Melanie Klein
I first met my coeditor, Anna Guest-Jelley, in 2010. I was introduced to her work through her blog post “Welcoming the Curvy Yogini,” which was about how to make space for bigger-bodied students in yoga. I was instantly enthralled. Not only did Anna’s words and experience speak to me, but I was taken by her bio wherein she described herself as “an advocate for women’s rights by day, a yoga teacher by night.” Given my experience as a sociology and women’s studies professor paired with my activist work and a yoga practice reaching back to the mid-nineties, I knew I had stumbled upon a kindred spirit. I was compelled to collaborate with her.
As an academic with a background and continued interest in a variety of healing modalities, I often felt out of place in both worlds. I had been regularly practicing yoga since 1996, became a certified massage therapist in 2000 through the Institute of Psycho-Structural Balancing, completed my advanced training as a Thai Yoga Therapy practitioner with Saul David Raye in 2001, took a yoga teacher training with Ganga White and Tracy Rich at the White Lotus Foundation in 2002, and had developed a consistent meditation practice after two ten-day Vipassana meditation retreats as taught by S. N. Goenka. During all this, though, it often appeared my rigorous academic training and critical thinking skills were seen as a deterrent or hindrance in this realm. Based on several experiences writing for the yoga community, it became evident to me that critical thinking was not necessarily welcomed or encouraged.
Simultaneously, I was actively involved in feminist politics, social justice movements, media literacy education, advocacy work, and the completion of two degrees in sociology with an emphasis on the intersection of gender, race, and class. To many in those arenas, yoga, meditation, and holistic healing seemed new-agey, trivial, and empty navel-gazing. In fact, my academic mentors could never figure out what my yoga practice had to do with my educational and professional goals.
But the connections between my sociological imagination, feminist consciousness, and advocacy work with yoga have always been obvious to me—they all represent opportunities to raise our consciousness, take a holistic perspective on our individual problems, become our best selves, and create a more equitable and balanced world.
Blended Worlds
I began merging these backgrounds and areas of interest by applying my sociological imagination to a newly burgeoning yoga culture. In 2004 and 2005, I presented on yoga, popular culture, and commodification at four different academic conferences: “The McDonaldization and Commodification of Yoga: Standing at the Intersection of Spiritual Tradition and Consumer Culture” at the Pacific Sociological Association, “Consuming Spirituality and Spiritual Consuming: Capitalizing on Yoga” at the California Sociological Association, “McYoga: The Spiritual Diet for a Consumer America” at the Far West Popular Culture and American Culture Association, and “Yoga and Popular Culture” at the California Sociological Association. Anna was the first person I had come across who shared a similar background. She had earned several degrees and had a professional background in which she worked as an English professor, ran a renowned domestic violence prevention program, comanaged a university women’s center, published papers, and created workshops and coordinated community programs on universal health care, reproductive rights, adult literacy, wellness, and emotional resilience. When it came to eating disorders, abuse, self-neglect, and anxiety—you name it, Anna had written the curriculum, xeroxed the worksheets, and hung the “Welcome” sign on the door.
I needed to connect with this woman. In my gut, I knew we were destined to collaborate and merge our efforts, talents, and skills into a broader conversation that bridged these seemingly disparate worlds. These two spheres of influence had so much to teach each other, and that marriage would only benefit and, hopefully, connect the members of each population.
Anna and I eventually had our first phone conversation in the spring of 2011 and the synergy was immediately palpable. We realized that a joint endeavor was undeniable. After a few months of percolating, we realized it only made sense to collaborate on a book focusing on yoga and body image.
Anna and I have not only each maintained a consistent yoga and meditation practice since the mid-nineties, but we are actively engaged with and play an active role in the larger yoga community. While we write for a variety of platforms, much of our writing is specifically published by publications advocating mind/body wellness. In this vein, Anna and I are among the pioneers and leaders who have opened a line of inquiry exploring the connection between yoga and body image. While conversations about yoga and body image have increased in the blogosphere in the last few years, Yoga from the Inside Out: Making Peace with Your Body Through Yoga by Christina Sell, May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind by Cyndi Lee, my chapter exploring the connection between feminism, pop culture, body image, and yoga in 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics and Practice (eds. Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey), and Curvy Voices, Anna’s collection of stories about yoga and body acceptance, are among the first book publications specifically exploring yoga and body image in contemporary yoga culture in the new millennium.
