Coming Home to Ourselves through Yoga

By Ally Maz, as told to goop

I grew up constantly overanalyzing every part of my body. I had an eating disorder, and I had a hard time handling stress, relationships, breakups, tests, and other challenging situations. For a lot of these issues I was struggling with—as a teen and well into my twenties—yoga eventually started to provide some answers.

For me at thirty-four, yoga is about mending the relationship that I’ve had with my body over all those years. But if someone had taught me how to breathe, meditate, and do yoga at fourteen, I think my life would have been different. For those learning yoga at a younger age, it’s not so much about mending but rather about discovering the relationship we have with our bodies earlier on so that we don’t have to do the mending later. You develop a deep relationship with your body from the start, and when difficult situations or thoughts come up, you know how to listen to and honor your body.

I started Girlvana ten years ago. I had been teaching yoga to adults for four years, and I felt called to bring these tools to a younger generation in the hopes that they wouldn’t have to go through the struggles I did. Yoga is an avenue for young people to be in their bodies in a noncompetitive way. When I was a teenager, most of us had a relationship with exercise that was related to competing with ourselves or others in order to hit a certain beauty standard or win in sports. Yoga is different. It’s this neutral space where it’s not about anything other than your connection and relationship to your body. I knew how healing that was for me, and it might be for younger girls, too.

Girlvana started with my reaching out to high schools, eating disorder clinics, dance studios, Girl Guides troops—anywhere teenage girls and young women gathered. And then we started doing weeklong yoga retreats, like summer camps. We reached all types. It didn’t matter who they were or where they came from. At the end of the day, to see a room of girls lying on their mats and breathing, giving themselves permission to rest and close their eyes and connect to themselves, is the most powerful thing.

Girlvana has included so many girls who are trying yoga for the first time. I work with them through that journey. For many girls, yoga breaks through their mental chatter so that they finally can calm their mind when they get to savasana at the end of a practice. What I hear from a lot of teens is “I wasn’t overthinking so much.” Or “I actually felt happy.” Teaching teenagers yoga is about creating a safe and brave space so that they don’t have to focus on doing a pose right or think about whether the girl next to them is doing it better. We aim to create a space that’s about putting people back into their bodies, about their being vulnerable and feeling out whatever they’re working with.

Part of the power of this work comes from doing it in community and sharing with each other. When we finish a practice, we sit in a circle, and everyone shares their experience of what was hard and what was great. Everyone gets to be heard and gets to feel like they’re not alone in their experience. That’s a game changer sometimes. These girls see that our stories have different characters and different plots but that so much of what we go through is universal. We all feel like we’re not good enough. We all feel sadness. And when we share our story, it creates connection even between girls who think they have nothing in common. It creates a lot of empathy and forgiveness.