THIS HAPPENED TO ME: THERE ARE NO BLACK FIRE BREATHING DRAGONS IN MY YOGA CLASSES AND I'M SUDDENLY FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT
I believe you have lost your god damn minds. So as a caring individual and champion of human rights, I feel it is my duty to lend a hand to this unfortunate blog post You see, I've had my fill of privilege and denial for the day, and I am too depleted to even to go line by line by filthy line, unpacking and explaining the micro-aggressive, self absorption and undercurrent racism going on with Jen Caron and her plight to keep her yoga studio a "safe space".
Instead I've decided to make a few choice changes to her work using the only logic I believe can both rectify and rationalize this terrible, terrible misunderstanding. Therefore you will see that I've revised her terrifying yoga encounter to have happened with not a black woman but a fearsome black fire breathing dragon, as in my experience, that is the only thing that could send me home from yoga crying. I hope this helps!
THIS HAPPENED TO ME: THERE ARE NO BLACK FIRE BREATHING DRAGONS IN MY YOGA CLASSES AND I'M SUDDENLY FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT
January is always a funny month in yoga studios: they are inevitably flooded with last year’s repentant exercise sinners who have sworn to turn over a new leaf, a new year, and a new workout regime. A lot of January patrons are atypical to the studio’s regular crowd and, for the most part, stop attending classes before February rolls around.
A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy LARGE black DRAGON THAT MOST LIKELY BREATHES FIRE woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio ON ACCOUNT OF BEING LARGE AND BLACK AND FIRE BREATHY—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes SCALES, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her GREAT TALONS elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.
Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people HUMANS freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this LARGE FIRE BREATHING DRAGON woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.
I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman DRAGON was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined BECAUSE SHE IS A FIRE BREATHING DRAGON AND I DON'T BELIEVE THEY HAVE THOUGHTS UNLESS IT'S TO BE CONSUMED WITH GREED AND GUARD THE GOLD OF DWARF KINGS FROM GENERATIONS AGO.
I thought about how even though yoga comes from thousands of years of south Asian tradition, it’s been shamelessly co-opted by Western culture as a sport for skinny, rich white women. AS WE HAVE YET TO FIND DWARF GOLD. I thought about my beloved donation-based studio that I’ve visited for years, in which classes are very big and often very crowded and no one will try to put a scented eye pillow on your face during savasana. They preach the gospel of yogic egalitarianism, that their style of vinyasa is approachable for people of all ages, experience levels, socioeconomic statuses, genders, and races; that it is non-judgmental and receptive. As such, the studio is populated largely by students, artists, and broke hipsters; there is a much higher ratio of men to women than at many other studios, and you never see the freshly-highlighted, Evian-toting, Upper-West-Side yoga stereotype.
I realized with horror that despite the all-inclusivity preached by the studio, despite the purported blindness to socioeconomic status, despite the sizeable population of regular MEDIUM RED FIRE BREATHING DRAGONS AND COLOSSAL YELLOW FIRE BREATHING DRGONS , LARGE black FIRE BREATHING DRAONGS were few and far between. And in the large and constantly rotating roster of instructors, I could only ever remember two being LARGE black FIRE BREATHING DRAGONS.
I thought about how that must feel: to be a heavyset LARGE black FIRE BREATHING DRAGON woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body BECAUSE IT'S LARGE AND WHEN SHE GETS OUT OF BREATH SHE KEEPS SETTING THE STUDIO ON FIRE. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my despair as possible—I would not want anyone to look at me or notice me. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid looking in her direction each time I was in downward dog, but I could feel her hostility, BEING A DRAGON AND ALL, just the same. Trying to ignore it only made it worse. I thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her. Would a simple “Are you okay? IS THERE ENOUGH ROOM FOR YOUR MASSIVE WINGS?” whisper have helped, or would it embarrass her? Should I tell her after class how awful I was at yoga for the first few months of my practicing and encourage her to stick with it, or would that come off as massively condescending? If I asked her to articulate her experience to me so I could just listen TO HER TAILS OF SCOURING THE EARTH FOR CENTURIES AFTER BEING BORN FROM THE HELL FIRES OF MORDOR MAYBE, would she be at all interested in telling me about it? CAN SHE EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH? I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SPEAK DRAGON. Perhaps more importantly, what could the system do to make itself more accessible to a broader range of bodies? Is having more racially diverse instructors enough, or would it require a serious restructuring of studio’s ethos?
I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying AFTER WATCHING HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON BECAUSE THAT'S A REALLY GOOD MOVIE. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially HUMANIST charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American DRAGON-HUMAN race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.
The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but to every body? And while I recognize that there is an element of spectatorship to my experience in this instance, it is precisely this feeling of not being able to engage, not knowing how to engage, that mitigates the hope for change. BECAUSE. FIRE!
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