Doing Naked Yoga With Strangers Showed Me How Far I've Come in My Eating Disorder Recovery
Last month, while moving through poses in a yoga class, I didn’t feel the familiar hug of a sports bra on my chest or the elastic waistband of a pair of yoga pants around my torso. In fact, I felt nothing touching my skin besides the mat.
As I rounded my back through several Cat/Cow poses, my eyes aligned with my soft, bare belly. Tears sprang to my eyes. I wished away that part of my body for a long part of my life. But now, I was in the middle of a naked yoga class—something I would never have believed I’d be capable of doing years ago.
I have been in recovery for the past 11 years from an eating disorder that spanned six years of my life. So when I read about a nude class called Naked in Motion, it sounded like a living, breathing exercise in what I had been practicing for the last decade.
I started hating my body around age 7. By 13, I developed an eating disorder that lasted for years and resulted in multiple hospitalizations.
Over the course of my recovery, I learned the coping skills necessary to handle my emotions in ways other than restricting, bingeing, purging, and over-exercising. I put a lot of work and energy into shifting my belief that only people who looked a certain way could be desired, respected, or loved. I finally adopted the idea that my body was a vessel for an outspoken, sassy, silly, intelligent, caring person—and that’s why the people around me loved me, not because of my appearance. I learned to think about and treat my body with more respect.
So, signing up for Naked in Motion made me feel like I was committing to something that represented everything this new me stood for. The class—which was open to cisgender women and transgender men or women—was meant to celebrate all shapes and sizes, challenge social stigma around nudity, and decry media “that glorifies certain kinds of bodies,” the website explained.
When the day of the event arrived, the confidence I had since buying my ticket started to waver. Okay, maybe I am a little nervous, I admitted to myself.
After climbing five flights of stairs at a nondescript apartment building in Brooklyn, I entered the space and was greeted by dim light, the smell of some woody incense, and an urn of hot water. While the instructor, Willow, welcomed attendees as they walked through the door, I made some chamomile tea and introduced myself to a few people already there.
She informed us that there were nine people signed up for class and instructed us to set up our mats in two staggered rows facing each other. Instinctively, I walked over to the far wall, laid out my mat, and sat down. A few seconds later, I stood up.
“No, I’m not going to hide in the corner,” I said quietly to myself as I dragged my mat to the middle of the room. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. One of the women who had already set up her mat heard my remark and grinned warmly at me.
More people came in and got situated. While we waited a few minutes for any stragglers to arrive, we sat sipping our teas, eyes averted. Given that we were a group of strangers, this seemed like the polite thing to do.
Once the door of the apartment was closed, latecomers were no longer welcome to join. Willow returned to the room and sat with us. She went over the rules of class, all of which were focused on how to conduct ourselves in class in order to maintain a safe, respectful, comfortable environment for everyone.
The last tenet? No body-shaming or negative commentary—including any directed at yourself.
Then, she asked us to go around and share one word to describe how we were feeling. Around me, people offered words like nervous, excited, anxious. I chose “nostalgic.”
As we sat together, still clothed, I felt like pinching myself. During my illness, a situation like this would be the absolute last place you’d find me. I kept thinking, wow, I am here. I am doing this. And the only reason I am able to be here is because I worked really, really hard for 11 years to arrive to a place where I could step away from all the disordered thinking and actions that destroyed my quality of life for so long.
I thought back to the yoga classes I took during that chapter of my life: Back then, I judged the room. I envied the bodies of the thinner women, felt embarrassed for the women bigger than me, and stressed about the possibility of someone looking at me. My eyes would dart around the room frantically for the entire session. I even stayed in strenuous poses for longer in an effort to make it more challenging.
Sitting in this class also made me think of everything that self-hatred cost me over the years. I thought about the countless nights in high school when, instead of enjoying my teenage years, I’d binge and purge before exercising until the gym closed.
I remembered the summer before starting college that I spent in a treatment facility instead of with friends. I flashed back to the weekend of Halloween my freshman year at NYU when I ended up in the hospital after a suicide attempt, because I couldn’t see a way out of being disordered.
But after reminiscing about all of the pain, I also thought back to all of the work. I thought of all the years that I spent doing cognitive behavioral therapy, becoming familiar with my hunger and fullness cues, and practicing being kind and patient with myself even when I relapsed. I thought of how hard it was for me to develop genuine respect for myself and be more present. I reminisced about the moment on June 1st, 2007 where I made a promise to myself to no longer hurt my body.
Sitting among strangers, about to reveal myself in a way that just the mere thought of would have sent me into a panic attack back then, I felt at peace.
Then, it was time to disrobe. Once I was completely naked, I took the hair tie from around my wrist and used it to secure my hair in a bun on the top of my head so I couldn’t use my long hair as a curtain to cover my breasts. I was not going to hide.
Fully exposed, we started in Child’s Pose. With all our backs facing the walls behind us and the front of our bodies resting on the mat, it was a perfect position to get acclimated to being naked in front of others. In Child’s Pose, I felt safe and could tune into my body.
When we finally stood up and started doing Sun Salutations, my belly was exposed to the room. Despite being completely nude, I remained focused solely on myself on my mat. And truth be told, I felt more comfortable completely bare in close proximity to other nude strangers than I did back when I was a 17-year-old, clothed in a near-empty gym.
In this cozy apartment space, my mind was able to finally go silent. If there were any eyes on me even for a moment (as Naked in Motion prohibits staring for obvious reasons), I didn’t feel them. I didn’t even feel tempted to glance at the women in my periphery more than what was inevitable given whatever yoga position we were in.
As we moved through poses, I stayed in the zone. There were times when we could choose poses depending upon what our body wanted. I didn’t look at whatever the person next to me was doing. During a few rounds of a Vinyasa flow, I chose a Child’s Pose instead of a Downward Facing Dog; in a side plank, I planted one knee on the floor.
At the end of class, surrounded by a strong group of people, I marveled at the reality that somehow, we all made it to this room.
Sure, I was proud that I had the guts to do naked yoga. But I was also proud that I made it to the other side of a debilitating eating disorder alive. And while I didn’t know all of the personal lives of the other attendees that day, I imagined that every one of us probably did some amount of mental work to reject the cultural messaging about body image and self-love that targeted us since birth.
That day, we showed up.
When I entered recovery, I promised myself that I would not look back on my life and say I wasted a single day that came after that first day in June, 11 years ago. Surrounded, in that moment, by other people stepping away from fear, I felt excited for the rest of all of our lives.
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