Everyone please welcome my yoga teacher and new friend Marissa Procelli to A Broadway Body: Continued Conversations! I’ve been taking Mar’s yoga classes for about two years now, and it wasn’t long before I recognized she approaches her teaching through a healthy body image lens. Her language in her classes spoke to me and allowed me to further deepen my connection to my own body in my practice.

Mar is an incredible leader, and I’m so excited to share our conversation with you. There are so many chunks of wisdom hiding in here for you, and I hope if you’re in the South Bay/LA area, you come take one of her classes to experience her magic for yourself!

“  It's really hard in this industry to not have people look at your body as your business card because, as a teacher, whether it's privates or yoga or strength training or Pilates or whatever, when they come to your class, a lot of people, whether they mean it consciously or not, look at your body as your business card. I can teach things that I don't know how to do in my own body. I can prep you and get you all ready to go and work into the splits. Do I have my full splits? No, I do not. My hope is that for people to understand, as teachers, it's about our knowledge, it's about what we've studied, it's about how much work we put into creating either a flow or a playlist or a type of class. My hope is that people start to see the teacher as what they teach and not what they can do in their own practice.”

- Marissa Procelli

Marissa Procelli: So when I was two years old, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. And so, with that, your joints tend to stiffen and swell and you lose your range of motion in a lot of parts of your body. And growing up with that, I was always in and out of remission, and because of that, I felt like I spent most of my life numbing my body because I was told that I shouldn't feel pain. And so, with all my medications, I was constantly numbing and subsiding the pain, but because of that, I was numbing everything, yeah? And your body's supposed to have a conversation with you, and you're supposed to get input from your body.

So growing up I was very active still. I played a lot of sports. Even when I was in the depths of my RA, I always found an alternative. I wasn't cleared to do land sports in high school halfway through. And so, I quit volleyball and basketball, which volleyball I played for, like, five years, and then I just switched to water polo and swim, and I was like, “Okay, I guess I can't do heavy-impact sports, but I can go in the water. So movement was always something that I really enjoyed.

And then college happened, and at least my college experience was a lot of going out, a lot of eating fast food, a lot of drinking, and, yes, academics, and I had a lot of great experiences. And I was an athletic trainer or assistant for the football team there. So I did learn about the body, and I was a public health major. But yeah, I was going out, I was having fun. So then when I moved here to LA, I was a very swollen version of myself just because I didn't really understand how to take care of myself.

So then when I started yoga, I was thinking, “Oh, this –.” Well, first, I actually didn't like it in terms of, I thought it was so challenging and it wasn't my vibe. But then I realized, after the class, I felt better in my body, and I said, “Oh, I haven't felt good in my body, or I haven't felt period in a long time.” So that was in 2016, and then I was in a really stressful job at the time as a behavior therapist, and I did in-home services, and I was getting a lot of anxiety attacks. And so, I started going to yoga more, and I was like, “Okay, I want to do teacher training.”

So I did teacher training, and at the same time as doing teacher training, I'm injecting myself once a week with my arthritis medication. I'm on what's called Methotrexate, which I was on for 20 years off and on, which is a type of chemo. But it helps regulate RA in the body. And so, I'm going from very westernized medicine to learning about yoga, which is very different.

And so, then after I did teacher training, I was like, “Okay, how can I incorporate what I have learned in my choices, in how I move my body, how I fuel my body, how I rest my body versus just relying on medication?” So then, I went to a nutritionist. I switched my diet, which was hard. It was like an elimination diet, so I took out things, brought it in, and so, then I figured out what worked. And that was in 2018, like I said, injections on the chemo meds. Six months later, I got off, and I have not been on it since.

Megan Gill: Oh my god, my heart.

Marissa Procelli: So that was 2018, and it's 2025, and I have not had one ounce of medication for my arthritis since.

Megan Gill: That is incredible.

Marissa Procelli: Yeah. So the downside part, though, is that because of my diet, I ended up dropping a lot of weight quite quickly, so much so that I dropped I think it was, like, 23 pounds in two and a half months. And I'm a small human. I'm five two. I haven't weighed myself in years, so I don't know how much I weigh, but like I don't have a ton to lose. And while my body was feeling great about not being on meds anymore, the compliments, which I know you hear the word compliment and you're like, “Oh, that's nice. That's a good thing.”

Megan Gill: But I know exactly what you mean. Yes.

Marissa Procelli: And literally everyone was like, “What are you doing? What?” I still remember to this day walking into my yoga studio and another student looking at me and said, “Oh my god, you lost half of yourself. What did you do?” In like a I-want-to-know-the-secret type of way.

Megan Gill: Oh my god.

Marissa Procelli: Yeah. So what was initially a good thing then started turning into me getting very intense about my diet, so much so that one of my best friends, still best friend, who's a teacher, a fellow teacher who also has a past of body image and eating disorders, she reached out and was like, “Hey, I'm worried about you, and I just want to check in and see what's up.” And she is a very vital component as to what pulled me out of a very slippery slope.

So after that, I started seeing a nutritional therapist and kind of going back onto being balanced. But I was so hardcore about the diet for my RA that it then wasn't about RA anymore. It was about everyone giving me compliments and me wanting to continue that and almost this weird feeling of like, “I feel like if I start gaining weight again, I'll let them down.” It was very weird expectations.

Megan Gill: Especially as the person who is leading a movement space where people are looking to you as like their, not mentor, but the leader in that area, yeah.

Marissa Procelli: Yeah, and also like what I wrote on the notebook was I just was talking about it with a friend, it's really hard in this industry to not have people look at your body as your business card, because as a teacher, whether it's privates or yoga or strength training or Pilates or whatever, when they come to your class, a lot of people, whether they mean it consciously or not, a lot of times they look at your body as –

Megan Gill: The projected results or something like that?

Marissa Procelli: Exactly. Yeah, as, like, your business card. So it was very tough, and now I'm kind of – I felt really good about it. I did have a bit of a low recently because, like I said, I got sick when I got back. Every time I get sick, after, it's always like, “Oh, like you look great.

Megan Gill: “I was just sick!”

Marissa Procelli: Yeah! Malnutrition? Is that where we're going for? Yeah, so there are still moments where I have to really pause and back up, and honestly, a lot of my fellow teacher friends, we chat about it every once in a while of the comments that people will make or the things that they expect from themselves based on us. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely there. It's not something we make up. It's a very active conversation, which is hard to, like, navigate sometimes of how to change that topic or almost make it a learning moment in moments.

Megan Gill: Mm-hmm. Like kind of steer the conversation, so that they walk away being like, “Oh, maybe that’s not how I should – maybe I shouldn't speak to my teacher in that way,” not from a disrespectful standpoint.

Marissa Procelli: No, and it's all good intentions, right? I do feel that. A lot of people, especially towards me, I don't think they're being malicious in any way, but it's more of we're so used to that.

Megan Gill: That conversation is so embedded in our culture.

Marissa Procelli: Yes, it is.

Megan Gill: It's everywhere! It’s everywhere.

Marissa Procelli: Yeah, and then I come from a Hispanic family, so it's kind of the opposite. When I go home, a lot of it is like, “You need to eat more.” A lot of the “endearing” terms are gordo and flaco, which is fat and skinny. And they are originally like endearing terms. They really are. But now we're in a world where they didn't really age well.

Megan Gill: Mm-hm, totally. And that they could be triggering said under certain circumstances, yeah.

Marissa Procelli: Yeah. So it is, it's a lot of navigating other people's impressions of you. And again, a lot of it I don't think is bad. I think it's just so ingrained in us to jus