Donation-Based Yoga: Behind the Curtain by Angie Hay

Angie, Dhanurasana

Replenish: the Spa Co-Op, which is the home to Yoga Enlarged, is Columbus’ only donation-based yoga studio. This unique model of support is a new-ish idea in the yoga community that hopes to destroy financial barriers that stop people from practicing yoga.

In a traditional model, the studio tells you what to pay when you come to class. This may vary depending on a number of things, but the price of the class is decided upon by the business end of the studio. Usually, a teacher in this environment is paid a fixed amount. This model provides a level of predictability and stability for the studio and its teachers, but can create difficulty for students.

In a donation-based model, the students decide what to pay when they come to class. Some students pay a lot, some students pay a little. In this environment, the teacher is usually compensated based on the total donations received for her class. You can see how this turns the above equation on its head a bit. This model creates a level of financial ease for students and unpredictability for the studio and its teachers.

Let’s look at how this works at Replenish, where the suggested donation is $15 per class. Because we believe in the importance of transparency, students are asked to write down the amount of their donation when they sign in. All donations are honored, regardless of the size. The value of the donation is split between the studio and the teachers. In our case, that means that Replenish receives 50% for providing the space, administrative support, and supplies, and Joyce and I receive 25% each for teaching the class.

Being a teacher at a donation-based studio means that I don’t know what I’ll be paid for the classes I teach. Yoga teaching is my full-time job, and this is my primary source of income. Can you imagine clocking in to work with no idea of what you might be paid for a day’s work? It can be a little scary. So why do it?

Teaching donation-based classes allows me to walk my talk in a lot of ways. It’s vitally important to me that the practice of yoga be cracked open for everyone that needs it - all bodies, all ability levels, all financial situations. I don’t want yoga to be limited to wealthy bodies any more than I want yoga to be limited to skinny bodies. I don’t want you to have to choose between school supplies for your kid and yoga, or getting an oil change and yoga, or paying rent and yoga. I want you to be able to do all of that.

It also requires me to trust (and to practice trusting) that the universe is actually a benevolent place with my best interest at heart. I have to trust that my students want to give what they’re able, and that gift will be enough. I have to trust that some students will give a little more when they’re feeling fortunate to cover those who are struggling. I have to trust that I have something valuable to offer, and that the people who need it will happily show up.

Donation-supported yoga classes have become an important part of the conversation about accessibility and financial disparity in yoga practice and are a much needed resource in our community. I want to thank those of you who have voted with your wallets to support this class, and I hope you know how valuable that support has been to its ongoing creation. If you would like to participate, join us at Replenish in Columbus, OH, or look up donation-based yoga in your area.

The Fullest Expression of the Pose by Angie Hay

Joyce and Sara, partner-supported heart opening.

Yoga teachers love to tell you about “the fullest expression of the pose.” I first started hearing this little phrase a few years ago when some Vinyasa teachers I know began to experiment with bringing inclusive language into their classrooms. Everybody was getting clear on the fact that saying “the real pose” was going to have to be abandoned because of the division it created - here I am in the real pose, there you are in that fake shit. Folks were casting about for a more yogic way to describe pose levels, and suddenly the “fullest expression of the pose” arrived.

Like so many mistakes, it was quick to catch fire. Reach back and grasp the opposite foot to come into the fullest expression of the pose. Touch your forehead to the floor to come into the fullest expression of the pose. Lift the feet off the ground to come into the fullest expression of the pose.

This phrase tends to hang out with poses that contain some degree of impossibility. Despite its many lovely levels of complexity, I have yet to hear anyone talk about the fullest expression of downward facing dog. Or the fullest expression of criss-cross applesauce, also known as sukasana. It always describes something to be attained, a goal to be accomplished.

Just like circus performers, we yogis want our bodies to do amazing things. We want to measure our progress from who we once were to who we are now. We want our bodies to be our temples, our playgrounds, and our measures of worth. Remember when I couldn’t put my foot behind my head? Well, look at me now. How long a road I’ve travelled. How different I’ve become.

