For more than 5,000 years, yoga has been a central pillar of wellness, building strength while instilling a sense of harmony.
Combining physical poses, breathwork and meditation, the ancient practice had an estimated 33.64 million participants across the United States in 2023, according to Statista. Despite the huge number of people practicing, some groups still find yoga intimidating or inaccessible—a view Jessamyn Stanley is on a mission to change.
The outlook is one Stanley herself once shared, as the 36-year-old from El Sobrante, California, said to Newsweek, "I always thought that yoga was for thin white women, so I was not interested in it as a fat Black queer person.
"When I was in graduate school, one of my friends convinced me to join her at a yoga class. I had gone to yoga once when I was in high school and absolutely hated it—I thought it was just the worst thing in the world, but she convinced me to go and join her."
This sparked what's now a 15-year strong relationship with the practice—an experience that Stanley said "pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me question the ways that I limit myself. It made me see all the different ways that I tell myself that I'm not good enough and that I shouldn't even try."
The impact of the practice's well-being elements was almost instant for Stanley, who said.
"Yoga really gave me a place to reflect on that and to go further and go beyond. All the boundaries that I created for myself and to see a much deeper version of myself—it really became my medicine, especially as I moved through the ups and downs of life. There will always be downs, and the practice can help me stay calm and peaceful within myself."
Stanley knew this feeling had to be shared, so five years after falling in love with yoga, it was time to get accredited.
"I did my yoga teacher training my 200-hour yoga teacher training at Asheville Yoga Center in Asheville, North Carolina, in March of 2015, so I've been teaching yoga for almost 10 years, and I've been practicing for almost 15," she said.
Creating Safe Spaces
Despite being able to connect with herself through yoga, Stanley understood why many feel sessions are inaccessible and that they're underrepresented within the yoga space. "I have been practicing yoga online for many, many years, and I taught yoga online on other platforms. I noticed that there was no place where it's just OK to be yourself."
She believes many spaces are focusing on the wrong benefits of yoga, marketing it against your insecurities instead of for the benefits it could bring you. "If you decide to subscribe to an online yoga studio or an online fitness studio, there is so much aspirational marketing. Everything is about changing your body or changing who you are, and there are no spaces where it's OK to be you."
Out of this, The Underbelly was born, as Stanley took the idea to her now-co-founder, Mary Carr, in April 2019. The pair have since built a strong online community of people from all walks of life to create what Stanley called "the coolest yoga on the internet."
"We are the most radical wellness space, meant for anyone who has ever felt like an outcast or felt marginalized or felt like yoga wasn't for them. We make space for everyone to come home to themselves," she said.
The Underbelly's platform offers over 200 accessible and adapted yoga and meditation classes Stanley said are suitable "for all bodies, all levels at every stage of life, no matter what you look like or where you're from. You can find home with us."
Sharing the Story Through Social Media
TikTok has been an obvious choice to spread The Underbelly's message, amassing over 66,000 followers on its profile (@the_underbelly).
"It's a great place to connect with like-minded people, and it's been a great place for us as The Underbelly to make community and to be in community with other people who are doing the same kind of work and just being present with themselves, healing from the inside out so that we can, as a society, take better care of each other and take better care of our world," Stanley said.
"TikTok is really an epicenter for that kind of healing."
Beyond growing The Underbelly's platform, Stanley's content also gives users the opportunity to see their bodies reflected on their FYPs—something she knows can be rare as a plus-sized woman herself.
"It's really important for plus size people to be able to see our bodies reflected in social media because there is so much negative advertising about being plus size and being fat," she said.
"There's so much stigmatization around fat bodies, so whenever you don't see yourself represented, it's really easy to feel like you shouldn't exist or that you don't deserve to exist. Having representation on social media is crucial because that is a place where anyone can put themselves out there, everybody can show themselves and be their authentic selves.
"Most people are using some form of social media, so even if you don't see plus size bodies represented in movies and television shows and on magazines, if you can see it on social media, that is much more powerful than all these other resources."
Stanley's content has pulled in reactions from across the world.
"The thing that really strikes me about it is that people who don't look anything like me, people who are not fat, Black and queer, really see themselves reflected in the content that I create, and it is motivating for me and reminds me of how important it is to just be visible," she said.
"I would say to anybody who is thinking about putting themselves out there, showing their content, creating content that maybe you've never seen anyone who looks like you and you're kind of embarrassed, and you don't know if you should be: do it. It's so important to stand alone, even if even if it is lonely a little bit. You are speaking out and representing people who do not feel seen, and that is a really noble act and really important.
"Just to have even one person say that they have been positively impacted and it's changed their life in one way or another, where they have found the confidence to be their best selves, then that to me is success, and that is achieving what I set out to do. There are people all over the world who have reached out to me to tell me that my work has positively impacted them, and that means everything."
The Future of The Underbelly
As to how she and Carr wish to continue growing The Underbelly, the community element will remain the key.
"The future for The Underbelly is for us to really get to know our community as well as possible," Stanley said. "To show up and serve in a way that changes not just the lives of the individual practitioners on The Underbelly but changes their communities, changes their families. And that empowers everyone who is connected to The Underbelly to find freedom within themselves and find love within themselves so that we can live in a world that is based on and moves from a place of care and compassion and love and harmony.
Stanley added, "I want to see every wellness brand, company, influencer person really embrace this mission of taking better care of ourselves as a way of taking care of each other and of taking care of the planet because that is how we can have a lasting impact beyond our lifetimes."
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