Chanelle John
Learning to love my body has been one of the most significant things I’ve accomplished. Growing up as a black girl in America, I knew self-love was never a given. Black was beautiful in my house, with portraits of black dancers and jazz musicians hung on the walls. Messages that conflicted with joy and affirmation I felt at home were everywhere. There weren’t many black families in my childhood town, leaving me feeling conspicuous and isolated. When I turned on the TV or opened a magazine, I rarely saw girls like me or women who looked who I’d become.
The media I consumed as a child conveyed Eurocentric beauty standards in no uncertain terms: thin and white, preferably with flowing hair. I was black, and my hair was usually defying combs and gravity, plaited with braids and beads. The lack of representation for women of color left me feeling alienated. The media messages taught me, and millions of other girls, that the pinnacle of beauty was being white and slim, and the goal of womanhood was to be beautiful. This sexist, white supremacist beauty ideal poisoned my self-image.
Magazines and movies insist that if we buy certain products, eat certain foods, and act a certain way, we too can conform to beauty norms and be successful. But this beauty standard is intentionally nearly impossible to achieve, leaving girls feeling inferior in its shadow. This can engender a sense of shame, hopelessness, and worthlessness. When girls and women internalize the beauty norms, it can mean being at war with our body image—especially for girls of color.
I internalized this dissonance until it morphed my view of myself. I slowly became more and more preoccupied with my weight, evolving into what I would later learn was body dysmorphia. It grew worse as I got older, quickly developing hips and thighs that belied my age. I resented my body and treated it like a problem to correct, an obstacle that I needed to overcome. Eventually this resentment and body dysmorphia led to cycles of disordered eating. I was either restricting my food and overexercising or binging and purging. Middle school, high school, and college found me vacillating between those two extremes.
In 2011, after years of body dysmorphia and disorder eating, I started therapy and realized that it was possible to break free from my struggles with body image. Therapy helped me change my habits, but therapy alone couldn’t heal the chasm between my body and mind. I knew that there was work I had to do on myself, that no therapist or counselor could do for me. I had to get in touch with my body’s needs and redefine health for myself.
Rediscovering Intuition
I deeply wanted to be healthy but I didn’t understand what life-long health entailed. The images I saw in media and magazines taught me that health was fad diets, fat phobia, and relentless exercise. I decided to limit my exposure to that toxic “health” paradigm, and the beauty standard it promotes. I cancelled my subscriptions to exercise magazines and became much more discerning about the media I consumed. Instead of following generalized dieting and exercise advice, I committed to using my intuition when it came to my health. Meditation helped me cultivate the self-awareness I needed to understand and respond to my body’s needs. Radical self-acceptance and compassion became the tools that helped me heal my relationship to my body. Only then did I see that food was fuel for my body and not just a tool for weight control. I created a body-positive, shame free relationship to fitness and transformed my yoga practice in the process.
When I first discovered yoga in my early teens, I wrangled the expansive beautiful tradition into my flawed fitness framework. My practice was a place of destruction instead of healing, constantly criticizing my body and trying to push myself further. While in therapy, my new yoga practice reemerged from my interest in meditation and mindfulness. As I read about the other limbs of yoga and it’s spiritual principles, I realized I needed to start my practice from a place of nonharming, contentment, and surrender. Instead of setting lofty goals for extensive daily practices, I started small—one sun salutation a morning before I sat to meditate. Slowly, one day at a time, a new practice grew intuitively from a base of self-compassion. As I found yoga videos with incredible instructors like Seane Corn, my home practice became my haven. I learned to love my body and myself as it was instead of constantly comparing it to unrealistic beauty norms. I felt myself get stronger and my meditation practice persisted. Eventually, I got up the courage to practice at a yoga studio.
Studio Struggles
It was difficult to find a yoga studio that fit. Getting up the nerve to walk through the door to one sometimes felt like an achievement unto itself. My initial experiences in yoga studios prodded the body image issues that I had been working through. By the time I entered my first studio class, I’d begun to heal my relationship to my body, but it was difficult. Every studio visit felt like a test of my progress.
