00:00:00

Intro

00:05:20

Amber’s relationship to body + food growing up

00:12:52

How Amber discovered yoga

00:16:51

How yoga teaches observing without judgment

00:23:35

How Amber developed her own yoga practice + teaching

00:31:08

How she stopped dieting + discovered body positivity

00:37:30

The importance of having a supportive community

00:42:55

Amber’s yoga experience as someone in a larger body

00:51:37

The Yoga and Body Image Coalition

00:54:20

Is yoga becoming more diverse + inclusive?

01:01:03

The Body Positive Clubhouse

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 135 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/135.

Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.

Hey, guys. Welcome back and thanks for joining me for another episode of Real Health Radio. This week’s episode is going out a couple of days later than usual, but I wanted to make sure that it was released and keep up with the weekly episodes.

Today’s show is another guest interview, and I’m chatting with Amber Karnes. Amber is the founder of Body Positive Yoga. She’s a ruckus maker, yoga asana teacher, social justice advocate, and a lifelong student of her body. Her commitment to accessible, adaptive yoga practice empowers thousands of diverse practitioners around the globe.

She is the creator of Body Positive Clubhouse, an online community using the tools of yoga to build unshakable confidence and to learn to live out loud. Amber is the co-creator of Yoga For All Teacher Training and Accessible Yoga Trainer, a Yoga International Featured Teacher, serves as a board member for Project Yoga Richmond and Accessible Yoga, and is a contributor to the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. Through her workshops, retreats, teacher trainings, and online yoga and wellness offerings, she seeks to further the message of inclusivity, consent, agency, body sovereignty, and accessibility for all on and off the yoga mat.

She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband, Jimmy, and blogs at https://bodypositiveyoga.com.

I have to say, I really love this episode. Movement and exercise is so important for health, and this is the case irrespective of someone’s size. Basically, you don’t need to be losing weight or making aesthetic changes for exercise and movement to be beneficial.

But despite this, whenever exercise is portrayed, the people used typically to do the portraying fit into this narrow band. They are young, lean, they match up to our society standard of beauty, and they often send the message that if you are exercising, you should look like this already, and if you don’t, you should be making changes so that this is how you can become or how you can look in the future. This is the case even though this is largely impossible for nearly everyone.

This is a problem because it leads to people having a disordered relationship with their body and disordered relationship with exercise, or it leads to people not exercising or moving their body at all because any time that they do, they never reach the goal of looking like these people, so why bother?

Up until recently, this was definitely the case with yoga. There was this idea of the quintessential yoga body, which, again, is a body that most people would never inhabit.

This is what our conversation is mostly about. We talk about Amber’s story, going from a fun, sporty kid to someone who then was very body-conscious and started to diet and completely disconnect from her body to then finding her way back through yoga and this really bringing her back into her body. We chat about what it’s like being in a larger body navigating the yoga world. This is from the perspective of originally being a student and what that was like, and then later on becoming a teacher and how that was.

We then also look at the benefits of yoga outside of yoga. Amber has taken so many insights from the practice that then inform how she thinks and feels and sees the world, so it was lovely to hear her talk about this stuff. Despite her being a yoga teacher and myself being a nutritionist, we really have a large overlap in what we are trying to do and how we think about the process of change and what it means to be healthy. So there’s a lot of common ground here.

Amber is a great speaker and storyteller, and I loved having this conversation with her. It definitely felt like we could’ve kept going a lot longer. I also really want to encourage you to go check out her site, https://bodypositiveyoga.com.

With this intro out of the way, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Amber Karnes.

Hey, Amber. Welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time to chat today.

Amber Karnes: Thanks for having me.

Chris Sandel: As part of today’s episode, I want to chat to you about yoga. I know how transformative it’s been for you, and I want to have a chance for you to be able to talk about this, as well as all the fantastic stuff you’re doing in the world of yoga right now with your teacher trainings and your Body Positive Clubhouse.

00:05:20

Amber’s relationship to body + food growing up

But I’d like to start with you as a kid. You spend your days teaching yoga now, but if we were to go back to you as a child, were you sporty? Were you an active kid?

Amber Karnes: I was. Actually, when I was little, I was always the one riding my bike and running around. I played tee-ball and was on the swim team and all that kind of stuff. I pretty much stayed active until I got into my teen years and that stuff sort of dropped off for me – which I think is kind of common. A lot of other American women I know have had a similar experience. As my body changed, we grew apart a little bit. But I definitely had a good relationship with my body as a kid. That changed a lot over the years.

Chris Sandel: With that good relationship with your body, can you talk about that growing up? Where did that come from? Was that modelled by your parents?

Amber Karnes: My mom dieted and stuff like that, and she didn’t always have the greatest relationship with her body, but I think it was important for her that we really feel good about ourselves. I feel like I had that modelled pretty well for me. She always encouraged us to be in sports and to do what we wanted to do.

When I became a teenager, I started to maybe become more aware of – the societal messaging started creeping in. As I went through puberty, which happened at a young age, I started to get attention from men who shouldn’t have been looking at a kid. But I looked like I was 25 by the time I was 12.

So I think that really shifted my relationship with my body and my relationship with movement from a really integrated place where I was moving my body because jumping on the trampoline was fun or riding my bike to get to the river or because it was fun to run around or whatever I was doing – but when I started to become more aware of how I was being perceived, I always had this piece of me that was watching me and understanding how the world was seeing me. When my body started to change, which happened a lot earlier for me than it did with some of my peers, that magnified that, I think.

