Yoga: Giving Hope, Comfort and Healing to Larger Bodies - Lanita Varshell

Yoga: Giving Hope, Comfort and Healing to Larger Bodies – Lanita Varshell

“Yoga, the oldest science of life, can teach you to bring stress under control,
not only on a physical level, but on mental and spiritual levels too.”

~ The Sivananda Companion To Yoga

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If you cannot manage your stress in healthy ways, unhealthy habits and coping skills will just keep adding more weight, more low self-esteem, and more ill health to your life. You will never be at peace with your body, weight, or life.

That’s the very last thing we want, right?

Most experts teach us that we must lose weight to be happy and healthy, but we have all watched people lose weight over and over again, usually to gain it all back plus more after their last fad diet. Perhaps that has happened to you?

A Gentle Way Yoga & Joyful Movement has taken a different approach to yoga, weight loss and exercise since 1996. Here is a piece of my story and my many students:

I never dreamed I would teach yoga and never wanted to attend a Yoga class, but Yoga found me when I was thirty-eight years old. I taught full-time from 1996-2020, and have continued to teach part-time since 2020 when Covid-19 closed the doors to our beautiful yoga studio.

All these years I have taught in a large body weighing 250-208 pounds. I have worn clothes in sizes 18-22 or 1x-3x most of my life.

I have always had a larger body. I began dieting at age twelve and lived the dieting yo-yo life for over 25 years, starving myself to lose a few pounds, thinking my life would be better if I could drop the weight. Rarely did I last more than a week or two with the latest fad diet. I did lose some weight, over and over and over again, and always gained it back, plus more. Some diets I would lose the most weight on had the worst effects on my physical body. The vicious cycle of giving up and facing the depression and stress eating or even gorging that would accompany more weight gain wore my health and self-esteem down to nothing.

I knew very little about yoga. As a young girl, I just remembered seeing this beautiful, slim woman with a long dark braid on a black-and-white TV, teaching stretching and doing things with her body that I felt I could never do. Still, this woman’s gentle nature, sincerity, and big smile reached out to me across the TV, and I would never forget her.

(This woman was Lilias Folan, teaching on the P.B.S. channel. I don’t know why my mother would always watch the show; I never saw her exercise, and meditation was an evil word in the religion of my birth. Yet I was deeply drawn to Lilias, and in my later years, I would not only meet her, but she would become a friend and mentor.)

By the time I got to my first yoga class in 1995, I had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia syndrome, FMS. I had severe back pain, high blood pressure, and major allergy attacks. I was unable to hold down a job due to constant illness. I had two small children I could barely take care of. Married to an alcoholic husband who was very little help, and with no relatives to help me, I was alone, very depressed, and by medical standards at least 100 pounds overweight.

The last thing I wanted to do was to walk into a yoga class and be humiliated or get injured, but the Universe had other plans for me. Yoga teacher Naomi Judith found me, and would simply not stop bugging me until I came to her gentle yoga class designed for large women. I finally went to a class – not because I ever thought I could do yoga, but because this teacher wouldn’t stop calling me and urging me to try it. I figured that one class of making a fool of myself would show this teeny little yoga teacher that this large, sick body would never be able to twist into a pretzel, sit cross-legged on the floor or do shoulder stands and headstands.

Much to my surprise, this yoga class was not what I expected. It was not intimidating or physically hard, as previous exercises had been for me. The class was not about how much you could do, comparing yourself with others or watching others during class.

Naomi’s gentle yoga class was about keeping your eyes closed, focusing on breathing, relaxation, and gentle, slow movements that reconnect us to who we are: body, mind, breath and spirit. In these classes I was reminded that I was more than just a physical body living in a chaotic mind.

After years of joining health clubs, diligently working out for a few weeks, and then giving up because of pain, injury, shame, and humiliation, I finally found a way to begin to connect with my body in a gentle, loving, non-intimidating way. I found a form of movement that would change the self-destructive path I was on. Something I have enjoyed and stuck since my very first class.

