I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a sucker for the reality TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

I mean, who doesn’t love a boy in a sequinned gown and a two foot high wig strutting down a runway?

Combine that with an ever-phenomenal slew of hash-tagable one-liners and you’ve got yourself some epic television. I am also a staunch supporter of the wisdom nugget, and drag race can spin out some good ones, usually having something to do with self-love and “back rolls?!”

Last night’s episode was no exception.

There she was in the “interior illusions lounge” with the other queens, Leganja Estranja (pronounced luh-gon-juh es-tron-juh) was playing the victim card yet again, pointing fingers at how another queen or two had “come for her” during the snatch game.

Joslyn Fox, having heard quite enough of the victimizing pity party turned to legange estrange and said, “girl, you gotta find your own applause.”

Short, wise, and totally quotable, it’s a perfect tale for the heart (anahata) chakra that is the focus of my classes this week.

There are so many ways to approach the love that is symbolized by the anahata chakra, but without self-love, all other loves are but candles in the wind. And the queens of Rupaul’s Drag Race—when they’re not being totally bitchy to each other—embody this principle of self-love better than anybody.

If you don’t find your own applause from within, the likelihood is that in place of that applause is a nasty nay-sayer and judgmental troublemaker, telling you you suck at everything and that you shouldn’t take that risk or pursue this job opportunity.

Without your own applause, without a well of affirmation to dip your bucket into, the world looks critical and nasty.

When the inside is blissful and affirmative, the world reflects those qualities, even if by “objective” standards everything is falling apart.

The yoga tradition tells us something similar: that by creating new samskaras (“imprints” in Sanskrit – habits of thought and body) through our practice to change our emotional and physical constitution, we can experience gradually more sustainable periods of bliss and contentment where before we were riding deep grooves of self-criticism and self-hatred.

So find your own applause, over and over, again and again. Drown out that nasty nay-sayer with the volume of your clapping.

Because, as her holiness Rupaul likes to say, “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen up in here!?!”

 

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Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: Wikimedia Commons