My Body And I Are Allowed To Take Up Space In This Yoga Class
“Restorative yoga always begins in a backbend,” my friend Clark says to the class.
He is pressing his long feet, endearingly simian, against the small of my back, urging me to lean into the pressure. Clark is my friend, but also the teacher, so this is normal and not just a weird bonding habit between friends. The goal is to make space so that when I lean against blocks and rest my head on one, I don’t feel crunched like an accordion desperate to play some shanty I cannot play. This is the backbend he’s referring to, a gently supported one, not the wheel pose that turns instagram into a rainbow of arced bodies, desperate for a dopamine hit in the form of likes.
Over to the far right our friend Jay has designed to use a folding chair and a skyscraper of blocks to get his long, muscular frame into position. It’s a bit much. Sometimes the contortions he puts himself into looks like a night at the sex club, a honey trap for polyamorous couples with a penchant for ropes. I try to erase this Eyes Wide Shut thought from my head, not because it’s uncharitable but because I don’t want to laugh. And Jay is sweet, a little deer with the upper torso of a swimmer.
This particular studio is marketed as the studio where your yoga teachers come to practice, which is why I stick to restorative and don’t venture outside this bubble. I work in marketing, so I’m not immune to good boilerplate language. And I understand the intention is to put the practitioner at ease, and let them know that they’re in good hands because everyone here is an expert, who trains other experts. For me, though, this has been singularly intimidating because I am not a yoga instructor, nor am I someone who practices daily, nor am I someone whose years practicing various yoga traditions has yielded a physical appearance that in any always matches what the multi-billion dollar Yoga Industry propagates: usually white (I’m that), definitely thin (but not that), able-bodied (mostly but not always this), and“fit” (what does this even mean?).
In fact, the myth of white, thin bodies as the only representation of yoga impacts how yoga is taught. Writing about Curvy Yoga, Anna Guest-Jelley calls this phenomenon out:
Like many things in life, yoga poses are often taught (even to teachers in training) on an assumed thin, fit, able, and fairly flexible body. In some ways, that makes learning and teaching the poses as a teacher easier. In that context, there is a “right” and “wrong” way to do a pose, and your job as a teacher is to help students get their body to move into the “right” way.
The only problem? Way more of us are not already thin, fit, able-bodied, and flexible than are. Even if you’re one, two, or three of those, very few folks are all four. So that means the vast majority of students will not be able to do the “right” version of the pose. And that tends to encourage one of two things for many people: (1) dropping out (or not starting in the first place) or (2) forcing your body into a version of a pose that isn’t right for you. (source)
Most of the time I’ve reconciled being at odds with most of the yoga studios I go to, but I do rebel. The more thin privilege dominates the wellness and fitness industry, the more likely I am to show up in a cropped top and a power scrunchie in my hair, my large breasts tamped down in a sports bra I’ve lovingly nicknamed Brienne of Tarth. I might cry about it later, but still, I try to take up space.
Restorative is good for taking up space. I feel the space between my shoulders widen as I lean over the blocks, a strap buckling me into myself like a human burrito. My head cocked slightly towards the door gives me a full view of a man sauntering in, chest first, a rooster in a muscle tee. He takes a look at Jay, towering above us over his blocks and folding chair, looking as mighty and busy as the George Washington Bridge, and then looks over at Clark who is putting on the last touches of my adjustments.
“Hi,” says Clark. “What’s your name?”
“Brad,” he replies, his voice flat.
Clark’s class got ranked on ClassPass as one of the best places for men to practice, which explains why top heavy men with skinny legs keep coming in. It seems strange that so many of them have missed leg day, but I can’t talk; I’m curvy, fleshy, in some circles fat, in others voluptuous, in others exoticized, in others demonized. I think of what a group of men like this would be defined as, like the way we categorize groups of fish as schools or geese as a gaggle. The closest I find is an obstinacy of buffalo. An obstinacy of Brads. At any rate, we’ve seen an influx of very fit men, which pairs nicely with the already strong contingent of fit women and men who attend this studio.