The problem with thinking of poses in terms of their fullest expression, the problem with this endgame asana, is what we allow it to infer about the rest of the practice, ours and everyone else’s.

The first time I kicked my feet over my head into forearm balance, I rested upside down against the wall for a few seconds, then laid down on my mat and cried with the sheer joy of living inside a miraculous vehicle. Was this the fullest expression of the pose, or would that arrive when I could balance in the middle of the room? After my friend’s knee surgery, she practiced a beautifully aligned tree pose laying on her back. Was this the fullest expression of the pose, or just a placeholder for a day when the real thing could show back up? I have seen many pictures of B.K.S. Iyengar draped over a solid wooden arch practicing a wheel pose. Would you suggest that this was not the fullest expression of the pose because of the prop? I triple dog dare you to say that to his face.

Outside of the laboratory of your own body, can you really say what the fullest expression of any pose is? What resource can give you this information? Light on Yoga? The nationally famous yogi you took a workshop with last weekend? Your Instagram feed? These are all likely to disagree in many ways.

Furthermore, supposing that such a thing as “the fullest expression” exists, what is its real value? From a therapeutic perspective, we know that we can see measurable results from the simplest and most relaxing forms of asana. From a spiritual perspective, we know that the yogi in class who can take every bind may not even be the nicest person in the room, let alone the most enlightened. From a physical perspective, we know that the ability to achieve extreme poses actually says very little about the health of the body creating them.

In truth, “the fullest expression of the pose” is just “the real pose” in disguise. Here I am in the fullest expression, there you are in that empty shit.  It's a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  

But when I look at my students, wherever they show up in the vast spectrum of a pose, I don't see chaff.  I see wheat for days.  To be increasingly effective yoga teachers, we need to practice dissolving our biases in every way - around race, around class, around sexual orientation and expression, around gender, around size, around age, and definitely around ability. This is not a liberal PC imperative but the revealed truth of the philosophy that surrounds the practice we love, which tells us that we are all one, all Divine, in no way divided from or less than all that is. The language you choose in class will surely and steadfastly reveal the ways in which you remain trapped in the illusion that we are separate from, and therefore measurable against, each other, and this language will inform your students thinking about themselves and the practice.

Honestly, sometimes grabbing a toe is just grabbing a toe.  And the fullest expression of yoga asana is something that can never be captured in a photograph.

The Ethics of Self-Improvement: truth in advertising from a non-dual perspective

The mythology of transformation is the cornerstone of advertising.  Offering to reduce the large and small discomforts inherent in being human, what we yogis might call dukkha, is the bread and butter of marketing.  Our dissatisfaction with ourselves and the world around us is used as a lure to entice us to buy cars, soda, shampoo, and every other product on the planet – even, sadly, yoga.  Though the philosophy of yoga indicates that each of us is entirely composed of the divine, the marketing of yoga tends to enforce the same tired illusions, or samskaras – that we are incomplete, flawed, probably even bad at the core, and that the practice of yoga (or its many accessories) can lead us toward the realization of radiance we hope to someday embody.  After all, if you thought the whole world was contained within you, what would you really need to buy?  For those working in the business of advertising our yoga classes, workshops, teacher trainings, and products, the quest to create ethical marketing can be as hard as asking our students not to round their backs in Ardha Uttanasana.  The question becomes can we entice students to give us their money without promising change?  Or is there a type of change we can promise that doesn’t stand at odds with our philosophical beliefs?

For the purpose of this paper, I will be using the viewpoint of non-dual Śaiva Tantra as the philosophical touchstone.  There are other philosophical concepts that could be referenced as “the philosophy of yoga,” but this is the one that resonates with my viewpoint and life experience and is the direction I reference when I have questions about how to proceed.  In his excellent book Tantra Illuminated, Christopher D. Wallis defines non-dual Śaiva Tantra (NŚT) in this way:

NŚT holds that one thing alone exists: the Divine, in various permutations.  To say that God alone is real is the same as saying everything exists is God.  In NŚT, to experience this divinity in and as all things is the goal of the practice. …[NŚT] is based on the teaching that all things are manifestations of the Goddess.  Therefore the body was seen not as a locus of sin and impurity, as in the pre-Tantrik tradition, but rather as a vehicle to realize divine reality.

