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When Michelle Cassandra Johnson enrolled in a 200-hour yoga teacher training in 2009, she had been  practicing yoga and dealing as a race-equity and anti-racism trainer for years. Although the training led her through the traditional philosophical teachings of the Sutras, she still recalls the disconnect she felt being taught a couple of liberatory practice and being certainly one of only two BIPOC students within the room.

The training had promised to assist deepen her practice, Johnson says. But it surely felt incomplete.

Her perspective as an activist, an educator, and a Black person in America, informed how she experienced this system. “What I felt prefer it was lacking was this application of what was actually happening to us and around us and in our communities,” says Johnson.

Although the social and political issues we face now aren’t that different from what was happening in 2009 or years prior, “there’s something that feels different in people’s awareness and there’s something that feels different now concerning the amount of individuals talking about yoga and justice,” she says. “And my query about that’s, how much of that’s performativity and co-opting? And the way much of it’s true intention around wanting to rework our wellness spaces and really wanting to do the work that’s required to create conditions for everybody to be well?”

In response, she and others have launched specialized social justice yoga teacher trainings (YTTs) intended to handle her query and the continuing Black Lives Matter movement and the racial reckoning that arose in 2020.

An Ancient Tradition as Means for Contemporary Change

Social change is complex, multi-faceted, and takes intentional and sustained work. While yoga alone cannot heal systems of inequity, social justice YTTs operate under the concept that the practice and philosophy may be used as a tool to contribute to meaningful and sustainable progress.

At their core, social justice YTTs share the foundational teachings of yoga as tools for individual and collective liberation. These curricula emphasize how the inner work initiated by yoga is inextricably linked to the external change needed on the earth.

Following her first YTT, Johnson enrolled in a further 300-hour weekend yoga teaching training. She also studied the Bhagavad Gita and started to weave yoga together with her work as an activist. Over time, this evolved right into a body of labor that included a book, teacher trainings, and workshops called Skill in Motion, all designed to assist people apply the deeply transformative practices of yoga to grow to be agents of social change.

Though training curricula are unique to the actual program and facilitator, most facilitate collaborative spaces that debate how yoga can function a tool for inner and societal change, and create greater equity and accountability inside and out of doors wellness communities. These interconnected areas of focus include:

• Honoring the roots of yoga and applying the teachings to current social issues
• Tapping into the psychological advantages of yoga to assist those with systemic trauma
• Making yoga spaces more accessible and inclusive

These trainings try and reclaim something that may be lost, appropriated, and commodified in some popular contemporary approaches to yoga. They accomplish that by providing unique and powerful spaces to explore individual biases and work together toward significant collective healing work.

Rest as An Act of Resistance

All YTTs instruct students on the physical practice and philosophical tenets of yoga. Social justice-focused YTTs are inclined to spend more time on yoga’s psychological advantages, including how physical movement, respiration techniques, and meditative principles can calm the nervous system in response to long-held trauma related to racism, sexism, ableism, and other types of systemic oppression.

“The statistics run between anywhere from 70-80% of physical problems are stress-related. We all know this,” says Gail Parker, PhD, a psychologist, yoga therapist, and president of the board of directors of the Black Yoga Teachers Alliance. “We also know that yoga practices—particularly restorative yoga, yoga nidra, and meditation practices—evoke the comfort response, which is an actual physiological response. We also know that when the comfort response books in, blood pressure drops, heart rate slows, metabolism slows, brain waves slow, and respiration becomes more efficient.”

An understanding of the compounded effects of stress, especially related to systemic trauma, enables yoga teachers to show to rest as an act of resistance each in their very own practice and in how they instruct their students.

“We’re all negatively impacted by racial stress and trauma,” says Parker, writer of Restorative Yoga For Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma and Transforming Ethnic and Race-Based Traumatic Stress With Yoga. She cites results from the recent American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey. “Our contexts are different, our circumstances are different, but we’re all being impacted by problems with race and ethnicity on this country. So, my work is to support people in taking note of that.”

Parker notes that step one to coping with racial stress and trauma is self-study, which may be facilitated through the relaxed state that yoga can incur. “Individuals make up the system. If individuals aren’t doing their very own inner work around race and ethnicity, then nothing changes. If the main focus continues to be external—changing the system without changing self, without individual personal transformation—things don’t change. And we see that.”

