yoga didn’t heal my body image, but teaching yoga did
I didn't want to write a post about my body image - ever, really! - but here we are. My terms of reluctance are legion: first, the cultural conversation seems over-saturated, often surface-level, full of the same platitudes and (increasingly) commercialized languaging. Secondly, as a white American voices like mine are over-represented in health and wellness spaces. Why should I add my thoughts? Who would be interested in hearing them, anyway? But it goes deeper than that. I'm tired of the body image conversation. A conversation I haven't even dipped my toe in! I'm tired. Let's be real: I'm exhausted from watching the Diet and Wellness Industrial Complex shoehorn the sacred constructs of self-care and self-love into programs selling weight-loss subscriptions, quack remedies, diet programs and foodstuffs, and flat tummy teas. In fact the other day Facebook so kindly showed me a fat loss ad using the phraseology: "I've learned my inability to release weight is a trauma response." Reader, that headline alone made me feel D-O-N-E. Nothing more disgusting than telling a trauma victim it's their own fault they can't be smaller. *** But here's the thing. Under Capitalism - and its little red rover buddies White Supremacy and the Patriarchy - all our bodies are under assault, being sold and sold to, up for grabs. All human and non-human animals are served up, sliced and diced (for billions, literally), commodified in every way and marketed to relentlessly. Now: I didn't set that up. But I have to survive it. And so do you! And just because I'm Tired - Doesn't mean I have nothing of value to add. I deserve to have my say, in the chance maybe - just maybe - I could help someone reading here. Because I know my interests and my goals are far more wholesome than those of Capitalism. *** Some day I'll tell my story of what I am up against. What it was like growing up in my maternal family lineage - surrounded by the women who sang duets and trios with one another about how they needed to lose weight, or how they were "bad" for eating that cheesecake, or how their asses were too fat and their features too unlovely - and the men who encouraged these women to care about this stuff. The men (including my beloved Grandfather) who wanted these women to make themselves smaller, the men who took pains to compliment women when they shrank (physically or socially). Some day I'll tell my story what it was like growing up, crammed into the wrong gender. Because if you think you know how it feels to have your body shape and size policed, growing up trans is a whole 'nother Level. My whole childhood it was "girls" or "boys" and which one was I, har har. I was complimented for any "femininity" of figure and form - I was never given space for my own gender autonomy. "Look at you here," my mother says to me, jabbing…