By Ellen Paddock / News Editor 

In honor of Women’s History Month, SUNY Brockport sponsored a virtual Body Positive Yoga session with Marissa Bee from Yoga 4 a Good Hood on Monday, March 16. The session was laced with positive affirmations that encouraged self-love.  

With the ongoing stress of COVID-19, the event helped students ground themselves through the quieting of their bodies and minds. Bee created a tranquil atmosphere with empowering messages that reached beyond the screen.  

The session focused on loving yourself and appreciating your body exactly how it is in the present moment. Bee encouraged students to take time to invest in themselves by choice and to nourish their bodies intentionally. She centered the night around a reading that she believes wholeheartedly.  

“Know that here tonight you are enough just as you are without doing or being anything for anyone else. You are worthy of love and appreciation just because you exist,” Bee said. “You deserve to be nurtured, supported, encouraged and considered with intention just for being you.” 

Participants were asked to note any physical or emotional reaction they might experience to those words. Through the repetition of affirmations, during the various yoga movements, students were reminded to consider how it feels to know that they are enough.  

To emphasize the message of body-positivity, Bee told students to have reverence and grace for their bodies and to recognize how their bodies carry them through the exercise.  

“Let’s celebrate the power of your body here as it sustains us through all these standing poses, squats and lunges,” Bee said. “Feeling the full weight of ourselves, the power that lies in our body. 

At this time, students are up against a semester that will run 15 weeks straight with no breaks. Additionally, they face social media’s increasing influence on body image and a world turned upside down due to a global pandemic. The grounding and self-reflective nature of yoga can help students center themselves in a time of chaos and uncertainty.  

Yoga 4 a Good Hood was founded with the mission to provide healing and wellness tools to groups that tend to be missing from yoga spaces. According to Bee, these missing groups are African American people, people who are from historically marginalized communities and those of a low socioeconomic level.