Shana Meyerson
I know a yogini (you may know her too … she’s pretty famous in the yoga world) who is as bendy as a rubber band, strong as an ox, and graceful as a swan. She also happens to know the sutras inside and out and, by all respects, is the epitome of the modern-day yogini.
She would be such a perfect cover model for any yoga magazine on earth. She is gorgeous and she’s got curves. Don’t read too much into this. I am not using the word “curves” as a euphemism for fat. She has a body that is strong but feminine. She’s not a size 0; she may be a size 4. And according to a best-selling yoga publication, that’s just too darn fat to grace their cover.
Funny, before I was told this, I never even realized that all of the yoga cover models are cute, petite, perfectly proportioned women. Before I heard this story, I would have told you that anyone could be a cover model if they were dedicated enough to their practice. I thought I could be on the cover some day. Right. No chance they would put my size 6 tuchas on their cover. Let me just say that if my strong penchant for desserts was ever a barrier to entry, it’s a concrete barrier now.
By the way, let me take a moment to mention that while size 6 is smaller than the average American woman (who wears a size 14), it is still considered to be too large in the mainstream media culture. “Plus size” would be the exact term they use.
I guess I was so caught up in the yogic ideal that a person’s value comes from inside, not outside, that I just assumed that yoga publications in the world would uphold that same ideal.
Wrong.
From the Mouths of Three-Year-Olds
Since 2002, I have been teaching yoga to people of all ages, infants through seniors. I’ve also seen the practice evolve (or devolve) with its explosive popularity from a practice based largely in awareness and mindfulness to one based largely in self-indulgence and aesthetics.
At its best, I’ve worked with rooms full of women of every shape, size, and background, who all walk out of a practice feeling beautiful. At its worst, I’ve worked with a 3-year-old girl (the child of two movie stars and already a pint-sized, lip-glossed bombshell) who in the middle of class, kept gravitating to the mirror and crying out loud, “I’m ugly! I’m so ugly!”
What’s Society Got to Do with It?
One of the ultimate goals of yoga is to learn how to see beyond maya, illusion. The concept of maya is that our worlds are colored by our knowledge and experience, our prejudices and our biases. We see the world as we are trained to see to it, rather than how it really is. Put in the context of body image, maya would be body dysmorphia, seeing ourselves as “fat” or “ugly” as subjective indicators of our worth (or lack thereof).
When our body image filters are tinted with Photoshop, plastic surgery, and size 0 runway models, it becomes hard to just accept childbearing hips, pancake chests, and the laugh lines that come naturally with age and, yes, smiling.
Sadly, these same judgments that adults place upon themselves are often projected onto their children. For the most part, the expectations are well intended. Everyone wants to see his or her child thrive and be accepted … and pretty (read: thin) people are popular people. But all too often, these misguided intentions become hurtful and shameful. This can look like 5-year-olds being told they can’t have cake at a party, 9-year-olds being put on diets, and teenagers being told they are fat in front of just about anyone within earshot.
So we wind up with a cadre of humiliated children with low self-esteem, convinced they are fat (read: ugly) and good for nothing. And the other kids aren’t helping to ease this perception, either. Rampant name-calling, chiding, and bullying all contribute to children who hate their bodies … and themselves. We need to move past this self-destructive spiral, to create self-worth in all children, to empower everyone to love him or herself.
We need yoga.
I wish I’d had it when I was a kid.
Mean Girls
Growing up in southern California, poor body image wasn’t something you had to inflict on yourself. Your peers did that favor for you.
Personally, I stopped hanging out at the beach by tenth grade because I didn’t like how I looked in a bikini. I wasn’t what you would consider fat, mind you. In fact, I was the consummate athlete, working out (hard!) for hours every single day. But I wasn’t what you would consider skinny, either. And the other girls were. Every day, I would spend hours trying to tie a sweatshirt around my waist just so, at just the right height, just the right angle, in an attempt to visually trim my waist. My boyfriend wasn’t allowed to touch my stomach.
And then, finally, in my freshman year of college, I decided to limit myself to one small bowl of granola and one small bowl of vegetables, plus at least two forms of exercise a day. Even still, all I could see was fat. Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.
Man, did I need yoga.
Woman in the Mirror
As an adult who discovered yoga for the first time at age 30, it was the first time in my life that I was told that it is okay to fall. That’s right. It’s okay to fall. This was a huge revelation, especially to someone who had been told her whole life that she needed to be perfect. How empowering to learn that the best I can do is the best that can be expected of me! And, what’s more, to realize that at any given moment I am always giving the most I have to give.
