Yoga and Body Image: 25 Personal Stories About Beauty, Bravery & Loving Your Body
Melanie Klein, Anna Guest-Jelley
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0738739820
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this remarkable, first-of-its-kind book, twenty-five contributors―including musician Alanis Morissette, celebrity yoga instructor Seane Corn, and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Sara Gottfried―discuss how yoga and body image intersect. Through inspiring personal stories you’ll discover how yoga not only affects your physical health, but also how you feel about your body.
Offering unique perspectives on yoga and how it has shaped their lives, the writers provide tips for using yoga to find self-empowerment and improved body image. This anthology unites a diverse collection of voices that address topics across the spectrum of human experience, from culture and media to gender and sexuality. Yoga and Body Image will help you learn to connect with and love your beautiful body.
2015 IPPY Award Bonze Medal Winner in Inspirational/Spiritual
2014 ForeWord IndieFab Bronze Winner for Body, Mind & Spirit
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knowledge comes from inside. It’s not a miracle cure. But it’s one that works. Today, I use yoga to live longer, love better, laugh louder, keep my mind clear, and prevent the most common health concerns that I know we all face. Yoga provides me the balance of work and play, of mindfulness and escape, and of relaxation and challenge. It also helps me maintain a positive body image and wabi-sabi perspective, because I know I look and feel healthier when I stick to a regular yoga practice, and
that I was not viewing my body negatively or putting much emphasis, if any, on my external appearance. Because I was not seeing my appearance as needing to shift or change, be thinner or more beautiful, the natural progression of self-love was that I let go of the illusion that my worth was measured by my size. I did not purposefully set out or even consciously determine to create a positive body image through yoga; it just arrived as a byproduct of all of the other gifts that the practice
felt like a guess. Although this process was difficult for me, after having trained myself for nearly twenty years to disengage from my hunger and satiety cues and eat by the external guidelines of a diet, I know that the only way I was able to engage with it at all was because of yoga. Through yoga, I learned that when a yoga teacher asks you to “feel what’s going on in your back leg in Warrior I,” that’s not a metaphor like I’d originally thought. Yoga taught me that it was possible to feel
presence whatsoever, then we’ve taken yoga away from its true intent. My deepest hope is that the voices from the margins—those who are practicing yoga and those who could be practicing yoga—will be heard as we continue to come forward and that the mainstream Western yoga community can adapt and change. What I don’t want is the mainstream yoga world to make room for us, in its version of yoga. What I want is for our experiences to shape and shift how yoga is currently practiced. I want us to
11-year-old. Jennifer and I had frosting smeared across our Rainbow Brite T-shirts, and our small, rounded, prepubescent bellies pushed against the waistbands of our wannabe designer jeans, full of pizza and cake. My friend’s mom, a former beauty queen who loved diet pills and martinis, pulled each of us in to her bony chest. She squeezed us tight with her thin, bejeweled arms as kids zoomed past us hopped up on birthday cake. With genuine sadness in her voice, she said, “You two will always have