One of the distinctions of Tantrik philosophy is its lack of a battle cry for self-improvement.  The Tantrik practitioner is not called to purify or refine herself, is not asked to participate in austerities.  Even participating in the illusion that oneself is separate from the totality is thought of as part of the divine play – a masking veil dropped by the Goddess in order to experience separateness and the eventual awakening into connection.  One may become drawn to yogic practices and holy scriptures as this play unfolds, or one may receive a direct transmission of the truth without having done any “work” at all beforehand.  However the veil begins to fall is thought of as an act of grace, not something that can be earned by devotion to practice, social standing, religious sentiment, or the like.  The practitioner does not have to earn it, and actually can’t.  

At first glance, most yoga advertising does not seem to create a conflict with the concept of an already-existing inner divinity.  There are some glaring exceptions, (such as internationally-known vinyasa teacher Sadie Nardini’s marketing for The 21 Day Yoga Body, which is touted as a “fast-acting program” to “renovate your mind, body, and spirit”), but most yoga advertising seems to use language with a fairly gentle brush.  A recent edition of Yoga Journal magazine included advertisements encouraging the reader to “Explore the Power of You” (Kripalu), “Find Your Serene” (Source Naturals), “Help People Let Go” (Mindbody), and to “Nourish Yourself” (Special K).  Yogi Tea asks “How good can you feel?” and Tom’s of Maine insists that, “We believe what’s inside matters.”  While this language doesn’t go so far as to support the realization of divinity in all things, it doesn’t contradict it either. 

But words are the smallest part of any yoga advertisement.  What really sells are the pictures, and, in yoga advertising, there are lots of pictures.  A quick perusal of any yoga advertisement reveals what’s really on offer here:  thin, young, strong, flexible, white women.  The 100-page November 2014 edition of Yoga Journal magazine included no less than 38 distinct advertising images of thin, young, strong, flexible, white women, and that’s counting paid advertising only, excluding the similar images used in the magazine’s actual stories.  In comparision, advertising presented 4 women of non-white ethnicities, 3 non-white men, and nobody fat, old, or differently abled.  A review of almost any yoga-focused magazine, website, or book will reveal a similar narrow visual focus.  Should we assume that most yogis are thin, young, strong, flexible, white women?  Many professionals in this industry with firsthand knowledge of the diversity of their student populations would argue against the truth of this assumption.  To understand the gross predominance of these images, we must remember the purpose of advertising: to convince the consumer of a need for something she doesn’t already have.

The yoga industry knows who we are, and it knows what we want.  Thinness is offered as a benefit of yoga by everyone from national registry Yoga Alliance (“weight management”), to the American Osteopathic Association (“weight reduction”), to the local yoga studio (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH – “weight loss and/or weight management).  The phrase “weight management” in this setting has to be understood as a euphemism for becoming thinner – one is unlikely to read this benefit as a way to gain a few or stay exactly as one is.  Yoga Alliance elucidates:

While most of the evidence for the effects of yoga on weight loss is anecdotal or experiential, yoga teachers, students, and practitioners across the country find that yoga helps to support weight loss.  Many teachers specialize in programs to promote weight management and find that even gentle yoga practices support weight loss.  People do not have to practice the most vigorous forms of yoga to lose weight.  Yoga encourages development of a positive self-image, as more attention is paid to nutrition and the body as a whole.  

With this kind of open-ended and unspecified evidence, one could easily replace the word “yoga” in the above paragraph with any sort of movement activity.  Why list this as one of the benefits of yoga?  Because everyone wants to be thinner, and yoga is what Yoga Alliance has to sell.  While thinness is used as an example here, this theme is consistent throughout all of the photographed attributes.  Advertisers know we want to be thinner, younger, stronger, and more flexible – these are easy commonalities, low-hanging fruit.  These desirable attributes also compose a cultural agreement about what it means to be beautiful.  In reality, when we attempt to sell yoga, we end up selling beauty instead.