As I became into my late teens, my body got a lot bigger than I had been as a kid. I was never a fat kid. I never was overweight or whatever. But when I got into my late teens, I gained weight pretty rapidly. So that really changed a lot for me too, as I had absorbed messaging, just like all of us have, from a young age that bigger bodies are not desirable and that we should be thin at all costs and that bigger bodies aren’t healthy and a lot of things that I know are not true now, but at the time was really a lot.

I spent a good amount of years kind of dissociated from my body and wanting to ignore it and live from the neck up, so to speak. Movement and exercise really wasn’t a part of my life in a positive way. At times I was trying to lose weight or diet or exercise to burn calories rather than that integrated experience of movement that I had as a kid and that I feel like I have now, where the motivation to move comes from an intrinsic place of pleasure, of joy, of feeling good and wanting to do positive things for my health, whereas when my relationship with my body was in a more negative place, it was about changing something about myself or burning parts of my body away or doing something because the body that I was in wasn’t a good place to be.

So yeah, yoga was definitely one of the things that helped me transform that. It’s been an up and down thing over the years.

Chris Sandel: You mentioned being someone who developed early and changed earlier than your peers. Did you have anyone that you could talk to about that? Were you able to open up, or you felt sort of isolated?

Amber Karnes: It wasn’t something that I really talked about. I don’t know; it’s not like I wasn’t supported by my family. It’s just that I feel like I didn’t reach out for that kind of support. It felt like it was just me, and maybe I was the only one that felt this way. I almost feel like I left my body behind during that time. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Chris Sandel: It does.

Amber Karnes: I was focused more on my intelligence or the projects that I was creating and, like I said, living from the neck up. It was like I wanted to ignore that I had bad feelings about my body or that it was so different.

I really feel like for a long time, I sort of pretended like it wasn’t there and put my focus and my interest and things like that onto things that didn’t have anything to do with it.

Chris Sandel: When did the dieting piece start for you? Was it around that stage when you started to develop, or was that later on in your teens?

Amber Karnes: I remember even as a kid, when I was I think 10 or so, writing in a journal about a secret diet that I was on or something – which is funny because I wasn’t always dieting through my teen years. It happened on and off, because dieting meant that I had to pay attention to my body, and that wasn’t something that felt very comfortable for me.

My late teens and my twenties is really when the dieting stuff was more active and become a bigger part of my life. Actually, I have dieting to thank for introducing me to yoga, because I came to yoga through a gym that I was working out at. But we can get into that at some point.

00:12:52

How Amber discovered yoga

Chris Sandel: Let’s go there. How did you get into yoga?

Amber Karnes: I was working out at this gym in my early twenties – I’m 36 now – and the trainer that I was talking to or whatever was like, “You should do yoga on your rest days because it doesn’t count as exercise but you’ll still burn calories.” That was the introduction that I had to yoga. [laughs] Now I know there’s a bit more to it than that. But at the time, I was like, okay, I’ll do anything possible to be thin.

I was nervous to go because I didn’t think that fat people did yoga; I had never seen any marketing or whatever that indicated that, so I was really nervous to go in. But I went to the class. I was the only bigger person there. I don’t remember what we did in the class, but afterwards, the thing that grabbed my attention was getting in my car and driving home, and 10 minutes into the ride, the little mean girl soundtrack that I have in my brain started back up. I don’t know if you’ve had one of these, or your listeners, but this little voice that’s like “You’re fat, you’re ugly, everything you say is dumb, people are mad at you” – that started back up and I was like, huh. I guess if it started, that means it stopped, even just for that 10 or 15 minutes after class.

That was a really big deal that that negative self-talk loop had been quiet, because it was kind of always present and, I thought, part of the way my mind worked and part of the world. I was really intrigued by that and I decided to go back to class.

I noticed that when I would go to the yoga classes and breathe and do the movements and follow what the instructor was saying, I would leave feeling more comfortable in my skin. My self-talk would be nicer. My mind would be quieter. I’d feel more grounded and more peaceful. That’s what really kept me coming back.

The physical practice of yoga for the first couple years wasn’t really super fun for me. I had a lot of teachers that really didn’t know what to do with me as somebody in a bigger body. They didn’t really offer me any ways to adapt my practice. I’d look around the room, and things that they were saying looked easy for other people, and my body wasn’t making those shapes. So I would struggle along and do what I could, and a lot of times I got ignored, or maybe the teacher would say, “If you need a block, use it,” but I didn’t know what to do with it. [laughs]

But I kept coming back because those internal regulation tools that I’d found were really powerful for me. I realise now – not at the time; I probably couldn’t have articulated it – but I was having that integrated, embodied experience of movement that I had as a kid, where my body was my partner in crime and my ally, and I was on the same side as my body rather than struggling against it. We were doing this cool thing together, and I was learning to tune into my body and trust the signals that it gave me and learning to listen to it again.

Dieting and diet culture had told me, “You can’t trust your body. Don’t listen to signals of hunger. That’ll make you eat too much. Your appetites are out of control. You can’t trust that you’ll feed yourself right. You should exercise until you burn off this amount of calories, not exercise because it feels good or because it helps build that relationship with your body.”

