Month: August 2019

When most people finish a sun salutation, they’re not pondering the history of the pose. They’re thinking “God, I’m a sweaty mess,” not, “Gee, I wonder who came up with this concept?” Although it might not come up in your practice, the history of yoga is storied and complex. As far as scholars know, the first yogic activities emerged about 3,000 years ago in India, and involved people isolating themselves from their community to perform contemplation, prayer, and purification, according to Matthew Remski, a yoga teacher, trainer, and the author of Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond. Now, as Remski puts it, yoga is “a globalized, middle-class, mainstreamed, $80-billion-per-year wellness commodity, produced and consumed mainly by women.” read more

I joined social media a couple of years ago and had no idea that we talk about women’s weight all the time. Or put up pictures of famous women on social media and then write their weights across their bodies. The only number you would ever write across a man is how much money he’s worth — you would never even care how much he weighed. And I started to see this more and more often. So I just posted on Twitter and Instagram what I weigh, which is my financial independence, my activism, the health struggles that I’ve overcome, my anxiety, my boyfriend, my best friend, everything that makes me up. I weigh the sum of all my parts. read more