Suzannah Neufeld
Ali MacGraw was my first yoga teacher.
In 1996, when I was seventeen and hospitalized for an eating disorder, Ali’s yoga VHS tape was the only movement I was allowed, and I loved her with a religious devotion, waiting all day for our special half hour together. You may think of her as an actress, but I think of her as a glorious yogini, stretching and breathing on silky white sandy dunes. I thought I was just pulling one over on my doctors, getting in some extra calorie burning at the end of the day. What I actually got was a practice that would nourish me for the rest of my life.
When I left the hospital, the doctor wrote a list of things she thought might help me on the road to recovery—YOGA was first on the list, in all caps. Though I didn’t recover for five more years, she was right. Yoga was the rope that I used to pull myself out of the abyss of self-hatred, confusion, and alienation from my body and humanity.
I’m skipping the details of how yoga helped my body image then because that story has been beautifully told by so many others. I remember being a teen with an eating disorder in the days before the Internet, and I had never heard anyone else’s story. At my local bookstore, I would scan the shelves for the one eating disorder memoir, open it within another book so no one could see the cover, and connect furtively and passionately to the words within, to know I wasn’t alone. Today, eating disorder stories and memoirs are everywhere. There are even subgenres of recovery stories—and the story of the young white woman using yoga as a path to healing is a standard in the canon.
I’m picking up my story much later, after a long, steadfast recovery, with what fascinates me now—how yoga keeps revealing new gifts with each passing year of practice. Yoga, once my tool for healing my eating disorder, is now facilitating healing in how I relate to my body in a whole new era of my life, one that feels lifetimes away from my diet-obsessed teenage years: becoming a mother.
Becoming a Mother
After recovering from my eating disorder in my early twenties, I went on to become a psychotherapist and yoga teacher with a mission to share the healing path of recovery and yoga with others. I felt grateful that I had learned to “love my body” and “trust my body” and wanted to share that opportunity. I recognize now that a big privilege I had in learning to “love” and “trust” my body was that even after gaining weight in my recovery, I was still relatively thin and visibly fit.
At age thirty-one, I became pregnant for the first time and gained a considerable amount of weight—mostly because I was so nauseated that the only way to keep from throwing up was to have food in my mouth. I also felt too sick to move much, and my yoga practice changed wildly. No more vinyasas, bandhas, and binds—I had to slow down and focus more on breath and mindful presence, which were (and always are) a blessing to help calm my brain’s chatter and connect me to my baby.
After my daughter was born, I trusted my body to find its set point at its own pace. I was so sleep-deprived and focused on creating my new family and figuring out how to balance time with baby, work, partner, and self that I didn’t really think about my body shape. A few months later, I realized that I had lost none of the weight I had gained in pregnancy—in fact, I’d actually gained more. I felt deeply ashamed and confused, unsure if I really could trust my body or love it anymore. This was compounded by “concerned” messages from my health provider about me being “overweight.” As a person who had been walking around with thin privilege my whole life, I got my first taste of what many face every day—how a visit to the doctor’s office becomes an opportunity to be shamed. Worse, I felt ashamed of being ashamed—as a body image activist and feminist, what does it mean when you suddenly feel bad about your body?
Articles like “10 Reasons Breastfeeding Is Best” tell you that nursing makes you lose weight. Not always! Nursing is an appetite stimulant for me—never have I been so constantly hungry as I was during the first year of my kids’ lives. I take very good care of my health with food and exercise—and I’ve learned that a nontrivial amount of extra weight is just what my body likes while, you know, growing humans. As I write this, I have been either pregnant or nursing for six years straight (and counting), and my body has never been the same weight and shape for more than a few months at a time.
Yoga in My “New” Body
One wonderful side effect of the “baby weight” changes in my body is that I was forced to become a beginner again at yoga asana. After years of being able to do contortionist poses a la magazine covers (and, by the way, suffering in my low back for it), I now could barely touch my toes. I had to let go of fourteen years of practice and humbly begin building strength and flexibility from scratch. I had to accept that I could only do “modified” versions of poses I used to slip into with ease.
A note to flat-bellied yoga teachers: please know that having fat on your belly makes accessing and being in poses different. I recall with embarrassment my first yoga teaching job. I was a therapist working in a women’s drug treatment center, had just finished my first teacher training, and was high on the ideas that “Everyone should do yoga!” and “Yoga heals everything!” I convinced the staff to let me teach a weekly yoga class to the clients.
