Layla: Jessamyn Stanley is an award winning instructor, author of Every Body Yoga and founder of The Underbelly, a virtual yoga studio available internationally by web, IOS and Android. Regarded as a leading voice on intersectional identity in 21st century yoga, Jessamyn has won many awards for her social influence and unique approach to wellness. With an articulate message of representation and feasibility, Jessamyn also speaks across the country advocating for body acceptance, female empowerment as well as African American and LGBTQ inclusion. Jessamyn has been featured in many media outlets including the New York Times, Good Morning America, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Allure, BuzzFeed, Shape Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian and Forbes. She broke boundaries for plus sized bodies with her 2019 cover of . In early 2020, Jessamyn was featured in Adidas’ Reimagine Sport campaign challenging old stereotypes and celebrating movement of all kinds.

Hi everybody and welcome back to Good Ancestor podcast. I am here with this amazing human being today Jessamyn Stanley. Jessamyn, welcome to Good Ancestor podcast.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much for having me Layla I’m happy to be here with you truly.

Layla: I’m very excited for you to be here and I’ll tell you why in just a moment but I wanna open with our first question that I asked every single guest, who are some of the ancestors living or transitioned, familial or societal who have influenced you on your journey?

Jessamyn: There’s a lot of people who I carry with me every single day and to the point where I think that some of them just it’s hard to even like put words to it because I don’t see myself outside of them but when you ask that all I can think about are my grandparents and the thing is like I was very close to my maternal grandmother before she passed and I think about her every day. I look at her picture every day. I feel very much like I see her in everything that I do more and more every day and I feel so grateful for the time that we spent together but also just the legacy that she—she’s just a person who loves so big and who is accepting so much and who—it’s hard to even use the past tense in talking about her because she’s so important to me and then I think about my paternal grandfather who I never met, my father never met. He was it’s hard to talk about this. He was killed before my father was born and I think of him as a first person in our family to go to college even a freshman at HBCU in South Carolina and we don’t know the details of his passing I mean it was the 60s in the south, so you can assume what happened but I think about him often because especially now because when I was growing up my father never talked about him. He had no contacts for him and I don’t know if that was him trying to protect himself I’m not sure but the more I think about it the more I think like, wow, what a dynamic life. It was brief on this planet but it goes on so much longer and what an incredible lineage he created in such a short period of time. And I think about this people who are the reason that my family is even here and who—they never sought praise or recognition or to really be seen outside of their communities and the fact that that is enough will always be enough, was enough, is deeply helpful for me and allows me to stay to just try to figure out what it means to just be and yeah, so anyway those are the many, many ancestors and really I am just the current iteration of so many but definitely those three people are leaning heavily on me for sure. Thank you for asking.

Layla: Thank you for your beautiful and vulnerable and truthful answer and I see especially as you are talking about your paternal grandfather and how like you said it was a short life but it was a deeply lived life and the legacy of that for you, you know, I have been following your work for a while and before I am like a fangirl over you I will say that I have watched the number of your interviews and listened to a number of your interviews and something that I observed about you is that you feel very uncomfortable when someone is praising you.

Jessamyn: Mm-hmm. Thank you for saying that. Thank you. Oh my goodness. Oh man, but you know what, I don’t know if it’s a problem. I do think that this is, it’s shame. One time I caught myself cringing in hearing about myself and I was just like wow look at the shame like where is that coming from? You can’t even hear somebody say just…

Layla: Right. I’ve seen you really deflected and I get I mean you’ve talked about how you wanna make sure that you stay grounded, right? And I get that. And you are somebody who has a very large platform seen as this global yoga leader and also a lot of people are projecting a lot of things on to you, right? From wherever their social identities lie or either the savior, the mommy, the token, all of these different things so I get it and I just genuinely want to share with you that when this global pandemic started, I was a hot mess. I had just come back of 2 international book tours and…

Jessamyn: Mm-hmm. My goodness.

Layla: Right. When I come back I’m like I’m gonna rest for a week, it’s gonna be amazing. I will go to the library, to the museum, and we will go shopping and hangout, I’m gonna do all these things and within just a few days of me being back, everything started shutting down and then within a week my kids were now studying from home. So, every plan that I had got thrown out at the window. I wasn’t ready for it. I was planning to go for a massage and the spa and all of these things didn’t happen, right? So I was a mess and I just came across on Instagram that you had this app, The Underbelly yoga app which I didn’t realize you had and I was like I think I need this and so I downloaded it, sign up for the subscription, started doing your yoga classes and they became such an anchor for me. I was not practicing any sort of yoga consistently. It wasn’t the first time I’ve done yoga. I’ve done yoga on and off throughout the years, but not like this. And there were so many aspects of it for me that just I felt like this was yoga for me and not for somebody else. Right? So I appreciated that you are so human which sounds still odd, right?

Jessamyn: Yeah. There’s so much in this world of yoga that is now real.

Layla: There’s so much that is going on and I’ve done yoga in classes. I’ve done yoga on YouTube but it wasn’t like this. I really appreciated the way that you, you know, would say you can modify it this way if your body is like this and I was like I thought I had to just force myself, to force my body into those shapes and that the practice of yoga was just getting overtime my body to perform as if I am a thin white woman.

Jessamyn: Right.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: Oh my goodness. I so deeply identify with that sentence.

Layla: I wanna say thank you because had it not been for that daily morning routine and that coming to the mat you used the language in one of the videos about, you know, you’re building yourself this life for us, you’re gonna ride through the day I was like that’s literally what this is. So thank you so so much because it made things easier for me which made things easier for my kids, made things easier for my husband and that’s real.

Jessamyn: And that is also like the only reason that ultimately to practice well. Can I just add so much to say in response to this?

Layla: Yup.

