Dapper Wednesday

It started when a student at a primary school in rural Maine decided to start wearing suits to school. The idea took off and it became a weekly occurrence. The children say that they stand up a little taller and feel a little bit better about themselves when they get dressed up for school every Wednesday.

With all that’s going on in the world, we need stories that celebrate goodness and affirm the inherent dignity of the human spirit. This isn’t to dismiss or minimize the myriad stories of hardship and suffering, but to fortify us so we can face them unflinchingly. 

Dapper Wednesday is a heartening reminder that amid the tumult and adversity, there are also triumphs, and multitudes of people committed to uplifting others.

Personally, this story touched me because the dignity and self-respect that I've fostered in yoga have been pivotal to my journey of personal growth, albeit not through the clothes I was wearing.

It was an inner shift - one that didn’t come only by doing the practices, but in taking to heart yoga’s perspective that each human being is unconditionally worthy of love, honor, and respect.

That was the revolutionary understanding that offered a whole new way of relating to myself and being in the world.

Decades later, yoga as fundamentally a practice of self-honoring remains a cornerstone of my approach. Perhaps this is why stories like this feel so significant.

It’s congruent with the story yoga tells us about our intrinsic worth and the tools it provides to integrate the spirit of self-honoring into our lives.