Casting one’s lot with the quest for beauty is financially a very smart move.  The beauty industry is estimated to have garnered $426 billion dollars in sales in 2011, with numbers heading ever upward.  This industry establishes demand by creating increasingly unattainable “standards,” offering images of these extremes as a cultural norm, and then offering to sell the consumer a product or service to help her bridge the gap between the flawed self and the perfected self.  We could be talking about longer lashes and healthier hair, or tighter tummies and perkier buns, or an unwaivering Natarajasana and an effortless Bakasana.  In the world of advertising it’s all the same:  Offer an image of perfection to highlight the consumer’s inability and insecurity, and then sell, sell, sell.

What are the risks of this tactic?  Marketing like this helps us keep our yoga studios open and our classes filled.  Many yoga businessmen and women would argue that we get them in the door with the simple stuff and let the practice fill in the blanks over time.  You come in the door for handstand and we sell you inner peace.  You come for your bad back and leave aware of your connection to the divine.  Is this wrong?  In Tantra Illuminated, Wallis argues against this deception in this way:

The great master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice yoga from the perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfill is ultimate purpose because it is a practice founded on wrong understanding. …However, if you undertake the practice of yoga with the right View of self, that you already are a perfect and whole expression of the Divine and that you are doing yoga to realize and fully express what is already true, then you have empowered your practice to take you all the way.

In The Heart of the Yogi, Doug Keller expresses a similar concern when explaining the importance of the kula, or community, to one’s experience of the truth:

Good company helps us to transcend limitations, bringing greater acceptance and understanding; bad company reinforces them (sometimes making virtues of our vices), usually with greater prejudice against ‘others.’  Our spiritual wholeness or integrity depends on the consistency between inner life and outer action.  Integrity requires that we not see or think of ourselves inwardly one way and yet act outwardly in another way.

This philosophical standpoint indicates that the bait and switch of beauty for possible divine realization actually builds a barrier decreasing the likelihood of our students (and customers) ever feeling and experiencing that profound connection with all that is.  Yoga as a pathway to picture-perfect beauty is a falsehood.  Enticing students to practice on the basis of this falsehood makes a virtue of their vices by making them heroic in their attempts to improve.  Instead, we could be helping them to transcend limitations by offering the possibility, from the very first interaction, that they are already intrinsically and unmistakably perfect.

If we choose not to offer beauty as a result of yoga practice or saturate our advertisements with envy- (and purchase-) inducing images of perceived perfection, what shape will our marketing take?  What can we do to make our imagery reflect the reality of our classrooms?  I propose the following three 

guidelines:

1) Create advertising imagery that includes vast diversity. 

2) Reduce or remove all language or implication of self-improvement from advertising text. 

3) Deliberately include language that supports the idea of union with the divine or the already-realized self.

Run your advertising through the test described above: how heavily does it rely on images reflecting beauty standards of thin, young, strong, flexible, and white?  Fostering the concept that everything that exists is God/dess means allowing those outside this paradigm to see themselves as yogis as well.  Support this by presenting images of a variety of body sizes, skin tones, age ranges, and differences in ability.  Imagine what yoga advertising could look like if informed by this quote from Dr. Timothy McCall?

What yoga can do, which can make the critical difference in your health and well-being, is give you greater control of your mind and a greater understanding of the tricks it can play. This, perhaps more than anything, is what leads to life transformation.

