I know I've been a blogging machine lately - last little bit of summer before school starts again! And I really wanted to share this.

I just came back from yoga class and at the beginning of class, before everyone had arrived, I was doing what one of my yoga teachers encouraged me to do - practicing handstand. As I was practicing, this fit woman who was much smaller than me (ok, I am not a really good judge of scale right now - my brain is all messed up!) put her mat down next to mine. As I came down from my handstand (still using my training wheels - the wall) she said "I'm so jealous that you can do that!".

I laughed and said "yeah well I'm still using the wall!". She responded that she couldn't even get her leg up high enough to kick up into handstand.

She went back to her mat and I practiced a few more handstands and then settled into my yoga practice.

It was maybe a 20 second interaction. I didn't really know what to say to her.

As I was sitting in child's pose, it hit me: this pose that I have been struggling to do for the entire summer, ok, for the last 9 months or so, my arch-nemesis, the one I can barely do, was the object of someone else's jealousy. I thought back to when I started yoga and I could barely do certain poses and how excited I would get when I finally got them. I realized that all of this time I had been feeling like a failure because I couldn't do a handstand. And that wasn't perhaps the best way to look at it. I'm not a failure because I can't do the pose without the wall. This is just where I am in my journey.

Just like weight loss. I've changed my perspective from diet to lifestyle. I've made so many changes. But I realized, I am going to stall out if I can't learn how to change my perspective about my body. One of my friends who hasn't seen me for a while told me I looked tiny. Instantly I thought "I still have 30 pounds to lose, I don't look tiny!" But I made myself stop, and said thank you, and made a mental note that I need to work on realizing that my body has changed. For so long I've looked in the mirror and seen myself as fat. 25 years now. And it's time to change my perspective. I also need to realize that where I am on my journey now, is also where someone else our there is working hard to be. I need to appreciate my hard work, and I need to appreciate the hard work of others around me who I strive to be like.

So the lesson I learned today:

There is a huge amount of power in how we look at things. Change your perspective and suddenly you are capable of doing a whole lot more. Change your perspective and you could change your life.