I tried to make my curvy brown body invisible by wearing all black clothes and placing my mat near the back of the class. The media would have you believe that yoga is the sole province of lithe white women, and my studio experience mirrored that portrayal. I was regularly the only person of color in my classes. Sometimes I left the studio on a yoga cloud from my practice. Other times I felt defeated after being beside all the other yogis who were bold enough to practice in their sports bras. I wondered, Can I really practice with all of these women who look like yoga models? Do I belong here?
I also wrestled with another question: Can I even afford to be here? Yoga’s commodification in the West has made it an exclusive pastime. The price of a class or even introductory offer is out of reach for so many people. Often I was one of them. When I first entered a yoga studio I had two jobs, but the majority of my money was dedicated to keeping my rent paid. Discretionary funds weren’t easy to come by. Still, I diligently searched for deals and community classes to ensure I could practice in a studio. I persevered in my studio practice, but it wasn’t easy. I let myself take child’s pose whenever I needed without judgment and listened to my body as much as I did the instructor. I went to smaller classes with noncompetitive atmospheres, where I eventually felt comfortable moving my mat toward the front of the room. The confidence I gained from my inner work was palpable. I was reaping the benefits of a compassionate, intuitive, shame-free yoga practice.
I wanted to bring my friends and for them to experience the healing potential of yoga. But I knew that, for all of my challenges showing up in a brown body at a yoga studio, other marginalized groups were absent as well. As I looked around my studio classes and talked to my friends I wondered, Where are the LGBTQ folks? Where were the differently abled and the fat positive yogis? Western yoga culture and community’s inability to address the racism, classism, ageism, and ableism kept yoga homogenous. It also made yoga inaccessible to populations that needed it most. It became clear to me then that I had a yoga practice and a community but not a yoga community. I wanted to see a yoga class with yogis from across the spectrum of human diversity. If I couldn’t bring my community to yoga, I was determined to bring yoga to them. Five years after my first studio class, my commitment to bringing yoga to communities of color collided with the inception of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
We Can’t Breathe
On August 9, 2014, as my yoga teacher training was drawing to a close, an unarmed Missouri teen named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer. I remember coming home after yoga practice and dropping my mat bag on the floor only to open Facebook and find my timeline buzzing with the news. I fell to my knees as I read the details. Recent high school grad. Twelve shots fired. Body left for four hours in the street. I was devastated and shaken. I remember wondering, Who will be next?
The previous month was tumultuous, as the video of Eric Garner dying in an officer’s choke hold entered the news cycle. Witnessing a father and husband gasping, “I can’t breathe” was traumatic, as was the lack of accountability for his death. For many, Michael Brown’s death widened the wound from the loss of Eric Garner. The trauma felt relentless as more cases of police brutality flooded the news and the list of victims grew.
I walked through the motions of my life, going to work and yoga each day. But I couldn’t shake the anger and sadness. In my mind, I was thinking of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. Tamir, a twelve-year-old killed by police in Cleveland, reminded me of the kids I taught in my community yoga classes.
At the time, I was teaching the class at a library in one of Boston’s black neighborhoods. Every Saturday morning, I would lead kids and their families through simple yoga sequences. I loved seeing the kids every week, their hair braided or barber shop pristine, dimples punctuating their grins, child-sized high tops beside their yoga mats. But sometimes when I looked into their faces, I saw our collective vulnerability. My yoga students, like Tamir, were young, black, and living in underserved neighborhoods. I worried for the ones whose height would soon belie their age, turning their bodies into targets of suspicion and fear. Their faces were in my mind while we protested that fall.
We marched through the streets, chanting the names of boys who would never grow to adulthood and demanding justice. When I was feeling enraged, I would use my vinyasa practice to sweat it out on the mat. When tears gathered in my eyes, my practice was like a prayer, sending whatever grace I could to the victims’ families and the protesters. I mourned for the female victims of police violence whose names were much more likely to be in my timeline than a headline. When I was overwhelmed by endless stories of black women’s lives lost, I would close my computer and my eyes, place my hands on my heart and breathe. Focusing on the rise and fall of my chest, I breathed for Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and all the others who would never breathe again.
That fall, a vision for my future coalesced. I wanted to be of service, to bring yoga to all corners of the hood, and affirm black life in my work. I was painfully aware of the reasons black and low-income communities could benefit from yoga. The ramifications of absorbing beauty norms, the burden of defying racist tropes, and the struggle of surviving in a society based on capitalism and white supremacy burdens the mental and physical health of the black community. I became more committed than ever to take my yoga teaching beyond the studio.
