Layla: Jessamyn Stanley is an award winning yoga 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 Yoga Journal. 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.