The women in the class showed up with bodies that had experienced trauma, addiction, love, sorrow, violence, sexual objectification, motherhood, youth, aging, and more. Many of these women had fat on their bellies. I taught them a “basic” vinyasa flow. They enjoyed it, but would groan and protest when I would ask them to do forward folds. They would tell me their bellies got in the way. I was so dismissive! I would tell them to bend their knees, to wish love toward their bellies, as though the issue was just psychological. I would smile (patronizingly) about how yoga wasn’t about touching your toes, even as I demonstrated forward folding myself in half, flat belly pressed on my thighs.
Ten years later, in my first yoga class post-baby, I almost gasped when I realized that I couldn’t forward fold because—my belly was in the way! The fat on my belly felt constricted, smushed, even painful. I struggled to breathe deeply. I felt frustrated because my belly didn’t allow me to fold forward deeply enough to feel a satisfying stretch in my hamstrings. Now I understood what those women were telling me, and I felt challenged to love this bigger-bellied body of mine.
Yoga, thankfully, offers endless possibilities for learning to listen to and accommodate our unique bodies. I learned to keep my feet a bit farther apart to make space for my belly. I learned to lift the flesh of my belly with my hands before folding forward to make a bit more space. I learned to lift the flesh of my belly with uddiyana bandha, a breathing practice. I learned to flex my feet and open my toes wide to challenge my hamstrings. I learned to incorporate other poses—ones that didn’t feed my ego the way my “impressive” paschimottonasana used to do. I began to notice myself smiling sometimes mid-practice, just because it had become so much fun. Screw getting my body “back”—I had gotten a “new” body! I found a sense of play and exploration in my practice that I had lost during my years of working to achieve “advanced poses.”
Self-Objectification
As a yoga teacher leading positive body image workshops and especially as a therapist working with people with eating disorders, I often feel as if my body is on display. I feel vulnerable going through the process of gaining and losing weight in pregnancy and new motherhood because my roles mean that my body is often the screen for others’ projections and expectations about weight and body image.
When I gain weight while pregnant and nursing what do my clients and students think? Do they think I’ve just “let myself go?” or that I’m overeating? Does seeing my body change prevent them from trusting the intuitive eating practices I preach? When I teach yoga and my flexibility is not “advanced”—something I have actually cultivated—being less flexible, to prevent injury during these years of pregnancy and nursing with a system full of the hormone relaxin, do students think I don’t practice enough?
Each time post-baby, when my daughters reached eighteen months old, my body suddenly and consistently started to lose weight. Probably because my babies started to nurse much less and my hunger subsided, or maybe because that’s just when my body knew it didn’t need the extra weight to nourish another life. I’m in the process of this weight loss as I write this, and, honestly, contrary to our society’s myth that losing weight always feels great—in some ways, as a body image activist and eating disorder therapist, it feels worse.
When I lose weight, I worry—will this trigger my clients? Especially the newest clients, the ones that have only known me post-baby—will they feel betrayed when I’m thinner? Will they wonder if I’m dieting, even though I teach that diets are oppressive and harmful? Will they think that I think thinner is better? Will this make it harder for them to focus on themselves?
In the psychology world, this experience of viewing one’s body from the outside is called self-objectification, which is what it sounds like: seeing your body as an object, a product, a decoration. High levels of self-objectification have been linked to everything from poor body image to eating disorders to reduced success in school and work. Women self-objectify more often than men, mostly because we are taught to do so all our lives, and this makes self-objectification a feminist (as well as a power, economic, and racial) issue.
Self-objectification is pronounced in pregnancy and new motherhood. People feel the right to touch, comment on, judge, and categorize new moms. So many mothers I have known as clients and students have described feeling like they were treated as incubators. People ask: “How much weight have you gained?” “Of course you aren’t drinking coffee, right?” “Will you be having a natural birth, epidural, breastfeeding, using formula …?” When not judged, mothers are exalted as (read: expected to be) “goddesses,” “powerful,” “miraculous,” and even “superheroes.” It becomes hard to share when we feel lost, overwhelmed, bored, resentful, or even just ordinary. It becomes hard for many women not to look at themselves through the eyes of others, to just do their work in the world and feel confident and respected.
Yoga provides a refuge for me from these worries. It offers me a place to let go of the “image” part of body image, and just feel what it is to be in my own body. These days, my practice focuses so much more on the internal experience of each pose than on alignment. I love, for example, focusing in warrior 2 on the energetic spreading sensation I feel from the fingers of one hand to the fingers of the other. In upward bow, I get curious about the strong opening in my chest. Where is it centered? Where are its edges? Where in my body am I at ease alongside this great effort?
