Today I started 40 days at my local yoga studio, which means that for 6 weeks I’ll attend 4 yoga classes a week along with a lecture about the spiritual and practical effects of yoga in a western lifestyle. I’m going to preface this post by saying I’m nothing special when it comes to this topic: I go to yoga but I’m no expert (I can’t touch my toes), I’m a thick girl but I’m about a size 16, I’m mentally ill but I’m high functioning when medicated. I’m not trying to tell anyone that practicing yoga will solve any of your deeply rooted problems, I’m mostly expressing my experience with the practice before starting a project, and at best hoping to start a discussion about the topic. 

My relationship with my body is both complex and subtle. I grew up in an athletic setting where women were openly shamed for being unable to control their growing bodies. I personally never experienced anyone telling me I wasn’t thin enough but I watched other girls experience blatant criticism for their bodies and thought to myself “I love them, but I will not be them.” However when I was seventeen due to a trauma I was no longer able to practice the sport I had dedicated 10 years to and the settling dust of this experience unearthed a lot of issues with my mental health. I found that being an athlete was quelling a lot of inner turmoil and without an outlet I was bursting at the seams with unbound mania and depression. I have experienced a lot of really deep and terrible depressive states in my early 20s but this time when I was 17 is still the time that I think of as my most unstable. I was diagnosed bipolar, which I now I think the more accurate label for myself is something my doctor calls bipolar depression, and when I was 18 I started medication before starting college. 

Let me make this perfectly clear: I don’t think physical activity is a replacement for medication. I fucking love medication. I would kneel down at the alter of my Effexor and my mood stabilizer and give it my deepest blessing. However, the meds accompanied by having no physical outlet caused me to gain a lot of weight in college. Luckily for me, this weight came at a weirdly perfect time in my life. Don’t get me wrong, the weight gain accompanied one of the most difficult and depressed times of my life, but I was so wrapped up in hating my mind and my heart that I couldn’t give a shit about my weight. Honestly I thought I looked fucking fine. I still think I look fucking fine. I think plus size women are so fucking beautiful and I refuse to allow anyone to tell me that being skinny is the only way to be genuinely happy. 

This being said, I still wasn’t content with my mind. I doubt i’ll ever truly be content with my mind. I remember reading Ellen Forney’s Marbles and for the first time truly feeling like I was understood. In this book she talks about being very skeptical about practicing yoga, but in time she found it to be extremely beneficially to her mental health. This was very accurate to my own practice, despite my mother’s futile attempts to get me to lose weight in any way she could manage. After a few weeks of frustrating and trying practices, I found that the quieting of the mind was incomparable. Sometimes the hour and 15 minutes I spent wiggling around in a hot room was the only time all day I didn’t feel like dying. The quieting for me comes from both the excursive and the meditation of the practice. I completely knowledge that as a white woman doing yoga in the USA in the year 2016 completely erases all of the beautiful eastern culture of the practice of yoga, but even the watered down version of age old poses I attempt do so much for me. 

featured image originally published in Ellen Forney's graphic novel Marbles.