“Have you ever done yoga before?”
Yeah, man, he has, but now he needs restorative. Needs restorative in the tone that indicates he has put his body through the wringer and now needs to relax it, let the body breathe and heal, so he can do it at the gym, in bikram, in the marathon, at the office, in the bedroom, all over again.
“Should I grab a chair to start?” he asks Clark, but his eyes are still trained on Jay draped over the folding chair.
“No,” Clark replies, “get yourself set up like Miranda is here.”
Although I’m leaning back over a series of blocks, my eyes mostly to the ceiling, I can still see Brad. Average height, strong build, dark hair, white man. I’ve seen so many of his type, I would not be able to recognize him in any other context. Maybe he flies by on a Citi Bike through SoHo past my office daily. Maybe he hits up La Colombe for bitter, dark coffee, drinks it in three gulps once it’s cooled to lukewarm. Maybe he is another meaningless face I scroll past on the dating apps, saying, nope, not for me, and I’m not for him.
Brad studies me, as I study him. I can feel his eyes taking in the shape, the length of my body, picking up every soft place on me, and then laying it down like a stone he should have left unturned.
“I’ll get a chair,” he says tersely, and walks off to where the folding chairs lie in wait, soldiers for the brave.
Clark and I say nothing, but between us I can feel a little cord that’s been pulled taut. If he’s telepathically hearing me, I’m whispering go for the jugular.
Later I see Clark take the chair away from Brad, and repeat his instructions to him to set up like how I’m set up. Brad complies, surly and stiffly. I pay attention to him through class, to see if he is truly the superior at this. He’s not. He’s average, able to hold some poses well because of his strength and inherent flexibility, and struggling with the small movements that are more nuanced. Stiff hip rolls. Elbows that lock when we flip our wrists. Eyes that do not look out in cat-cow, just down, at his crotch and beyond.
The Yoga Industry has made billions off the idea that yoga is for strong, flexible bodies — both the creation of and the maintenance of. This has dovetailed nicely with racist, western beauty standards, which has been heavily marketed and unchallenged through most of my life (though how refreshing to see that slowly changing).
Yet, studios that struggle to turn a profit amid high rents and now the impact of COVID-19 would do well to reconsider putting accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront of their business strategy. Doing so, of course, would require an overhaul of how teachers are trained to teach yoga. Not all yoga instructors are like my friend Clark, who challenges the Brads, who corrects the yoga apprentices when they base their adjustments on wrong assumptions about practitioners, who if I call out to him “my body is incapable of doing the thing that everyone else seems to do” he offers a modification. He is a good teacher, so even if he was trained in a biased system that narrowly defines what it means to practice yoga, he does not subscribe to that. Still, advocates for yoga inclusivity have tips and tricks on small but impactful changes you can make to do better, starting with language.
But even if doing the right thing isn’t the goal of yoga studios, making money to survive recession, pandemic, and inept administrations should be a goal. Sacrificing the Mirandas in hopes of bringing in the ClassPass Brads is like trying to round up an obstinacy of buffalo: Brads are transient and in search of leaner, greener pastures.
That particular Brad never returned to Clark’s class, though many other lookalikes did right up until the pandemic shook us all of our studio-hopping. Now, only the most committed sign up to do classes from our living rooms over Zoom, without any of the benefits of the instructor’s expert adjustments. We rely on commands issued via tiny screens, and we make the most of it. In some ways it’s a relief to do away with the formality of a studio. I have less performance anxiety and seem to connect with certain poses more deeply than before. No one is looking at me. No one is judging me. Odds are, no one can really see me too well in my dim-lit room through the many shifting pixels of buffering screens. There’s a freedom, a transcendence, that seems to suggest that as much as the body matters, the body does not matter here in the future where we are boxed off from one another, unable to quite make out the lines of one another’s bodies except to see each other as flattened, flickering, incandescent.
