Going Through It

INTRO:

JESSAMYN STANLEY: The iconic image is probably a white, thin woman practicing a handstand in the sunset of a beach. Like she’s wearing a bikini, perfectly framed in the shot, everything is glistening, golden. You’re like, wow, yoga teachers must shit rainbows or something! If this is what it is.

As a fat-bodied person, I’ve spent so much of my life trying not to be in photographs. So the mere practice of intentionally taking a photo of myself was terrifying.

ANN FRIEDMAN: Jessamyn Stanley never set out to do anything radical. She fell in love with practicing yoga and started taking photos of herself in various complex poses. After she started posting those photos on Instagram, she became hugely popular. People were thrilled to see a prominent person in the yoga world who wasn’t a thin, white, blond woman.

And so Jessamyn made a big decision: she committed to becoming a yoga teacher. But before she could carve out space in the yoga community, she had to come to terms with some complicated ideas she’d internalized about herself.

I’m Ann Friedman, and thisis Going Through It: a show about how hard it can be to figure out when to quit and when to keep going.

On this episode: What happens when everyone loves the fact that you disrupt the stereotypes, but it’s still not easy to be the only person like you in the room?

Jessamyn Stanley was going through it—and I’m not just talking about a sequence of yoga poses.

STANLEY: Prior to practicing yoga I was a very angry person. And I have a habit of just being like, not necessarily angry all the time, but just really fiery. And feeling like in that fire, in my anger that I'm able to sort of harness some sense of control of the world around me.

We live in a world that believes fat people should not exist and believes that any fat-bodied person should shame themselves until they are no longer fat. And that your only worth comes when you are not fat. And that as long as you’re fat, you have no worth. So just boil that down to being a part of every single piece of my life.

FRIEDMAN: How did you start doing yoga in the first place?

STANLEY: I was 16. My aunt was obsessed with Bikram yoga at the time. It's practiced in a room that's between 100 to 104 degrees. So my aunt she drank the Kool Aid and she wanted me to drink it.

I remember that experience like it was yesterday. The first thing that you notice walking into a Bikram yoga studio, besides the fact that it's hot as all hell, the first thing you notice is that it reeks. It smells so bad because all of the classrooms are carpeted and so as a result that carpeting has soaked up gallons of sweat over time from all of the bodies that have been in this 100 to 104 degree room. And it creates an odor… I mean it is so specific and so unctuous. It's enough to bowl you over, honestly.

You start with two rounds of very intense pranayama. Pranayama is breathwork.

FRIEDMAN: I just have to interrupt and ask what that sounds like?

STANLEY: I’m going to do a demonstration. It's like you hear this sharp inhale [BREATH IN] and then you hear a very loud… BAHHHHHHH exhale. It is a huge inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth that is so loud. And because we live in a performative society a lot of people who are in the classes are trying to perform their best loud breath. So you see people making these like really intense faces. As a 16 year old non-practitioner I was just thinking, like, everybody’s in here pretending to be a dragon. And it’s so hot. Then immediately I was sweating from places that frankly I didn't even know human beings sweat from. I was sweating from my eyebrows and sweating at my elbow creases and the tops of my knuckles and I was like, “I have to be here for 90 minutes. What is happening?”

We go through the first few postures and everything just seemed completely impossible to me. I made it maybe a third of the way through the class before I was like, “I have to get out of this room, I’m done.”

FRIEDMAN: So given how impossible that felt, and how terrible that first experience was, what was it that made you go back to yoga?

STANLEY: I am prone to depression and anxiety, it comes in waves. It's come in waves like my entire life. And so this was just yet another time where I found myself sort of sinking back into a space of depression. And during that time a bunch of things happened.

The thing that happened that really just fucked me all the way up was that my aunt passed away really unexpectedly. She was very young and she just dropped dead of a heart attack, like outta fucking nowhere, and—my mother has two sisters. My Aunt Tracy is the person who introduced me to yoga my Terria is the aunt who passed away. But both of them have been, I mean, pivotal is not even the word. They are massive parts of who I am.

It was really, really, really difficult for me. I did not have anyone to lean on. I moved to this new town and I was going down this new path and I really began to just doubt everything about myself and really just slip so much further down this spiral. And I kept thinking like, “What was making me feel OK before? What was I doing when I was living in Winston and I was going to graduate school, what was making me feel better then? Yoga? Ok yeah, I just got to figure out a way to start doing yoga right now. And that’ll be my medicine.”

FRIEDMAN: So you start taking yoga more seriously, doing it regularly, and then after you get pretty good you start posting these images on your social media. And honestly they look pretty different than the other yoga photos that are already out there.

