Dear friends
This week I want to sit with a question that has quietly shaped much of my own path: can the way we look at something actually change what we’re looking at?
In physics, there’s a strange idea that the observer affects the observed, that attention itself is not neutral. I think yoga has always known this. The way we hold our gaze, on the mat and off it, is never just passive looking. It is a kind of touch.
I didn’t grow up around compliments. What I received instead was attention to what was wrong, the flaws, the things to fix. Later, in my relationships, I found the same pattern: partners who didn’t know how to see me and say so out loud. For a long time, I waited for someone else’s gaze to tell me I was worth appreciating.
At some point I understood that waiting for that gaze was its own kind of prison. The shift was not about finally getting the compliments I had wanted, it was about learning to become the gaze. To look at myself with the same warmth I had always hoped someone else would offer.
And here is what I now believe: a positive gaze does not just make us feel better about the object, it genuinely changes it. Attention carries a kind of vibration. When we look at ourselves, at each other, at a pose, at a difficult moment, with real appreciation, something in what we are seeing actually lifts and softens. Not through denial or forced positivity, but through the quiet power of witnessing something well.
So this week, an invitation: notice your gaze. Notice what you look for in yourself when you come to your mat, the tightness, the imperfection, the “not enough”? Or can you practice, even briefly, looking with the eyes of appreciation? Try offering yourself one honest compliment before you leave your practice today. Not a compliment you are waiting to receive, but the one you give.
A compliment, after all, may be less about flattery and more about a way of seeing. And how we see truly can change what we find.