Jessamyn: Mostly that I just feel so grateful that we are able to connect with one another this way in an era where like there is so much noise and so much chaos and just so much unbridled fear and overtime I mean getting better at it but I’ve had a lot of conflicting feelings about cutting my practice out into the world about the way that it is experienced by others and even in teaching yoga in this premise of teaching yoga which really there’s no teaching of it, it’s always just, you’re just practicing, I’m just practicing and we just happened to be near each other and you are always being led to this teacher that’s inside of you when I’m just seeking out the teacher inside of me, I’m always very hesitant about this idea of like I’m going to teach someone something. I’m like I’m not teaching, I don’t know, I’m literally just showing up for my practice and we will see how things go and I just more than anything I’m just so glad that it resonates. I’m glad that you are like, yes, I see myself in this. Yes, this practice can help me like that to me feels like I’m gonna talk about good ancestor it’s like that’s the whole reason to do it. So that someone can find a sense of calm that you can maneuver and change depending on what’s going on in your life and where you are and because life is always complicated. One thing about this pandemic is that it’s like the first time that all human beings on this planet are on the same page about how crazy things are. It’s like there’s been a lot of almost like a classism to the experience of pain and chaos. We are finally in this age of like, okay, it’s crazy here. Everything is wild. And in that regard, I’m grateful for the honesty and authenticity that that allows for that people are just like, wow, I feel crazy. I don’t have anything. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to anchor myself and it’s like that’s how life always is.

Layla: Is, yes.

Jessamyn: It’s just changing more and more every day and I mean more than anything I’m just glad that we can talk about it. We can flourish together and it’s okay.

Layla: I love that you say that because after a few days of using the app and going through some of the practices, something that I said to a friend was, oh, I needed this before the pandemic like…

Jessamyn: That’s real. It’s like, oh, this is not happening. That’s so real. It’s like it takes something jarring to really stick and I mean everyone that I know who is really like practices yoga every day and has for a long time it’s because it’s a medicine for them like there’s something that happened, they were in a car accident, they deal of severe depression, they deal with alcoholism like somebody close to them passed away. Something has happened to jar them into recognizing that the only constant in life is chaos. Is it Octavia Butler, God is Change like that’s the thing that we can expect. And if we can just expect the waves then you come ride the waves. It’s fun. We are at the ocean together.

Layla: That’s right. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the other things that I really took from your classes but I haven’t got before in other classes. I think in other classes it’s really just been about the author itself and not how it relates to my experience in my life right now. What I was really learning as you’re, you know, moving into these different positions but you’re also talking us through it was there is no end, there’s no peak that we are trying to get to. There’s no happy place that we are trying to achieve. It’s really being in whatever is arising right now in this moment and that was something very, very different for me. I began to see how yoga is a practice especially for those who are really deep in the practice, why you would be attracted to the practice because it’s not just a fitness thing. It’s not just the author, it’s how do you relate to your life? How do you understand your life? You’ve talked about in your own experiences, you know, I know you started, you have your first yoga class when you’re in high school and hated it because there was this awful yoga class, you’re not ready for it, you know…

Jessamyn: You don’t know the interval, the worst.

Layla: The worst, right? But you came back to it in college and I think it sounds like when you can talk us through it a little bit but what was it at that time in your life that really was calling for yoga as a practice?

Jessamyn: You know, what’s funny is that the first yoga class that I ever took was the exact same type of yoga that I ultimately went back to and the interesting thing about the B sequence is that I always call it like the McDonald’s of yoga because it is literally the same everywhere that you go no matter where you are in the world. It’s the same sequence. The room is always hot so like I can’t over emphasize that like I had this identical experience that I was just in a completely different mental space to receive in two different times. So the first time I was very focused on the aesthetics of it that like it’s very hot in here. All of these postures are impossible. I can’t “do any of them”. I don’t see my body going into these shapes. I must not be able to do it. Then cut to some years later I was in graduate school and I was going through something that I think is really just something that happens to all human beings like if you’ve been on a path for a certain period of time, a path that is deep outside of yourself, you know, it’s career driven especially if it’s about the accumulation of power or wealth or money and I came to this realization of like this is not who I am. I don’t know what I am or who I am but this is not it and I don’t feel any spiritual connection to this and I mean there were other things that were happening too like I was in a graduate program that did not fit with who I was. I was in a relationship that was ending. I was there’s just a lot of different things happening and one of my friends, she was really into yoga at that time and she was like, oh my god, you should go. It’s just gonna make everything better and change your life. I just could not get my mind around that idea at all because I mean what I did know about yoga was very much about the physical performance of it and very much like definitely this is something that thin white women do. It’s not something that is for really for everybody and when I went and I went then and everything was exactly the same. It was still hot. It was so hard. And now I had this whole other fact that I don’t think I fully comprehended in the past that I had this idea of like I’m a fat person. I’m the only black person in the room. Am I really supposed to be in this space? And what I didn’t realize I was truly hungry for was just being able to let myself be like exactly as I am. Not making any explanation for it or trying to explain it in a way that I was able to just be there because what would end up happening is that the postures seemed impossible to me like I will try to go into one of the first couple of postures in the sequence and it would just be like I can’t do this. I have looked to other people around me and they are like what’s going on? They don’t look like they’ve practiced this together and I’m not able to keep up at all and I would look at myself in the mirror at these huge mirrors in the front. So I’m looking at myself in the mirror and I would just be like okay maybe it’s okay. Maybe how you’re able to do this is plenty. Maybe that’s perfect. Maybe you don’t have to try to like compare yourself against everyone else in here. Maybe you can just be here for yourself. And yeah, maybe you fall over. Maybe everyone sees the teacher’s gonna know that you don’t know what you’re doing and maybe that’s okay. And it’s not even so much about the experience of that in that posture, in that moment on in my class. It was what other parts of my life am I feeling this? And I’m just not like holding on to it in that way. What other parts in my life I’m telling myself I’m not gonna know if I can to do this. Why even try that I’d see these boundaries in my life and never question them and I wondered like how long have these boundaries been in place? When did I make these huge decisions about who I am as a human being and what I deserve? And it just heard in this whole other deeply spiritual and philosophical conversation that I didn’t pay to go to yoga class for. I certainly didn’t know any yoga thinking like yeah I’d like to have it and it’s an essential breakthrough today. No, it was like maybe I’ll get some strength training. Maybe I’ll become a little bit more flexible. That’s why I always think that like it doesn't really matter why you show up to yoga. It doesn’t matter like if you show up for the postures or if you show up for the leggings or coconut water or whatever it is that you think is in accordance. Ultimately, the truth is always the truth and you’ll always be led to that point even if you start from a place of being solely obsessed with the physicality of it because it’s unlocked so much that I was not even open to when I went there like I didn’t go to yoga looking for therapy, the therapy found me.

