Yoga Is For EVERY Body
“I’d love to come to your yoga class, but I’m not flexible.”
“I want to try yoga, but my body just doesn’t bend like that.”
“I am definitely too old to get into yoga.”
“I am too stressed for yoga right now.”
I have heard them all — every reason people come up with for why they can’t show up on their mat. I used to say some of them myself over the years of my practice before I went to yoga teacher training and woke up to what yoga is truly about. I only started teacher training because my life had hit rock bottom. I know people say that flippantly, but my rock bottom looked like this: waking up in a pool of my own vomit, after yet another whiskey bender, just a few months after my son died. I was surprised to be waking up, not just because of the vomit on my face, but because I was hoping I took enough painkillers the night before that I wouldn’t. That was a rock bottom lower than I’ve ever imagined. I signed up for yoga teacher training that same day after seeing a post from the studio I used to go to. And then my fear set in.
Fear is holding us back.
All of those reasons people give me for why they can’t “do” yoga have a thing in common: fear. The fear of age, body type, ability, or mental state that’s preventing them from practicing yoga in the way they think they should. The image we have of what yoga should look like, or what kind of person does yoga, tends to feed into this fear that we don’t fit in or have no business. So, this was the first thing I needed to drop, or rather the first thing I needed to wake up to. After becoming a yoga teacher and teaching for years, I think a lot about the most important thing when it comes to practicing yoga. For me, it is this: the knowledge that yoga is for every body.
The fear I had walking into the first day of teacher training nearly paralyzed me. I don’t look like a stereotypical yogi, and this nearly prevented me from showing up in the first place. I am 185 pounds, give or take 5 on any given day. The weight I gained when I was pregnant with my son stayed after he was gone. I am Bipolar, and I have sustained brain trauma. I wondered what business I had there; my body didn’t look like any of the people I saw when I walked into the room, and my brain doesn’t work the same anymore. My body was certainly different, but not like I thought. It didn’t look like the 6’2” Iraq veteran. It didn’t look like the 17-year-old college student. It didn’t look like the 75-year-old grandmother I set my mat down next to. And it certainly didn’t look like the 60-year-old leading the training, nor the person on the other side of my mat with a boot on her foot. I was certainly the “biggest” body in that room, but that was just my fear. Everyone around me had their own personal fear for why they didn’t belong in that room. And that we showed up meant that we were ready to break from that fear in order to gain what yoga has to offer.
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Read the rest of this post on my Living Well blog for Berks County Living Magazine!