STANLEY: The iconic image is probably a white, thin woman practicing a handstand in the sunset of a beach. Like she’s wearing a bikini, perfectly framed in the shot, everything is glistening, golden. You’re like, “Wow, yoga teachers must shit rainbows or something.” If this is what it is. And then my photographs are me in my messy apartment, with frequently a dog or a cat in the picture. You can see that I’m physically tired. And then on top of that I’m the complete opposite of the typical practitioner that you would see. I’m fat, black, I’m queer and I’m not apologetic about any of those things.

FRIEDMAN: Can you talk about what it felt like to document yourself?

STANLEY: As a fat-bodied person, I’ve spent so much of my life trying not to be in photographs. There are entire years of my life where there are two photos of myself because I was so afraid to be in front of a camera lens. So the mere practice of intentionally taking a photograph of myself was terrifying.

FRIEDMAN: So when you posted these photos to your social media, how did people respond?

STANLEY: The response that I had from people on social media was really extreme. I had a lot of people that were honestly just flabbergasted to see a fat, black, queer person taking pictures of themself and putting them on the internet and not being ashamed of themselves. Like, it didn't even extend to like, “Wow she's practicing these really advanced yoga postures”. It was literally just, “There's fat black people that don't hate themselves? This is amazing!” So that was a huge part of the response. And then a sort of subset of that response was people being like, “Wow I never thought I could do yoga. Now I see this person who I also never thought I'd see doing yoga. So if she can do it, maybe I can do it. Can you come teach me? Come teach me!” So I had all these people from all over the world who were like, “Come teach me yoga!”

And I could not get my mind around the financial commitment of it. So one day I was talking to my father. And I had a fair amount of press mentions at that point and I guess my mom had told him about some of them. One day I was talking to my dad and he was like, “Well your mom told me about this People Magazine thing, what's going on with this yoga thing Jessamyn?”

And I was like “Well I don't know…” And he was like, “Well, are you going to be a teacher? What's the purpose of all this? What are you doing?” And I was like “Well maybe, but I don't have the money to go to a yoga teacher training.” And he was like, “How much money does it cost?” And I was like, “It's three thousand dollars.” And he was like, “What if we could help you find that money so that you could go do this training?”

If this dude—the person who has been saying the whole time, like, he could give a shit. Like at all. My father does not care about social media! My father does not care about these things! That's not a thing! But if he is saying that I need to go to a yoga teacher training, that's the universe talking.

Because when that happened, I was like, “OK, let me get serious about this.”

FRIEDMAN: In your mind, what did you think teacher training was going to be like?

STANLEY: What I was expecting walking into my yoga teacher training was that, I would go in, I would learn about history and anatomy and modifications and alignment and that all of that knowledge would make me at least an okay yoga teacher.

I remember the first session that was had, walking in, and it’s like this big circle of people and I was one of only two people of color. I was one of the only visibly fat people. Right off the bat I was immediately like, “This is going to be one of those experiences where I’m the only and I have to build my space for myself.”

Walking into my yoga teacher training, literally everyone was crying. Like every day, a new person would be crying.

FRIEDMAN: What?

STANLEY: Crying all the time. Right. People would be crying and I would almost be like looking down on them… like, are we crying about yoga now? Is that what this is? I say that because, about halfway through training we were doing this partner yoga exercise. I was partnered with someone who is much smaller than I am. She’s like 4 foot 11. And however much you weigh at that size, she’s like a lot smaller than I am. And I am… me. We're doing partner yoga together. Partner yoga being where you basically drape the other person's body on top of you and you move through yoga postures together in varying formations.

That experience of being paired with someone who was so much smaller than me was horrifying. It was literally like a nightmare come true. I'm picturing every possible scenario where like, I put my body weight on this person and she screams and maybe she falls and maybe she hurts herself and maybe just the sheer weight of me is going to hurt her and she's going to collapse to the ground, and my day is going to end at the hospital because I took—let's call her Jessica—I hurt Jessica so badly that she's now like permanently in a state, and it's all because I'm fat.

The whole time that we were practicing together, I would just apologize. Any time that I would even sort of touch her I'd be like “Oh I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” And eventually, this person stopped me, she literally put her hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eye and she was like, “You do know you don't have to apologize for everything all the time, right?”

I laughed—because laughing is one of my defense mechanisms—and I was like, “Oh I’m sorry. I guess I’m just apologizing for existing.”

And this is the thing about that. I said I was apologizing for existing. That is not something that I had ever consciously thought in my entire life. Ever. I'd never thought that before. But it slipped out of my mouth like it was the most true thing that I'd ever—like it had been on the edge of my tongue my entire life.

