There is a chef in Italy named Massimo Bottura. He is considered one of the best chefs in Italy, and in the world, and his restaurant holds three Michelin stars. When he first opened, people balked at his food because it wasn’t traditional, Italian-grandmother-style cooking. Now he is famous.
He serves a dessert called “Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart.” One day, a chef in his kitchen was carrying a perfect lemon tart across the room to plate it when the tart slipped and broke. If you’ve ever watched a cooking competition show, you have a sense of the perfection often demanded in these kitchens: images of a head chef screaming bloody murder and tossing dishes at the wall come to mind.
But Massimo looked at the broken tart, its crust all awry and its filling smeared across the plate, and thought, “How beautiful.” He took the rest of the perfect tarts and intentionally broke them the same way, painting the filling across the plate, and served them like that. The chef who dropped it said that in that moment he learned something important about life: the mistakes are just as good.
Mistakes on display
I think this is so wonderful: mistakes, in all their beauty, put on display. So often we hide behind a facade of perfection, expecting things to always be in control. But they are not. Something my yoga practice taught me is to see disappointing moments as something beautiful, something divine to be cherished, not tossed in the trash.
Chitta: the storehouse
Yoga philosophy teaches us about chitta, the subconscious mind. We hold a storehouse of memories that deeply affect the body we live in. Only when we confront each one, essentially permeating it with our consciousness, can we fully process it. Until then, our past conditioning is driving us all the time, and healing is harder.
Yoga teaches us to look at the other side: to see the difficult things with a new perspective, one of admiration.
As you move through your yoga practice, give yourself permission to admire the hard stuff, not just the graceful things. Don’t be afraid to fall, because it might teach you something important about yourself worth knowing.