So yoga was a completely different way for me to relate to my body and move and have that positive and integrated experience of movement that I had as a kid. So it stuck with me for – well, till today. [laughs]

00:16:51

How yoga teaches observing without judgment

Chris Sandel: It’s interesting to hear you say that it helped to stop that negative loop playing, because I could easily imagine it doing the opposite – that you being in a room, which I’m imagining as having mirrors everywhere, where you’re moving your body in front of other people, your comment about being the only large bodied person in the class – that I would imagine for a lot of people would have the opposite impact in terms of bringing the chatter up even louder. Is that something you’ve thought about, that it is counter to what could possibly happen for others?

Amber Karnes: Oh yeah, and I’m not saying that wasn’t there. It definitely was and is part of my practice. I’m a full-time yoga teacher now, I’m a teacher trainer, and I teach people how to do this stuff and I still have that. Before I walk into a fitness space, a wellness space, a yoga studio, I get that little voice that’s like, “You’re going to be the big one. They’re not going to think you’re a good teacher,” all of that stuff.

When I first started practicing, that was definitely there. A lot of times when the teacher would go around and everybody would get the physical hands-on adjustments and assists and I wouldn’t, then that voice starts up and says, “Well, it’s because they don’t want to touch you because you’re gross.” Or if somebody else could do something and I couldn’t, of course that negative self-talk shows up.

But one of the tools that yoga gives us – and I guess I found this tool so powerful that I really tried to put it into practice as much as I could – is that yoga helps us to create a pause between the thing that’s happening and the way that we react or respond to it and really helps us develop the skill of observing without judgment. That’s what mindfulness really is. It’s paying attention on purpose without judgment. That’s my favourite definition of it.

There’s a big difference between something like – let’s say you’re in a yoga class and you’re the only bigger person there. If you think about it with judgment, it might sound something like, “I’m the only bigger person here. I don’t belong here. This space isn’t for me. I’m not going to be able to do the things. People are looking at me. People are thinking bad things about me.” If you observe without judgment, it could sound like, “Looking around this room, my body is larger than most of the people in here.” That’s it. That’s the fact. That’s the reality.

When we spin it up and make it mean something about us and who we are as a person when actually we don’t know what those other people are thinking – the only we know is that our body is a little bit different than everybody who’s in here. Then you can respond and decide how you want to react from a more peaceful and grounded place and a place that’s more true, actually. I think we put a lot of story, we put a lot of identity around things that we observe because we put judgments onto them.

That’s one of the tools that yoga gives us. We start with very simple things, like observing the breath. When we breathe in and out – and at the beginning of a lot of classes, if you’ve ever been to a yoga class, the teacher will do this. Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Notice the quality of your breath. How long are your inhales versus your exhales? Where do you feel movement? Is it getting stuck anywhere? Because it’s pretty easy for us to observe breath in a way that doesn’t involve judgment. There’s not social stigma around the way we breathe. We don’t usually feel like we’re a good or bad person based on “Do I breathe in my chest versus my ribcage?” So that’s a really easy, non-emotional, non-drama place to practice that skill of observation.

Then the better we get at it, doing it with our breath, with the sensations in our body, with the different poses that we’re doing or maybe in meditation, when the goal is really to come back to the breath or come back to whatever the object is that you’re focusing on, whether that’s a mantra or your breath or whatever, then we get better at it. We build that skill.

Observing without judgment, practicing mindfulness, is a skill just like anything else. The first time you ride a bike or write a research paper or sing a song, you’re not going to be an expert level at it. So it does take practice. That’s why yoga is really a living practice.

We can take that skill from something like observing the breath or observing sensation in the body and then translate it to when your kids are driving you crazy and you want to scream at them. Instead of “My kids are being crazy! I wish they wouldn’t act this way. This means I’m a bad parent, I’m a failure,” blah, blah, blah, we can say, “The kids are being noisier today than they were yesterday, and I’m struggling with that a little bit.” From that place, we can create that pause of saying “Here’s what’s really going on in this situation,” and then decide to respond from a place that feels more aligned with who we really are and who we want our best selves to be, not just like we have to react and be in this defensive state in every single situation. Yoga helps really create that pause.

That was a long, rambling answer to that question, but that’s one of the ways that, as I’ve worked with self-acceptance and making peace with my body, when those thoughts come up, observing those without judgment and really getting curious about, “Huh, it’s really interesting that I’m feeling like I’m going to blame my body for a bunch of stuff today. I wonder what’s going on” and finding that usually, the root of the problem is not my body. It’s something else that’s bothering me.

So being able to develop that skill of what we call the witness in yoga, that skill of observing without judgment, really serves you in a lot of different areas of your life.

Chris Sandel: Definitely, and it relates to a lot of what I focus on with clients, where it’s like, what are facts and what are stories? Like the examples that you gave, “I’m the person in the larger body in this class.” That’s the fact. It’s then what you do with that fact afterwards. Do you then create a whole story around it, or do you just sit with that fact? That is a really helpful bit of advice for people.

00:23:35

How Amber developed her own yoga practice + teaching

How did your yoga progress then after that first class? Were you instantly hooked and you were then going regularly, or was it a slow burn? Did it start with fits and bursts? What happened after that?

Amber Karnes: It’s definitely been something that’s ebbed and flowed over the years, but yoga’s been a consistent part of my life since then, which has been about 15 years. When I first started practicing, at least once a week, I was showing up because I was finding it to be so helpful.

