How to Feel Happier in Your Body with Jessamyn Stanley

0:06Pushkin.

0:11Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. It's just about the start of summer, which means we're finally coming to the end of our special series on spring cleaning your happiness. But since swimsuit season is around the corner, I wanted to end this series with one final thing that many of us need to let go of to boost our happiness. We need to clear out our body shame. With social media feeds filled with bikini body workouts and looks maxing tips, it can be very easy to not only beat yourself up about what you look like, but also to turn exercise into some form of body hatred. But what if you swept away all that self-loathing and embraced moving the only body you'll ever have in a healthier, happier way?

0:51What if you exercised without trying to transform what your body looked like? That is what we'll be exploring in today's Throwback episode. It's a show we ran a few years ago in January, another time of year when we tend to fall into body hatred spirals. And it features an inspirational yoga teacher and author who's changed the way that I personally relate to exercise. Jessamyn Stanley spent most of her life identifying as what she called a, quote, fat and awkward weirdo. Jessamyn avoided exercise at all costs until she realized that it was her own body-shaming mind that was holding her back. So in our final spring cleaning episode of the Happiness Lab, get ready to wash away your body shame and learn how you can refresh your relationship to movement.

1:35That's all coming up right after some quick words from the Happiness Lab sponsors.

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3:55On the face of it, moving your body should be a really good New Year's happiness goal. Most research shows that exercise makes us feel good. In fact, one study showed that a half hour of cardio a day could be as effective for reducing symptoms of depression as taking an antidepressant medication. So I should applaud the fact about half of us intend to exercise more in the new year. The problem is, I worry, we're kind of not doing it right. For many of us, hitting the gym isn't about enjoying ourselves or feeling better. It's about looking better. It's about not really liking our bodies and trying to get them to look like the ones we see on Instagram.

4:32But could there be a more compassionate, more happiness-inducing way to get our bodies moving? And one that could help us achieve a bigger well-being boost than we think? Of course there is. So if you're ready to learn how to be happier through movement, then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for this final New Year episode of The Happiness Lab.

4:55You know, I think that there was a time that I did really enjoy movement. This is one of my heroes, Jessamyn Stanley. I used to love just, like, running around in the yard and, like, run a lap and ask my mom to time me just so that I can know how fast I am. Or, like, I would just try to turn cartwheels just because I can. Jessamyn's childlike love of moving her body was pretty short-lived. Because like me, Jessamyn grew up as a chubby kid. Or as she puts it even more bluntly in her book, Every Body Yoga, a fat, occasionally smelly, supremely awkward weirdo. Jessamyn quickly learned to fear all things fitness.

5:32Like gym class and that awful lineup where you get picked for dodgeball teams. And that trauma-inducing eight-year-old rite of passage of sit-ups, push-ups, and sprints. The Presidential Fitness Test. I don't know if this is a thing for you. if you did this test in grade school. But I remember that a component of the presidential fitness test was running a mile. And I was the very last person in my class to the point where if memory serves, like either one of the other kids in my class or the teacher came back to join me. And I was so mortified and I felt so totally insufficient. And that directly impacted me never wanting to do sports at all.

6:18I used to, on the way to field day in school, like try to look for holes in the ground so that I could turn my ankle in a hole so that I could claim that like, oh, my ankle hurts and now I can't do field day. Like I went out of my way to not do physical exercise as much as possible because I was so worried about keeping up with other people. and really just at a bare level being good enough. And hating your body when it came to kind of gym class and the presidential fitness contest, that was part and parcel of not liking aspects of your body and your identity generally when you were growing up, right?

