The following is a sneak peek from the "New Year, New Start" feature in our January issue, heading to newsstands now.
Photo by John Robinson courtesy Body Positive Yoga
Amber Karnes remembers that about 10 minutes after leaving her first yoga class, she noticed negative thoughts about herself popping up again on the drive home: Everything you say is stupid. People are mad at you. You’re fat. You’re ugly.
But if those thoughts were starting, that meant they had stopped, ever so briefly.
“That was a big deal, to just have some silence and my mind to be a little bit quieter,” Karnes says. Then in her early 20s, she had been trying to lose weight since she was teenager. She’d dieted, she worked out, but she was unable to transform her body into the svelte figure she envisioned.
She discovered that with some modifications, such as adjusting her stance or using a prop, she could do yoga poses successfully. Her confidence grew, her mindset shifted and she started to see her body as her partner, rather than as a problem to be fixed. That opened the door to other exercise activities she could enjoy, not just endure, such as hiking, riding a bicycle, climbing a rock wall and lifting weights.
"Our bodies have a lot of wisdom that we have often lost, especially as women, because diet culture and the way that we’re socially conditioned is to not pay attention to our body," Karnes says. "Yoga gives you the tools to be able to be friends with it again, and kind of come back home to yourself."
Photo by John Robinson courtesy Body Positive Yoga
In an effort to better incorporate yoga into her life, she signed up for teacher training. She didn’t plan to become a teacher, but partway through the training program, she realized two things: One was that other curvy friends told her that they would feel comfortable attending a yoga class if she taught it. The other was that she was offering feedback, which the training program didn’t provide, on how to teach students who didn’t fit the usual model, including people with larger bodies and those who are disabled or injured.
"Often, there’s a misconception that people in larger bodies aren’t as flexible or maybe aren’t as capable of doing the things we do in a yoga class ... because we often don‘t see images or video of bigger bodies in fitness situations. We think that we‘re just a 'before' picture," Karnes says, "when there’s plenty of athletes in large bodies and lots of people who do fitness and do amazing, strong and beautiful things with their bodies. We don’t often get shown those representations in mainstream media. It’s really interesting to give people tools to challenge the assumptions of even the things they’ve made about themselves."
Fifteen years after her own introduction to yoga, Karnes is cultivating a growing community of what she affectionately calls “yoga misfits” via workshops, retreats and teacher training sessions offered in Richmond and around the country through her company, Body Positive Yoga, in collaboration with other partners and organizations. Coming up are a Jan. 5 workshop on “Making Peace With Your Body,” a February series of classes for plus-size yoga practitioners, both at Project Yoga Richmond, and a 200-hour teacher certification program starting in October. (For details, visit bodypositiveyoga.com.)
Her advice to someone who wants to get moving in 2019? “It’s important when you’re beginning a movement practice that you enjoy what you do,” says Karnes, who moved to Richmond in 2017 after living in Charlottesville and Norfolk. “But you also approach it from gentle expectations and a place of loving kindness instead of a place of judgment or comparison.”
What’s the best decision you made?
“Read the book ‘Health at Every Size’ by Dr. Linda Bacon. That was the turning point for me. … [l learned] that if I wanted my best chance at health, it’s based in the habits that I cultivate and the choices that I make in my life, not in my body size.”
What’s something you’d do differently?
“I spent a lot of time hating a body that was a perfectly good one, just because of external forces and things I had been conditioned to believe, that when I really examined my thoughts and became mindful about the body that I had, weren’t actually true.”