Using language that encourages action (as we hope advertising will do) without encouraging change is tricky, but can be done.  Notice the elegance of this sentence about Baptiste Power Yoga:  “This practice is designed to reveal not just physical strength and flexibility, but also mental clarity and empowerment.” (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH).  The use of the word “reveal” (instead of “create” or “improve”) implies that physical strength, flexibility, and mental clarity are already within the practitioner.  The practice then becomes the tool that shows her how capable she truly is, not the tool that creates this capability.  Replenish: the Spa Co-Op (Columbus, OH) recently posted an Instagram picture of a couples yoga session that showed two men sitting across from each other in Sukasana with their hands resting on each other’s hearts.  The teacher in this image was positioned well-behind and obscured by the two practicing yogis, demonstrating the importance of the practice and stepping away from the idea of the teacher as the celebrity, the most important person in the room. 

As yoga continues to grow in popularity, our responsibility to safeguard its sacred intent becomes increasingly critical.  As teachers, business leaders, and longtime practitioners, our voices reach the widest audiences and have the longest resonance.  While engaged in the important process of creating financial wealth, let us return over and over again to the center of the work, and let the practice itself guide us into divine action.

[Yoga] involves a honing and refining that releases your true essence, as a sculptor brings out the beauty of form in a stone by slowly and carefully chipping away the rest.” –Joel Kramer, “Yoga as Self-Transformation”

Resources

Keller, Doug.  The Heart of the Yogi: The Philosophical World of Hatha Yoga.  DoYoga Productions, 2007.

Kramer, Joel.  “Yoga as Self-Transformation.”  http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/writings/YogaAsSelfTransformation.pdf

McCall, MD, Timothy.  “Yoga as a Technology for Life Transformation.”  http://www.kripalu.org/article/179

Wallis, Christopher D.  Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition.  Anusara Press, 2012.

Yoga Journal, no. 269, November 2014.  Cruz Bay Publishing, Inc.

www.balancedyogastudios.com

www.yogaalliance.org

www.sadienardini.com

Why I Chose Yoga by Michele Prater

Michele and her friend Alex the dog

"You have cancer."

Three words that unleash a riptide of emotions.  The kind I have is a chronic, live-a-long-time-with-it disease.  The anxiety of when I am going to get sick again and the constant worry is tough.  Especially when stress is my major trigger for the next cancer outbreak.  I had to find a way to calm and control my emotions of this self-fulfilling cycle of impending evil.  I knew that included a way to calm my whole being: mind, body, and spirit.  My oncology team encouraged me to try yoga, but I had heard all about yoga classes and was more than a little nervous to try.  I was desperate to find a class where I felt safe and would not feel discouraged if I wasn't "good enough."

So I chose Yoga Enlarged.  After the first couple class, I was awestruck, feeling almost addicted to how I was beginning to feel during and after class.  I had no idea just how wonderful yoga would make me feel and was surprised as to how happy the students and teachers were.

But then, how could they not be?  Yoga is the exact opposite of cancer: the latter is toxic what-ifs, the former is peaceful empowerment.  Now, six months later, here I am, healthy, in remission, and happily loving the class, the wisdom and helpfulness of the instructors, and the friendships I have made with my fellow yogis.  Yoga has helped me build that union of mind, body, and spirit I was desperately seeking in the form of relaxation, happiness, peace, and tranquility.

Ocean City by Angie Hay

(Originally published at yogacolumbusohio.com, February 12, 2014)

I have a picture of myself at age 18 flying a kite on the beach in Ocean City, Maryland.  I am wearing one of my favorite shirts of all time, the same shirt I had my senior pictures taken in, a long sleeve black turtleneck sized 3XLT.  I imagined that I had this kind of flowy bohemian poet thing going on, but what you see in the picture is a tiny girl wearing a giant square.  The beach-goers around me are comfortable in tank tops and board shorts, but I am basically a head floating above a censor box of my own creation.

I should warn you in advance: this is not the before and after story you may already be imagining.  I was fat on the beach and I’m fat now.  I’ve been thinner than now twice in my adult life, each time the result of a crushing nervous breakdown during which eating slipped outside of the realm of concern or, really, possibility.  I lose weight when I spend lots of time crying; when I’m happy, I’m fat.  So I won’t be telling you I lost 75 pounds and finally wore that bikini.  This isn’t that kind of journey.

