things we think about during savasana

Yoga is equal parts physical practice and spiritual practice, and it is the spiritual practice that has helped me accept my body the way it is. 

I am naturally tall and curvy, a typical female endomorph: fairly weak, curvy and soft with a hip-heavier hourglass figure. In the past couple of years, my BMI has oscillated from 22.4 to 24.4, depending on the season and how stressed I am. I am also Asian, and the two most common comments I get are “wow you are really tall for an Asian” and “wow I didn’t think Asian girls were that curvy.”

My mother’s side of the family are small-boned, thin people; my father’s side of the family are tall, big-boned and solidly built. My sister got the big bones but small overall build, and I got the small bones but a large overall build. The women in my family, nuclear and extended, never understood how I could be so tall and curvy—they still don’t—and my mother’s reaction in particular was to always comment on how I needed to lose some weight and to act as a food police. 

Under the combined pressure from family and from larger society, I gravitated towards physical activities where thinness was a pre-requisite. I believed that the more I danced and the more I ran, then being thin would naturally come. But it didn’t.

As how it often goes, I began to change my eating patterns, and they became very, very weird. My mother noticed, and the oddities irked her (for example, I refused to eat fruit because I had read that it makes you fat; I would only eat half a protein bar for breakfast, the rest for lunch, and small portions of “safe foods” for dinner), but by and large she encouraged the change because I was dropping weight and becoming what Asian women are supposed to look like. In the words of Marya Hornbacher, “when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match. We believe she has done what centuries of a collective unconscious insist that no woman can do—control herself. A woman who can control herself is almost as good as a man. A thin woman can Have It All.”

It’s been a few years since that, and I’ve constantly struggled to eat normally and to not allow my body image dictate what I eat. In all honesty, how many woman eat normally? How many of us eat when we are hungry and stop eating when we are not? How many of us have skipped meals because we’re “watching what we eat” and “trying to be healthy?” How many of us have stopped ourselves from ordering a burger or a cookie because we’re on a diet even though that fucking burger is what we really, really want to eat right now? 

One of the mantras that Emma, our yoga teacher, constantly repeats is the idea that each body is unique. Each body has its own strengths and weakness. There is no way to say one body is better than another because we all have our unique strengths and weaknesses. That idea has greatly helped me along the road of accepting my body. 

No, I will never be thin. No, I do not have long, beautiful lines. Yes, I look normal in person and chubby in photos. Yes, I have beautiful lines that curve. Being curvy is not less beautiful or aesthetically appealing than being thin; it is simply different. Yoga has allowed me to understand this.

Yoga has allowed me to gain appreciation for the way my body looks. Yoga has helped me realize and appreciate the beauty of my youth. Youth in itself, without any help and adornments, is beautiful because of its vigor and clarity. Right now, I may be the most beautiful I will ever be, and I am grateful for this opportunity. Yoga has helped me recognize this, and instead of wallowing in the idea of that I could be more beautiful, I celebrate the unique beauty that I do have. 

Yoga has changed how I view my looks and body from that of a critical outsider who can only see flaws to one in which I recognize the gifts I have from my own ideas of beauty. That is one of the reasons why I love yoga, and I am so grateful that I took a chance and began practicing yoga. 

—Karin