Layla: Wow. And would you say that that is because I’m really fascinated about you just said that it doesn’t matter what your actual motivations are for why you come into yoga. The yoga will give you breakthrough or whatever it will, is that the very nature of it?

Jessamyn: Yes. I think that ultimately it doesn’t matter what lineage or where on the planet you’re practicing it. It doesn’t matter what time of day. How many physical postures that ultimately every posture is the same because it’s just as complicated to bring your body into the posture. The heart is posture really is to just lay on the ground and not anticipate like the need to have goals and to look to the future and be obsessed with what’s already happened or what’s happening in the future that is so in another self so limiting that the idea of just trying to find the present moment in the what we would deem to be the most simple and physical postures is actually the most difficult. So that it really doesn’t matter like you can come to it and be like, yes, I’m gonna do hand stand, you know, I’m gonna crawl up walls and I’m gonna contour my spine this way like whatever, you know, like it’s all fine because ultimately like you’re just trying to get your body tire less so that it can just be so.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: The complexities of the postures are just to figure out new and more creative ways to breath. That’s why on The Underbelly I start the first track is called the air track because it’s like just focus on breathing. You’re gonna eventually forget to breath and you’re gonna be like so focused on trying to building to these other postures but just start with trying to breath because that’s the only place you’re ever going and all roads leads to the same destination.

Layla: Right. So I found that the breath part was actually really has been challenging for me over the years, you know, that I find that I believe like very much from here not deep down from inside of myself that raising mind supposed to get to the next thing and okay now I’m settled and now we are gonna stop moving into these different and now I’m holding my breath. I’m holding my breath.

Jessamyn: And it’s like and there’s so much anxiety that comes from not breathing as someone who is prone to anxiety like the first thing that I do when I’m really getting into it is I’m not breathing. I don’t need to breath because I’m in my head and that’s always what you’re told in those moments is like just breath, just try to find the way to breath and like that practice because it’s the first thing that we learned coming out of the womb that just breath so really like, okay, you used to live in fluid and now you need to learn to breath the substance that keeps us alive and that’s all we are doing from that moment forward is just trying to breath. But it’s so it gets harder because there’s so many different things that happens in life to inhibit the breath and fear is real and anxiety is real but it’s also, it’s the only place, it’s all the really matters.

Layla: Yeah. Well, thank you for really helping me to understand that. So I started following you like many people did because you were posting a lot of your practice online and I was definitely one of those people that was like, oh, a black person doing yoga, a fat black person doing yoga, right? And because of the images that are projected to us all the time from the yoga world and ideas in diet culture that tell us that what fitness looks like is this and if you look like a certain way then you are not fit. And so when I saw your post, it kind of blew my mind. I was like that means she’s hella strong if she can do that, right? That means like she was having really strong core.

Jessamyn: Yeah. I mean it’s different to lift a couple of hundreds pounds than to lift a hundred pounds, yeah.

Layla: But it wasn’t so much your weight. It was that you could move into these positions that I’m like I know if I just go into that position my belly can’t hold me, my arms start shaking. She’s just going into it like it. So first of all that means diet culture, fitness culture is a bunch of crap because it says that you can only do those things if you look a certain way, right? And here’s this person just completely defying that, right? And helping me these things like, oh, I don’t have to get thin in order to do that like I can do that from the body that I have because body positivity and the, you know, all that is a movement we can talk about where you are with that. But in those early days, no, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a thing, right? It wasn’t what the norm was and I think and I’m guessing that because of that you probably had a lot of people exoticizing or fetishizing or holding you up as this rare exception. Look, she’s a fat black person but she’s able to do this and you’re just doing it as you practice but this is how everyone is.

Jessamyn: It is so strange to put one’s self out there.

Layla: Tell me how that experience was for you especially in those early days and what things did you have to learn over time in order to kind of like have really good boundaries for yourself so you don’t get defined by other people’s projections of you?

Jessamyn: This is an amazing question. Thank you so much for asking this. I feel like I’m never asked things like this. Okay, well, I think it’s important to note that when I first started posting on social media particularly on Instagram, it was before Instagram was popular. So it was like back when it was mostly just college students and then of the people who are on there, there was a very small community of yoga practitioners and I just started practicing yoga at home and one of the reasons that people don’t practice yoga at home is because it’s really isolating and it can be very much like you’re like I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I was trying this thing yoga at home largely because I could not afford to practice yoga in studios and so I had this feeling of like am I doing this right? Should I be doing this without a teacher? And so I would take this excessive photos of myself just so that I could check my alignment and I was like look up resources online and look at my practice right next to all of these photos trying to figure out like okay so this is how my knee should be. I should have my arm this way, etc. And so it took a long time. Oh, please.

Layla: Can I just ask you a question there. The photos that you were comparing yourself to, did those bodies look like yours?

Jessamyn: No, not at all. And to that point very briefly, I just wanna say that I was looking at the #mybook Every Body Yoga. I was looking at the hashtag for it and I was just like looking at the diversity of bodies who are tagging themselves with this hashtag and I was just like this is not what it used to look like on this app at all. It was like there were nobody diversity and I don’t wanna say to make it seemed like there were not people out here and I guess Dianne Bondy, Amber Karnes, these people have been out here practicing yoga in curvy bodies for a long time and they were hugely inspirational to me. But definitely when you look to advance like looking at inversions, deep backbend arm balances, there was no body diversity whatsoever. So it did help me to understand that these skeleton is ultimately like pretty universal that if you can look at the way to the skeleton grooves, it doesn’t really matter how much body fat is on top of the bones. It’s all kinda the same.

Layla: Yeah.

