Hi Sangha Community,

 

This month’s letter is brought to you by me – Robin Zabiegalski. For those of you who haven’t met me yet, I’m a queer, non-binary yoga teacher, writer, and parent. I did my 200hr yoga teacher training with Story Yoga, a non-profit that offers free yoga teacher trainings to people in recovery from addiction, eating disorders, and trauma. I’ve been teaching yoga with Story Yoga for about five years.

 

I started teaching at Sangha in March of 2023, and since then I’ve picked up three classes on the weekly schedule – Flow at 10am on Tuesdays, LGBTQIA2S+ Gentle Flow at 5:30pm on Tuesdays, and Fat Yoga at 7pm on Wednesdays.

 

Though I love every class I teach, the classes I teach for queer folks and fat folks on Tuesday and Wednesday are particularly special to me. As a queer, trans person who self-identifies as fat (because it’s a neutral descriptor like tall or short, not an insult), there are a lot of places in this world that don’t feel very safe to me.

Though I’m glad to live in Vermont, where I’m a lot safer than other queer and trans folks, Vermont still isn’t as safe for queer and trans folks as we’d like to believe. Republican lawmakers in our state government have introduced legislation to prevent trans kids from participating in gendered school sports. Anti-LGBTQIA2S+ groups have protested at Vermont’s Pride celebrations two years in a row. The Pride Center in Burlington has been vandalized multiple times. Anti-trans stickers keep going up in public places all over the state. As of 2019, Vermont had the second most hate crimes against LGBTQIA2S+ people in the country. Vermont does have pretty robust legislation that protects queer and trans folks, but unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that queer and trans folks are actually safe in our state.

 

Fat people aren’t either. Like the vast majority of states in the US, Vermont doesn’t include weight as a protected class in its anti-discrimination laws. And though fat people face brutal harassment on a nearly daily basis and sometimes physical violence, they have no legal protections from these harms either because weight isn’t a protected class in Vermont’s hate crimes legislation.

 

Because we live in an anti-fat, diet-obsessed culture, you might be thinking, “Well, fat people can just lose weight to protect themselves from discrimination and harassment!” It makes perfect sense that you’d think that when you’ve been raised in a culture that worships thinness and glorifies weight loss. But several studies have shown that body size isn’t as within our control as we’ve been taught to believe.

 

Though people definitely can lose a significant amount of weight by cutting calories and increasing exercise, 95% of people will regain all the weight they lose and gain more weight within five years because the body has complex mechanisms in place to maintain body weight. Research has also shown that repeatedly losing and gaining weight, called weight cycling, is extremely harmful to our bodies and is associated with diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome, all of which are usually blamed on being fat, not dieting. Finally, research has shown that over 400 different genes impact body size and that body size is highly influenced by social status, income, housing status, and geographic location. So, body size is much more determined by genetics and demographics than personal habits. Fat people actually can’t just lose weight to avoid harassment and harm and keep them safe.

 

What does all of this have to do with yoga, and specifically Sangha’s LGBTQIA2S+ Gentle Flow and Fat Yoga classes? Glad you asked. With so few places in this world and in Vermont where queer folks and fat folks feel safe, both of these classes provide spaces where queer and fat folks can be “safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble,” the literal definition of refuge, which happens to be Sangha’s theme for October.

 

Practicing yoga is a refuge for every practitioner. When we come to our practice – on our mats, on the floor, on the grass, on a mountain, in a studio, or at home – we are taking refuge from the world around us, entering a space that’s safe for our minds, bodies, and spirits. Yoga teaches us that we can find refuge in our grounded seat, in pranayama – breathwork, in asana – the shapes we take and flow through in our physical practice, and in meditation. In a world where the majority of us are feeling a little less safe, a little less secure, practicing yoga is the refuge we can access whenever we need it.

 

When we walk into the studio to practice, we find a place where, just for an hour or so, we can take a break from whatever’s going on in our lives and in the world, and devote ourselves to practice. And we get to do that with other people who are seeking the same refuge. So, our studio spaces, offer a special kind of refuge – refuge in community with others. And in classes like Sangha’s LGBTQIA2S+ Gentle Flow and Fat Yoga, people who haven’t been able to find refuge in many other places, people can find be safe from harm and in community with others who understand what it’s like to move through an unsafe world.

 

I’m so grateful that Sangha offers these spaces of refuge, for queer and fat folks, and for all of us. If you’re seeking refuge from this wild, sometimes painful world, I invite you to come practice. 

 

Much love,