Author With 10-Year Scoliosis Practice Becomes Yoga Instructor, Reclaiming Body Image
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 15
Author With 10-Year Scoliosis Practice Becomes Yoga Instructor, Reclaiming Body Image
1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 15
Summary
A journalist who has lived with scoliosis for more than a decade said she is now a qualified yoga instructor, a shift she credits with ending years of shame about her asymmetrical body.
At 13, she declined spinal-fusion surgery despite a surgeon’s warning that scoliosis would limit “bikini modelling,” and the condition later fed disordered eating and body-image struggles.
Yoga began as a therapist’s coping strategy for stress, then became a daily practice that eased pain more effectively than the repetitive physiotherapy exercises she found joyless and hard to sustain.
In 2025, she stepped back from journalism, trained as an instructor and said the discipline’s 5,000-year-old philosophical tradition helped her see scoliosis as motivation rather than a defect.
Now teaching at a hot yoga studio, she has posted photos of her body in yoga poses on her website, framing that visibility as a personal rejection of the shame she carried since adolescence.