Jessamyn: So the bodies can just feel like, oh, okay, so this is generally the same thing. But it also led to me learning more about alignment and anatomy and like they deepened my practice of this whole other way but definitely no diversity, taking these photos feeling like I wanted to have a connection to a community outside of my house and so I started posting the photos on Instagram really just as a way to get feedback from other practitioners and it took a while before and I mean I also am an internet kid, I was on Tumbler and Live Journal and all these things and so I’ve been posting things online, not necessarily self-portrait like this but I have been posting online for a long time so I was used to trolling to a certain degree. I was like, okay, so there’s gonna be people if I put pictures of myself wearing a sports bra and I’m fat, if I put this on the internet, there are going to be people being like there’s a way along the beach or whatever hurt thing somebody in the 7th grade class said. So I was like, okay, I can expect that. That’s fine. But that means that there is yoga people out there and I can connect with them but it took a while before I realized that aside from the substantial number of trolls and then the relatively smaller number of yoga people, there were so many people who are just like, wow, I didn’t know this that people could do yoga. I really genuinely didn’t realize this. And I was just like that people do all kinds of things all the time like really what we have is a visibility issue because I actually didn’t think that there’s anything of that revolutionary about what I was doing. It just kinda felt like this is what my life was like and yeah I see no representation of my life. The only black people that I see prominently are like Queen Latifah and Mo'Nique, so I was like, yeah, I know that people don’t know the lives of that black women but this does not feel like an outlier to me. But I realized that for a lot of people it was an outlying experience and I kept posting because I was like this is an opportunity to show just the way that someone else lives and I think that had it not been for that, I would not have kept posting photos of myself because I really especially as time went on, I started to feel like and I continue to feel that social media as the opposite of what yoga as the best. Social media is always asking us to look outside of ourselves and yoga is asking us to look inside of ourselves and so there was a point a few years ago where I was like I’m gonna delete everything like I felt no connections to it like, yes, I’ve successfully kept this journal and that’s the big benefit to me as I looked back and I’m like, oh, I have this record of my practice. I’m so glad to have this but there’s a couple of different camps that evolves into. So there’s I think in overwhelming number of people who really are just happy to see another human being living authentically and unapologetically so this I think that’s the largest number of people but there’s also a group of people who were like it’s like they are going to the circus or the zoo and they are like, wow, I love looking at this incredible act. Wow, the amazing performance.

Layla: Performance, right.

Jessamyn: Yeah.

Layla: Right. Right.

Jessamyn: And then it becomes how this whole thing about what is the line for seeing yourself as a minstrel show? Where is the point in would she say like this performance that you are enjoying has nothing to do with my humanity.

Layla: That’s right.

Jessamyn: So there’s that thing and then there’s this other group of like I think it’s probably that after that it’s just like trolls and hecklers and those who come to the show to throw a popcorn.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: So within that I think where am I? Where’s Jessamyn. So there’s all these ideas that have nothing to do with who I am. Who I am is not even Jessamyn. Jessamyn is someone that my parents born it’s like a name that they put on to this person that they have tried to raise and I have tried to live in to, that’s not even who I am. So if I’m going to seek myself beneath this identity that I have been wearing from the moment that I got here, I really can’t be depressed about what somebody out on the internet is gonna say about. There has to be some separation there.

Layla: Amen.

Jessamyn: So that’s always where the line is for me. And it has also led to me being a lot more selective over time about what I show other people and what feels like an appropriate expression of my practice because I used to post a lot of my personal practice like just all the different pieces of like I’m obsessively working on this posture, that posture and over time it’s just kind of like that’s really personal. It’s really private. It just needs to be for me. But it also means that there are other parts of yoga practice that people because there is this seemingly inextricable length between physical fitness and yoga, it’s very hard for people to understand that yoga is everything and it’s really the moments when we are practicing yoga the most are like when we are fighting with our partners or trying to raise our children or trying to stand up in those difficult moments when we can’t stand up. That’s really where the yoga comes into play and it has made me feel like that’s the most important yoga to share. I would like to be talked about the complicated parts of my identity where because every intersection of my identity is where the yoga is really happening and it’s also the parts where it’s going to be most difficult for people to engage with it. It’s gonna mean that people are going to be offended or going to feel like it’s too close to the bone or it’s not what they decided that I’m allowed to do which then for me just circuses all of these is momentarily hidden beneath the surface of why people are engaging with the contents to begin with. It’s like you were here for a show and then the show didn’t go the way you thought it should go.

Layla: The way you thought it was, right.

Jessamyn: And now you are dealing with that. And then to me from that point it’s like, oh, so this is like performance art actually. It’s really just I am sharing these piece of myself that then allow someone to portal to understand themselves better and that doesn’t mean that it’s always gonna be pleasant but more than anything it just means that I have to separate myself from whatever the perception is.

Layla: Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Jessamyn: I hope that answered your question.

Layla: It does. The way that it answers my question is that it’s not a simple answer and that we continue to evolve how we relate to ourselves as we continue to grow as me the individual and me the public figure that everyone else sees and finding that harmony between understanding like I have to protect the very core of who I am that has to be for me and I recognize that because of the journey that I have been on, a large group of people find inspiration or themselves reflected back or perspective that they made it or something that leads them back to themselves, right? And so that’s all true all at the same time and it’s just the truth of it but I wanted to dig deeper into what perhaps some of the ways in which you have faced people saying well that’s not yoga. If you do that, that part of your life that’s not yoga or because you live your life in this way that’s not representative of yoga, of real yoga. What are some of the things that you’ve come up against?

Jessamyn: Oh man, everything. I mean from the idea that I am fat, the idea that I am an omnivore, that I am not a vegetarian or vegan, a lot of yoga practitioners are very concerned with one of the guiding principles of yoga which is nonviolence and the way that it is frequently translated is nonviolence and not eating anything in which you would be violent for another living being so from the idea that I would understand nonviolence and still be an omnivore to the idea that cannabis and plant medicine more generally are an integral part of spiritual practice. There’s a lot of racism and white, really it’s like just purely white supremacist idealogy that rest of the core and as a result the same racism and white supremacy that is embedded in cannabis prohibition is a part of that yoga guidealogy as well so that a lot of people when I talk about cannabis, when I talk about plant medicine they are like that’s not yoga or this is offensive and if I can speak more specifically but then the American yoga world there’s a feeling of like wanting to pretend happiness at people like wanting to perform the idea of calm and it’s a big thing…

Layla: It’s really passive aggressive.

