Instagram, Yoga, and Learning
to Love My Big, Black Body
Jessamyn Stanley
White beauty ideals invaded my psyche at a very young age. I’m sure every little black girl has a story just like mine, but please indulge me for a moment. I was encouraged to idolize women who looked absolutely nothing like me. Was it Jennifer Love Hewitt’s giant ivory breasts and tiny waist in Can’t Hardly Wait? Maybe it was Julia Roberts’s flowing auburn locks in Pretty Woman. I’m sure Alicia Silverstone’s iconic portrayal of Clueless’ avidly blonde and beautiful Cher Horowitz deserves at least a smidge of responsibility. And lest we forget the age of “innocence” at the turn of the twenty-first century when women like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera dominated and turned the antiquated beauty and body ideals of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence on its ear. Images of slender human Barbie dolls “shuffle-ball changed” their way across my mind when I was both awake and asleep. I prayed every night that I’d wake up with pore-less skin, silky flowing hair, and large, clear azure eyes. I figured I could purchase at least a few of these qualities via, at the very least, consistent investments in Biore pore strips, kanekalon hair extensions, and colored contact lenses. Instead, I woke up every day with acne prone skin, brutally kinky hair, and squinty, almond-ish brown eyes. Because I failed to spontaneously transform into the celebrated beauty icons of the late twentieth century, I considered myself a human failure and thus began a slippery slope toward self-loathing.
When you are hell-bent on a path of vicious self-loathing, a self-fulfilling prophecy is basically wholly ensured. To that end, my adolescence was rough. I was considered heavier, effortlessly awkward, and hadn’t quite figured out how to control my body odor and skin dryness. My hair was always acting out against me, and even though I wore complicated braided extensions for most of my adolescence, I quickly acquired the unfortunate nickname of “Medusa” because of the fear inspired by my artificially long locks. What started as an elementary school addiction to French fries and chicken nuggets quickly (and literally) ballooned into a body size that neither Limited Too nor Gap Kids could handle. To be frank, they weren’t ready for this jelly. In short, I felt indescribably uncomfortable in my own body and, what’s worse, I felt completely alone.
Does It Really Get Better?
I was bullied by my elementary and middle school classmates to the point of spending all of eighth grade applying for scholarships to attend a semi-local all-girls boarding school. Leaving to attend Salem Academy seemed like an opportunity for change, and I envisioned a future with fewer asinine young men marring my daily life with their endless searing taunts. And, with the help of large scholarships and financial aid, I was welcomed into a sisterhood of intelligent, driven women who were essentially required to value themselves outside of beauty norms.
If fat black girls couldn’t be found on MTV or VH1, you certainly couldn’t find them in Seventeen magazine. But let’s face it, they weren’t in Jet magazine or on B.E.T. (Black Entertainment Television) either. Sure, there were some black bodies on display, but even the fattest among them looked more like Naomi Campbell and Halle Berry than Gabourey Sidibe. There were so few black, female, plus-size role models that I was usually shocked to see someone who looked anything like me on screen or in print. Eventually, the entertainment world started to shed more light on veteran performers like Mo’Nique and Queen Latifah, but aside from those grand queens of comedy and hip-hop, there were a precious few fat black women accepted by or represented in Western media.
I think that’s how fat black women learned to laugh at our bodies because our only strong role models were forced to make a career out of laughing at theirs. And I did laugh at my body. I laughed my way from dance performances in elementary school to lead roles in my middle and high school theater programs. I quickly learned that if I could make a joke out of my God-given body, I was one step closer to being accepted by my peers. Turning self-loathing into comedy isn’t a terrible method of living life. People do it every day and some have built impressive careers revolving around self-deprecation.
However, my penchant for making a joke of my own insecurities hit a serious roadblock after college. It was hard enough to joke about my body insecurities since I was already a Weight Watchers drop-out three times over and had never been able to maintain a regular gym or eating schedule. But with a host of new insecurities on the horizon, including a crumbling long-term relationship with my high school sweetheart, crippling anxiety over my student loan debt and chosen career path, and an increasing familiarity with the death of loved ones, it became impossible to differentiate my self-loathing from reality.