I think I don't deserve to exist? How long have I been thinking this?! How long?! Since I was born?! What else has that related to? I mean there's so many things that I have blamed on my family. Blamed on my parents. I blamed on the media for not representing me. I blame on my friends for saying horrible things about themselves and others. I blame it on my romantic partners. I try to stifle it by drinking, by smoking weed, by shopping, by eating. You dig into all these vices when, at the end of the day, you're walking around thinking, “I think I don't deserve to exist.” Like, what? And so I was literally shell shocked. I could not move forward.

I cried through the rest of the practice. I cried through our final rest, our Shavasana. I got in my car and I was crying. And again, everyone is crying. I finally understood why everyone was crying. Because when you see the truth within yourself and when you see it so profoundly, it’s not tinged with anger and with meanness, or anything like that. You just see the truth.

I'm not saying this to say that, “Yeah, and the moral of the story is that I never apologized for anything ever again and my life is awesome because of yoga.” That's not it at all. I still compulsively apologize for things. I'm still struggling with all of the same constructs and fortresses that have always been there. But to see them… what would happen if we lived in a world where everyone saw themselves with compassion? What would that look like? We would live in a completely different world.

So that really shaped and changed so much for me. It made me understand that, yeah I need to be a yoga teacher. Fuck, everybody should be a yoga teacher! Every single human being needs to be able to reflect to somebody else that it is okay to be able to respond with compassion toward yourself. And that by starting that within yourself, you can reflect that experience to other people.

FRIEDMAN: When you think about this moment of crying and realizing this thing that had been on the tip of your tongue, like, how did your body feel differently before and after that moment?

STANLEY: Mmm. It's like wearing weights. Like if you’ve been wearing a really heavy backpack. You have to wear the backpack. It's got all your stuff in it. You need everything that's in it. You wear it for so long that it becomes a part of who you are and you don't even acknowledge that you're carrying this weight around. And then you take that backpack off, and you stand up without it, and you feel what it feels like to just be with yourself.

FRIEDMAN: So after you’ve had that transformative take the backpack off feeling yourself, how do you get your students to the same place? How do you get them from I’m just doing some yoga poses to I’m having this transformational feeling too?

STANLEY: The way that it shows up for me as a teacher is that, really, it's like I found an instrument inside myself.

Like one day I was digging away inside myself, and I was like, there's an instrument, a musical instrument inside of my body! And so I reach inside, I peel back the skin and the guts and I pull out this instrument and I'm cleaning off the guts and the organs. And I start to play my instrument. I don't know how to play this instrument, I just found it inside myself. How the fuck do I know how to play it? So like I'm teaching myself to play this instrument, and then somebody comes up, they hear me playing my instrument, and they're like where’d you get that instrument from? And I'm like, bitch I found it inside my myself! And they're like, word? And I'm like, yes! And they're like, do you think I have an instrument inside of me? And I'm like, you totally have an instrument inside of you, look for it! And then they're like OK!

So then they started digging away inside themselves and peeling back the skin and the guts and they pull out their instrument. And they clean it off and they start playing their instrument and were not playing the same instrument. They have some other instrument. And neither of us know how to play it but we're just playing it and it's fun to learn how to play something. And then other people hear us and they come up and then they start looking for their instruments and then even more people come up, until finally, it's this massive orchestra of people playing instruments that have always been within themselves.

I actually have a spreadsheet that is literally like—it's basically everywhere on the planet. In my mind. I'm just gradually working my way down that list to reach all of the people who have asked me to teach them. And I feel like eventually—hopefully—I will reach the end of that list. And I'll move on with my life.

OUTRO:

FRIEDMAN: Jessamyn Stanley travels the country teaching yoga. And wrote a book called Every Body Yoga. Her approach to yoga has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Cosmopolitan Magazine. You can follow her on Instagram where she continues to post incredible photos of herself in various dramatic poses.

CREDITS:

FRIEDMAN: Going Through It is an original series from MailChimp. And I’m your host, Ann Friedman. I am properly aligned by producers Eleanor Kagan, Megan Tan, Gabrielle Lewis, and Claire Tighe. This episode was edited by Joel Lovell. It was scored and mixed by Hannis Brown. Thanks to Max Linsky, who’s always disrupting the status bro, and everyone at Pineapple Street Media.

TEASER:

FRIEDMAN: On the next episode: How do you learn to stop saying yes to other people, and start saying yes to yourself?

SAMIN NOSRAT: Here I had just spent my entire adult life, basically, investing in a career of cooking. And all of a sudden I was faced with the thing that since I was 12 years old I wanted to do. I had the opportunity to do that. And I had no idea how to do any of it!

FRIEDMAN: Samin Nosrat, author of the beloved cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat talks about how going through it meant walking away from the kitchen.