Jessamyn: There’s a lot of like white savior mentality in it. It’s like we can all be happy if we just pretended hard enough and my thought is that a huge part of my yoga truth is accepting every piece of my identity and my identity is inherently political and very complicated and in order to actually see and experience my whole self, I have to accept that all of those complicated feelings and any time that I talk about something that could make somebody feel uncomfortable or more specifically that could make someone have to deal with their whiteness, there’s usually a good amount of push back with that. So, I would say there’s lots of ways in which I deal with like push back on, how I define practicing yoga and what I tend to get from that is that whoever is offering this push back is well (a) they are dealing with their own practice, that’s s their practice.

Layla: That’s their practice, right.

Jessamyn: That’s them finding the balance and what I can offer them is to not take it personally that what they are trying to figure out something what’s in themselves but then I guess more generally it’s kinda clear to me that that person doesn’t really know that much about yoga actually even if they have been practicing for decades and I think there’s a lot of pretending again that happens with practicing yoga where people are like, well, I go to this yoga studio and I own this yoga leggings and I went on retreat to some other country that I don’t live in so I guess that means that I am a yogi.

Layla: Right. Right.

Jessamyn: I’m always like, yeah, I don’t know I won’t even call myself a yogi. I don’t know I feel a lot of complicated emotions about that. All I know is that we feel differently about it. I just think it’s so important that we all actually be having these conversations with one another like I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people disagreeing with how I experience the practice that I think the only problem is if we can’t just talk to one another about it because I think that the reason the social media exist and the reason that this global yoga community exist so that we can experience collective healing and we can’t experience collective healing if we are not all willing to express the ways in which we are heard. So I am here for it honestly. I am like come at me. You don’t like it. That’s great. Come through itself.

Layla: What I really appreciate is and I’m guessing this comes from your practice of yoga is your non-attachment to how people feel about you which is really refreshing because like you said like we live in this social media world and we live in a world in which we are supposed to strive to become something other than what we are and it’s just really refreshing. You know, I’m sure that you have your moments like you’re a human being.

Jessamyn: I was gonna say…

Layla: We are not making Jessamyn perfect here, right? She has her moments, okay, and I’m sure you have your initial when it comes up that initial like argh, right? That petty or whatever that comes out, right? That you wanna hit back, clap back, strike back, whatever but it does sound like you allow the space for that and you aimed to be true to what yoga means for you.

Jessamyn: Yeah. I mean now I’m kinda getting into a place for like a long time I felt like okay just don’t say anything at all, don’t say anything at all and now I’m kinda getting into a place where like sometimes on the days when people try me and they actually they find my underbelly and they poke at it and on the days when I’m like you don’t know me, we can go outside, you don’t know where I’m from, you don’t know what I can do then on those days now I like to have a laugh with it. I think it’s funny. Specifically on Twitter and only when I’m just like, you know what, this is funny. I’ll like comment on someone like if someone is fat shaming or whatever I’ll be like, wow, that’s great. I’ve never heard that one before. I’ve been fat my whole life, you’re saying something I’ve never heard before. So that something like that is funny to me but beyond that I’m always like just don’t, just try not to because and it really it’s very deeply selfish. It’s like I know I mean I’m a double cancer, I have a lot of feelings. I’m just like everyone is having their own experience and they are allowed to have that experience and you put yourself out there and that’s why this is called vulnerability like there’s something that comes along with that and there’s a price and ultimately it’s worth it though, you know, like another huge part of it for me is like you can’t attach yourself, non- attachment, so non-attachment to the bad but also non-attachment to the good.

Layla: That’s right. You can’t have it, right, you can’t have it one and on the other, right? Yeah.

Jessamyn: Exactly. It’s always that’s the balance thing is like there’s no way that I can find I mean because ultimately any feeling that someone would offer me is actually just something that they are feeling within themselves, for themselves and it’s beautiful that they are projecting out to me and that I can feel it but I just can’t, I need to find ways in which I can be enough for myself and be constantly refilling myself and that’s the way that I can then—if for some reason I’m like, yes, I need to affect others then it may come from that place that I’m just I’m refilling my own cup and that’s how you can affect others.

Layla: Thank you. I definitely have had to learn that about not attaching to the bad or good. In the nature of my work, you know, I often get messages from people who have work privilege who are doing the Me and White Supremacy work and will start to be like, oh my god, this work changed my life and blah, blah, blah, and you know, you are this and you are that and if I attached to that then I also have to attach to when I get some BS message that says you are the scam of the earth. You are nothing, right?

Jessamyn: Exactly.

Layla: I have to hold both so I’m like I’m not gonna held either of them. That’s your experience of me and I have to just go with my right.

Jessamyn: Literally.

Layla: But it’s the safest place to be, I feel is right inside of yourself is the safest place to be. Yeah.

Jessamyn: It is and we are not trained to do it though. I mean I think this is something that capitalism does not really prefer because if you constantly look within yourself, you’re not looking to the average eyes that tell you you can’t be happy. So like it’s not in the best interest of our society for everyone. People think of themselves that it’s always the answer at mystics from every part of the world say this exact same thing depending on just it’s definitely ways for different people but it’s always exactly the same thing.

Layla: That’s right, yeah. So Jessamyn I recently spoke with Nicole Cardoza who is also a black yoga practitioner and she’s amazing. Our conversation was amazing. I loved it so much and I said to her we are gonna have to talk about this Yoga Journal thing that happened to you and midway through the conversation I was like hold on did this happen to Jessamyn? Also did something, and she said, “yes”. And I was like wow I’m speaking with her soon so we gotta have that conversation as well.

Jessamyn: Oh, yes.

Layla: So as somebody who is not in the yoga world, you know, I’m aware of Yoga Journal as a publication, heard of it, even seen it here in the supermarkets in Qatar like it’s a global, it goes everywhere but I remember seeing the image of your Yoga Journal cover which was a beautiful cover and I was like, oh, I love it, I love it, I love it so much and then very quickly hearing that, oh, but this isn’t the cover that Yoga Journal shows to go with and they didn’t let Jessamyn know that and they put someone else on there who was white instead.