6:54Exactly. I definitely felt as though I was insufficient, that as a fat Black woman, I didn't see any representation of my body at all where my body was not the punchline. And this was in the era of like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Christina Aguilera and the Olsen twins. And there was definitely this very pervasive idea that being small bodied, small featured, having blonde hair or brunette hair, basically just having like really straight hair was very important. But certainly not having dark skin, big lips, really kinky hair. None of those qualities were represented. And so I just felt there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

7:40And honestly, I felt as though there would always be something fundamentally wrong with me. That really, even if I did lose weight, those changes would never be enough because I just fundamentally was not good enough. Even if you weren't a fat kid, you may be able to relate to this sort of low-grade self-hatred Jessman's talking about. That deep sense that there's something bad about you that you need to fix. We feel deep down that we'll only be happy once we've lifted enough weights or run enough miles to get that new, idealized body. But all of that is a lie that your mind tells you. And that's the important lesson that Jessamyn Stanley learned, one that she now teaches to millions of people around the world.

8:18Her early forays into the world of fitness involved all the body-hating that many of us are feeling when we make that gotta-exercise-more New Year's resolution. But she was able to break free from all the body shaming in a way that transformed her career and her overall well-being. But as you'll hear, her journey wasn't a quick one. My very first yoga class was when I was in high school. My aunt at the time was obsessed with bichon yoga, which is a style of hot yoga where you practice 26 of the same yoga postures over a 90-minute period. Jessamyn's aunt Tracy was the epitome of 90s glamour. She was tall and beautiful and everything teenage Jessamyn thought she wanted to be.

9:01So despite her reservations, Jessamyn joined her aunt for that first ever yoga class. I remember it like it was yesterday. I went into the studio and it is extremely hot. It's like somewhere between 100 to 104 degrees, kind of depending on how sadistic the teacher is. Immediately I walk in and I'm just sweating in places that I didn't even know human beings sweat. Like I was sweating from the tops of my fingers. And this is before anything has ever happened. Like this is, there's no postures have been practiced. And I was like, I got to be in here for an hour and a half. And I mean, I made it, let's say a third of the way through the class.

9:38I think I'm being too generous with that, but I made it about a third of the way through the class before I was like, I'm done. I don't need this anymore. I'm good. And they tell you before you go to a Bikram class, not to walk out of the room. But I was like, these people don't know me. I cannot do this. Like I'm going to die. And so I walked out of the room and I learned a very important life lesson about why you should not walk out of a hot yoga room. Because the transition in your physical body is so intense going from hot to cold that temperature change can bring on a lot of different physical experiences.

10:11And for me, it brought on a wave of nausea. And after when we left, I was like, I'm never doing that again. And this is the worst. It's bad experiences like this that discourage so many of us from making exercise a regular and fun part of our daily routine. We can feel ashamed or humiliated by our bodies and abilities. We're just discouraged because the aesthetic changes we so desire don't materialize right away. Fortunately, Jessamyn got a second chance to find joy in moving. I was in graduate school and I was going through a really tough time in my life that I now recognize is emblematic of being 23.

10:48Like, I don't know who I am. What is the purpose of my life? What is going on? And one of my close friends, she had gotten into Bikram yoga and she was like, oh, my God, you should come to yoga. You're going to love it. And I was like, I am not doing that. I've done it before. I know it's not for me. And she got me caught up on a Groupon, though. She was like, what's the worst that can happen? You go one time, you pay$30 for this pass. That's like, what's the worst that could happen? And I went, and the interesting thing about Beacon Yoga specifically is that I think of it as the McDonald's of yoga.

11:21It's literally like you could go anywhere in the world and get this practice exactly the same. So nothing had changed. It was still hot as hell, hard as hell. Everything about it was the same. But I had changed though. I didn't realize that so much of what was making me unhappy and unsatisfied in my life was that I'd created all of these boundaries for myself. And I'd made all these decisions about the type of person that I am and about what I'm capable of handling. And I never allowed myself to step outside of those boundaries. And yoga requires that you step outside of your boundaries. And it put me in these situations where I actually had to look at the way that I talk to myself and look at the way that I process information and be like, you know what?

