YOGA DOESN’T KEEP SCORE
Angela Yazbek is a staple in our Beaches + Afterglow community. With her commitment to creating accessible and enjoyable yoga, she has grown her classes into inclusive, SOULful, and nurturing practices. Angela’s honesty, and authenticity is what draws us to her, and we are grateful for this extremely open and raw share.
“True yoga is not about the shape of your body, but the shape of your life.”
It has taken me many, many years to finally and fully understand these words. Years of forcing my body into a shape that it was never meant to have. Years of restricting food and the uncontrollable urges to overeat that inevitably come along with it. Nights of shame around a life I was not in denial of— but unwilling to change.
Many years to understand that yoga doesn’t care. Yoga wasn’t requiring any of this, even though I believed it did.
Worshipping the holy grail of a perfectly thin body did not improve my yoga practice but it did hurt every single relationship in my life.
With my husband. With my 4 boys. With my friends. Most importantly, it damaged my relationship with my own body, my own mind, my own heart.
I called it health. I called it self-care. I called the strict adherence to food rules a “kindness” to myself.
An important part of my practice, in fact. But all the while I knew.
Deep down, when I could muster a rare, quiet moment in my body, I knew.
And you do too.
This wasn’t the body I was meant to have.
And yet, I persisted. Through chaturangas and cleanses. Downward dogs and detoxes. With just a little more effort and a little more time on my mat, I believed someday, somehow, I would settle the score with yoga. I would be in the thin body that it demanded of me, if only I could try a little harder.
What I didn’t understand then was that yoga wasn’t even keeping score. It didn’t care if my belly was flat or round. It didn’t look twice if I had gained weight. In fact, it applauded when finally, after decades of trying so hard to reign myself in, I let the restrictions go and let my body take up the space it had always craved.
My anxiety, my constantly revved up nervous system, my inability to settle my mind – – all these things that I spent years, no, decades, in therapy working through, all these things I believed were just my burdens to bear — fell alway. Literally overnight.
Once I started doing the terrifyig thing that felt impossible to do — feeding myself enough food.
More food than I believed this body needed.
And yoga stood up and cheered.
Yoga was happy for me to simply inhabit my body exactly as it was, exactly as it is on any given day.
Yoga just wants me to show up on the mat, show up for myself and trust in the practice.
So what I have come to realize is this:
If your belly is flat or round, yoga doesn’t care. If your weight is higher than it was a year ago, yoga doesn’t even notice.
If your skin has aged and you see lines on your body that you don’t recognize, trust me on this, yoga could not give a shit.
Yoga is here for you. No questions.
It always was.
And it always will be.
-ANGELA YAZBEK
