Amber Karnes is a yoga teacher, social justice advocate, and the founder of Body Positive Yoga. Amber is a pioneer in the yoga community making noise for marginalized populations and people of all shapes, sizes, genders, races and abilities.  For Amber, yoga has been an integral part of a decade-long journey toward self-acceptance and body positivity – a journey of making peace with her body and helping others to do the same.

This episode of the Mindful Strength Podcast is really important to our work and is about more than just Amber's story and trajectory to living with peace and confidence, which we were so happy to learn about. It is a call to action and a conversation starter around how we can open the sphere of awareness around dominant body standards in Western yoga culture, how this stems from the layers upon layers of the systems of oppression we see across our cultures and modern societies, and what we can continue to do to change that in order to create more inclusive communities in movement and beyond. 

Amber shares her own story as well as her passions for yoga as a tool on the quest to radical self acceptance for herself and all beings. This episode covers the internal benefits of practice, wellness as our birthright, representation in yoga, working to support values in practice and teaching, adaptation, accessibility, inclusion, normalization and the power of language. Kathryn and Amber address the responsibility we hold as teachers to engage and communicate with people in bigger bodies and people of ALL abilities in meaningful, positive and inclusives ways, and to honor the courage it takes when people show up for themselves in all of their vulnerability.