12:11I know I decided that I'm not going to be able to do this, but maybe I'm just going to try. The example that I think of often, especially that first class back, I remember we were practicing a posture called awkward pose. That is literally, it's so aptly named because it is extremely awkward. I was watching everybody around me just like sit down into this posture and it looked like they had all practiced it together beforehand. In Be From Yoga, you look at yourself in the mirror. So I'm looking at myself in this mirror, which is traumatizing on its own because I literally would go out of my way at that stage in my life to avoid mirrors.

12:49I went out of my way to not look at myself, but I'm forced to look at myself. I'm looking at myself and I'm just thinking, why did you even think you could come to this class? You obviously don't know what you're doing and everybody here knows it and you can't even do this basic thing. This is like maybe the third or fourth posture in the class. I'm like, if you can't do this, then why even show up? And I had this moment where I was like, you know, you could just try. Maybe you just try. Like, yes, maybe you're going to fall down. Maybe everyone in the room is going to know that you don't know what you're doing.

13:23Maybe the teacher is going to know that you don't know what you're doing. And maybe that's just got to be okay. Because did you spend this money to come to this class to just stand here and talk shit about yourself because you could have done that at home. And that moment, that breaking point, to this day, ultimately, that is why I continue to practice yoga. It's a cracking open of the spirit. It's being able to, I think of it a lot of like, it's like you're looking in a foggy bathroom mirror, a mirror that you fogged up and like just swiping across it and seeing your actual reflection back at you.

13:59And it was so profound for me in a way that I certainly didn't walk into class thinking I was going to experience. Jessamyn's insight of noticing how she was really talking to herself kept her going back to that hot studio. But eventually her groupon ran out, and she was out of work and out of money. She couldn't afford the yoga classes that were teaching her so much. And she started backsliding to that bad emotional place, but she decided to fight back. And so literally one day I just rolled out my mat in my living room and I like pushed, I had to push all the furniture out of the corner of the room.

14:34And I really didn't feel confident practicing any postures that were outside of the postures that I knew. Like, so I would practice the same, like eight to 10 yoga postures from the Bikram sequence. And that just became my medicine. I'm going to do this yoga and I feel comfortable doing this without a teacher watching me. This is great. But then over time, you know, I became more and more obsessed with the practice and wanting to try out postures that I saw on the internet. This was back whenever Instagram like first came out. Because I was practicing at home, I wanted to be able to receive feedback from other people.

15:13But I was also very scared to take photos of myself because I was so afraid to look at my body. And when I first started taking the photos, I would take them at really random angles. I'd be like, no, I think this angle is my good side so I can shoot it from here. But like after a while, I was like, I can't even see my body. Like I have to do something. So I had a timer set up on the camera. I have like 30 seconds to hold the posture while it takes four photos. And in that moment when I'm in the posture, I'd be like, oh my God, yoga is amazing. I feel incredible. I am lifted up to another place.

15:49And then I would go and look at the photos and I would just immediately start talking shit about myself. I'd be like, oh my God, look at my belly. Look at my arms. Look at my chins. Like every negative thing that everything that I thought was negative was getting picked at and scrutinized. And it took a really long time. Like I would say months before I started to really question that. And I would be like, no one else is here saying these things about yourself. Like I, you know, we always want to blame the media. and I want to blame my family and I want to blame my partner. That's why I hate myself.

16:22No, I'm looking at these photos. I'm saying these awful things about myself. This is me. I have to own that. And if I'm the one saying these things about myself, are these things that I really believe about myself? Like it turned into this whole space for therapy that again, I didn't go into it thinking like, yes, I'd like to have an emotional, or an emotionally complex relationship with my higher self. No, I was just like, this is dumb. I hated that aspect of it, but it really opened up so much for me in terms of just being able to understand where self-hate resides and that it's something that I have to own as an individual.

