Your Body, Your Choice: A Conversation on Yoga and Gender Oppression

Recently when I was teaching a yoga class the words "your body, your choice" fell out of my mouth.

I say similar things throughout my classes fairly often. I make an extra effort to emphasize the importance of listening to your body because I've personally struggled with feeling like if a posture or specific alignment doesn't feel good for me I don't have permission to do something else.

And isn't that often how it goes for women.

As women, we are taught that our bodies are not our own. That we must seek permission to express ourselves. That governments have the right to police our bodies. That men have claim over them.

Women hold an immense level of power. We literally create life. And sometimes I wonder if the oppression of women and policing of our bodies comes from fear of our strength. Just look at the stories we’ve been told from Adam and Eve to Pandora’s Box. Women are seen to be dangerous and unpredictable, a sexual object that can only be sexual when possessed by men. Throughout my adolescence I was given the messaging that my worth is tied to how I look and since women are lesser I should also act like a “chill dude”. It has taken many years of tapping into my femininity, emotions, and my body to come into my power as a woman.

Perhaps part of the reason why I find myself repeatedly pushing this idea that you can do whatever you want in my yoga class is because we all need a space to feel free and like our bodies belong to us. To connect to our needs and express ourselves by linking breath to movement. It is so rare to be expressly given permission that you can do whatever feels right in your body, to find freedom and joy in the movement itself instead of focusing on how our body looks.

Loving our bodies and forging our own path is a true revolution. And while there might be some days where we have to overtly remind ourselves of this, that it truly is our body and our choice, slowly we can march our way forward to liberation. As always, we also need to be allies towards all identities and actively fight against gender oppression in all forms whether its governmental or individual cases of gender oppression.

True change comes from our everyday actions. One of the last statements I say in my yoga class is that yoga is more than the asanas, the physical postures, and includes how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, and how we interact with the world. By continually choosing what feels right and sharing compassion, which is yoga at its essence, we can change the world.

Disclaimer: this is my experience as a cis straight white woman. I cannot share the experiences of gender oppression for trans or nonbinary folks as well as the specific experiences of BIPOC women. For more information on the history of gender oppression as well as relevant book resources, please follow Alok Vaid-Menon.