About

About Yoga in Bold

Yoga in Bold’s mission is to instruct yoga students and teachers to value inclusivity and honor the diversity of practices, bodies, and people that yoga reaches on a global scale. We do this by inspiring yoga teachers to dismantle the social, cultural, and physical biases against people with bigger bodies and inviting yoga practitioners of all sizes, genders, races, and backgrounds to embrace where their bodies are, as they are.

In my own experience, moving through the world as a fat woman is a remarkable education. At a glance, people make assumptions about your intelligence, ability, health, confidence, self-discipline, sex life, and relationship to your body. Practicing and teaching yoga in a bigger body comes with even more assumptions, especially when it comes to health, ability, and fitness.

I came to join the body-positive and health at every size movements through a life-long commitment to feminism and social justice. The narratives policing fat bodies are so often gendered, and they take on new dimensions when we add the intersectional experiences of race, class, sexuality, national status, age, and ability into the mix. Yoga in Bold is about leaning in to all of those difficult, necessary conversations about social bias so that we can learn how to be better friends and allies to one another, one person at a time, though teaching and practice that acknowledges our lived experience.

I believe that, from the very beginning of their studies, every yoga teacher should pursue how to teach yoga for every body. Often the way yoga teachers have been taught to “modify” asana for bigger-bodied folks actually push them further away. Teaching and practicing yoga for bigger bodies is not about handing someone a yoga block while everybody else is doing vinyasas. It’s a necessary art that requires us to challenge the scripts of the health and wellness industries, and re-program how we think about size and the physical body in society. The question we should be asking as yoga teachers is not “How can we adapt this posture?” but “Who else can we include?”

In 2016, I came up with the concept of Yoga in Bold as a way to honor the diversity of bodies we have and to be in them, just as they are. Since then, it has evolved into classes, private instruction, workshops, international retreats, and teacher training that take a trauma-informed approach toward people of every size and ability. 

Yoga in Bold is founded on the principle that being in our bodies shamelessly is a practice. It is a political act. Let’s take up space on our yoga mats so that we may claim our space in the world.

—Susan Somers-Willett
Owner/Founder of Yoga in Bold

About Susan

A writer, professor, mom, and global traveler, Susan Somers-Willett has many roles, but one of her most compelling is helping yoga practitioners embrace the wisdom of their own experience. Her diverse and inclusive approach to practice inspires her teaching, which ranges from challenging, lyrical Hatha flow to regulation of the nervous system through yin and restorative practices.

Susan offers yoga as an act of radical self-acceptance, and she is passionate about making yoga accessible and empowering through specialized practices including prenatal and postnatal yoga, yoga for bigger bodies, trauma-informed yoga, gender-sensitive yoga, and other inclusive modes.

Susan is a graduate of Yoga Yoga’s RYT-500 and PRYT programs as well as Sundara’s Trauma-Informed Yoga Therapy program. She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, and she has over two decades of academic teaching experience at the university level in gender studies, creative writing, and literature. She currently is a Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin and joins yoga and social justice through her passion project, Yoga in Bold™. An advocate for trauma-informed yoga methods, Susan is also a cancer survivor and credits yoga as one of the key sources of her recovery.

Certifications: Ph.D., E-RYT-500, RPYT, TIYT, YACEP