17:01It really helped me to understand that I am a body shamer at my core. Like how an alcoholic is an alcoholic forever. I'm a body shamer forever. And all I can do is just be aware of it. I can just know it and see it, and I have to accept it about myself. But I think that had I not started that practice of photographing myself, then I would never have started that conversation. When we return from the break, we'll try to figure out how being ashamed of our bodies and exercise got so intertwined, and how we can all begin to separate them out again. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

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21:23world-renowned yoga instructor and author of the book, Every Body Yoga, Let Go of Fear, Get on the Mat, Love Your Body. As one article put it, she's now become famous for everything yoga instructors are not supposed to be. Black, queer, messy, unapologetically fat, and she swears a lot. Jessamyn's used her yoga practice not to achieve some perfect body, but to accept and allow her imperfect reality to be there, just as it is. And in doing so, she's realized that a more self-compassionate approach to exercise can be an important way to boost your health and your happiness. When you look at people who are extreme athletes, people who run ultra marathons, they're not doing that for their health.

22:06Like, they're not obsessed with that experience because it's like, oh my god, my body is going to look this way. No, they are working out deep psychological truth. They are having a spiritual experience. And I think that the more that we can approach fitness from that perspective of just wanting to get inside yourself, just wanting to touch something that is real, it's really ultimately coming back to that experience of being a child, that experience of just running around the block just because it feels good, not because there's any kind of goal or any kind of expectation. You run around the block, you try to turn a cart wheel, you swim in the ocean, not because something is going to change about you, but honestly to honor who you are right now.

22:55And this is something that really isn't talked about in the mainstream with yoga, because in the mainstream, yoga is only about fitness. It is postures that you practice for exercise. I think that what really shifted things for me was understanding that yoga is really a spiritual life path. I love to dive into some of these benefits because I think they're so powerful. So, I mean, one of these approaches about thinking of yoga, not just as fitness, but as kind of life changing, is to recognize that yoga really is about mindfulness. It's about being present with whatever is going on. And this is something we talk about a lot on the happiness lab that being present even for negative stuff is good right this is the kind of thing we need to do is to work on allowing and so you know talk about how that works in yoga either as a practitioner as a teacher when you're holding these postures that might not feel great in the moment but the act of allowing that like how does that change you it really i think allows you to see life as being so much more than it seems on the surface.

23:59Let's take a posture like chair pose, for example. You look at a posture like chair pose and it's like, what do I need to do? I need to turn my thighs toward one another. I need to engage my core. I need to fall down backwards while also sitting upright. I need to lengthen out of the crown of my head. When I'm feeling challenged, when someone is pushing back against me at work, when I feel like someone is being mean to me, those are the same things that I need to do. I need to pull into my core. I need to try to fall down backwards, but also stay upright. I need to lengthen up to the sky. I need to pull.

24:44It's all of these ideas that seem theoretical and that seem like philosophical, but that are really actually very practical. And I think it makes it easier to deal with the parts of life that are really hard, really, really hard and complicated, and that are not meant to be anything other than that. Like, I think sometimes in life, bad shit happens. And you think this isn't how things are supposed to be. Things are supposed to be good. I'm supposed to be happy. This is wrong. And what yoga reminds is that everything in life is not good. Everything in life is not happy. You need for things to be hard so that you can actually strengthen from the inside.

25:27So practice the things that you do when things get hard, pull into your core, draw your butt cheeks together, whatever the things are. Practice that in the moments that feel emotionally hard and you will be strengthened as a result. In yoga, we talk about it as tapas and tapas has many definitions, but I would loosely define it here as fire and that we step into this fire that is burning away the pieces of ourselves that don't need to be there. And you think about how anything becomes strong, how anything becomes honed and deepened, and it is always through intensity. It's always through things being complicated and messy and unpleasant.

26:16And really it's just, are you okay with that? Are you willing to get okay with that? Are you willing to take the tools that you have in your arsenal to withstand that intensity? I love that you brought up chair pose in this capacity because that is one of the poses that anytime one of my yoga instructors is like, let's go through chairs secretly in my head. And my first reaction is like, I hate you. Why did you do that? Then I have to turn on the sort of voice that I talk about a lot on this podcast, my sort of stoic voice that says, no, I invited this. You know, this is a nice challenge, right?