In addition to writing and shaping conversations within the yoga community, we have both created and facilitated workshops on wellness, yoga, and body image. I am approached more and more often about delivering speeches that specifically address the interplay between yoga, body image, and pop culture for body image summits, conferences aimed at empowering girls and women, as well as talks and workshops for Women’s History Month, Love Your Body Week, and the National Eating Disorders Association’s annual Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Anna has been teaching yoga classes that create space for women of all sizes to develop a yoga practice. She has also created curriculum to train yoga teachers to be mindful of body image issues and differences in size, thereby producing teachers who have the tools, techniques, and language to guide and teach curvy students. Her Curvy Yoga classes are now being taught in multiple countries and across the United States.
How This Book Came to Be
We decided on this topic because it’s something we’re both passionate about and our work over the years reflects that interest. We are both staunch body image advocates with a long history of advocacy work, curriculum development, and research combining the insight and analysis developed in academia, media literacy training, social activism, our yogic background along with a variety of other healing modalities, and our life experiences.
We are committed to not only creating dialogue about the ways in which self-love may be cultivated (and why that’s a necessary step in maximizing our own life experience thereby allowing us to participate and contribute more fully in the larger culture), but offering yoga as a tangible tool that can make that happen—if one consistently practices with a particular mindset and level of consciousness.
It’s not enough to encourage people to love their bodies through positive slogans and affirmations, such as “Love your body!” If people knew how, they would! We think it’s crucial in our body-focused culture that perpetuates a one-size-does-NOT-fit-all standard of beauty to provide a practice that can help facilitate that acceptance and self-love. But we also wanted to explore the intersection of yoga and body image because it’s an area we don’t see discussed often enough in the yoga community. Though they are often so focused on the body itself, yoga classes and conversations rarely include the topic of how we feel about our body and how yoga affects our body image and vice versa.
And to us, that is a major gap in the conversation—not only how individuals’ body image can benefit from yoga, but also how yoga has a complicated place in the conversation about body image, both contributing to negative perceptions via media stereotypes of the “yoga body” and contributing to positive change when the practice is focused on connection with one’s body, exactly as it is today.
The primary focus of this book is on the transformative benefits of a yoga practice on the body-mind. But the conversation would not be complete without mentioning the culture of yoga that has sprung up, for better or worse, in the last decade along with the yoga industry. It is possible to be critical and aware of the changes in the culture while hailing the many positive benefits the practice offers. In fact, without turning a critical eye to the images and ideas that influence our body image, we believe it is near impossible to create any substantial change. We have to work on the micro and the macro level at the same time.
While Anna and I could have written a book on yoga and body image based on our own powerful experiences of transformation as a result of a regular practice, we were and are fiercely committed to bringing together a diverse collection of voices that span across the spectrum of human experience.
Yoga and Body Image
Body image refers to an ideal image of one’s body, an image that is intellectual and subjective. This psychological image of one’s body is shaped from a lifetime of observations, experiences, and reactions from others, such as family members, peers, and the media. Race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, size, age, class, and physical ability all play significant roles in the formation of one’s body image. And, too often, the reflection we see in the mirror is a grossly distorted image of ourselves influenced by our experiences, interpretations, and expectations. As a result, much of our dissatisfaction (and disappointment) with our bodies and compromised self-esteem is a result of an image not rooted in reality but grounded in an illusion.
Yoga practitioners and those plagued by distorted body image issues do not come in a uniform mold. We wanted to reach readers of different backgrounds, casting a wide net and allowing people to draw inspiration from at least one contributor’s body image journey and how their yoga practice facilitated that transformation. We feel yoga and the potential healing benefits are for every body. No body should be excluded from having access to the practice. We believe in the power of the practice and its ability to change lives and communities for the better.
Though no anthology can be completely representative of every community, we feel that our efforts to be inclusive are evident. While the experiences and journeys of our contributors often run parallel to and complement one another, each is unique in exploring a particular sense of self and body.
In Part One, Linda Sparrowe, Dr. Sara Gottfried, Marianne Elliott, Dr. Melody Moore, and my coeditor Anna open the book by talking about the ways in which yoga allows us to expand our options and our perspectives. Yoga is truly about “Making Choices and Creating Change.” In fact, Anna and I feel that this is at the heart of a yoga practice—the potential to create profound changes. Yoga develops our ability to listen and it raises our consciousness to become more present in each moment of our lives.
