Yoga guru Jassemyn: "Self hatred was my constant companion"
When newcomers to Jessamyn Stanley enroll for a yoga class in Durham, North Carolina, she often hears the hesitant question, "Are you the receptionist?" ? "I'm the teacher!", Jessamyn answers with a big smile, and she already knows what's coming.
"Then their faces are almost always falling apart, and the horrified look says: Ogottogott, this is going to be a lame hour today! Most people automatically think that whoever is fat can not do good yoga." Jessamyn laughingly adds. I show them a kick-ass lesson! "
Jessamyn calls herself "fat", more precisely a "fat femme", a fat, feminine lesbian.
That's how she imagines it is on her website under her name. "I'm fat and strong," she says proudly. She can elegantly slide into a headstand or balance one-legged in the king dancer. But when she started practicing yoga six years ago, she found no teachers "who can tell you what to do with your stomach, if you're in the way of the forward bend, or if you almost suffocate one of your own breasts." (The solution to the latter: you take a harness, a common tool in yoga, and tense it just above the chest.)
Like her hundreds of thousands. Since Jessamyn documented her yoga practice on Instagram, she has been followed by 300,000 fans. Who "Googles Yoga" sees 90 percent photos of young, white women who do not have one ounce on their hips. "I found it almost impossible to identify myself with these one-dimensional images," says Jessamyn, "in the Yoga Studio I'm always the greasiest in the room and almost always the only black man. The scene is definitely very white and wealthy white. "
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