I also found that as I discovered body positivity and body acceptance and the fat acceptance movement, I wanted to go more and more because I was finding that the physical integration that I was getting there, the body trust that I was building – even though that wasn’t something that the instructors necessarily were facilitating purposefully, it was something that was happening for me. As I became more comfortable moving my body and really being present there, I was becoming more physically fluent, I was becoming more confident in the way that I moved and in taking up space, and also more sure in my mind, being able to make friends with my mind, sometimes which was an anxious mind or a depressed mind. Those tools were really big for me and really transformed my relationship to movement.

There are other things that I like to do to move my body, but yoga was really the first time as an adult that I had that positive experience of my physical body. It was something that I stuck with after that.

About seven years into my practice, I had a conversation with one of my teachers. Maybe about three years after I started, I met her, and she was one of the first teachers that understood my body, understood what was going on, was able to offer me ways to adapt certain postures and supplement the things that I had figured out on my own, not having other teachers who were able to have those tools. It really transformed my practice because she offered me a lot of tools and ways to use props and things like that that helped me to be more comfortable in the physical part of the practice.

I had a conversation with her and was like, “I’m thinking about teacher training because I want to learn the rest of the yoga.” I think in the West, we focus mostly on the physical part of the practice, and yoga class is basically like a stretching class. I knew that there was more to it than that. We’d done the breathing, I’d done some meditation, but I had seen people like her who really lived yoga as their life. And that doesn’t just mean wearing yoga pants all the time. I knew that there was a lot more to this. I wanted to be that kind of peaceful person. For me, she was really this still point in a world that was sometimes pretty crazy. So I’m like, “I want that.”

I entered teacher training, never intending to teach – that was not part of the plan – but just wanting to learn more and deepen my personal practice and the benefits that I had found there with my body and with making friends with it.

Then about halfway through the practice, I had two revelations. One was that I was having a really different experience than the other people in the training programme. I was the only person in a larger body, and every time we would have to do practice teaching and give each other feedback, which is something that happens in teacher training, I think I was really annoying to these other women because every time I would have feedback like, “When you say ‘step your foot forward from down dog into a lunge’, this is what’s happening in my body and my belly’s meeting my thigh. I cannot do that physically, so this is what I had to do instead. You could also offer that as a way.”

In teacher training programmes, most of them, we’re not being taught how to teach to people in bigger bodies or people with disabilities, folks who might need to adapt the practice to suit the body that they’re working with. So I was innovating and inventing ways, and I had some tools through the props I was using and stuff like that. That really made an impression on me, and it was like, okay, we’re not being taught to teach in a way that actually would be helpful to me and other people like me. So that was interesting.

Also, I had a lot of friends telling me, “I would never go to a yoga studio. It’s too intimidating. I don’t feel like I belong there. But I’ll come to class if you teach.” I was like, “Uh, okay.” Obviously that’s not because I’m a great teacher. I wasn’t a teacher at all at the time. I was like, what’s that all about? I realised that for folks who are in bodies that aren’t that dominant body identity that’s presented to us through yoga marketing or through images of wellness or whatever that only looks one certain way, representation is really important. To see a teacher that looks like you, that’s in a body that’s similar to you, that has a type of practice you can relate to, that knows how to work with a body like yours and really understands it, is a really powerful thing.

I decided that maybe I needed to try to be that person for folks like me who had come to the practice, and I’d never seen a teacher in a body like mine. In fact, that’s probably one of the reasons going into teacher training that I never even conceived of being a teacher. I didn’t have that role model.

In 2010, which is when I was going through teacher training, I started a blog called Body Positive Yoga and I started to create some resources, some videos and posts and things like that, that were the things I was looking for when I first started practicing. Hopefully that would help other people that were out there navigating this on their own to find some resources.

You have to remember – I know it’s hard to remember a world before Facebook and Instagram existed, but this was before social media was really prominent where you could jump online and find – now I can go on Instagram and search ‘plus size yoga’ or ‘wheelchair fashion’ or whatever I want to search and find representation. I didn’t have those resources. There was very little out there on the internet, at least, that I was finding. So I just started creating the stuff that I had always been looking for. And I’ve been doing that ever since.

In 2015, I started running retreats and started an online programme for teachers, and now I’ve been running Body Positive Yoga full-time as a business for coming up on my third year. It’s pretty cool.

00:31:08

How she stopped dieting + discovered body positivity

Chris Sandel: Nice. There’s a lot that you said there that I want to go back through, but one thing I want to find out – you mentioned earlier about dieting and that being a big thing in your late teens, early twenties. When did you start to transition out of the dieting phase, and what did that process look like for you?

Amber Karnes: My first exposure to body positivity in general, or just the idea that people in larger bodies could be happy with themselves as they are, was through the plus size fashion community on LiveJournal. I had a lot of really cool role models on the internet who were being that representation for me and that visibility that I really needed, because growing up I had never seen someone in a fat body portrayed in a positive light.

Usually, if I’m seeing somebody in a fat body represented in media, they’re either a headless fat person on a news story about how obesity is going to kill everyone, or they’re an actress in a comedy that’s chasing a man that doesn’t want her or is the butt of a joke or is lazy or whatever. I had never seen positive representation of people in my type of body in mainstream media.

