Gwen Soffer
How often have we convinced ourselves that we need to be smaller and take up less space? When I was younger, I often thought I was too big: too tall, too heavy, and my feet were even too large. I grew up as a tall girl with an athletic body and curly hair—the trifecta of negative characteristics in my mind. I spent many hours as a young girl and teenager trying to be smaller, which included disordered eating patterns, sneaking diet pills, and pledging to starve myself until I could make this happen. My hair even took up too much space, and I continually struggled to tame my curly locks in the hopes of having perfectly coiffed Dorothy Hamill hair. I would go to bed every night with my hair wet, smooth it down, sleep on one side and then switch midway through the night to attempt to flatten the other side, only to wake up to my uncontrollable ringlets of shame the next morning.
One of the benefits of middle age is that it can be a time of clarity about things that used to be quite overwhelming earlier in life. Sometime around when I turned forty, I had an epiphany about how much time I was wasting trying to get smaller. It occurred to me one day, “What if I did not worry about weight? What if I decided to not buy into the constant preoccupation, not eventually, but right this very minute? Is it possible for me to be present in whatever form my body is in this moment and be ENOUGH?” Amazingly, but not without a lot of work and constant reinforcement, I followed my “WTF!” with a “No more!” Of course, I have flashbacks to old beliefs, but I am committed to inhabiting this body, the one I live in today, with bold and unapologetic compassion. My body no longer was something that I forced to change but instead a vehicle that allowed me to live a full life. With this proclamation, I realized that I already had the tool at my fingertips to help me in this practice of self-acceptance, but I had been misusing it for so many years—yoga.
Hiding in My “Yoga Body”
When I first discovered yoga, I used it as just another way to perpetuate my destructive belief that my body was not good enough. It provided me secret access to a body that I had been looking for all of my younger life and, by obsessing over it, I was able to find the skinny body that I had been seeking for so long. The results were intoxicating. I got down to a size four, a size that my frame is not meant to hold. When you lose a lot of weight, people start to reinforce the value of being small by telling you how good you look and eagerly asking you how you did it. Of course, there is no malice in these compliments and questions, only other people who have been told “small is better” for a lifetime just like you. I fit the “ideal” of the yoga teacher that we see so often on the cover of yoga magazines and social media, and I remember thinking somehow I had arrived, and I was desperate not to let it go.
This “yoga body” was not without a hefty price, and it took an incredible amount of effort to keep it up. I would wake up at five o’clock every morning to go to a step aerobics class at the gym (warming up for twenty minutes on the rowing machine beforehand), go to a very physical martial arts class at noon, and then squeeze in a yoga class, capping off the day with some sit-ups and push-ups next to my bed before I went to sleep. I was obsessive about what I would and would not eat, and every bite was planned out each and every day. Forcing myself to be small took up a lot of my time and energy, but at the time, it felt worth it, and I justified it in the disguise of health. I finally got what I had wished for—except for the curly hair, I seemed to fit the ideal on the surface. Like any facade, however, it was not sustainable, and eventually the other shoe dropped (still a size 10).
Practicing Self-Acceptance
The truth is I was using this image to cover up very serious personal issues that I needed to face. For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with depression. I am an upbeat, independent, and productive person, so it was always easy to hide this from people, including myself, but it had gotten much worse. The “yoga body” that I had was actually the result of this hidden depression, and I was self-medicating through disordered eating, alcohol abuse, and obsessive exercise. I fit the portrayed yoga ideal, however, and it went unquestioned. I was able to continue my destructive behavior right out in the open without anyone paying attention, and I could get a quick fix anytime I felt down. The most dangerous part of this avoidance technique was how abusive I had become to my own psyche. Because skinny is equated to being happy, well-adjusted, and confident, it is easy to hide this type of self-destruction. I was in complete denial that underneath the image I was falling apart, and the relationships that meant the most to me were suffering. Instead of spending my time and energy building myself as a person, I was losing who I was at the core. The truth, however, has a way of making its way to the top, and I could not sustain the act any longer.
After a bad accident falling headfirst down a flight of stairs, I had to step out of yoga for a while, and for the first time in years I went to see a doctor. It had been so easy to keep up appearances before, but now as I sat before him bruised, stitched, and broken, reality was coming to the surface. I remember thinking that I was going to die during my plummet down the stairs, and, in some distorted way, it was the literal and figurative bottom I needed to hit in order to change. My physician had a history of depression and alcohol abuse in his family, and he knew how to ask the right questions that would get to the core of the problem hidden deep down behind the “perfect” yoga facade. He traced my behaviors and addressed my issue with depression and alcohol abuse in a compassionate way, and I was finally able to see what was happening to me. I left his office that day and everything looked different.
It has been almost ten years since that day, and I look a lot different now. I stopped drinking completely, I dropped my gym membership, I began managing my depression, I gained thirty pounds, and I have never felt more confident and self-accepting as I do today approaching age fifty. The path to self-acceptance was not about learning to love my body but more about learning to love myself so that I could show up in the world for real. With my realization that I did not want to spend my energy trying to change my body anymore, I instead started focusing on the freedom and potential that self-acceptance would bring me. As a result, my yoga practice changed drastically. I did not want to abuse it anymore and use it to reinforce my old destructive beliefs about myself, but I wanted to use it to establish sustainable self-acceptance that would then push me into the real work that I am here to do.
