Jessamyn Stanley

Jessamyn Stanley is a yoga teacher, author, entrepreneur and advocate. She describes herself as a yoga teacher, content creator and writer. She teaches yoga and meditation around the world and speaks about 21st-century intersectional identity and the role self-acceptance plays in social change.

She is the author of Every Body Yoga and Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance. Every Body Yoga, published in 2017, mixes memoir with practical guidance. In it she writes about her history with yoga, food, weight and family, and about the poses and the emotional obstacles that can keep people off the mat. She also co-founded The Underbelly, a yoga community.

According to her Wikipedia entry, Stanley first tried yoga as a teenager and disliked it. She came back to it in her twenties as a way of dealing with depression. She began sharing yoga photos on Instagram in 2012 and built a following through an inclusive, body-affirming approach that focuses on how a practitioner feels rather than how they look. She trained as a teacher at the Durham Yoga Company.

On her YouTube channel she explores big questions about life, death, fear and joy through yoga, storytelling and humor. She also writes on Substack.