Jessamyn: I hate the sounds of it, it still happens. Yeah. Well, basically. Well, should I?

Layla: Yeah. Walk us through it, please. Because, you know, people are gonna be listening to this and don’t know what the ins and outs are.

Jessamyn: Totally. I mean the thing is this is something that I feel like I will keep manifested because I’ve said years ago like I’m gonna be the first fat like person on the cover of Yoga Journal like I just feel it. I would like for this to happen and then when I got the call, I was like, yes, this is, I have arrived. This thing that I always wanted to happen is going to happen and I don’t know what but I’m yoga something.

Layla: I am in. I am the moment. I have arrived.

Jessamyn: Yes, I have arrived and so like I remember everything we have to it was just like, ahh, I’m so excited. The shoot is great. Everyone that I worked with was so dope like, oh, this is so amazing and then, well, let’s just go to when the day that the magazine came out. I went to Barnes & Noble and I’m so excited I went like early in the morning and I went to the periodical section and I was like looking through all the magazines and I was looking for Yoga Journal and I found Yoga Journal but there was somebody else on the cover and I was like, oh, they must have forgotten to take out the January issue since it’s February.

Layla: I was gonna say what was your first thought and was it the first thought this was last month’s cover because this month’s cover is me.

Jessamyn: Yeah, totally.

Layla: Right. Right.

Jessamyn: Exactly. I was like maybe this is like they frequently do like special edition.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: Maybe this is a special edition cover and then I actually flipped it over too because I was like maybe they decided to do like a double cover but nobody told me that I was on the back of it either so I was just, okay, and it even it said February 2019 so I was like I look through a few magazine and I found my cover but I was like, oh, so they did a second cover as well with a teacher who has since passed Maty Ezraty. Maty Ezraty is a teacher who has taught many people who have taught me. She started yoga works which is a very prominent chain of yoga studios and I was like in some ways, in a different situation actually in this situation I was humbled to be in her company because she is someone who has had such a profound second hand influence on my own practice, but then there’s this other part of me that was like probably the much louder part that was like what? When was this decision made? Then I’m like on my Gmail in Barnes & Noble looking back every email that I have had…

Layla: Thinking did I miss it? Did I misunderstand?

Jessamyn: Totally, I was like did I misunderstand? I’m emailing my manager like did they have talked to you about this? Like what is going on? And she’s like, no. I don’t know about this. I don’t even know about this. So that was my first reaction and then after I suddenly reorganized the magazine so that mine was on front and walked away from the periodical section, I then thought, oh, actually this is just like when I was in high school and I was one of five black girls in my graduating class and I auditioned for the lead on the musical and even though I was the president of Glee Club and everyone liked me like I’m not gonna play this like when I’m in college and this white guy has all these I didn’t feel like he worked as hard as I did but yet he got the thing that I wanted and you know, it just reminded me of all these kinds of in my life where I have been felt like there were other forces in play as to whether or not something worked out or didn’t work out and I was just like what made you think that that wasn’t gonna happen now and also why were you striving for the approval of white voices like this? That was the part that I really couldn’t get over and honestly the part that I think continues to resonate from me as time goes away. That feeling that I had when I first got the call was like I have arrived. I’ll have you arrive. What has really happened in there?

Layla: Where have you arrived? Right.

Jessamyn: Are you super yogi now like what is this? So is it like you wanted your whole life to sit at this table, why did you wanna sit at that table? What does that mean? So it’s calling up all of these feelings and questions that personally I would have rather not had come up and…

Layla: And it would be a big public thing right? Like a big public meteorite.

Jessamyn: It would have been better to have them privately not necessarily in front of other people. So then that also led you, so there was outrage from people who thought that I was gonna be the only person on the cover and they resent Yoga Journal and then there was seemed like a secondary camp where people where like Yoga Journal is allowed to do whatever they want and you know, it was just so I’m watching this back and forth online where people are fighting about this cover and I just didn’t say anything because I’m dealing with all of these internal questions about it and then I get I have calls from Yoga Journal and they are like wanting to set up a meeting with me and the executives. I’m trying to remember what her exact title is but basically main person in charge. They are trying to get me to have a sit down with her and I was just like I don’t wanna be a part of this but I also understand that there is a need to have some sort of resolution and so she and I ended up having a call where she is just like apologizing profusely and like we didn’t mean for this to happen and that’s really just..

Layla: But what did they mean to happen?

Jessamyn: I asked this, I was like I just don’t know why we didn’t discuss this before it came out I mean like we did the cover shoot in October. The magazine didn’t come out until the following winter so I don’t really understand how in all that time we can have an email exchange about this. But the main thing that really stood out for me is that she kept saying that she wanted for my cover to start conversations in the yoga world and she felt like this situation had eclipse the conversations that could have been had and she felt like the situation had eclipsed really the impact that I could have had.

Layla: Oh, no, this was the conversation.

Jessamyn: That’s exactly what I said. I was like you all wanted to start conversations and you did. It’s not the conversation that you wanted to have but it’s the conversation you needed to have.

Layla: Right. It’s the conversation you needed to have. That’s right.

Jessamyn: And Yoga Journal I mean one of the most prominent yoga publications that they would be a part of that conversation. Again not in the way that you wanted it to be. You wanted to have white savior complex.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: You wanted to have like really in charge of how this dialogue happens and really we are just patting ourselves on the back for it.

Layla: Because we put her on the cover, right? So that makes us one of the good ones and then we are gonna micromanage, right? How we have this conversation and it’s like when they were doing that like they were already coming with a history of already excluding and marginalizing people who look like us.

Jessamyn: Exactly.

Layla: I couldn’t just enter into this conversation without any sort of repercussions of what the historical context has been and it makes complete sense that though it was at your expense but it makes complete sense that the way that they roll that out was very much in line with how they have been operating from day 1.

Jessamyn: From day 1, 100%. I thought they were extremely on brand for them.

Layla: That’s right.

Jessamyn: Right? I was like I mean I don’t know what’s your problem is frankly like it seems like this is what you want.

Layla: Isn’t that like this is you, this is how you roll.