Growing up, I truly believed that I had to be the best at everything: the president of every group, the captain of every team. And I had one life goal and one life goal only. I was going to go to Stanford. For four years of high school, I was top of the class, top of the SATs, top of the teams, winning awards and honors, and generally believing I was invincible. Then came the dreaded thin envelope and my world came crashing down. I wasn’t going to Stanford. I wasn’t the Golden Child. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t worth the paper that @#%#% letter was written on.
For ten years—ten years—I beat myself up for being useless, worthless, after not getting into that school. That is, until I stepped into Bryan Kest’s yoga class. I could have sworn he was talking to me when he said it was okay to fall. It was like living in that song “Killing Me Softly” … how did he know me so well when we’d never met? How did he know what I needed to hear? (Or, perhaps, is it just what we all need to hear?)
When we learn to accept that we are perfect in and of ourselves, by default we also learn that everyone else is as well. Take it one step further: if I can accept the perfection of my current self, then I must, in turn, accept the body that contains me. The process of learning self-acceptance is a difficult one. We are taught from an early age to be both critical and humble—two sides, in a way, of the same coin and ourselves.
Paying It Backward and Forward
In yoga, there is a certain code of ethics—the yamas and niyamas—that leads us beyond this illusion and self-abuse. The first of the yamas, ahimsa or nonviolence, says that we must be kind to ourselves as we are kind to others. This is sort of the Golden Rule of yoga. It reminds us that at every moment of every day, we can be our own best friend or our own worst enemy. Ultimately, it comes down to our relationship with ourselves and our comfort within our own skin.
The reason I started mini yogis® yoga for kids was because I wanted to give children this gift that I didn’t receive until I was 30. I couldn’t stop thinking how my life might have been different had I been introduced to yoga at age 3 instead of 30, if I knew I could not fail.
When I work with kids now, I work hard to make sure that every child feels good about himself or herself and feels empowered. No matter what weight loss goals the children I work with might have, I make sure they understand the reason I am there is not to make them look prettier, thinner, or more perfect, but rather to help them see how perfect they already are.
Body Positivity without Pom-Poms
In my yoga classes with children, all of the focus is on effort and not on “right” and “wrong.” A kid’s yoga practice is likely the only arena in a child’s life where competition and perfection don’t come into play. Yoga acknowledges that all people are inherently perfect within their idiosyncrasies and imperfections. In fact, falling is a really great indication of effort … something to be applauded and celebrated, rather than condemned.
Of course, it’s important—especially with preteens and teens—that your students do not think you are pandering to them or patronizing them. It’s not enough to just wait for a kid to tell you he’s fat and then react with “No, you’re not.” It’s important to know which kids have low self-esteem and make sure you are proactive in reinforcing positive thought … before the negative thought even appears.
When I have kids with low self-esteem or poor body image, we will work on mantras, repeating a positive affirmation over and over in our heads to the exclusion of other thoughts. And if a student says anything negative about herself, we quickly work to change the thought and change the words.
When a teenager with poor body image walks into class, tugging down on her shirt or failing to take off his bulky sweatshirt, I comment on how good they look that day and instantly their energy shifts, because I say it like I mean it (and I do!), not like a well-trained seal who always reflexively responds “You’re not ugly.”
What Do Boys and Girls Have in Common?
Of course, these issues aren’t limited to teens and ’tweens. Body image awareness starts at a very early age. According to Britain’s Daily Mail, the number of children under age 10 being treated for anorexia doubled in 2011 over the 2010 figures, with girls as young as 5 years old being treated for severe cases. They also estimate that 25 percent of all girls 10 years old are on a self-imposed weight loss diet.1
In my personal experience, perhaps the most disconcerting trend in body image awareness is the growing number of boys who are becoming obsessed with their weight and bodies. While our awareness of this issue has been largely focused on girls, I am meeting more and more boys with the same issues.
I have one particular boy I’ve worked with for years. He carried his baby fat perhaps a bit longer than some others, but he never looked overweight or out of shape. I spent a lot of time helping him boost his self-esteem and telling him how fabulous he was (not just on the outside, but particularly on the inside), and while he was in my classes, it seemed to work. He sat up taller, smiled more, and carried himself with pride. But the kids at school kept tearing him down, and every week we’d start over with me reminding him of how incredible he really was.
Then he went to New York to spend the summer with his (female) cousin, a club-hopping freshman at NYU. This 17-year-old boy came back at the end of summer a good 10 pounds leaner and clearly feeling great about himself. He even bragged to me about how much he ate that day. And it was a lot. This from the boy who was usually so embarrassed about his weight and his looks that eating for him was a shameful addiction and something he didn’t want to talk about. And then as I came closer to him, I realized that he had just brushed his teeth. At four in the afternoon. I quickly discovered that he had just thrown up his meal, and I wanted to cry.
