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.