Tamika Caston-Miller is the director of a 200-hour virtual social justice yoga teacher training through Ashé Yoga. Named “The Subtle Side of Yoga,” it emphasizes Yin and restorative yoga practices. Restorative yoga “rehearses rest,” while yin yoga taps into the resilience that oppressed and marginalized communities have already got inside, Caston-Miller says.

Many social justice-oriented YTTs welcome, create secure spaces for, and uplift those that are sometimes excluded and underrepresented including BIPOC, queer, and in another way abled people.

Creating Inclusive Spaces

Courageous Yoga arose from what director Jordan Smiley describes as the necessity to create yoga spaces that ask for “not only yogic self-awareness, but yogic self-in-a-collective awareness.”

“Which means that we study trauma and ways to work with it, in addition to examine the implicit and explicit ways in which white supremacy, homophobia, ableism, classism and other harmful biases can operate in wellness spaces and our world at large,” says Smiley in an email. “We work to cultivate behaviors that consciously disrupt and decolonize spaces we inhabit.” The Courageous Yoga school offers each a 200-hour and a 300-hour training.

Andrea Pares, a graduate of Smiley’s  200-hour training, had already taken a 200-hour YTT however the history of yoga and its appropriation in the US was not acknowledged in her first program. She present in Courageous an inclusive community of people that also desired to honor the roots of yoga and create more expansive yoga offerings.

“I desired to grow to be trained in yoga in order that I could teach yoga to people in larger bodies like myself, in order that they may grow to be liberated like I actually have been,” says Pares, who now teaches a weekly yoga for larger bodies class at Courageous.

Beyond Studio Partitions

Yoga as a tool for social change, by definition, expands yoga beyond the partitions of yoga studios. The Prison Yoga Project (PYP) offers a 200-hour teacher training that implements yoga in a restorative justice model. Meaning it  focuses on self-empowerment and  rehabilitation to scale back the cycles of crime and recidivism, by assisting prisons and organizations beyond the prison system (comparable to youth outreach programs and governmental agencies) with offering trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness programs.

“Everyone deserves to feel comfortable of their head and of their body,” says Jen Lindgren, PYP lead trainer and Latest Hampshire chapter director. The teacher trainings are designed to work with accessibility, energetic release, and allowing students to explore what communities they feel called to serve.

Lindgren says that the query becomes, “how can we in our tiny little window of support really be there and offer this practice that folks didn’t possibly even think was for them?”

Since its start in 2002, PYP has grown to greater than 120 programs across nine different countries, including the US. When Lingren held the primary YTT in 2016, she taught ten women who were incarcerated in Latest Hampshire, all of whom have been released from the prison system. A few of her students from that initial YTT have gone on to grow to be lobbyists, work with autistic adults as caregivers, and hold mental health peer support groups. In 2021, the training became a six-month long virtual program for anyone who is known as to serve inside and out of doors of prison.

Safety and Accountability

Felicia Savage Friedman’s anti-racist and social justice 200-hour virtual teacher training, draws on her work for the Center for Health Equity on the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. The founding father of YogaRoots on Location (YROL), Friedman launched yoga programs that might be approachable to individuals who typically wouldn’t have access to the teachings. Think yoga and line dancing classes in prisons and community courses that focused on the yoga of driving. The approach to her training is predicated on the teachings of raja yoga, which focuses on honoring our humanity through meditation and energetic practices.

“It’s actually claiming our humanity because we never have done this level of labor. We definitely haven’t done it in community,” Friedman says. She explains that collective liberation work is finished by working on ourselves in an intimate community where people may be vulnerable while also being held accountable.

About Our Contributor

Allie Sivak is a author, yoga teacher, and food scientist based in Denver, Colorado. Yoga has been in her life for over ten years, and has helped her immensely in moving through life’s changing seasons. She sees her yoga practice as a life-long tool for embodiment, awareness, and growth, and writes about holistic wellness and culture.

Allie holds a 200-hour yoga teacher certification, in addition to certifications in yoga anatomy and Yin yoga, and currently teaches vinyasa and restorative classes. When not practicing on her mat or writing, she enjoys cooking and sharing meals with friends, traveling, and spending time in nature.