So much of the friction that exists between my mind and body is generated from this idea that there are certain spaces that I am allowed to occupy.
Being raised as a girl, this idea was enforced to me in small ways. I wasn’t supposed to sit with my legs apart. I was supposed to sit still and not fidget. I should wear clothes that fit, clothes that make me look slim and pretty. Most importantly, I needed to be skinny in order to look nice, to look beautiful, to look desirable.
These ideas became integrated with my ideas of femininity until they became inseparable, and the pressure of needing to check all these boxes was enough to compress me to be even smaller than I felt.
Having grown up with a strict idea of who I was allowed to be, I learned to squeeze into the margins of what was allowed, feeling constantly entitled to less and less space. I shrunk into backgrounds and corners in my mind, minimizing myself enough to make space for the person I needed to be—the person the world wanted me to be.
What I found in that was that, no matter what I did, no matter how I changed my clothes or my diet or my mannerisms or my tone, I never felt adequate. I never felt that there was space enough for me to be seen.
Existing now as a queer person, a survivor of sexual assault and a person in recovery from an eating disorder, the spaces that I am allowed to occupy feel like they are constantly closing in. I reached a point where I could not exist anywhere without being wrong. I didn’t feel entitled to any space, and tried to reduce the space I did occupy constantly. It was around this time, when I felt most helpless and small, that I began practicing yoga.
In yoga, I learned to move through different shapes and stretches in a way that was mindful and intentional—the whole point of yoga is to move mindfully and intentionally. In learning that my movement could be purposeful and beautiful, rather than something that felt like a mistake, I started to learn how taking up space could be celebratory rather than shameful.
Yoga is about taking up space.
In that way, it meant the world to me, a person who has never felt entitled to any sort of space, to reserve time every day simply to move through a series of movements that I would not typically move through, to occupy space that I would not typically occupy. It was freeing. It made me feel like my body was my own, and that I could be my own without existing for any sort of external standard, because there is no external standard in yoga. The purpose of yoga is to show up and feel, to show up and be.
I can do that. I’m learning to do that. I am learning to be entitled to something, and I am learning to take up space.