We caught up with Ocean Breeze from the British Warren of Yoga Bunnies, to ask her why she has controversially banned size 12 and above women from attending her yoga classes.
“It’s just not the image I want to project,”
Said the yoga teacher and Warren spokeswoman, standing on her head in her Laura Ashley kitchen and preparing a quinoa and wheatgrass salad with her feet.
“They reek of white bread and supermarket wine, and one of them was joking about needing a kebab on the way home, to recover from an hour of Bikram. When you do a lot of yoga and keep your body pure, you develop an acute sense of smell, and it’s off-putting to true yoga fans to have these sloths lumping themselves around in the studio,”
When asked if banning larger ladies from daylight classes was in any way prompted by personal prejudice, Ocean Breeze said:
“I am not thinking of myself here, but of all my lovely, tiny, slim yoga bunnies, who have long tolerated the presence of meat eaters, social smokers and dairy consumers. Only yesterday, in our Covent Garden studio (a beautiful space with great energy), a man attended our class, and his shirt fell over his face during the ‘Stork Bumming A Dead Penguin’ pose, and he didn’t even have a six-pack. We try not to judge, so we didn’t say anything. But during the ‘Downward Facing Dog’ pose, he broke wind with great force into the face of the size four vegan behind him, and it smelled of rotting Vindaloo. She’s still in a coma now, and her family are playing whale song 24/7 to wake her up.
“It can be dangerous to have these people in the studio with smaller yoga bunnies,”
Ms Breeze continued, while gracefully returning to a standing posture and staring at her perfect abs in the mirror for several minutes.
“In L.A. a woman with cellulite was attempting the tree pose for the first time, and fell over onto a skeletal yoga instructor, who’d been living off cherry pits and salt licks for the last twenty years, and killed her. That yoga sloth has blood on her hands,”
Understandably shaken and slightly de-yogafied by these recollections, Breeze leads me through to the living room of her airy Highgate apartment. We drink Rooibos tea, and she offers me a slice of carrot. The walls are tastefully decorated with a mish-mash of spiritual symbols from other cultures, including that blue dude from Ikea.
When asked if people of all shapes and sizes should even be allowed to practise yoga, even if they’re not stick thin, middle class, slightly arty gluten free vegans with a Buddha in their front room, she replied:
“Well, I suppose they could. But they should do it at home, or rent a working men’s club or something. Nobody wants to see disgusting, imperfect people standing on one leg. It’s obscene,”
Guest post by Ruby Tuesday.
The Beezly Street Gazette 