I waited for five years to start yoga teacher training. I knew I wanted to teach, to hold space for those who needed a place of calmness, of stillness. I wanted to pass down the gifts that had been given to me by the teachers I’d been so blessed with. But every time I’d start to research a training program, intrusive thoughts about my body would stop me from moving forward. I’ll start when I lose ten pounds, I’d tell myself. Or twenty. Or thirty. But a pandemic happened, and then some health issues started to flare up. I’ve been hovering around my highest weight for four years now.
Maybe it was the memory of being the chubbiest little ballerina in dance class as a child that held me back. Maybe it was my years of disordered eating and overexercising in my early twenties that left me with unshakable body dysmorphia. Maybe it was the years I spent dating a tall, rail-thin model who never gained an ounce of body fat, even though we ate all the same food in the same portions. People would take candid photos of her as we walked through the streets hand-in-hand, and they’d show up on social media with me cropped out of them.
Between residual childhood insecurities, an unhealthy relationship with food, the incomprehensible damage to my self-esteem in that relationship, and years in a cutthroat, corporate finance job where I could feel male coworkers glaring disapprovingly at my body every time I sat down to lunch, my body image was destroyed by the time I was in my late twenties. The thought of showing up so wholly, so vulnerably, in skin-tight yoga clothes in a room full of strangers was absolutely terrifying.
As a mid-size person, there are plenty of people who’d tell me I’m much too thin to be writing something like this. Others acted as if my weight was life-threatening twenty pounds ago. Ideals of “thinness” are deeply culturally varied and constantly shifting over time. I grew up in the era of “Heroin Chic” and emaciated models in print magazines, with Tyra Banks berating teenage girls on TV, telling them “no one puts anyone above a size four on a runway.” In the lilywhite suburbs where I went to high school, I was considered “plus size” when I could still fit into size eight jeans. Like anything else, body politics are a matter of perspective. We are all entitled to speak about our experiences and subsequent insecurities. They’re all part of a larger system designed to feed our self-hatred and then sell us things to “fix” ourselves.
When I stumbled onto the Three Sisters Yoga website, I was warmed by the diversity of both the teaching staff and the student body. I was so scared that the body-positive, size-inclusive promises would turn out to be empty rhetoric, but nothing could be further from the truth. Jen has always been instrumental in helping me learn to love my body again by praising it for all the things it can do and helping me make adjustments and modifications for what it can’t.
Not one person in this community has ever made me feel “less than” for the size and shape of my body. In fact, I have always felt empowered to try new things to make myself more comfortable, like Jan’s suggestion to stand with my feet at hip’s width distance instead of touching in standing postures, which has been a godsend for balance as someone with hips as naturally wide-set as mine. Who knew one simple shift could create such a strong foundation, literally and metaphorically?
During all 500 hours of my teacher training, the focus was always on my capabilities as a human being and leaning into my strengths, instead of focusing on the fact that there are many poses and flows my body may never be capable of. The armor of insecurity I stepped into the studio with crumbled slowly. There were no strict, performative asana lessons here where everyone’s poses were expected to look the same. No. It was all about finding the most comfortable, fruitful expressions of each pose for my body and learning to teach others to do the same. Now, I’m blessed to be able to pass that down to incoming students as one of TSY’s teachers.
That’s not to say that body stigma in yoga doesn’t exist, or that any of my fears were unfounded or never actualized. I recently auditioned to teach at a boutique studio, and the owner audibly exhaled and looked me up and down continuously the second I stepped into the space. I could feel her searing disapproval as she stared at my stomach and thighs instead of my eyes as she spoke to me. She continued to interrupt me with every sentence I spoke, asking me to teach to the air as she observed me, rather than acting as a student and taking my little mini-class for herself. She said to me, with a quizzical tone and raised eyebrows: YOU teach a yoga teacher training program? Her instant, unfounded disdain was so palpable. She folded up my resume into a tiny square in front of me: a silent but powerful signal that she only planned to throw it away.
I wasn’t surprised when she posted her next crop of teachers on Instagram: not one of them over a size two, each one primped and polished in a perfect Lululemon outfit. In one glance at my body, she hadn’t just deemed me unworthy as a teacher, she had deemed me unmarketable. Something outside of the “aspirational” image of holistic health, of fitness, she was trying so laughably, so desperately to sell. This woman in her crushing, capitalistic misinterpretations of wellness, wanted to make it very clear that I didn’t “look like a yoga teacher.”
If that had happened a few years ago, it would’ve crushed me for months, sending me into a spiral of skipped meals and grueling workouts, but not this time. I feel wholly changed by my experience at TSY. I’ve cultivated such a deep sense of self-love, true confidence, and so much acceptance through the ideologies in this community. I now teach in studios that pride themselves on fostering body diversity and creating inclusive spaces for every student to practice. I hope that by showing up on my mat unapologetically at any size, I can encourage my students not to dim their precious lights in fear of the petty, short-sighted judgments from others.
With so much sweet, juicy love,
Anna Rose