BE ABUNDANT : a story about community creation
Jo Gale is a movement teacher who blends yoga and Pilates in her practice. Jo has been diving deeper into the Body Positive movement and tries to carry body inclusivity and love through her teaching. Her ethos: Movement is a way to celebrate your body, not change it superficially.
Recently while promoting my new class, Be Abundant Moves, a virtual movement class exclusive to those living in larger/plus-size/fat bodies, I received a very good question from someone. In fact, a question I had had myself at one point.
“Why do people in bigger bodies need separate classes?”
And the question really got me thinking.
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It got me thinking of when I met Katie McCrindle in 2019. Katie is a Body Liberation Counsellor, Fat Activist, and Registered Social Worker. I was taking the Yoga For All training with Dianne Bondy and Amber Karnes at the time, a course that focuses on adapting Yoga practice for all bodies. Katie was co-facilitating Fat Chat out of Body Brave in Hamilton, a group for “fat individuals” to create a supportive community. We wanted to see where our individual expertise could intersect and how we could try to create some kind of experience that would be useful, joyful, and meaningful for folks.
What we created was a workshop series called Be Abundant, which was a place for folks to get out of their heads and into their bodies. A place where we could share, laugh, cry, move, and learn together. And people came, and people liked it, so we did more. In 2020 when we started to offer a new round of workshops, we extended an ask to the community to see if anyone else wanted to facilitate and we expanded more. We pivoted online, as the whole world did in March 2020 and offered two more sessions of the workshop via zoom.
One thing that came out of feedback from the workshops is that people wanted a weekly movement class for the community, therefore Be Abundant Moves (which I call B.A.M for short) was created.
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Katie and I are gearing up for the next round of our Be Abundant workshops, which starts September 20th. We’ll be digging into what worked last time, finding new guest facilitators, and continually trying to make the offering better based on feedback and our own continual growth. As we were catching up, I mentioned the question I received about the B.A.M class as I was promoting it and asked Katie what she thought:
“If you haven’t had the pleasure of being in a room of people that truly get your experience, I understand why you might ask this question. Identity-specific communities are places where people don’t need to explain or justify their experiences or themselves. We come together as people in fat bodies among other people in fat bodies to commiserate, celebrate, take up space unapologetically, and to simply be.”
“Our culture is not welcoming to people in larger bodies, so Be Abundant (and other fat-specific community spaces) becomes a sacred gathering- a space to share, and to welcome each other in as much non-judgment as we possibly can. As we open to being together through verbal sharing, our bodies open too- we expand, our energy expands, the group’s collective energy radiates outwards. Sharing in moving our fat bodies, in seeing each other's bountiful squish in ever-different and rippling forms, serves to solidify and strengthen this collective energy. We leave with our cups full. We leave having been truly seen, heard, and honoured in each other’s abundant experiences.”
“We come together in community for us, but as our energy expands and radiates into the world (I'm imaging shock waves of abundance flowing outwards), we do this for you, too. As we heal and give ourselves permission to be in our bodies, the world heals and gets that same permission.”
And that is some powerful mic drop stuff right there, and why I love co-creating with Katie.
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If you are living in a larger/plus-size/fat body and this kind of community is something you need, I encourage you to join us, either in our Be Abundant workshop series or in the weekly B.A.M class, which is taught by me and a collective of different movement instructors, each with our own lived experience as bigger bodies in movement.
Be Abundant Workshop
Sundays,
Sept 20th, Oct 25th, Nov 22th
1-3pm est
(more info in workshop tab)
Be Abundant Moves (weekly drop in class)
Every Monday
5:30pm-6:30pm
GBF livestream
(sign up via Mindbody)