When I was a brand new bellydancer, I met an amazing Amazon woman named April who danced in the Advanced class.  She was bigger than me by a mile.  She was wide and tall, gave powerful hugs, and could out-dance anyone in any room anywhere, hands down.  She wore skimpy tank tops and sarongs that showed her thighs and she looked like sculptures of goddesses that cavemen worshipped by firelight.

One night a bunch of us were sitting around doing that thing we do, bemoaning our miserable bodies, and we riffed on the topic of arms for quite a while.  Oh, my fat arms, oh, my flabby arms, oh, the way this shakes, it’s awful, I keep them covered up all the time.  April listened for a while before interrupting us.  “I’m bigger than all of you,” she said, “and I wear tank tops all the time.  How do you think it makes me feel when you say those things?  You’re not just talking about your arms, you’re talking about mine.”

Oh.  Was that true?  To my shame, it was.  Our insistence on hating our arms was a direct and evil instruction to April, who was smart enough to kick open the door we were trying to slam in her face. 

(April, I miss you, girl.  Wherever you are, I hope you’re dancing and happy.)

But could we really love these arms?  We had a list of their failings one hundred items long.  We had stacks of magazines that confirmed their ugliness.  Was there a deeper truth we had been missing?  There was.  It was the truth of April dancing.

Summer was coming, and we were tired of sweating in long sleeves on ninety degree days and acting like we were perfectly comfortable.  My roommate Andrea and I made a plan:  Tank tops, summer 1998.

We bought tank tops in spite of cringing in the mirror.  We negotiated tiny challenges.  Wear the tank top for five minutes at home.  Wear the tank top for a full day at home.  Wear the tank top on a little trip to the gas station.  Wear the tank top on an hour long trip to the grocery store.  The miracle was that Andrea in a tank top was just as lovely as Andrea in a hot long-sleeve shirt.  She wasn’t somehow fatter or suddenly way too much, she was just a curvy girl enjoying the breeze on her arms in a chair on her back porch.  We were mirrors for each other.  Accepting the possibility of April’s beautiful round arms and Andrea’s beautiful round arms meant accepting the possibility of my own beautiful round arms.  It was a practice, and we practiced it.  And it didn’t take long for the challenge to dissolve into two girls wearing what everyone else wore in the summer, and not thinking about it too much.

There were other challenges, some of which we did together, but mostly roads I eventually took on my own.  The getting-rid-of-control-top-pantyhose challenge.  The dancing-with-my-belly-bared challenge.  The not-keeping-my-butt-covered-in-a-long-shirt challenge.  The wearing-whatever-I-want-to-yoga-class challenge.  The getting-dressed-without-thinking-about-being-sexy challenge.  The no-make-up challenge.  The wearing-a-skirt-without-shaving-my-legs challenge.  (Did I lose you on that one?  Why?  Can only shaved legs be considered beautiful?)

This doesn’t mean that I now live a magical life of loving myself unconditionally every minute of every day.  There are still days when looking in the mirror makes me sad, or when trying to get dressed for a fancy occasion is a painful of hour of putting on everything I own and taking it back off in despair.  What it means is that when that happens, I try to love myself anyway.  It’s the loving-yourself-when-you-feel-ugly challenge.  The quieting-the-mean-woman-in-my-head challenge.  It’s a practice, and I practice it. 

Every time I feel tempted to limit myself, whenever I feel those walls closing in, I push back.  Sometimes I do it for myself, and sometimes I think about who might need me as a mirror.  When I ride my bike, or practice yoga in public, or dance on a stage, or even take a nap when I feel a little tired, I can create space for someone else to love themselves a little.  Five minutes at a time.  Maybe just on a little trip to the gas station.    