Yoga and Diversity in Practice
In the months following Black Lives Matter’s inception, I created POC Practice, a yoga class for people of color. It was important to me that I hold a space for people to come together and heal in light of the collective violence we face. I envisioned POC Practice years earlier while attending hip-hop yoga classes at local studios. Practicing sweaty vinyasa sequences with hip-hop music was incredible. Hip-hop is home to me, like a native tongue. But being the only person of color in those classes was no homecoming. The classes, mostly attended by white people, were in close proximity to elite and expensive universities in a segregated city. I wanted to create a hip-hop yoga experience that felt uplifting and could be enjoyed without reservation.
I began teaching POC Practice at an accessible community space in Boston’s South End. The South End held a special significance for me. Formally a vibrant part of Black Boston, it had undergone waves of gentrification that forced black families, mine included, to far corners of the city. The all-levels, donation-based community class brought people of color from across the racial and ethnic spectrum, and of all sizes and shades, back to the South End.
That winter a white ally and I cofounded the Yoga Diversity Initiative (YDI). At YDI, we provide scholarships for yogis of color to attend yoga teacher trainings. Having more visible teachers of color is an important step in rectifying yoga’s racial divide. As I stated in an article for Decolonizing Yoga, “Despite the stunning array of options one has for a yoga teacher training, these programs are still certifying teachers that promote yoga’s status quo. To effectively combat this image issue, and to teach to diverse communities in a culturally sensitive way, there will need to be more yoga instructors of color.” 15
While in their yoga teacher training, the yogis are paired with a mentor who is a yoga teacher of color. The scholarship recipients have built-in support for any racial, class, or other issues that may come up in their training. After the training, our awardees each teach a number of free classes in neighborhoods of color as seva, or selfless service. When we train and support yoga teachers of color and send them back out into their communities, we expand the idea of what a “yoga body” is. We affirm to them that they too can take part in this beautiful tradition. I hope that, by doing this work, people of color can experience the type of grounding and resilience that yoga has given me.
Yamas and Niyamas: Keys to Transformation
There are many challenges to self-acceptance, body-positivity, and life-long health. I’ve seen firsthand the damage oppression does to our sense of self. I’ve spent years trying to unlearn sexist, unrealistic beauty standards I internalized. Deepening my understanding of yoga’s non-physical aspects has become an invaluable part of my journey.
Yogic philosophy includes an ethical code, called the yamas and niyamas, that can help us transform our relationship to our yoga practice and ourselves. The yama ahimsa asks us to practice non-harming. Extending the gift of non-harming to ourselves can liberate us from constant self-criticism and judgment. Satya, or truthfulness, can help us interrogate the validity of the oppressive ideas we’ve internalized. The niyama svadhyaya, asks us to study and observe ourselves. Through compassionate and dedicated self-study, we can see the nuanced ways oppressive ideas hinder our relationships with ourselves and one another.
Through practicing the yamas and niyamas, we can reconnect with our intuition and separate who we are from what society tells us to be. It’s rewarding to liberate ourselves from these limited notions of self, but it’s a difficult process. Your intention to cultivate self-acceptance and self-love may run counter to years of conditioning and negative thought patterns. We must remember that we are worthy and that change is possible.
Though our bodies may appear different, we are all negatively impacted by oppressive ideologies. Sexism, racism, and sizeism impact the quality of all of our lives. They keep us from accepting our selves and divide us from one another. No matter what we look like, we all have something to gain from naming and dismantling these oppressive ideas and the systems they represent. With commitment, compassion, and bravery we can lift the burden of oppression so we, collectively, can breathe.
Chanelle John is a race scholar, yoga instructor, and business owner based in Boston, MA. Prior to completing her yoga teacher training, she received her BA from Goddard College, studying the intersections of racial identity, culture, and art. She can be found teaching at libraries and community groups in Boston, as well as online at www.wholesoulhealthco.com. Author photo by Tatiana M. R. Johnson.
15. Chanelle John, “(More) Reasons Why Your Yoga Class Is So White,” Decolonizing Yoga, August 28, 2014. Accessed August 15, 2017. http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/reasons-yoga-class-white/.