‘I was called to teach yoga’
Her Instagram poses made Jessamyn Stanley an online star — now she wants to get the world moving
Jessamyn Stanley isn’t some type of unicorn, although as she travels the country, many people are just as surprised to see her.
She’s a “fat,” black lesbian who teaches yoga. Yes, she calls herself fat and embraces the word.
“There are tons of fat black women, men and all kinds of people who are out here trying to teach and trying to live their practices,” said Stanley, 30, who started posting her poses on Instagram and now has more than 300,000 followers.
She’ll be at the Houston Public Library, 500 Mckinney, 6-8 p.m. Monday to talk about her new book, “Every Body Yoga: Let go of Fear, Get on the Mat, Love Your Body,” (Workman).
“There are tons of people of all shapes and sizes doing yoga,” she said. “We’re all looking at each other in a way that’s so dope. This what needs to happen.” Stanley talked with the Chronicle
about how she got into yoga to deal with depression, how she fends off body-shaming haters and why yoga is her calling.
Q: How did you get started in yoga?
A: I was in graduate school going through a pretty severe state of depression and one of my classmates wanted me to take a yoga class. I told her I wasn’t doing it because I had actually tried it when I was in high school and hated it. She just wore me down. I went and I loved it because it was exactly what I needed at the time.
Q: Did it help with your depression?
A: I’m prone to anxiety and depression. It helped me to understand one of the major problems in my day-to-day life is not challenging myself and not stepping outside of any boundaries.
Q: When did you know you were good at yoga?
A: I don’t really think that I’m good at it now. I think a lot of people go because they think they are good at the poses and they look good in Instagram photos. Yoga is a practice, and whenever I start one of the poses, it feels like the first time. The idea that you are a master is an ego thing and has nothing to do with anything. I don’t feel like there are any poses that I’ve mastered. I’m in a constant state of learning and will be like that forever.
Q: Why do you like it?
A: The reason I keep doing yoga and retreating to it in the darkest points of my life is because it allows me prompt questions about who I really am that cannot come to otherwise.
Q: You seem cool with calling yourself “fat.” Many people cringe at that.
A: I’ve been reclaiming the word “fat” for about a decade now. It happened before I started practicing yoga. I’m fat and identify with being “queer.” Fat has come to mean stupid, ugly, unworthy and all of these things that it doesn’t mean. What it really means is large.
Q: Why do we have a hard time with the word?
A: We living in a society where people feel it’s OK to fat shame and to make an obese person feel like a worthless human being. We live in this bizarre body-obsessed age, and I feel to really make any change with that is to own these weapons people are trying to using against us. There is no evidence that shaming makes people take better care of themselves.
Q: How can we encourage people to love their bodies?
A: The way to make someone feel better about themselves and to take better care of themselves is to make them feel like a worthwhile human being. As a fat-bodied person who is really active, it is important for me to own that worth.
Q: Do you feel pressure to lose weight?
A: I think everyone has all of these assumptions about my life based on fewer than 1,000 photos on Instagram. People are so concerned that I sit around and eat hamburgers all day. There was a period of time I was practicing asana (a type of yoga) really intensely, like about eight months to a year, and I lost weight. Then there was this other period when I wrote the book, was touring constantly and I gained 30 pounds. There’s no reason for people to know all of this because it has nothing to do with them or with my practice. I think another really important part of fat acceptance is drawing a line in the sand as to how I’m going to allow people to characterize me. If I decide to lose weight, that’s no one’s business but my own.
Q: What other stereotypes do you hope to dispel?
A: There’s this assumption when you see a fat-bodied person who exercises that they must want to lose weight. Why else would they be exercising? But humans aren’t meant to sit in chairs all of the time. We’re supposed to be moving. It doesn’t have to do with weight but overall capability. I’m not obsessed with losing weight also because I have other stuff to do.
Q: Why the book?
A: I’ve had my social media presence for a while, and so many peopled reached out to me about how to get into yoga. There are so many resources about yoga, but when I looked it up, it was so confusing. Is it a religion? Do you need special clothes? Is it for white people? I just wanted to put it in layman’s terms.
Q: So do most people ask how you got started?
A: Yes. When someone asks me how I started yoga, what they are really asking is, “How did you — a fat, black queer person — determine that you were going to do yoga?” In order to tell that, I have to talk about my childhood experience, events that took place, alcohol abusing and so much more, which I tell in the book.
Q: You started with Bikram yoga. What was that like?
A: When I started going to Bikram, I was always the fattest person in the room and frequently the only one of color. I couldn’t do anything at first, then I got to a place where I decided to tune out the negative and try it.
Q: How do you get motivated to do yoga when you see other people with more flexibility?
A: You have to look beyond other people and manually ignore them. That’s what you do. That is hard to do. I’m practicing this constantly — whenever people look at the clothes that I wear and think I don’t deserve them because I’m fat, when they look at the food I eat and think it’s too much and I should be eating less. I’m constantly reminding myself not pay attention to what other people think. That is what you have to do in the yoga class or any class where you feel people think you are not supposed to be there.
Q: What do you think of online classes?
A: Studio environments can be too intimidating to try for many people. That’s when I encourage people to do it at home online. I do agree you need a teacher to learn good alignment. But when you’re just starting out for the first time, it’s totally chill to take an online class. It’s like being in a classroom except the teacher will never come over and belittle you. You can take all of the time you need to feel what down dog is supposed to feel like. You want to be in an environment where you feel comfortable.
Q: If you weren’t doing yoga, what would you be doing?
A: I went to culinary school and was working in a restaurant when I started doing all of this. I’ve done a lot of work in marijuana legalization in the state of North Carolina, and I have a business I’d like to open in relation to that. I also worked in nonprofit arts management with a lot of arts organizations, dance companies and festivals; I still have a deep interest in arts philanthropy. But I feel like I was called to teach yoga, and I’ll do it as long as I can.
Q: What brings you joy?
A: Remembering that there’s no reason to dwell on unhappiness. Most of the moments when I really need something to pull me out (of anxiety), it usually just means sitting alone in silence. My family, close friends and my animals also bring me joy. I’m so irritated that I’m so fluffy and light like this now because I used to be super jaded. But the reality is this light is really is amazing, and that is what really makes me happy.