In Part Two, Vytas Baskauskas, Dianne Bondy, Carrie Barrepski, Teo Drake, and Joni Yung share their experience of existing “On the Margins”—feeling out of place and being “the other” in some capacity, being excluded from adolescent peer culture, or not conforming to the conventional able-bodied, Eurocentric, size-0 beauty ideal, or the expectation of the “yoga body.” Often that feeling of marginalization has included yoga culture itself. But, in the end, each individual moves to a place of integration—and the practice plays, and continues to play, a key role in coming to a space of wholeness. As Vytas readily admits, it’s a work in progress, a daily practice of self-love and acceptance along with shifting one’s perspective.
In Part Three, I explore “Culture and Media” along with Rolf Gates, Nita Rubio, Seane Corn, Chelsea Jackson, and Alanis Morissette. Not only do we examine the role of mainstream culture and the mass media in framing our expectations of ideal masculinity and femininity, several of us examine the downside to yoga culture and the ways in which it replicates idealized and impossible images of beauty. We discuss the ways in which a yoga practice can diminish this cultural noise and argue that culture is what we make it. We can create change that leads to a beauty standard that fits everyone.
In Part Four, “Parenting and Children,” Kate McIntyre Clere, Claire Mysko, Dr. Dawn M. Dalili, and Shana Meyerson tackle consumer culture, the salacious and unforgiving tabloid industry, and advertising, as well as distorted body images, eating disorders, and the challenge to raise healthy and confident children in an often toxic media culture while simultaneously struggling with their own self-esteem. They write about the pressures of bump-watch, the joy of creation, and the value of teaching yoga to children, many of whom have already begun to learn to hate their bodies.
In Part Five, “Gender and Sexuality,” Rosie Molinary, Dr. Kerrie Kauer, Bryan Kest, Ryan McGraw, and Dr. Audrey Bilger examine sexual orientation, sex, and the gendered body as related to yoga. As a group, they urge us to consider the myriad ways that yoga can transform the relationship to one’s body as a reflection of one’s gender identity and sexual orientation. From culturally sanctioned notions of violent masculinity and the “proper” way to be a “real” man to sexualization, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia, the yoga practice provides peace, solace, and healing for the contributors in this section.
As a whole, whether their bodily disassociation was a result of objectification, race, class, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, size, shape, or an “outsider” status, yoga provided the opportunity for this collection of writers to know and love themselves in an authentic and extraordinary new way.
What Yoga Can Do
Unlike many of the solutions offered in a culture rooted in instant gratification, yoga will not transform our body image overnight. As Anna reminds us in the conclusion, creating a healthy relationship to self and healing a fractured body image is a work in progress, like anything else meaningful and long lasting.
Similarly, Anna encourages us to utilize yoga as a tool in conjunction with others that may be uniquely helpful to us. For some that may mean seeking the advice of a doctor, therapist, or nutritionist in tandem with our practice. For me, my feminist consciousness and academic training provided the intellectual grounding that supported the self-inquiry and spiritual growth that resulted from my yoga practice. For Anna, the support of therapy, meditation, feminist activism, and body-positive yoga friends helped her learn to accept and love her body. And for just about everyone, it means finding solace and support in a community of like-minded individuals.
Our intention is to inspire people who have an interest in developing a practice to begin exploring their options, especially those who thought yoga wasn’t for them. We also want current practitioners to begin or expand inquiry into how yoga and body image intersect in their communities.
A yoga practice can and should be available to everyone and every body. Begin by trying out different teachers and classes in person or explore the ever-increasing range of options online or on DVD. Explore and experiment with teachers, classes, and styles until you find the practice that speaks to you and encourages you to be gentle, kind, and compassionate with your body.
We also want yoga teachers to begin cultivating healthy dialogue in class that allows the yoga practice to nurture students in a noncompetitive environment by focusing on the quality of mind, not the aesthetics of the pose or the body in the pose. You don’t have to have a perfect body image or all the answers to begin creating this space in class. Yoga teachers are human too, and they have to do the work just like everyone else.
Let’s celebrate our humanity in all its diversity—the shapes, sizes, abilities, ages, and colors that make the human race special. Let’s celebrate our bodies, open our hearts, and grow our spirits in this practice. Let’s raise our consciousness and our awareness. Because of its focus on union (since that’s the definition!), yoga is uniquely situated to facilitate this process. When we engage in it, we’re able to move past the clutter, learn how to listen, and make authentic choices about how we see ourselves and move through the world.