By Vicky Hallett

The Washington Post

Sitting on the ground with her legs straight out in front of her, yoga instructor Annie Carlin demonstrated her problem with seated forward bend. It's not an issue of flexibility -- Carlin has the bend part down pat. It's that the size of her thighs makes it physically impossible to keep her feet together.

So she prefers to keep them hip-distance apart, as she explained to the students enrolled in her four-week Yoga for Larger Bodies workshop series at Washington's Golden Heart Yoga, which began this month.

"The other thing we can do is move our butt flesh out of the way," she added, noting with a grin that "yoga teaching is the only time I get to say 'butt flesh.'"

Other teachers can say it, but most of them don't actually have much of it. And that's what can prevent people who look like Carlin and her students from feeling as if they belong in a yoga class even though they derive the same benefits from stretching, strengthening and breathing deeply as everyone else.

"I stand out no matter what I do," says Carlin, 31, who admits that even she's wary whenever she walks into a new studio. But with certain modifications and props, Carlin can be comfortable in any class, and that's her goal for her students, too.

Every person brings something different to the yoga mat, Carlin says, and it's not always visible. In her case, it's a decade of practice that started when she fell for yoga while studying

"I've lost 100 pounds and gained it back," the Takoma Park, Md., resident says. "For a really long time, I was angry. All these moves, I couldn't do them anymore."

But Carlin still adored yoga, and in 2010, she went ahead with her plan to take teacher training, despite being the only "larger person" in the program. Beyond lessons on prenatal yoga that required her fellow trainees to strap big pillows to their bellies, most had no firsthand experience working with different bodies.

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Teacher makes yoga accessible for 'larger bodies'