Clare Nicholls has taught and practiced yoga for most of her adult life. She doesn't fit the mold of skinny white yoga teachers and believes that the way yoga is presented is deeply problematic.

Clare Nicholls is a trained midwife, a highly experienced yoga teacher, a philosophy nerd and published author. For the last few years, she has been project-managing a not-for-profit yoga space in the old town of Berne, called Hrdayam.

25 years ago, Clare first walked into a community-space class on home turf, in the UK. She has been a practitioner of the physical aspect of yoga ever since.

Not a skinny white yoga teacher

When she arrived in Berne in 2017, she and I instantly bonded over questioning the dynamics of the yoga world. Clare has become a dear friend and estimated colleague who doesn’t fit the category of skinny white yoga teachers. Fortunately, she sets a much needed different example, which is why I wanted to sit down with her and ask about her experience concerning to body image in yoga.

What was your initiation into yoga settings years ago?

When I was 21 years old, I saw a photograph of Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls doing Urdhva Dhanurasana (Full Wheel) in Glamour magazine. She was commenting on how she had lost a lot of weight thanks to yoga and a micro-biotic diet.

To my 21-year-old brain, she looked amazing and I wanted that for myself. That was my first introduction to the practice of Asana (postural yoga) on a very superficial level.

Philosophically, I was introduced to the concept of yoga at about eight years old, when I saw Peter Brook’s film on the Mahabharata (1989), a Hindu epic, on television.

I never linked the philosophical aspects of yoga with the Asana practice until I walked into a yoga class.

What was your first experience like?

I walked into a class at my local counsel-run health center (it was a center funded by the state, not a private gym, so it was affordable). Looking back, this formed a lot of my beliefs as to how yoga could be disseminated.

The class was in the basement, it was dark, no incense and no candles.

I felt very young compared to everyone else. Everyone looked very different from everbody else, it was a diverse environment. And everybody was friendly.

I can’t remember what Asanas we did.

I remember that about halfway through my first yoga class, I knew I was going to do this for the rest of my life.

At some point the teacher, Gaia, mentioned philosophy, even though the class was mostly about Asana. My anticipation was based around the spice girl picture. I found that I liked the very different reality a lot more than my expectation.

This experience foreshadowed the future: At the end of the class, I knew I wanted to be a yoga teacher. Even though I love the physical practice, I instantly felt more drawn to the philosophical teachings.

How did your experience within the yoga culture evolve?

For the first 9 years, my experiences of yoga were in community halls and counsel-run health centers. It was always with a wide spectrum of people, more women than men, but still diverse.

My first experience at what we consider a full-blown yoga studio was in one of the largest studios in London. I don’t know if the 21-year-old that walked into the health center would have felt welcome in that environment. But it was long enough into my practice, that I felt at comfortable there. But it was my experience, not the environment, that accounted for that.

Full-blown yoga studios were a turn off

As I got older and more experienced, I actually got turned off by that studio. I still went there if I wanted to practice with an international guest teacher. It wasn’t a warm environment, not actively welcoming.

The demographic was predominantly young white women.

I was mainly attending Ashtanga or Vinyasa flow classes. I’d gone from being the youngest to being the middle-aged person in the class.

What is your relationship with (your) body image?

It’s probably worth saying that I’ve had a dysfunctional relationship with my body image since I was eleven. I have a very good relationship with my body. It does what I ask it to and I treat it with as much respect as I can.

But I don’t like the way my body looks, don’t like to see myself in photos. But I tell myself that I don’t have to look at it, I merely have to live in it.

I was a very round pre-pubescent. When I was eleven my body started changing with puberty. A family member gave me the nickname “lard ass” and never stopped calling me that until I lost my puppy fat.

Nevertheless, I never slipped into disordered eating. When I was eighteen, I lost a lot of weight, but that was due to stress. I never set out to do it.

I never wanted to lose the weight. I just never dawned on me to punish myself in that way.

I was more interested in exercise than I was in diet. So, I focused on movement, not restrictive eating.

