mission. A call to action. Something
to drive purpose in life. When I left
training I was like, ‘OK, now it’s time
to reach the people who have asked me
to reach them.”
And she does. Stanley spends nearly
every weekend on the road teaching
classes in regions where she’s been
beckoned by students who are hungry
for her brand of off-the-cuff honesty
and brazen practice style. “She
definitely has a take-no-prisoners
approach that I deeply admire about
her,” says yogalebrity in her own right
Kathryn Budig. “I think we’re entering
a phase where people want fewer
platitudes and more honesty, and she
delivers any message that she wants
to give with no frills, completely
unadulterated.”
Stanley’s ultimate goal is to make
more body-diverse classes accessible to
45
april 2019yogajournal.com.auanyone who wants them—and to those
who don’t yet realise that we all need
them if we are ever to truly embrace
what yoga is all about. Her new yoga
app, The Under Belly, launched early
this year, will help to make her classes
available to anyone with a smartphone
or computer. Stanley realises that this
alone requires a certain amount of
privilege, but she says she’s doing the
best she can. She’s got bills to pay, too.
On our last day together,I ask her
about some of the tattoos that adorn
her arms like sheet music. One of them
is the state motto of North Carolina,
Esse quam videri, Latin for To be, rather
than to seem. “She’s not about what
things look like or being a yoga
poseur,” says Sage Rountree, co-owner
of Carolina Yoga Company, where
Stanley once had a teaching residency.
“She focuses more on being real than
trying to project the image of being
real.”
And that’s exactly why Stanley
would like everyone to stop calling her
a yogi. True yogis, she says, live in a
state of perpetual detachment—from
material possessions, from worry, from
judgment. “It would be outrageous and
outlandish to say I’ve found a way of
dealing with, and releasing, attachment
like that,” she says.
But hey, she’s working on it.