So being able to see these women who I thought were super cool in awesome outfits – I’ve been into fashion and design and art and all that stuff since I was a teenager – and being able to look at them and say, “Oh my gosh, she looks so cool and her body is the same size or bigger than mine” blew my mind. I was like, if I can look at her and think that she’s cool and beautiful and awesome and hot and whatever, I could be that too.

For me, that was the first crack in the diet culture foundation, I guess. I could see myself reflected in these women. So I really jumped full force into the body positivity community that was being built online, which was based in the fat acceptance community. It was a political movement and it was also a place where a lot of women like me were sharing their stories and talking about the fact that you can feel okay about yourself, no matter what size you are.

Around that same time, maybe a few years later, I discovered Health at Every Size, both the book and the concept. That really came out of a time when I had done a lot of dieting, I was CrossFitting, I was running, I was doing all these different things, and no matter what I did, I was still in a larger body. I lost some weight, but I was never thin. I was never even close to that. I was really frustrated because I was like, okay, I’m a really smart person. I know how to do math. Everyone’s saying ‘calories in, calories out’. This is not working, the equation that they’re saying. What is going on?

So I started looking for resources about that and why diets don’t work. That’s when I found Health at Every Size and realised that almost everything that I knew about weight and health was not actually true and that the science was not backing it up and that there were probably a lot of different reasons why my body was the size that it was.

But when I found out that you can be healthy no matter what size body you’re in, that the science tells us healthy habits make healthy bodies in a wide range of sizes, I was like, “Screw this. I’m not doing this again when it doesn’t work.” For me, it was a very logical thing. I was like, “The scientific evidence says this; I’ve been taught to believe this other thing, which none of the evidence backs up. This diet industry is like $65 billion a year and fails 95% of the time? Uh, I’m smarter than this. I’m going to do it this other way.”

That was a really easy decision for me to just say, “I’m going to leave this behind and get back in touch with my body and learn this new way of intuitive eating and moving my body in a different way.” I’d already dipped my toe into that because I was practicing yoga, so I had experienced joyful movement, and the cracks in the foundation were there through the self-acceptance resources that I was reading and the people I was following online. I was diversifying my visual inputs by being able to see representation of all different body sizes.

So I had all these little streams that came together to make one big river, and I was done with diet culture. And I’m not going to say that it wasn’t hard sometimes. If you’re doing something as radical as quitting dieting as a woman, especially as a woman in a large body, you’re literally swimming upstream. You’re never going to get the message from society or from mainstream media or from even the majority of your friends or family or whatever that you are doing the right thing because most people believe that being overweight means you’re unhealthy at all times.

I think that unlearning that stuff and relearning and retraining your brain to feel okay with the fact that you’re in a body that most of society is not going to find desirable or might even think that you’re lazy – all the different stigma that comes with being in a bigger body, you still have to deal with that stuff even if you leave diet culture behind. So that took a lot of mental work. Luckily, I was getting tools in the yoga practice that helped me to facilitate some of that stuff. But it was a process. It was a long process. But the rewards on the other side of it were really great.

00:37:30

The importance of having a supportive community

Chris Sandel: It sounds like you were finding lots of communities to support you. You mentioned the body positivity movement, you mentioned other things online. Was it all online, or did you start to develop people in real life who were living near you that were also into the same thoughts that you were?

Amber Karnes: It was pretty much all online. I didn’t have a fat community or people who were on the same path as me in real life. I had a lot of friends online. I had communities through LiveJournal and then through my blog and through things like that, but I wasn’t really finding that in person. And it’s still something that I’ve never had consistently local to where I am.

But community is something that – I’ve always been a community builder and community organiser since I was a kid. Whatever my interest was, whether that was music or entrepreneurship or crafts or art or whatever, I’ve always been somebody that puts people together and connects people and creates stuff for us to do around these different interests.

That’s part of what I started doing with my blog and ultimately why I started running those retreats in 2015: I wanted to create that container where people could come together and really feel what it’s like to be in a space where you can take up as much space as you want and you don’t have to leave any parts of your identity behind and you’re going to be accepted and not judged and everybody there is facing similar issues, and we’re going to get together and share meals and move our bodies in amazing ways and talk about these things.

So community for me is definitely the secret sauce to making all of this work. If you are working on self-acceptance, if you’re trying to leave diet culture behind, if you’re approaching movement from a place of loving-kindness and general expectations versus a punitive way of using movement, which I think a lot of people do, you’re swimming upstream. You’re doing something that’s pretty radical, and I think having support on that is really crucial.

I started creating those spaces in person, and now I do that through an online community that I host. It’s really I think important no matter what part of the journey you’re on. I remember when I first started, when I was on LiveJournal in my twenties and seeing these women for the first time who were okay with themselves, and learning that they were travelling and having relationships and doing all the things that I thought I could only do once I got thin, I would see them and think, “They must be a freak of nature or something. There’s something special about them that allows them to have control over their minds and be able to be so brave and confident, and I’m just a mess, hating my body and not feeling good about myself.”

We can usually relate to the starting point, and we see the people who we think have made it and we’re like “Oh, they never have any negative thoughts about their bodies anymore” – which is not true. But we don’t really get to see that messy middle part.