Jessamyn: And I mean granted like I feel like there has again coming back to acceptance it’s like we need to accept that this is where we are if we are going to be anywhere different. Like if we are gonna have this collective yoga experience where like this is the first time where people practice together in such large quantities and that we are actually talking to each other about our practices, it’s like the first time in history that has ever happened and there’s a reason for that and I think that like there’s this desire within the American Yoga World specifically and American Yoga is something that I mean I think of it is this like very particular like materialistic kind of monster that’s like it does its own thing. It’s born a very specific values and American Yoga has to reckon with those values like there is no way for us to in the same way that the all of the isms are lying just underneath every part of our society, they are underneath that too.

Layla: Yeah. And I would say it’s been exported as well.

Jessamyn: Absolutely.

Layla: I mean what I have practiced in studios here though the teachers are not American, they are Arab, they are British, you know, they are from all over the world but it feels like it’s probably a very American type of yoga.

Jessamyn: It’s American yoga, yeah. I mean I think of American yoga as being any yoga that like where the practice was really born from like if white practitioners are in any way shape or form in the linage or infrastructure that to me is American yoga and there’s a beauty to it but there are deep dark complexities that I think just are not acknowledged and that are not anything to do with postures or whether or not exercises and core ends or how much unique you eat or how nice you are to anyone. It’s about, it’s these darker, more important layers of our identity that I just I think for a long time the yoga mainstream has wanted to avoid and wanted to ignore and we are getting to a place where it’s just impossible to do that and I mean again like I’m just grateful. I feel like this is way more interesting. This feels like why we are all here together and it is uncomfortable and for me just as much as anyone else like again the part of that whole situation that I can’t get past is how much I have sought the approval of white people throughout my life in all the different places that shows up and that’s my stuff to deal with. I think that everyone has their bag and everyone has like whatever they need to figure out, but it’s not bad because it’s unpleasant. It’s just it’s there, it’s what to do and it’s important.

Layla: Right. Thank you for sharing the experience but also your own inner reckoning with what came up for you, the mirror that was held up for you to look at.

Jessamyn: Yes.

Layla: Oh, okay, so I was listening to an interview on Facebook under GirlTrek and they were interviewing Nikki Giovanni and Angela Davis.

Jessamyn: Mm-hmm.

Layla: And Nikki Giova—it was amazing. I think it’s still available to watch.

Jessamyn: I will be seeking about that.

Layla: Yeah, it’s really, really good. But Nikki Giovanni was being asked about, you know, last year was the first year that black women held like they were the top as the Miss World and Miss Universe and like there were three categories or so and they were all held by black women, what do you think of that? And one of the things that I really love that she said is you’re seeking approval from people who hate you. You are seeking to be told you are pretty from people who think you are ugly, who hate you.

Jessamyn: Exactly.

Layla: Right. And that was like…

Jessamyn: Who feel happy and proud of yourselves for telling you that you are worth it.

Layla: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s part of our internalized oppression and having to reckon with, right? Like oh, this is the ways that I have internalized white supremacy. This is the ways that I have seen myself as inferior as less than and if I can get into that table that proves that I am enough. And you get onto that table and you are like I’m not supposed to be at this table. This room is not for me.

Jessamyn: Literally looking around like is there anyone who looks like me? Okay, there is.

Layla: And I still have to hate myself to sit here like I can you know. Because the moment I start loving myself, right? The moment I start really showing up truly loving myself I’m getting booted off of this table and yeah.

Jessamyn: That’s exactly right.

Layla: Yeah.

Jessamyn: It’s not because there’s just so many lessons to be learned from all of it. I think it’s hard to see it until you are experiencing it and feeling it and then when you get there it’s like shit I didn’t mean to be here and then it’s like how could you even come to that realization without getting there like you’ve had to have that experience and I think that there’s a lot of beauty to it. It’s brutal, hard, disgusting medicine and it’s…

Layla: That’s so accurate. It’s accurate. I’ve never heard it.

Jessamyn: It’s the point of this experience, one of the experiments.

Layla: That’s right. Thank you. The final conversation I wanna have with you I could literally talk to you forever, this is an amazing conversation but I would be remissed to close our conversation without talking about body positivity.

Jessamyn: Mmm.

Layla: You have at your journey with the body positivity movement tell us a little bit about that I mean from my research, what I can see and actually from many black women, black fans that I’ve talked to it’s a very similar journey. They have found initially validation and a sense of being seen and being able to be themselves. They find body positivity and then body positivity got colonized, appropriated, changed so that it became to center people who didn’t look like us and there is a breaking up and a movement into something else.

Jessamyn: Oh, man.

Layla: What’s that look like for you?

Jessamyn: Everything awesome always feels gentrified and colonized.

Layla: Is it true?

Jessamyn: Everything great always gets, there’s always somebody trying to own it. Yeah, I mean I definitely came to body positivity through fat positivity and fat acceptance and to be fat positive and fat activist, they have been shading body positivity for years like they just been like it doesn’t mean anything like it’s too general, it’s too vague, it’s not radicular, it’s not about anything and to me body positivity has always meant you are okay today exactly as you are and nothing about you needs to change and that when you are able to find acceptance through that mental space that there is a way to really live into yourself, really do everything, leave everyone and to do because you have accepted yourself. But I think the generalness of that message makes it very easy to coapt and very easy for it to become about lifting up experiences that are not the heart of what has made, what strengthen body positivity at best and I felt for a long time that labels are kind of the enemy and that really being so attached to words over action creates long term problems so I’ve just been feeling like not really that connected to body positivity even and really that has started to happen around the time I started to be more attached to the movement publicly so that these people are like body positive yoga teacher, etc. And like, yeah, my classes have a body positive approach by definition but I don’t really think that like the movement itself does not feel like something that really has all that much to do with me in the end. And also expressing that with a lot of anger because I think that I do think that self- acceptance is really important and I don’t think that everything always has to do with me. What annoys me is people feeling like not single themselves, reflected in the movement so that there are people who are like body positivity is about thin white women turning their bodies at certain angle so they can hold on to their fat roles that are predicted.

Layla: Like today decided to go search the #bopo and #bodypositivity and that’s a lot of what I saw. It was maybe 95% white bodies is what I saw and a large number of bodies that were not fat but that were slouching or twisting to, you know, or just a little pouch or something I’m like, oh, I’m not sure that this is what the center of this movement is supposed to be.

