attracting the wrong kind of attention.
When I started training traditional Chinese gongfu, I couldn’t look at the mirror to check my form and see if my body was aligned properly for the forms. Through years of training, 7 to be exact, I eventually moved past my fear of the mirror. Now I find a mirror indispensable in my work and training. It’s the way I can move past my bad habits, my body tendencies, to make sure I can cultivate perfect alignment, at least as perfect as I can make it. How can I know I’m stooped over to free a client of back pain? I can check the mirror in the room. I can run through my body alignment checklist that has become second nature to me now.
With perfect alignment comes the gift of “equipoise” in the gravitational field so that gravity doesn’t have a handle to pull on. Everything stacked in such a way that gravity pulls straight down into my structure. The structure created to support me. Humans are upright creatures. Every move we make resists gravity.
So back to mirrors…. I also avoided looking at the mirror of the people around me. Their actions spoke volumes about the way I am in the world. My stories, biases, and grudges. I spent time blaming them rather than seeing the reflection about my actions. I’m ready to embrace this mirror now, much as a glass mirror with my physical training of gongfu, to monitor the effects of my character and spirit. Am I compassionate or judgemental?