So I think it’s really important to have community around you and to have people that you can tell your story to and listen to their story and share the experiences that you’re going through – what’s working for you, what’s not, to have that support network. Maybe it’s a shoulder to cry on that you need every now and then, or maybe you just need a cheerleader to give you a pep talk about that hard thing that you’re about to do.

For me, community has really been transformative in that way. We’re not going to get that validation from mainstream culture that what we’re doing is the right thing and that we are worthy and we’re good enough just as we are. We really have to surround ourselves with people who are on the same path as us in order to I think set ourselves up for success and really understand that we’re not alone. Because it can feel really isolating sometimes when maybe you’re at a job and literally every other woman on your department is dieting or whatever, or you’re in a family that everyone’s really invested in you losing weight. It can be really difficult. Community is really transformative and supportive in those cases, I think.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. If you can get that in person, I think that’s really wonderful, or even if it’s in short bursts like going to retreats, etc. But there is some goodness to social media. There are some great things, in fact. There are different Facebook groups or places online that people can congregate where they do have shared experiences. So I definitely want to echo your thoughts around community and say that I completely agree.

Amber Karnes: Awesome.

00:42:55

Amber’s yoga experience as someone in a larger body

Chris Sandel: I’d also like to hear – you’ve touched on different aspects of this already, but more about your experience of navigating the yoga world while being in a larger body. You can comment on this both from the perspective of being a student or being a teacher, but are there other memories or incidents that come to mind?

Amber Karnes: I think as a student, a lot of the experiences I had coming into classes were that teachers would either ignore me or single me out. Those were the two ways that it would show up. Either I’d be in the back corner, doing what I could do, and the teacher would kind of pretend I wasn’t there, or it would be like everybody else is doing something and they’re like, “Um, you should be using a block” or whatever. Or sometimes it was a really weird cheerleading sort of way, like “We’re all going to work on handstands. You can just rest in child’s pose.” I’m like, “No, I’ll do a handstand with y’all. Let’s go.” Then when I could do something, like, “Oh, that’s amazing! I can’t believe you! Good for you!” That kind of thing.

So a lot of times it was really feeling singled out in one way or the other. At the time, it was hard for me to deal with, but now I understand that most teachers just don’t have the tools. They don’t get training in the basic teacher training to understand how to work with people who are in bodies not that dominant body identity of somebody that’s young and thin and fit and super flexible or whatever. Most yoga teachers leave teacher training knowing how to teach to each other. [laughs] Not to the cross-section of humanity – folks in bigger bodies, older folks, people dealing with injuries, people dealing with disabilities, any of that kind of stuff.

Now I know that, and now I don’t take it personal. But at the time, it was kind of alienating. But I was really persistent and stuck with it because of the benefits that I was feeling in my life from it.

I will say that on the positive side, one of the things that did for me was it really put the responsibility for my practice into my hands. I would say it really gave me some of my power back. A lot of people who go to yoga practice or exercise class or whatever, we expect the teacher to know everything and tell us exactly what to do or maybe you’re following along a personal trainer and they’re going to tell you, “Put your foot here and breathe this way” or whatever.

Since I wasn’t getting the guidance that a lot of times I needed from those teachers, I had to figure things out. That meant that I really had to become partners with my body and say, “Okay, in this position, my belly’s running into my thigh. I feel like I can’t breathe. They’re saying I need to have a deep, full breath. What can I do to make some room for myself here?” And then taking that agency to say, “Hmm, I wonder what’d happen if I put my foot over – oh, that feels better.” I really had to use my body as a tool to be able to discover things about my practice and get to know it a lot better than maybe I would have if I had a teacher that perfectly understood what was going on and told me what to do.

So that was I think a really interesting and unique piece of how my practice developed.

Chris Sandel: Do you then keep that in mind now as the teacher? When you were talking about that, it really made me reflect on the way that I work with clients as well. I want to be a guide, but I don’t want to tell them everything they need to do. That’s got to be collaborative. I want them to be figuring it out because they often know what to be doing. There’s that tightrope you walk where you want to be of assistance, but you also don’t want to be stealing from someone being able to figure this stuff out for themselves.

Amber Karnes: Totally. It’s so cool to hear you say that, because I think a lot of times, whether we’re teachers or trainers or fitness instructors or whatever we are, we’re taught to teach a certain way, which is I stand at the front of the room, I tell you everything to do, you do those things, nobody else talks, we all go home. Right? [laughs]

For me, my teaching is definitely a lot more collaborative and co-creative. Many of the students that I work with – and now mostly I train teachers, but when we work together, most of the students that I work with or the teachers I’m training are working with students who are not that dominant body identity. They’re not Yoga Barbie. They’re people who are in bigger bodies, they’re people who are older, they’re people who are disabled, who have injuries or mobility limitations. So their physical practice is not going to look like the cover of the yoga magazine or the picture of B. K. S. Iyengar in his book. This is going to be an adaptive practice. Things are going to be looking a little bit different.

So for me, my mindset as a teacher when I’m working with a student is every asana – and asana is the Sanskrit word for a physical posture in yoga – every asana is a question. Every asana is a puzzle. We’re going to work together, you using your body in the way that you want to use it and me providing some guidance, some questions. I’m more of a guide to facilitate an environment of inquiry and an environment of you investigating what this feels like in your body. And if that doesn’t feel the way that we’re looking for it to feel, I can offer some options to explore some other things.

