Today—and last year she became the
go-to yoga spokesperson for the New
York Times. Her podcast, Jessamyn
Explains It All, is recording its second
season, and she’s about to launch a Web
series, in which she’ll tackle taboo,
politicised issues such as the legalisation
of marijuana and the shortcomings of
monogamy. (Her first guest will be yoga
teacher and fellow body-positivity
advocate Dana Falsetti.)
Stanley believes people are paying
attention because they aren’t used to
seeing a fat black woman tackle tough
asana, the American yoga space
being—in her words—“deeply rooted
in white supremacy.” She’s uncensored
in her critiques of modern yoga in the
West and of forms of oppression and
body shaming she calls “patriarchal
white-centric beauty standards.” She
calls herself fat constantly—in her
Instagram posts (“It’s weird to be the
fat kid that thin kids want to know/
befriend,” she wrote in August); in her
2017 book, Every Body Yoga; and in
conversation—as a means of taking
back ownership of a term generally
reserved for shaming those it describes.
To that end, she’s a one-woman
visibility crusader, dismantling
expectations about what a yoga body
looks like and encouraging more people
who don’t generally see themselves
reflected in the yoga space to come
along.
Stanley started her Instagram
account not to become the poster child
for fat yoga, but to solicit feedback on a
home practice she’d started in 2012. Like
so many yoga practitioners, she says she
never truly felt comfortable in a public
yoga class, squeezing herself into the
farthest back corner of the room
wishing to be invisible—the very
opposite of what she stands for today.
But back then, she was insecure and a
little lost, having dropped out of grad
school at the University of North
Carolina School of the Arts, so she
began a yoga practice from the safety of
her own living room. She utilised Yoga
Journal’s pose index and online classes
from Kathryn Budig and Amy Ippoliti,
documenting her progress online. “But
the response I was getting from people
wasn’t a lot of feedback about my
practice, it was more people being like,
‘Oh, my god. I didn’t know fat people
could do yoga,’” she says. “And I was
42 like, ‘Why do you think that fat people
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