I went from a person who was so sick I couldn’t work to teaching 14- 20 yoga classes and private sessions per week. I opened and managed A Gentle Way Yoga Studio in San Diego for over twenty years, while still teaching an average of ten weekly sessions.

My health improved, my self-esteem grew, and I now deeply appreciate my body instead of hating it as I once did. My gentle, consistent yoga practice keeps my body pain manageable. I am no longer my weight or my pain. Yoga helped me remember that I am much more.

I have had the privilege of working with and helping hundreds of other large-body women and men who come to me feeling defeated and afraid to move. They have found hope and comfort in our gentle way of teaching yoga and joyful movement. I have watched many of our students shed weight by doing nothing more than showing up for themselves, connecting to their breath, and moving their bodies gently.

Others of us have not lost that much weight, but we no longer judge our self-worth by our body size. We let go of dieting (die-eating), and focus on inner health peace. We practice letting go of negative thoughts about ourselves and others, blame, and shame, and we carve out the time to live our lives fully right now, not waiting until we are what society tells us is ‘The perfect weight.’

Yoga is much more than exercise. It is a complete science of life that originated in India thousands of years ago. It is the oldest system of personal development in the world.

The goal of yoga is to get so strong within our own bones and our own knowingness that we wouldn’t think of not taking care of ourselves. We wouldn’t think of not moving and maintaining this precious body we’ve been given to use for our life on this planet. We wouldn’t think of abusing our bodies with constant empty calories or food that is not living, non-nurturing. We wouldn’t think of filling our minds with negative thoughts or putting ourselves in environments that do not nurture our souls.

Yoga teaching strategies to help you accept that, as humans, we will have our down days of negative thoughts or actions, but we learn not to beat ourselves up for them or dwell in them.

Yoga teaches the new language of ‘letting go’ of the need to be perfect in actions or have the perfect body, life, or relationship. It teaches us to reach deep inside ourselves and find the peace that already exists within.

That is the goal. The journey of yoga.

This yoga journey has helped me focus not on how much the scale shows I weigh but on finding the strength that lies within to give up the old habits and negative thinking that have been holding me back from being the healthy and happy person that yoga says each one of us is here to experience.

I have been teaching yoga for twenty-eight years now, and I know it is something I need to continue for the rest of my life. It still brings me great joy seeing others lives continue to heal and change as mine has. My students have shared hundreds of stories about how yoga has enhanced their life and health.

Anyone of any size and any age can significantly benefit from yoga. It can be done sitting in a chair, lying in bed, or actively in group classes. Yoga is truly for every body, but perhaps those of us who benefit the most are the students who, like me, used to never “fit in” or feel they were “not enough” because of their body size.

In yoga, you do not have to ‘fit in.’

In a group yoga class, if you ever feel like the instructor is asking you to ‘fit in’ or ‘keep up’ with the pace of the rest of the class, you are at the wrong studio, or with the wrong teacher.

With the right teacher for you, will learn how to customize yoga to ‘fit you.’ Just as you are today.

And this, my dear one, will be a delicious experience!

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Lanita Varshell and Diane Ambrosini of Gentle Way Yoga invite everyone—regardless of age, size, physical ability, ethnicity, or gender, to join them on this mystical land for a life-changing week. This week is a sweet invitation to slow down and become intimately present with what is: without judgement or distraction, June 14 – 21, 2025, “Pause, Reflect, Let Go, Repeat: A Gentle Way Yoga Retreat.”

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ABOUT LANITA VARSHELL:

Lanita Varshell - A Gentle Way Yoga

Lanita Varshell is a soft, kind, mystic earth mother. She emanates love and compassion. Lanita is one of the oldest and most and respected plus-size, gentle and therapeutic yoga teachers in the United States. She has been a pioneer in the world of body positive, accessible and adaptive yoga.

Owner of A Gentle Way Yoga and Joyful Movement, she has taught yoga and trained teachers full time since 1996, and owned a busy yoga studio for over 20 years, all while living with chronic health, weight, and life challenges. She has inspired thousands of students and teachers to look at themselves and others through the eyes of kindness and love. In addition, she is an inspiring writer, public speaker, and yoga life coach.

Learn more about Lanita: agentleway.com

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