But it’s less of me being a drill sergeant that shouts out yoga poses and more of a collaborative process where I’m holding space for people to get to know their bodies, to understand how to interpret the information that their bodies are giving them, whether that’s sensation or pain or a stretch or they’re trembling because they’re building strength – whatever that is, to learn those things and be able to have agency.

Honestly, that’s one of the biggest things for me: to be able to build agency in our students and to redistribute the power a little bit that is inherent in the teacher-student dynamic. Because they’re the expert of their body. I know some things, but I can’t do the practice for them, and honestly I have no idea what things feel like to them. It might look a certain way, but that internal experience is what really matters. Being able to facilitate a relationship that looks more like a collaborative process is really important for me as a teacher.

Chris Sandel: It’s really interesting when I hear you chat about this, and also when you were talking earlier about the whole mindfulness piece and noticing the stories versus the facts, etc. It’s like using yoga as a gateway to open up so many other aspects of your life. This just helps to do it in a very focused way or do it in a specific manner, and you’re meant to then take those skills out into the wider world. It’s not just getting better at yoga for yoga’s sake.

Amber Karnes: That’s right. It’s a living practice. There’s a lot more to yoga than just the physical practice. That’s something we tend to focus on, especially in America, but there are so many tools that are available there that can serve us in many other aspects of our life, especially when it comes to being in our bodies and using our bodies in a way that I think dominant culture encourages us not to do. We’re told you can’t feed yourself; you need to eat this prescribed calorie count or this list of foods that an expert put together. Who’s the expert of you? It’s you.

00:51:37

The Yoga and Body Image Coalition

Chris Sandel: One of the things you’re a part of is the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. Are you able to explain what this is? Because this is something I didn’t know about until I was prepping for this chat.

Amber Karnes: The Yoga and Body Image Coalition is a collection of yoga teachers and body positive activists who want to shift the conversation in yoga and work with the different ways that yoga and body image intersect to create more access and make things more accessible and to change the way that yoga is represented especially.

There’s a lot of things that they do with media literacy. They’ve got a campaign called This Is What a Yogi Looks Like that shows the wide range of different types of human beings that are practicing yoga. They also have a blog where we have different posts about topics on yoga and body image. There are also several books that have come out that are collections of essays by prominent folks in the yoga world and also just in the world. I think Ashley Judd is in the first one, and Alanis Morrissette. So there’s a lot of people who are talking about their relationship with their body and how yoga affected or transformed that.

There’s two books, one called Yoga and Body Image and one called Yoga Rising. Those are really cool collections of stories and profiles of folks that have used the practice of yoga to do the kind of things that we’re talking about on this conversation – to shift the relationship with their body, to build more body trust, to really take the skills that they’re learning there out into the world.

The Yoga and Body Image Coalition host different events, like book clubs, and they present at conferences. There’s a really big team that supports that. A lot of them are yoga teachers or studio owners or people that are involved in things like women’s studies and things like that. It’s a really big and powerful collective of folks who talk about these different topics.

If you’re interested in the kinds of things we’re talking about today, definitely check them out. We can put a link to them in the show notes. I’ll make sure to send that to you.

00:54:20

Is yoga becoming more diverse + inclusive?

Chris Sandel: Awesome. Does it feel like yoga or the space of yoga is changing, like there are more options for people of all shapes and sizes and more visibility of teachers in a diverse range of bodies?

Amber Karnes: I think it’s definitely changing. I think just in the space of time since I took my teacher training, there’s a lot more people who are doing this type of work. And it’s not like there wasn’t anyone in larger bodies teaching before we were doing it on the internet, but it’s easier to find people now and to connect with your community.

I think also, I’m seeing a shift even in the mainstream conversations. Associations like Yoga Journal, who’s sort of like the Cosmo of yoga, who have never really been – they’ve been I would say the opposite of body positive – have lately started trying to get into that conversation and featuring different people in the movement. When I start to see mainstream publications do things like that, when people like Jessamyn Stanley, who’s an Instagram yoga star – she’s a fat yogi in a bigger body, she’s Black, she’s queer – when people like that are getting endorsement deals from national brands and working with mainstream publications and getting coverage, I think it’s a really good indicator that this movement is shifting a little bit. It’s really cool to be able to see a lot of people who are teaching yoga.

Also, I see this in the wider fitness community as well. There’s an awareness that fitness is something that people of all shapes and sizes want to have access to. And a lot of that is from, I think, a capitalistic perspective of like “There’s money on the table!” But I also think that it’s very positive because we’ve been out here waiting on y’all. I’ve been wanting some cute leggings in my size since I was 18 years old. So now that there’s more options, that’s really cool.

I’ve seen it reach into all different aspects, from athleticwear to the way that different companies are advertising things. Representation is opening up a little bit. I think that we still have a long way to go, but Yoga Alliance is our governing body and trade organisation here in the U.S., and they write the standards for what teacher trainings have to be and who can call themselves a certified teacher and things like that; they just did a big standards review to look at the qualifications of a teacher and also the curriculum that’s offered.

I think it’s very likely that one of the results of that is going to be that every teacher training curriculum is required to have things in it like being able to work with diverse body types, being able to offer yoga to folks with disabilities, offering trauma-informed teaching, and creating a culture of consent around touch for physical adjustments and things like that.