“But Isn’t Yoga Only for Rich White Girls?”
It probably seems improbable that one of the whitest corners of the fitness world would help change my mental body conversation. We can tap dance around the race, body image, and athletic world crossroads forever, but I’d argue that our inability to accept reality is part of a larger problem. Frankly, the Western yoga world has been heavily fortified by wealthy white America for decades. Up until the late twentieth century, it was extremely uncommon to see a yoga practitioner who wasn’t either a stern but svelte brown skinned man or an equally stern but svelte white skinned woman. Before the Internet was part of our daily lives, any other body type besides these two was relatively invisible within the yoga community, and the media has reflected that cultural imbalance. It seems that the Achilles heel of Western yoga is our inability to accept that the eight limbed path knows no “ideal” practitioner. Yoga transcends specific body types, and the practice should be enjoyed by any and all who encounter it.
However, I didn’t know about any of that when I started regularly attending Bikram yoga classes around the corner from my graduate school about five years ago. My depression must have been palpable to those around me because one of my grad school classmates encouraged me incessantly to join her in hot yoga classes, which had allowed for considerable emotional clarity in her own life. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the idea of a curvy yoga practitioner. My mother has always been interested in holistic healing, and the books and magazines she left strewn about my childhood home made me familiar with the work of Dianne Bondy and Anna Guest-Jelly. I knew there were definitely plus-size women who were practicing yoga and loving it, but their influence hadn’t completely punctured my psyche. Quite frankly, the journey toward asana varies from person to person. Usually, the motivation that brings a person to a long-standing yoga practice isn’t based upon visibility of body types, but on a desire to truly look within and deconstruct the soul.
Ultimately, what brought me into Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Bikram Yoga studio in 2011 was a need to reclaim my dignity from the angrily clenched fists of depression. To dilute that soul reclamation to the influence of a few curvy bodied practitioners would be off base. Ultimately, I just wanted to stop feeling depressed. When I finally dragged my ass into the studio on Fayette Street, I was shocked to find that a sequence of arduous yoga poses combined with brutally intense breathing exercises was the exact medicine I needed to pull myself out of my life funk.
The extreme heat of the yoga studio, topping out around 105 degrees on a regular basis, was the equivalent of a chloroform soaked rag over the mouth of my self-loathing. Regardless of whatever pathetic quantity of self-doubt and pity I’d brought with me into the studio, it was imperative that I release my baggage in order to make it out of class alive. And when I challenged myself to release my self-doubt and avoid self-pity, I was astounded by the strength my body unleashed. The more I devoted myself to my yoga practice, I saw that my real problems didn’t have anything to do with my body or my life circumstances. I began to realize that my perspective and judgment was clouded by my inability to harness my own strength. I saw that the energy I spent showering myself with negativity was primarily responsible for my unhappiness. Every time I practiced, with sweat dripping from my knee creases and tears welling in my eyes, I reclaimed a sense of self-respect that had been sorely missing from my daily life. For me, it was finally a way I could exercise my body and keep the pressures of twenty-first–century body norms at bay.
Sure, my local yoga studios were dominated by plenty of svelte bodies, but how was that any different from an afternoon spent exercising at the YMCA? However, unlike spin classes or treadmill jogs, yoga was a way to look inside myself. Prior to establishing a yoga practice, I never challenged myself to look within my own being for answers to life’s endless questions. Up until that point, I remained convinced that the answers to every question could be purchased at the right price or learned at the hands of another human being. By looking within myself, I was finally able to redirect my emotional distress into a respectful internal dialogue. Basically, I was able to discover a way to love myself without the involvement of other people.
Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer
My true journey toward self-love didn’t fully kick into gear until I began regularly photographing my home asana practice and posting the evidence on my Instagram account. I began photographing myself because I noticed a growing number of yoga practitioners and teachers posting asana progress photos on Instagram and I wanted to be part of a larger community. In many ways, home yoga practice can be very isolating, and I wanted to feel like I was “part of a team.” In many ways, photographing my body’s gradual transition in yoga poses became a kind of guerilla emotional therapy. I transformed into my own psychiatrist and gave myself the necessary time and space to confront my internal demons. By photographing my body and being forced to stare at it on a daily basis, I had a literal constant confrontation with the parts of myself that previously seemed unforgivable. For example, if I photograph myself in the heat of a challenging side plank variation and the image is dominated by my gelatinous fat spilling over the waistband of my leggings, I’m faced with two options: throw shade at my body for not being slender, OR give myself a high five because “DAMN, MA! THAT SHOULDER STRENGTHENING GAME IS ON POINT!”
That’s the difference. I steadily began complimenting myself for the physical strength and flexibility exhibited by my body instead of denigrating it for not resembling pictures in magazines. When I started doling out high fives instead of going on “shade parades,” I saw that I had a lot to be thankful for in my own body. My meaty thighs, once cast into shameful darkness because of their width and girth, proved to be secret weapons in my balance and standing posture practice. My chubby belly, once a constant source of embarrassment, began to give me a sense of pride because I was amazed by my ability to engage the surprisingly strong core muscles underneath. It seemed like a waste of time to hate these aspects of myself, when they were obviously key contributors to my overall strength and self-confidence.
In my opinion, the experience of practicing yoga at home and photographing the practice is a more genuine definition of the eight limbed path because it disregards the opinions of others that can become overbearing in a classroom environment. In a group class, the opinions of both teachers and fellow students have a tendency to distract even the most devoted yoga practitioners. Photographing a home practice is an opportunity to reclaim the strength that can be mutilated by the opinions of others.
For me, it doesn’t matter if the superficial Western yoga world ever truly accepts and promotes the curvy, black female body. After all, it’s not as though any other aspect of our whitewashed society has openly accepted fat, black women en masse. My only concern is making sure that my fat black sisters understand that yoga is for them, regardless of what society wants them to think. Prior to apps like Instagram and blogging platforms like Tumblr, Western marketing ploys were designed specifically to harvest body dissatisfaction in pursuit of monetary gain. However, with the advent of social media, we finally have a platform for exploring the actual body dissatisfaction imbedded in all humans. And, in response, “beauty centric” marketing ploys are under scrutiny. The progress toward change may be slow, but it is critical to note that it would be even slower coming without the influence of a robust and active online community.
Every day, whether it’s via social media or real life interactions with my yoga students, I encounter brand-new diverse bodied yoga practitioners who cite the Instagram yoga community as the origin of their practice. People of all gender expressions, lifestyles, and bodily handicap are building yoga practices that reflect the unique edges of their everyday lives. Because social media offers both autonomy and community, there’s a remarkable number of people who have chosen to document their physical practice for the same reasons that fueled my early Instagram presence. The proof of change is evident in a multitude of areas, including the rise of plus-size active wear options and the growing ubiquity of yoga classes specifically directed toward various marginalized communities. In many ways, the “body-positive” phrase has become a trendy and potentially misunderstood label. As one would expect, change has come about slowly and there are dissenting opinions within the body-positivity movement about how best to seek equality.
Ultimately, social media has redistributed a power dynamic once fully controlled by corporate media. Against the odds, the opportunity for an egalitarian yoga community is finally on the table. We now have a way to communicate with one another and form a utopian yoga community where all bodies are created equal—even fat, black ones. Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I think the online yoga world is the key to evolution within the “real” yoga world. By manually carving space for diverse bodied yoga practitioners online, we can usher in a new generation of yoga practitioners who see yoga’s eight limbed path for what it truly is—the great equalizer and unifier of all humanity.
Jessamyn Stanley is a North Carolina–based yoga teacher and writer, and the creator of Cody App’s EveryBody Yoga. Her blog and Instagram offer body positive advice for yoga practitioners and attract thousands of followers daily. Stanley has been featured by a wide range of international and national media outlets including Good Morning America, Al Jazeera English, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, and The Sunday Times, among others. Author photo by Zoe Litaker.