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can’t do yoga? Fat people do all kinds of
stuff all the time.’” That’s when she
realised her unique opportunity to
broadcast a real yoga practice, “scars
and all,” she says.
By the time she attended a 200-hour
yoga teacher training (YTT) in
Asheville, North Carolina, in March
2015, she had amassed a sizable online
following and interest from the press. In
January of that year, People ran a story
about the “self-proclaimed fat femme”
who, with 29,000 followers, had become
a “yoga star on Instagram.” In the piece,
she discussed her plan to crowdsource
the money she needed to attend YTT
later. “There’s obviously a need for this,”
she said at the time. “People are thirsty
for someone who looks like them—or at
least who doesn’t look like everybody
else—to show them what to do.”
But as we sit across from each other
eating churros and sipping on lattes one
October morning in Durham, where she
lives with her partner and three cats,
she tells me she never aspired to become
a yoga teacher at all. “So many people
were asking me to do it,” she recalls.
“But I didn’t understand why I needed
to be the one to teach.” Instead, she’d
thoughtfully respond to her fans by
researching and suggesting Jessamyn-
approved teachers in their areas. It
wasn’t until her father, who had
disapproved of her foray into yoga “from
the jump-off” offered to help fund her
training that she began to take teaching
seriously. “My parents do not have
$3,000 laying around,” Stanley says.
“For him to be so emphatic, I realised
there were bigger forces at play.”
Stanley says her life could be neatly
divided into pre- and post-YTT. “During
YTT I had a number of experiences that
cracked open my soul,” she says. “I
was able to see so many things I’d been
hiding from myself, and I understood
that the way to teach people would be to
genuinely live this practice and to shed
light, as much as I can, on the spaces
that are ugly and dark and complicated
and refl ect that to the people. For me,
that’s what teaching should be. Rather
than being a career choice, it’s a