How do you perceive the culture around body image in the yoga world?

A couple of years ago I decided to leave Instagram. The repeated images of Yoga Asana being practiced by one group of people, namely thin white women, made me uncomfortable. More and more, yoga was being represented by only one group of people. I didn’t feel skilled enough to deal with my discomfort, so I left.

I don’t mean to make a statement about these particular individuals. Those were simply the images that were everywhere. At the time, it felt to me that these images were communicating what yoga was and who it was for.

Yoga was for thin white women and also by them.

I’m a healthy white woman of normal proportions, but I don’t feel associated with that group. Actually, I don’t associate yoga with any group, because yoga is for everybody and every body.

Are there other instances, besides social media, when that became apparent to you?

Years ago a studio manager in the UK asked all of us yoga teachers from the team to choose from a selection of photos that would represent the studio in an advertising campaign. The faculty chose according to their own identity, age, shape. Meaning, the male yoga teacher chose photos of men doing yoga and so on.

In the end, the studio manager published photos of skinny white women in leotards instead of the diverse photos the staff had chosen. The manager had consulted an advertising expert who said: “These are the images that will sell."

That story says it all. 

Holding space for diversity

How do you feel in the position of a teacher who is not a skinny white woman?

I feel that people who are not skinny white women feel more comfortable practicing with me and in my space, because I don’t represent that yoga stereotype. We want to see ourselves reflected in the people in the space. That’s why we also have a BIPOC class at our studio.

I think it takes skill to be able to hold space for everyone.

Have you experienced overt or implicit judgment or body shaming in a yoga setting?

I never got any unsolicited advice about my diet or exercise routine in yoga settings.
I do think it is there implicitly, even though I never experienced it personally.

But if all you see is one set of images, it’s hard not to infer from that. You start to think that’s how you should look or be.

We may assert that yoga is diverse, but that’s not what we see.

The language around certain poses or complementary practices is also a problem: If we use the language of self-improvement and label certain classes or offers as “detoxifying” or “cleansing”, we frame yoga in a particular way. Whether we do it because it sells or because it’s a projection of our internal dialogue, doesn’t matter. People are going to infer that that’s expected and part of the practice.

I obviously don’t think detoxing is bad. I’m currently on a 9 day-water fast. But we never want to impose or present cleansing as a must for self-improvement.

Fitness culture super-imposed itself on yoga

What is your interpretation of why a particular body shape is idealized in yoga?

I think it’s totally Western diet and fitness culture that super-imposed itself on yoga.

That is not what you see in India, at all.

The local community in a yoga class looks very different to what you would see in a London studio. It looks much more like the first yoga class I ever went to.

Do you feel like diet culture and antifatness are present in yoga setting?

Yes, and I think it’s due to capitalism, consumerism, this sense of trying to make money out of people’s insecurities. You sell them the panacea and they buy it, even though it’s a lie.

We continue this mythology that people need to be fixed.

They become attached to us teachers having the answers, being like a pill they can pop and they will be cleansed.

What could we all, but especially yoga teachers, contribute towards a change for the better?

For me, the biggest thing that needs to change is the images that we use to talk about yoga. Personally, I believe that we have a responsibility to come up with different visuals.

I think we need to ask ourselves about our relationships with our bodies, about the language we use when we’re teaching and advertising.

I don’t mean to body-shame the people who fit into the skinny demographic. But I do question the integrity of people who capitalize on that, who use their looks to sell yoga classes. They might argue that that’s what they do: offer yoga classes on a beach wearing little more than a bikini.

But then I say:

We have a responsibility.

If we get up in front of people, we need to factor in that a percentage of the practitioners in yoga classes have eating disorders, have experienced bullying or shaming or have other types of trauma in connection with their body. 

We also have a responsibility towards yoga. If we mis-represent it, even with the purest of intentions, it’s still misrepresented. What I mean by the responsibility to yoga is to the integrity of the philosophical practice, which is much more than Asana. 

It’s about compassion, inclusion and love.