I Am Not My Body
In motherhood, I have now lived twice for a few years in a body that was bigger than I ever could have imagined accepting or loving when I was younger. I have practiced yoga, done good work in the world, and been completely loved by all the same people who loved me before—while being at my highest weights. I’ve learned that not getting my pre-baby body back is not a bad thing. I am learning this yogic teaching viscerally: I am not my body.
I was me when I was a small baby, I was me in my teenage body, I was me while in a pregnant body, I will be me in an elderly body. I am me at my lower weights, I am me at my higher weights. And my body will keep changing. If I am lucky to live long enough, I will look worse than I do now, at least by conventional standards. I may suffer injury or illness that change my body. I will probably look better than I do now—on that magical day when my kids start letting me sleep in on weekends, for sure. I will feel better in my body than I do now, I will feel worse.
Yoga teaches us about our true nature as pure and unchanging consciousness—even as our embodied form, qualities, thoughts, and experiences shift, transform, and come and go. Our bodies, however, are always changing, and none of us get yesterday’s body “back,” even if we don’t have babies. I use my yoga practice as an opportunity to connect to this teaching and this wisdom, to bring my unchanging self and compassionate awareness to each day’s new body.
My Own Learning about Yoga, Body Image,
and Self-Objectification Through Motherhood
Has Had Deep Impacts on the Way I Teach Yoga
I have reduced offering alignment cues. I know that sharing alignment with students, while important in terms of safety, is not the most vital thing yoga has to offer. Alignment cues often encourage self-objectification and reduce a sense of empowerment.
I have almost completely stopped doing hands-on adjustments. Even with twenty years of my own practice and more expensive yoga teacher trainings than I can count, I have no idea how a pose should look and feel for the unique individual in front of me. Even if they tell me they have sciatica, and I know what poses are “good” for sciatica, I do not know what that means in their lived experience. I also know that, especially when my body image has been shaky, when a teacher comes over and just moves me into a pose, I immediately think of what I look like and tell myself that my pose (and, at times, my body) is wrong.
If I see someone doing something I believe is dangerous or limiting I now try to use invitational language to encourage them to explore changes in the pose. I ask them to notice: “What happens if you bring shoulders back over hips?” “How does it feel if you bend the knees here a bit?” I hope to make the experience more about developing awareness and kindness to one’s self than about the shape of the pose.
I’ve also worked hard to let go of language that puts poses (and people) in a hierarchy: calling one version a “full expression” or “advanced version” versus a “more basic pose.” I want to remind myself and the students in my class that a true advanced pose is one that allows us to be present, steady, and at ease.
Love Your Body
So, did yoga save my body image yet again? Do I now “love my body” with all the ways it has changed in motherhood? My ego wants to say “of course” and be a really impressive recovery role model or inspiring yoga story. And yes, a lot of the time I really dig what I look like as a mama. I love how my body reminds me of nature: my stretch marks flow into one another like rivers, the flesh at the center of my belly wrinkles like tree bark, my curves roll like hills. But honestly, other times I don’t love what I look like—none of my clothes seem right and I wish certain parts of me were bigger or smaller.
This contradiction doesn’t bother me much: I believe the mantra “love your body” becomes at best useless and at worst counterproductive if what it really means is “love what your body looks like.” A comparison—what would I feel if my husband said loving me was about loving what I look like? (Professional therapist tip: If your partner only loves you because of what you look like, get a new partner!) I’m not that interested anymore in loving what my body looks like if I’m doing it through the gaze I’ve trained on years of television, billboards, and media-created imagery that values thin, white, young, able-bodied, cis-gendered bodies over most other bodies. If, however, “love your body” means show love to your body, listen to your body, and give unconditional love to your body, then my answer is, unequivocally, yes.
Yoga is the clearest action of loving my body that I know how to take. It feels really good to sit quietly, to move with breath, to turn inside, to explore, practice, learn. My hope, too, is that yoga becomes about loving more than my body. My deepest intention is that my practice enables me to serve in the world: to be a good model for my daughters, showing them that I, and they, are so much more than what we look like, to be one voice against objectification of myself and others, to value freedom and life in all its forms, in all bodies, in all beings.
Suzannah Neufeld, MFT, is a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, body image activist, and mother of two living in Berkeley, California. She is a cofounder of Rockridge Wellness Center in Oakland, where she has a private practice focused on supporting people recovering from eating disorders/body image struggles, and around pregnancy/new parenting. Suzannah teaches prenatal and postnatal yoga, leads yoga therapy workshops on making peace with your body, and is currently working on a book on mindfulness in pregnancy and early motherhood for Parallax Press. Learn more at: www.suzannahneufeld.com. Author photo by Emily Takes Photos.