Tales of a Rubenesque Yogi

For most of my life, I have wobbled somewhere on the spectrum of physicality between being curvaceous and being fat. Between being oh-so-close to fitting into the narrow band of physical acceptability, or to being relegated as the fat friend on a tv show, or to being the kind of person who would only appear on tv as part of a weightless competition. I remember in middle school watching as one of my naturally slim friends compared the size of our thighs, and then exclaimed that both of her legs could fit into one of mine! I wasn’t as enthused as she was, and while I’m not sure if it was the first time I measured myself against a peer and came back lacking, but I know that it wasn’t the last. Looking back on photos, I wasn’t really fat as a kid, just curvy. I had wide hips, a well padded tush, and a chest that popped into existence sometime in the 4th grade and just kept right on growing. But those kind of comparisons have the nasty tendency to sneak into your psyche and take up space without signing any kind of rental agreement.

When I discovered yoga in my late teens, I was at a diet clinic disguised as a wellness retreat, desperately trying to lose weight I was absolutely certain I needed to lose. Colonics, wheatgrass shots, raw food, green juice, every kind of sprout on the planet and there in the middle of it all was yoga. Every other piece of “wellness” that I took away from that retreat I have had to work to discard, but the yoga has stayed and changed and grown with me. From size 12 to size 26 and back to somewhere in the middle, yoga has been with me. It has gifted me with the unique lens of telling people about my interests and watching their response change based on my weight at the time of the conversation.

Telling someone that I do yoga, and teach as well, as a tender young size 12 usually engendered a response along the lines of, “oh that’s cool where at?” while giving the same answer as a heartier size 26 would almost always result in a “DO you?? Oh my gosh, GOOD for YOU!” It invariably reeked of well meaning praise, and it just as invariably put my back up, made me feel pitied, condescended, and less for having accomplished what I had. I also found that people would still be willing say to me that they felt they couldn’t do yoga until they had lost -insert arbitrary poundage amount here- of weight, but then they would definitely get back to it/would start it.

The amazing thing about yoga, though, is that it doesn’t require you to be a thin white woman to do it. Admittedly, that’s a large portion of the population, but that’s something a lot of people are working to change. I tend to say that yoga is for every body, but not every part of yoga is for every body. That’s not me saying you can’t do yoga if you are larger bodied, but rather saying you might not be able to do crown pigeon if you have bad knees, and bow pose is a bad idea for anyone with lower back problems, and that if you have extra tissue around your belly and chest, it might be hard to breathe in happy baby pose without a modification.

The larger concept of yoga, of stretching and moving and breathing and connecting with body and self, that is for everyone. And those who choose to make you feel that not being able to do every pose perfectly means that you can’t do yoga have way bigger problems in their life than whether or not you can do lizard pose. I do have a hard time breathing in happy baby pose, but it feels good on my hips, so I do it anyways. Yoga was not created for thin white women, it wasn’t even created for women. Some of the first recorded asanas come from monasteries in India, where they would use a series of stretches to help prepare the body for long periods of silent meditation and prayer. This was particularly for young monks who had recently arrived at the monastery and weren’t accustomed to the particular challenges associated with long periods of sitting in quiet contemplation of the universe. Just because we are not young monks in the remote corners of India doesn’t mean we can’t do yoga, because it has evolved from that, and it continues to evolve past something that is only for the thin and rich. Just take a look at social media today- if you look in the right places, everyone is doing yoga. Check out the amazing Jessamyn Stanley and her company The Underbelly and see where that leads you.

When I first started teaching yoga, I began by teaching at a couple of gyms, and got used to seeing people do an about face when they were about to come into the class, only to see me as the instructor and decide something else sounded better. I get it, most people are at the gym to lose weight so why would they take a class from someone who has obviously failed at this incredibly important task? I spent years thinking I would only be successful as a yoga teacher if I could finally lose the weight, and feeling like a failure for not being able to make it happen for any kind of long term period of time. Losing weight and keeping it off is incredibly hard, as it turns out, as well as being damaging to my metabolism, my hormones, and my body.

Years after I started teaching, while on a break from teaching myself, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who turned out to be one of my former students from that very gym. She had in fact become a yoga teacher herself, and was getting ready to teach her next class. She was larger bodied woman much like myself, and she told me a story about taking my class, and listening to my words and music, and how she had laid in Savasana, and wept over her life at that moment. Afterwards she said she felt a profound sense of relief, and closure. She had the realization, laying on the floor in a dimmed room in LA Fitness, that she wanted to give that relief to other people and if someone who looked like me could do it, why not someone who looked like her?

Reader, I cried. At that time, I was taking a break from teaching yoga because I was at my heaviest weight and here was someone telling me that I had made her life better with my yoga, even yoga taught while I was larger. Especially yoga that I had taught while being larger. That I had inspired her to go out and do what she wanted, and go on to inspire other people. I felt overwhelmed and full of gratitude, which was ironic because she was in the process of thanking me, and I just wanted to grab her and say thank you a thousand times over. I went back to teaching yoga after that, and I have no regrets. The more I teach and do yoga, the more I love it. I created new classes, I started working on online content, I linked up with a local studio to offer new classes and workshops, because when it comes down to it, I just love it. I would do myself a disservice to remove it from my life because society dictates that I have the “wrong” body for it. I don’t want to think that I can only do it when I’m at a certain size, or only do it in public or for pictures when I’m at an even lower size. My body is my own, and the fact that I can use it for yoga is one of my great pleasures, even if it does mean that there’s a little bit of huffing and puffing in happy baby pose. That’s just life, baby.