Yoga became a practice of being with myself no matter what my outer shell looked like and no matter what I was struggling with. It became a practice without judgment that was liberating in a way that I had not experienced before. We are taught from a very young age that we only deserve to feel free in our bodies if we look a certain way. We are taught that if we do not fit the model of beauty that we should be shamed about our body and that we don’t deserve to be seen.
After a beginner yoga workshop that I taught recently, I asked the participants to fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions was, “Why have you not tried yoga sooner?” Overwhelmingly, the responses were based on not believing they had a “good enough” body to practice yoga: too heavy, too inflexible, too old, too uncoordinated, not like the images they had seen of yogis. This really struck deep for me, and I understand why they would feel this way. Saying that yoga is for everyone is not enough if our classes and teachers don’t reflect everyone. The truth is that many people feel that they don’t deserve to be seen if they do not match the ideals that we perpetuate in our media, including the yoga media.
Taking Up Your Space
With the change in my own yoga practice came a change in how I teach yoga. I started to pay more attention to what I was saying and how I was instructing poses. I began instructing a wider stance in poses, including expansion in the arms, grounding in the hips, and embracing the power of our bodies. I often use the expression, “Take up your space on your mat,” and students tell me how powerful it feels when they give themselves permission to get big. How many times have we been told in our lives to get small? Whether it is getting smaller in our bodies, in our voice, in our opinions—there are too many to count—and it feels good to stand tall. In order to do this, we have to be willing to fill our space and be seen.
Being seen is a crucial element in our emotional well-being. When we are babies, we instinctively look to those around us for affirmation of our safety and validation of our worth. You see me. You hear me. You understand me. You care about me. I trust you. I am enough. We are hardwired to look at each other, and our emotional development depends on knowing others value us and that we matter. Being seen goes far deeper than what we project on the outside, but we have been told over and over again that our bodies represent who we are. When we don’t take up our space, we are in essence trying not to be seen for fear of rejection, so getting small has become, for many, a way to protect ourselves.
In my women’s self-defense classes, I point out to my students that women have their power in their hips, which makes them amazing kickers. I make the connection that the place where women are the strongest, their hips and legs, is exactly where we are often told to get smaller. Not a coincidence. We talk about how to use our strength and not to deny it or struggle to make our power smaller. Helping women see that they are powerful in their minds and hearts and also in their bodies is so important. So many of us have grown up believing that the place of our physical power is not beautiful if it is too big. So, what do we do? We spend hours complaining about this power spot and even more hours working to get rid of it. In yoga terms, our body is our “first home” with the grounding energy of the first chakra in the lower part of the body. This energy center is where we find safety. It strikes me that if we don’t believe we are enough in our first home, our bodies, how will we move completely into our own power in our lives?
What I love most about teaching yoga and self-defense is when I see women begin to realize how powerful they actually are. I can see in the way that they stand and the expression in their face that they are intentionally filling their space. It is very liberating to use the power of our hips and legs to ground so that we can expand and lead from the heart. Filling your space is not the same as pretending to be big, which involves posturing to appear larger. We don’t need to “act” small or “act” big, but instead we can fill our space completely in the body we have without asking permission to do so.
Being Seen
As a mother, it has always been important to me to teach my daughter how to take up space, be seen, and not ask permission or apologize for it. Although I struggled when she was younger to negotiate the constant cultural and media images that pressured her to do otherwise, I was relentless in pointing out the false ideal that she was seeing. More importantly, I knew I had to live by example by taking up my space unapologetically. I knew that my opinion of myself and my willingness to be seen was the anchor that would bring her back to understanding her own power. I wanted her to know that how she treats herself and others and how she shows up in the world is always more important than appearances. Because of the hundreds of images that our young girls are seeing every day telling them to “be smaller,” it is even more important that we take up our space and be seen as mothers, mentors, and teachers—our children are watching us too.
Not always an easy task since we have grown up with the same bombardment of images and finding that confidence can be a real challenge. Yoga for me is now a practice of being myself so that I can step off of my mat and be seen in my world. This practice has helped me negotiate the many conflicts I have had around depression, alcohol abuse, disordered eating, and obsessive exercising, and it has become a safe place that I get to practice a healthier, stronger, and more sustainable relationship with myself. I had to face what exactly I was practicing on my mat, and yoga became the tool that showed me how to deconstruct my belief system so that I could reorder things and start living as the larger, more authentic version of myself. Even if we are not feeling particularly powerful in our lives, we have the space on our mat that is ours to see what it feels like to take up our space. If we practice taking up space, feeling the power of our hips, the openness of our hearts, and our ability to get big, we may just start to understand how much we can fill up our own lives and demand to be seen.
Gwen Soffer is a trauma-informed yoga teacher, women’s self-defense instructor, author, and community mentor. She is cofounder of Enso studio in Media, Pennsylvania, and leads trauma-sensitive yoga classes for survivors of trauma. She believes in the strength of the human spirit and is committed to creating safe and empowering spaces for her students to heal. Visit her at www.experienceenso.com. Author photo by Andy Shelter.