So I definitely see a shift, and it’s pretty cool to be part of that and to be able to have some influence there. Despite what the dominant marketing has been, this practice is available to anybody that wants to participate. It just might look a little bit different than what we’ve been sold. So I think it’s really crucial that we continue to move that so that the accessibility is centre and not an afterthought. Then anyone who wants to practice can come to a studio – or to wherever a class is being held; I think one of the biggest things about accessibility is making sure that we can come to where people are.

I love seeing when yoga is outside of that studio industrial complex. [laughs] Bring it to the people. The first place I ever taught was in a library, and nobody’s intimidated to go to the library. So I think it’s really neat to see where that’s going and to see more and more teachers care about making their teaching accessible from the get-go rather than an afterthought like “Oh, I can only teach this way if I specialise in chair yoga or plus size yoga” or whatever. Having those tools in their toolbox to be able to offer it to anybody that comes to their class.

Chris Sandel: I know you have the online option. Is that a stepping stone in your mind? Are there a lot of people who start with online yoga and then end up in a studio versus the other way around?

Amber Karnes: I think that’s one way that it can happen. I think for a lot of people who maybe are in a bigger body, who have had a bad experience at a yoga class, or maybe they’ve talked to other friends who have gone to yoga and they said, “The teacher didn’t know what to do” – finding videos online of how to adapt and modify poses or personalise your practice a little bit, or maybe attending a workshop by me or somebody like me – there’s a lot of people doing this work – it can help people feel a lot better. Then they have the ability to take care of themselves and to advocate for themselves and use their body in a way that feels good, even if the teacher doesn’t have those tools to work with them.

Sometimes it is the best way to go. If you maybe don’t have access to a studio near to where you are – maybe you’re in a rural area or you’re in a city that doesn’t have a lot of choice, or maybe you can’t afford to go to a yoga studio (it can get quite expensive) or maybe you just haven’t found the right teacher for you. Sometimes participating online is a really good way to get started and to start developing your practice.

Then if it’s your goal to be able to be part of a community or study with a teacher, then you can translate some of those skills into going to a studio or going to a public class. So I think it can be a great way to get started.

01:01:03

The Body Positive Clubhouse

Chris Sandel: Cool. Do you want to just mention a little about the Body Positive Clubhouse that you run?

Amber Karnes: Totally. I want to mention first, I just came out with a programme that is a chair yoga programme. I had so many requests for this, so I just put out a little package of videos. It’s 15 classes, some of which are completely seated and some of which are using the chair as a prop. You can find that on my site at bodypositiveyoga.com. I’ve had a really cool response to it and a lot of people have signed up. That’s a good way to get a taste.

But also, I have a membership site called the Body Positive Clubhouse. It’s really affordable, and you can try it out for free for two weeks. Basically, it’s the community that I’ve always wanted. [laughs] We have this resource vault that I’ve created. There’s over 200 things in there right now. A lot of them are yoga classes, from five minutes to an hour long. There’s all different kinds – chair yoga, classes that you don’t get up and down off the floor, classes that are more challenging, classes that are more gentle, restorative – there’s lots of options in there.

And then there’s a lot of videos and writings about body positivity, making peace with your body, building confidence, Health at Every Size, Intuitive Eating – all of those kinds of things. The folks in the community all have requested those. Usually the resources I create based on what people are asking for and the things they’re struggling with.

We have all of those resources available. I also have an online group. It’s a closed Facebook group where the members talk to one another and we share and we give support and we ask questions based on whatever we’re dealing with at the moment.

About every month or so, we also have a live online hangout where I present a little bit deeper dive into a topic, whether that’s something like Health at Every Size or – I don’t know when this is airing, but this weekend is the weekend before Thanksgiving, so we’re having a class all about dealing with food and weight and well-meaning but nosy relatives at the holidays and how to engage or not engage with people around diet talk and weight talk and unsolicited advice.

We really take questions from the members about what they’re dealing with in their life, and then I will do some teaching on it. It’s kind of cool; we get to hang out live together and Zoom and see each other’s faces, and everybody gets to have a conversation about a topic that we’re all dealing with. It’s really cool because you get to come together with folks and you feel like you’re a little bit less alone. Everybody’s dealing with the same issue, and maybe it just shows up in a little bit different way.

I’ve found it to be really transformational for me, even as the organiser. But I know a lot of people have found really good support there, so if you’re listening and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s what I’ve been looking for,” we’d love to have you. You can check it out for free for two weeks. You get complete access. You can download videos. I don’t care what you do. [laughs] We’d love it if you stay after, too.

So yeah, Body Positive Clubhouse. You can find all that stuff on my website at bodypositiveyoga.com.

Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all of that in the links for the show notes. If you want to send over the link about the chair yoga, I can link directly to that as well.

Amber Karnes: Sure.

Chris Sandel: Awesome. Amber, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. I’m pretty sure you’ve mentioned all the links of places people can find you; is there any social media or anything like that that you want to mention?

Amber Karnes: If you go to bodypositiveyoga.com, all my social accounts are linked from there. But you can also just search for me on social, Amber Karnes, and you’ll find me. Body Positive Yoga or Amber Karnes.

Chris Sandel: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time and your knowledge around this topic. I know it’s going to be helpful for a lot of people.

Amber Karnes: Thanks for having me. I really appreciated talking with you.

Thanks for listening to Real Health Radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at the Seven Health website. That’s www.seven-health.com.