Jessamyn Stanley - Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance

Yoke

My Yoga of Self-Acceptance

Jessamyn Stanley

Workman Publishing

New York

For everyone who walked so I can run, but especially Tangela Michelle.

Contents

Foreword

I wrote most of the essays in this book before 2020, before COVID-19, when Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were still with us.

Every day, more of what we know falls apart. The dream of America is burning.

Everyone is scared of whatll happen next. No one is immune to the fear. And everyones fear is valid.

Pull up a chair, your fear is welcome here. You are welcome here, exactly as you are. You dont need to change anything or do anything differently. You dont need to hide anything or pretend that somethings not there. All your sadness, all your anger, all your doubt, all your frustration, all your confusion. Its all welcome here. All of you is welcome here.

The part where its uncomfortable. The part where youre ashamed of yourself. The part where you say the wrong thing and piss someone off. The part where youre stuck in the same place and dont know what to do next.

The universe is forcing us to quit with the bullshit and to show each other how we really feel. But when you forgive the smelliness and accept the ugliness of it all, what lies beneath is just as beautiful as anything else. Just as beautiful as a decaying flower, a rose on the last day of its life.

Have hope in yourself, in your family, and in your children. We have seen worse than this. We will see worse than this. There is always hope, even when there may be worse to come.

Yolk

1.2 - The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga. (Satchidananda, 3)

1.14 - Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time, without break and in all earnestness. (Satchidananda, 19)

1.13 - It means you become eternally watchful, scrutinizing every thought, every word, and every action. (Satchidananda, 18)

O kay, so its after midnight a few months after the release of Every Body Yoga, my first book. Im wide awake in my home office and knee-deep in a Wikipedia wormhole when a Gmail notification BLOOPs into view.

For the record, I hate push notifications. Theyre such a buzzkill. Sometimes theyre helpful, but then again, so are mansplainers. And just like a mansplainer, a push notification is much more likely to irreparably fuck with your day.

Anyway, this particular notification was from someone whod read Every Body Yoga and was so deeply affected by it that she felt compelled to send me an email. In the middle of the night. A complete stranger sent me an email in the middle of the night.

Sigh.

In my experience, unsolicited late-night correspondence from a complete stranger is rarely a good thing. Ive found that the fine print on being a fat, Black, queer yoga teacher in a predominantly thin, White, and very straight yoga industry is that there are just as many people who are inspired by you as there are with a strong desire for you to shut the fuck up. I pressed my palms together and prayed for the best.

Apparently, the messenger was a freelance copy editor soliciting her services on my next literary project because, as a yoga practitioner herself, she was appalled by a very specific typo in Every Body Yoga.

Uh-oh.

I snatched up my nearest copy of Every Body Yoga and bout got a paper cut in pursuit of the page shed referenced. My heart stopped. Right there, on page twenty-fucking-nine, Id accidentally defined the Sanskrit word yoga as meaning to yolk.

Girl, I bout fell out.

Id MEANT to use the word yoke, meaning to join together. Yoga means to yoke, as in, to join together the light and dark of life, the good and the bad. Yoke, as in, lets yoke these cattle together. To yoke is to marry breath, thought, and movement, to connect the body, mind, and spirit. To yoke is to explore the meaning of balance.

This definition stands in stark contrast to the definition of yolk, which means the yellow food storage sphere composing a substantial percentage of an eggs interior. This was a glaring typo, certainly worthy of criticism. I couldnt believe that after dozens of drafts and round after round of edits, Id failed to notice such an obvious mistake.

Now, Ive gotta be honest with you, especially if you and I are gonna have a real relationship and not just be on some bullshit. Straight up, my knee-jerk reaction to that email was to pop shots. How dare this bitch try to call me out? And in a passive-aggressive, after-midnight, stranger-danger-ass email, no less! If she was in fact a copy editor (and not merely a bored, lonely internet troll nursing a vendetta, as I secretly suspected), then she must understand that typos are to be expected in a work of any substantial size. Before long, I was shit-talking and verbally drop-kicking this bitch all the way into next week.

But once my Mars in Cancer cleared the scene, my anger flushed to red-hot embarrassment. I was seized by a need to wake up my editor so we could run risk assessment options on possibly reprinting Every Body Yogas entire run.

Instead, I did something thats gradually become my Pavlovian response to stress and anxiety. I sighed, closed my eyes, walked over to my yoga mat, and unrolled it right in the middle of my office.

I didnt start practicing handstands or any acrobatic shit like that. I just sat down and closed my eyes.

I didnt tell myself, Time to meditate!

I didnt start a timer or practice a specific breathwork technique.

I just sat down and focused my attention on trying to breathe. Steady, in and out through the nose.

I didnt try to stop thinking about what was stressing me out. I actually did the exact opposite. I let my Virgo rising run wild and allowed myself to consider every nook and cranny of my anxiety. Instead of trying to kick out my inner critic, I made space at the table. And the whole time, as my mind raked my angst over the coals, I just tried to breathe.

At first, my breath came shallow and timid, tinted with uncertainty. But as my body submitted to its whim, my breath stood up straighter and rolled back its shoulders. It started to take itself seriously and believe in itself. My breath whistled around the branches of my anxiety and I found myself softening like forgotten butter. And, gradually, I began to see the surface of what had actually pissed me off.

It wasnt the typo.

It wasnt the email or its sender.

It was my imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome Id felt ever since Id posted my first yoga picture on Instagram. The feeling that I didnt know enough about yoga to participate in a mainstream conversation about it. The feeling that I could never read enough books, that I could never take enough classes, that I could never work on postures hard enough. Id managed to publish a whole-ass book about yoga before my thirtieth birthday and I subconsciously believed that every yoga practitioner and teacher knew how unqualified I was for the task. I doubted my ability and assumed that everyone else did as well.

As a social media influencer-cum-yoga teacher, I regularly feign confidence. Much as I try as to fight it, projecting confidence is part of the influencer job description. Yet all it took was one loose-lipped email from a complete stranger about a singular typo to crush my projection of confidence.

Cornered by shame and inadequacy, I saw how I spent most of my days and much of my energy desperately trying to