Why Yoga Enlarged? by Angie Hay

(Originally published at yogacolumbusohio.com, January 13, 2014)

I spent the first twenty years of my life not loving myself much at all, and then somebody I loved stopped loving me.  In retaliation, I took up bellydancing.  This wasn’t an act of bravery or courageousness of any kind.  I was grasping at straws.  I went to dance class in oversized overalls covered by a black sweater that hung to my knees.  My dance teacher gently confirmed that she’d be better able to help me if she could see my body moving, but it wasn’t an option at the time.  I was doing the best I could, and the sweater was part of that.

Next, my mom suggested we take a yoga class together.  My first yoga teacher was a gift from the universe straight to me, a wise woman wrapped in a blanket in a golf course clubhouse.  She taught a class that was compassionate, creative, and well-informed, tuned in to the seasons of the year and the people in the room.  She had a way of suggesting modifications that made them seem like natural extensions of the poses, no judgment included, no subtext that “better” yogis would be doing something way more awesome right then.  The body I had always been at odds with opened like a gate in her class and I began to believe myself capable of amazing things.  I thought that’s what yoga classes were like.

After a year, she stopped teaching and I began looking for yoga in other places, ending up in lots of spots that had a decidedly different vibe.  By then the modifications I had learned were so much a part of my practice that I added them without prompting, which was good, because I wasn’t given any.  The teachers seemed busy with their soundtracks and giving us “a good workout,” and only my love of the practice kept me in the room.  I became aware that in these classes I was the biggest person by far, and I felt committed to holding that space for other people like me to practice.  Instead, each week I watched the same tragic trajectory:

One or two big mamas would come in and roll out their mats, spending a few anxious moments before the start of the class weighing the room.  (I do this, too.  I felt you every time I saw it.)  The warm-ups were okay, and the first unlikely shape didn’t kill anybody, but the second one always did.  I would start wishing for the teacher to say aloud the modification I was already imagined, but she never did.  Her pathway was more about complexity, and by the time she was explaining how to “deepen the pose,” the prospective yogi had rolled up her mat and sealed the double doors behind her.  It was awful to see.  I knew that the right teacher could drop them right into the practice, as mine had, and the fact that they were turned away instead was heartbreaking. 

I wish I could say that only happened in one room with one teacher, but any plus-size yogi already knows that would be untrue.  It’s hard to find a doctor or employer who doesn’t see you as fat first and foremost, and it can be a complicated negotiation among family members, lovers, and friends.  The world is a harsh place for bodies right now, an ugly web of what’s not allowed and what you can buy to banish the parts of yourself you don’t like.  Many yoga classrooms are tiny little mirrors of these poisonous ideas.  From the teacher who pretends not to see my big body because she doesn’t know what to do with it to the teacher who over-assists me because she’s hyperaware of a big butt in her class.  From the skinny teacher who insists “we all have little bellies we’d like to lose” to the teacher who offers a modification “for students who are obese.”  From the yoga companies who don’t make clothes in my size (all of them) to the partners who would rather work with anyone else in the room.   

When I began to daydream about teaching yoga, those left-out yogis were the first people I thought of.  People brave enough to give their bodies something delicious and new, only to have everything they feared about their own self-worth reinforced in the first few minutes.  What if the room they walked into was filled with bodies that look less like Shiva and more like Ganesh?  Have you ever seen a fat man in Warrior II?  It’s awesome.  It looks like someone who wins every battle.  Have you ever seen a room full of fat women doing backbends?  I haven’t either, unfortunately, but I saw a picture once of a big woman in Pigeon that looked like Aphrodite in her shell.

These are the reasons why Yoga Enlarged feels important to me.  I want yoga to look like me and I want it to look like you.  I know yoga can work for me and I want you to know it can work for you.  I want big butts in yoga pants on yoga mats doing yoga poses.  I want you to feel how powerful your thighs are and the amazing length of your wingspan from fingertip to fingertip.  I want you to take a big breath that makes your big belly stick out, and I want it to be the one breath of the day when your size feels like an asset to you.  I want you on this journey with me.  I want yoga to feel like a home to you.  If you’re there, it will make it feel more like home to me, too.

