This workshop explored the intersections of personal and cultural messages and perceptions regarding “body identity” in yoga culture.  Personal identities are complex and sometimes we embody conflicting messages, aims and intentions.  We are each constantly negotiating the terrain between personal views and perceptions of ourselves and our bodies and the external gaze. Though yoga often prompts us to focus within, we don’t leave the burden of external judgment entirely behind when we unroll the mat. We carry cultural stories in our bodies, and the very real privileges and oppressions that formed those stories. Participants worked with experiences of body size/shape, gender, sexuality, and via their intersections with these other issues, race, class, age and ability. Participants also focused on the language of teaching, yoga, and participation, revealing our own – and cultural – assumptions and stories through body contemplation and writing. As a part of the workshop participants also contextualized the role of body image via an understanding of how yoga came into western culture and the pursuit of yoga as a fitness activity. This workshop included minimal asana practice, personal writing (sharing is optional) and small and large group discussion.

Kimberly Dark is a master facilitator who has led groups to awareness and understanding on three continents over the past twenty years. In addition to teaching yoga since 1999, she’s a writer and storyteller whose work has been invited to hundreds of colleges, universities, theatres, festivals and conferences. Through the body and stories, she leads groups to their own skills of peace and cultural transformation. She blogs regularly for Decolonizing Yoga and Ms. Magazine and is also a founding member of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition Leadership Team, in addition to coordinating the Yoga Program at Kalani, one of Hawaii’s largest retreat centers. Kimberly uses an Iyengar-style training and more than twenty years experience with diverse yoga practices to challenge and welcome students of every ability and body type. She has taught yoga styles ranging from vinyasa, yin and restorative to prop-assisted hatha yoga for people who don’t feel comfortable in fitness settings due to size, health or anxiety. Her classes encourage personal sovereignty, inner voice and an entitlement to health and vibrancy at all sizes, ages and abilities.