I’d never seen this boy happier than when he discovered bulimia.
And here’s the challenge: if I continue to talk about how good he looks and bolster his self-esteem, he’ll know his eating disorder is “working.” And if I don’t, he’ll think it’s not working and is likely to take it to even deeper extremes.
What would you do?
Sticks and Stones
The things that people say to us when we are very young—particularly the things that hurt the most—are the things that tend to stick. Beyond the poor body image that ridiculed children grow up with is the skewed body image they will carry with them their entire lives. It is not uncommon for someone who was teased as a kid to always carry that “fat kid” label with them throughout their adult lives … no matter how thin they get, or what measures they have to take to get there.
The beauty of yoga—particularly at an early age—is its nonjudgmental nature. Unlike other popular sports that revere the physical aesthetic, forcing children to diet (or even starve) and work through injuries, yoga encourages students to love who they are and be mindful of their injuries and/or limitations. That’s not to say that yoga promotes complacency. It doesn’t. But it does promote constant self-study and introspection (svadhyaya), so that you are living to your own ideal of the best you can be, instead of someone else’s.
Of course, not all children have negative issues with body image. Some are quite proud and uninhibited about their bodies, regardless of shape and size. I have a girl I work with who is 8 and very tall and slender. She has a penchant for short-short shorts and small tops that show off her belly. Her 10-year-old sister likes to wear fake tattoos on her low back, just above the line of her miniskirts. And their mother is fine with it. As long as they feel good about themselves, they can wear what they want.
Now, I look back at pictures of my sister and me growing up in the 1970s and the outfits we used to wear. Funny, they aren’t that much different from these girls’ (minus the tattoos). But that was a different time. Back then, we were just kids who were hot from playing and wanted to cool off. These days, with the constant objectification and hypersexualization of women—and girls!—little girls can’t wear skimpy outfits without men leering at them like predators.
On the flip side of the coin, I have another girl, age 3 and precious as can be, who is pretty well overweight for her age. But she couldn’t care less. Let’s call her Vivian. She loves to roll up her shirt, lift up her shirt, take off her shirt. Not the least bit self-conscious. Healthy.
She is in a class of five children, ages 3 and 4, and after meditation, they love to pile up on my lap one at a time into a lotus tower. One day, four kids were on the pile and Vivian starts bounding up—huge smile on her face—to be “the cherry on top.” Suddenly another girl squealed “Not her! It will hurt!” And Vivian deflated like a popped balloon.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I could tell that Vivian knew the girl didn’t mean one more person would hurt (we do five every time). It meant that Vivian would hurt them. And instead Vivian was the one who wound up hurt.
I quickly put out the fire by taking everyone off the tower and offering Vivian the highly coveted space directly on my lap. Then I talked to the kids about everyone getting a turn and that I will never, ever do anything with them that will hurt them, and about being nice. To everyone. Always.
My Little Belly
I also work extensively with adults and have a well-viewed YOGAthletica channel on YouTube. A few months ago someone posted the comment “I love your little belly” on my most popular video. And I was mortified. The whole world could see the comment and laugh.
Now, I don’t know if the comment was meant as an actual compliment or a dig, but I went ahead and clicked “like.” Not because I appreciated the comment or was happy about it, but because I was proud of myself for not deleting it.
For all the yoga and all the practice I do, day in and day out, I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t still like a flatter stomach, maybe some smaller hips. Heck, it would be great to lose just five pounds. Maybe ten. I wouldn’t complain if it were fifteen … because I’m a yogini, but I’m still human. I try my best to accept my body, but through it all, I do always remember that it’s what’s inside that really counts.
And, quite frankly, I really like what I see.
1. Sophia Borland. “The Anorexia Victims Aged Five: Doctors Blame Ultra-Slim Celebrities as Almost 100 Under-9s Are Treated in Hospital.” Daily Mail, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020765/Children-aged-FIVE-treated-anorexia-Doctors-blame-ultra-slim-celebrities.html (accessed March 2014).
Shana Meyerson founded mini yogis® yoga for kids in March 2002. A pioneer in the children’s yoga community, Shana has taught teachers all over the world how to teach children in a fun, safe, and mindful way. Her intuitive and integrative approach to teaching allows her to positively change the lives of both typically developing and special needs children. Trained in classical yoga by one of the world’s most renowned yogis, Sri Dharma Mittra, Shana considers her teaching an offering to the sweet innocence of children and the lives that lay ahead of them. www.miniyogis.com. Author photo by Madoka Hamlin.