“Yoga is not just about yoga poses.  It is a technology designed for revelation:  revelation of your true face, your true name, your true nature. For most people, unflinchingly and lovingly knowing yourself requires a great deal of power. Although we tend to mistrust power as corruptive, I learned from my teacher years ago that, if I want to do something good in this world, I damn well better be powerful.” – Bernadette Birney

All The Space You Need by Angie Hay

(Originally published at yogacolumbus.com, February 4, 2013)

Years ago I came across this quote from supermodel Cindy Crawford:  “They were doing a full back shot of me in a swimsuit and I thought, Oh my God, I have to be so brave. See, every woman hates herself from behind.”

I was recently reminded of this arguable statement when I received an invitation from my colleague to be photographed doing yoga for the studio’s new promotional materials.  The instructions specified that one’s hair should be neat, and included hopes that clothing for the shoot would be provided by a fancy national yoga gear chain known for their behind-flattering pants.

My brain, known for occasional moments of cruelty, instantly flooded me with images of my out-of-control dreads, my big butt, and the package of vegan cookies I ate almost entirely by myself the week before.  They sent this to everyone, my brain said, but clearly they didn’t mean you.  I mean, let’s be realistic.

Oh.  Right.  You’re probably right.

I took my first yoga class when I was twenty-one through Gahanna Parks & Rec.  One day, unannounced, a guy from the local free paper showed up asking to photograph our class.  The other yogis refused, but I was feeling fearless and said yes.  In class I felt like a gazelle, like a waterlily, like the Grand Canyon, and it was new feeling for me.  Why not capture it in pictures?  I practiced like he was shooting a feature and waited anxiously for the paper to come out.  The image that made it to the cover was my face in profile in Trikonasana.  My round cheeks.  My soft neck.  Me, just me.  Not the yoga model I expected to see.  My face was as serene as a bonsai tree, but it was difficult to see that through my disappointment.  I didn’t even save a copy, not one.

These are the facts:  there has never been a body shaped like mine on the cover of Yoga Journal.  Lululemon’s snazzy yoga gear isn’t made in my size.  They don’t look at me and see a yogi.  But, miraculously, I do.  Almost every hour of the day, almost every day of the week.  When seeing myself as a beautiful and valuable person is the hardest thing I have to do all day, I stay in the fight.  But not in that particular moment when I was invited to have my picture taken.  In that instant, it was a fight I couldn’t win.  It was bravery I didn’t have.

As a fat lady, professions other than belly dancer and yoga teacher might have made more sense.  Maybe there are jobs where a big gal is just the thing.  I worked in a café for a year where the boxy men’s chef coat I had to wear because the ladies sizes didn’t fit made my eyes sting with tears.  For two years I sat in a basement office where all anyone talked about was how few calories they allowed into their bellies.  The truth is that there are no safe havens for fatness, not yet.  So I take my body to the dance floor and the yoga mat, the places it feels best in the whole world.

This is the type of bravery I do have.  To stick with it.  The courage to be the fattest lady in class so another woman doesn’t have to worry that it’s her.  The courage to come to the mat as I am, even if I’ve never received the “yoga body” promised by the world’s ad men with the purchase of your first mat.  The body I see in the mirror is a yogi’s body shaped by fifteen years of practice.  A dancer’s body shaped by sixteen years of undulations and shimmies.  The body of someone’s favorite aunt, someone’s beloved girlfriend, a girl who watches hours of vampire TV and eats too much ice cream, who rides her bike singing down High Street in the spring.  A body created by two lineages of exceptional women who I am proud to call my ancestors.  I am shaped exactly like myself.  On this point I am unfalteringly, unshakably clear.

Though the yoga industry does not make space for all of us, the practice of yoga does.  I believe there is a room somewhere with a vacant space that is exactly your size, waiting for you to roll out your mat.  I promise to greet you there exactly as you are, with my head bowed and my palms pressed together in front of my heart.  

If what we want does not exist, it becomes our responsibility to create it.  Knowing this, I will put on my own clothes, and, when invited, turn to face the camera.