Jessamyn: Totally.

Layla: Yeah.

Jessamyn: And it’s definitely like it is seen as a way I think the body positivity is kinda equated with like being nice and happy so that people say like, yeah, I’m bo-po where I’m and there it’s like they are saying something else in addition to that.

Layla: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And where does that come from because thank you for putting that into words because is it because of the word positive, is that where that comes from?

Jessamyn: I think it is and I think the people are very hungry to at least pretend to be happy because then that will make other people think that they are happy and then if other people tell them that they are happy then that’s how they all know that they are happy. I think it has a very little to do with influencing other people. I think it’s about like desperately wanting for someone to tell you that you are okay. I mean there are a lot of people who suffer from eating disorder. I get a lot of outreach in people who want for me to speak on eating disorders and I’m like I don’t feel a deep connection to that but the people who do feel the connection to that are thin white women who have been taught their whole life that they are not allowed to look a certain way or be a certain way and there are values that I consider to be particular to like white patriarchal beauty that I don’t think extend to the black community honestly and that while I do think that there is a lot of fat phobia in the black community, I don’t think it exist the same way. So that I’m like whatever like people won’t rally behind something I’m like take body positivity carry it as I am good on it but I also don’t want for other people who need that of not seeing themselves in it so that’s kind of the world for that with me. But now what I’m noticing is people who have taken off the mantle of body positivity but then decided that the concept of being positive towards your body is unrealistic and so then they are rebranding body positivity as something else. So, what I’m seeing more now is like-

Layla: Is it body neutrality?

Jessamyn: -body neutrality.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: Yeah.

Layla: I’m glad you brought this up because I wrote down this quote of yours from an interview you did on Greatist and you were referring to body neutrality and you said, “in trying to accept every single part of myself, there can’t be any neutrality” and that really struck a chord with me because when I first heard the term body neutrality, it didn’t resonate for me. It kinda felt like disconnect from my body. It kinda felt like don’t see myself as a body and I’m like well I’m not just my body but I have a body and it feels strange for me to not be connected to it when it’s everything that I feel and do and I didn’t get a sense of feeling empowered by the term I actually just felt like I’m supposed to detach from my own self, yeah.

Jessamyn: Exactly. That’s my general understanding of body neutrality is that essentially it’s like just don’t think about your body at all. Just don’t pretend it’s not there.

Layla: Right.

Jessamyn: Like yeah I don’t care about it and so then I don’t have to worry about it, I don’t have to obsess over it. So, I get it logically and I think it does not allow for our bodies to be these political entities which they are and that there isn’t a way that you can be neutral no matter what your body looks like, there’s no way to be neutral toward it that every piece of you and I’m talking about like tall, white, thin men who identify as Christians who see themselves reflected in every part of society, their bodies are deeply political.

Layla: That’s right.

Jessamyn: Everyone is existing in something that has every piece of you is worth.

Layla: It has meaning, right.

Jessamyn: It doesn’t mean that it’s gonna make you feel happy though and I don’t even think that body positivity is asking that of anyone. It’s just saying you are okay like you shouldn’t have to feel as though there is anything wrong with you because you are okay. You don’t have to feel happy about it. I think again with this idea of being happy tortures us. This comes back to being good and doing right and being pure and all of those ideas are so not the point of being alive because not every part of life is good or pretty or happy. A lot of life is complicated and dark and ugly and sad and that there is ultimately beauty in that and that all of that is what love is and I think that because you get hang up on not wanting to experience the bad parts of it or the feeling negative parts that we don’t get, it’s like you don’t get to have the whole flavor of it. So, I think that ultimately it doesn’t really matter like how you get to the party, all that matters that you get there, so like I don’t really care if people are like body positivity, body neutrality, body liberation whatever as long as we are having conversations about it that means that we are a step toward getting over it because the real problem is that we are so obsessed with our physical bodies when there is way more going on in this life than what is happening just with our physical bodies. So, anything that can be done to ease up the tension on that, I’m here for it. I won’t necessarily be having as a bumper sticker on my car but I’m here for it.

Layla: Amazing. Thank you for that Jessamyn I appreciate that. And I appreciate you. This conversation has just been everything. The thing is there’s also many more things that you do that I’m like we could spend an entire another hour talking about that, you know, I’ve been reading or listening to your latest podcast on polyamory and the conversations around cannabis, conversation around your bodies and spirituality like there’s so many things that you do and they are so amazing and so I just wanna say thank you. I really wanna encourage everyone listening to go checkout your work because there’s just so much. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much. I’m really humbled by that and I think I’m always just kind to show what a real yoga practice looks like and yoga practice is complicated with lots of different shades and sexuality as a part of that and self-care is a part of that, for me cannabis is a part of that self-care, you know, talking about the parts that feel unpleasant, talking about the different shades of my identity. I think it’s all just me trying to win my practice and I’m grateful to be able to live that practice and community with others and really grateful to be in community with you as well, so thank you.

Layla: All right, our closing question Jessamyn, what does it mean to you to be a good ancestor?

Jessamyn: To me to be a good ancestor is to see that this life is like a relay race and I’m picking up the baton from those who came before me and I’m just running with that baton for as long as I can and the more freely I run, the more space I offer to others to be able to run the better it is for everyone and I think that it just means like standing in the truth even when the truth is unpleasant and really being open to all of the lessons that life offers and understanding that my legacy is not really in my control and there’s not much that I can do in terms of how other people will experience me but all I can do is just show up in my truth and that’s how I can inspire other people to do the same thing.

Layla: It’s beautiful. Thank you so much Jessamyn.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s a beautiful space. I feel so held.

Layla: Oh, good.

Jessamyn: Thank you.

This is Layla Saad and you’ve been listening to Good Ancestor podcast. I hope this episode has helped you find deeper answers on what being a good ancestor means to you. We’d love to have join the Good Ancestor podcast family over on Patreon where subscribers get early access to new episodes Patreon only content and discussions and special bonuses. Join us now at https://www.patreon.com/goodancestorpodcast. Thank you for listening and thank you for being a good ancestor.