Jessaamyn Stanley, 35, is an American yoga teacher and body positivity advocate who found fame when she began teaching yoga through social media. She is the author of the book Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear, Get On the Mat, Love Your Body. For HELLO!, Jessamyn shares what Black joy means to her as a self-identifying 'fat femme' and 'queer femme', and honors the Black activists who founded the movements we praise today...
© Bobby QuillardBlack joy to me is resilience. It is showing up no matter what, and saying, I am here, even if no one wants me to be, because my existence is not based upon what another human being has decided about me. And for me, joy looks like remembering that I'm not a machine, and no one box can contain me – and what that actively looks like is spending time outside and trying to get my feet in the dirt, listening to the sound of water, letting the sun shine directly on me, standing in the moonlight.
It's so easy to forget that we are creatures of this earth and that we can be recharged by the same things that recharge all of the plants and the other animals that live in this world.
The first time I went to a yoga class I was 16; my aunt was obsessed with Bikram yoga, and I was just sitting on the couch all summer. I've never been particularly athletic, and when I entered this hyper-athletic environment — where I really felt like everybody had gotten together and practiced it beforehand —it seemed impossible. I left the class and I was like, I'm never doing this again. Yoga is the absolute worst.
But in my early twenties, I had a friend who asked me to join her and I realized that your first time is supposed to suck. When we start a wellness journey or physical practice, we're expecting to immediately be good at it, but what usually happens first is that it just sucks, really bad. We have to confront all of those hard emotions that are sitting in front of whatever else we may be feeling.
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I started sharing my yoga on social media when I started practicing yoga at home because I couldn't afford to go to studios. I didn't have a teacher there telling me, This is the way to practice the posture, so I still was looking for a measure of accountability, plus I also wanted to be in community with others. But it can be lonely to practice at home by yourself, so I started posting photos of my yoga practice and when I did that, the vast majority of people that reached out to me were not yoga practitioners, they were people that said, 'I didn't know fat people could do yoga.'
Why do you think fat people can't do yoga?
Fat people do all kinds of stuff all the time. But we have a massive visibility issue. Even now, in the ten years that I've been sharing online, there has been tremendous change, but there is still a visibility issue. It was a very alienating and very isolated experience but the really cool thing about sharing your voice and telling your truth and living authentically is that you will always find your people.
Fat positivity, fat acceptance and fat liberation is a movement that was really grounded by Black activists, and that work we saw first in the body positivity space and then body acceptance, body neutrality, and now body liberation. I've been fat and Black my entire life, it is my full truth. Black women have always been mistreated and disrespected so as a Black woman that is something that I already know.
© Bobby QuillardWalking into every room, it is likely that many people in the room do not want me to be there, that they do not want my success. To persevere as a Black woman is something that is much bigger and is something that is in every single part of my life.
The long term effects of systemic racism are so deeply embedded in our society, I'm still waiting for real change. What that looks like is each of us, on an individual level, accepting our internalized racism and moving forward from that place. It's not slapping a band aid on it, not saying, Oh we put this picture out or we're doing this work. It's less about the showing and more about the doing.
Seeing fat Black people more often in the media, that is a huge shift, but I don't know that that shift is really pointing to what needs to happen on a larger level and in each household around the globe. But every step is a step in the right direction and I'm always optimistic and I think that optimism is going to be crucial as we go into these next stages.
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