POC Yoga ~ safe spaces

~ POC Yoga ~

A personal journey to understanding why safe spaces are needed

I would imagine that by now many, if not most, of you have heard or read about the recent firestorm in Seattle, surrounding a group of yoga students and teachers who offered a yoga class specifically for people of color. A Seattle radio host, who I have heard spouting obnoxious and demeaning comments for as long as I can remember, caught wind of the class and took exception to it, specifically its verbiage asking that “white friends and allies respectfully refrain from attending.” Following his broadcast, the organizers of the class, as well as the yoga studio owner who hosted the class, were immediately targeted with death threats from all over the country, horrible internet posts, and scathing (and ludicrous) Yelp reviews (there – one more reason not to trust Yelp, but that’s for another day). The class, which had been taking place for five years, was suspended and ultimately shut down, the studio had to temporarily close its doors, fearing for the safety of its teachers and students, as well as the owner herself. When I heard about what was happening, my first reaction was deep personal concern for the people most directly involved. The founder of the POC class, Teresa Wang, the studio owner hosting the class, Laura Humpf, the teacher of the class on the day the media showed up, Genevieve Hicks, as well as the majority of others working to support the class, are all part of the larger Samarya community – current and former teachers and students, as well as longtime community members and supporters. In fact, The Samarya Center phone line itself was targeted with threats, insults and hang-ups. As the days progressed, my mind and heart were consumed with this story and how it might ultimately play out. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about my friends and fellow humans, our shared history through Samarya and through life itself. I had so many ideas and thoughts I wanted to share, and so much anger at the radio host who would sell out good, kind hearted people for ratings and to feed his own desire to stir the pot of hatred. But I also knew, even then, that this would ultimately be a good thing. While I would never wish the fallout on anyone, this would bring new awareness, new commitment and new ideas to our community and beyond. These were also my last days in Seattle - I actually got the threatening phone messages while I was at The Samarya Center clearing it out for one of the very last times. My time was filled with all the details of my major life change. I was commuting into Seattle from one of the nearby islands where I was spending time with my sister as she went through her last and most difficult chemotherapy sessions. My attention was divided and it was surely a good thing that I was asked by the people involved not to write or say anything about the situation. My thoughts had some chance to settle. I left Seattle with a deep and healing stop at the Texas Yoga Retreat. There I got to spend quieter time with my dear friend, student, faculty and colleague Genevieve, who taught the class the day of the media maelstrom. I had the honor of listening to and witnessing her perspective, her insights and her inner conflicts. In those few days, hearing both spontaneous updates and deep wisdom from Genevieve, while reading posts from Teresa, Laura and others, I looked for some way that I might be supportive from the sidelines. I spent time connecting with the community I have found in the Yoga Service Council and asking people from afar to support their peers in Seattle, as well as to create a call to action for all of us about the need for POC safe spaces and to continue our conversations about race and diversity within our larger satsang. I also spent time reading the articles on the class, what happened, and then looking at the various arguments for and against POC specific classes, as well as the unbelievably vitriolic and backward comments on the internet, not just about the class, but personal insults about the organizers, hosts and teachers, as well as straight up hateful and degrading commentary about any and all of our fellow humans. I say, “unbelievable,” I suppose because somewhere in me I still held out the idea that somehow we, as a culture, had moved forward enough that this kind of frothing anger at the slightest thought that somehow we would be called out on our structures of racism was a fringe thing, not a groundswell reaction. But then again, I’m white. I bet my black friends didn’t find it so unbelievable. So here I am now, settling into my home in Mexico. I am still thinking and reading about what happened in Seattle, but with some physical and mental space, I have been spending time reflecting on my own journey to understanding the need for POC safe spaces and how my journey might be helpful to others who, like I once did, feel conflicted about the need for POC classes. I hope in sharing this journey I might offer some new perspective or some context or some support for where we are now. This is a personal journey, my own perspective. I was not in any way involved with the POC yoga classes and I myself was never threatened or fearful for my safety, nor was I there in person to support the people who were directly involved. This is their story, first and foremost. I share my story only because I believe it speaks to the shared journey of Samarya, as well as the shared journey of people of yoga and other contemplative practices everywhere, and perhaps provides some insight into how we might recognize our own internal battles and barriers. The journey spans almost fifteen years, so it may be a little long. May it be useful in some way. When I founded The Samarya Center in 2001, it had the mission to “provide access to the teachings and practices of yoga to all people, regardless of perceived barriers.” At that time, coming out of clinical practice, what I really meant by “perceived barriers,” mostly had to do with people with developmental or other cognitive challenges, or people who would not be able to afford yoga classes, much less private therapy sessions. I had the idea that I could create a space where all people could practice together and that those most marginalized – in my mind at that time, again, people with physical and/or cognitive challenges – would practice together. It would be a healing space for my “clients” (students who were coming to me for “clinical intervention”) as well as for my “regular” yoga students, who would have the opportunity, as I did, to see and know and develop relationship with people they usually saw as being very different from themselves. Because I was an Ashtanga student and teacher, most of our public classes at that time were Ashtanga Yoga. I even taught the Ashtanga sequence to the kids with Autism with whom I worked, to stroke and traumatic head injury survivors, to teenagers experiencing depression and anxiety. I held the belief that, as long as it was modified enough, the sequence would work for anyone. I began to promote my “regular” Ashtanga classes as accessible to anyone, determined to create a space that was not so hierarchical and divided as the classes I had experienced, while offering the only “yoga” I really knew. My heart was in the right place – I wanted to share what had been so transformative in my own life with everyone, not just the typical Ashtanga students, and I wanted to share my clinical practice, and the Integrated Movement Therapy method I was developing, with anyone who believed they might benefit, not just the families who could afford standard therapy rates. I also deeply, deeply believed that true healing would come from taking down all the walls that separate us. That kids with autism did not need to be separated from the “regular” students, instead “regular” students needed to accommodate and yield to folks who are strategically and consistently marginalized, and that further, that process would be of deep benefit to the yoga students as they grew in their yoga and in their sense of shared humanity. I still believe that to be true, but I now know I had gotten way ahead of myself. My deep compassion was not held by deep wisdom. There was much learning to be done. The Samarya Center began to grow and we added on “specialized” classes, starting with “Life After Loss – Healing into Wholeness” - a class for people experiencing profound grief and loss, along with “Re(Union),” a class for parents of newborns who have been diagnosed with congenital differences. Students from the Ashtanga classes would sometimes be interested in these classes, most often because they were therapists and wanted to see how the classes worked. While I would sometimes allow them to join the class, I began to see the conflict. These students were there – with good, loving intentions, mostly to observe and learn while others were there with the specific intent of healing and connecting within the specific topic of the class. At this same time, and partly in response to this conflict, I began a series called “Topics in Yoga Therapy,” that were classes specifically for therapists as well as any student who was drawn to the topic, regardless of their own history. For the most part, that worked. But when I offered the topic of Yoga and Recovery from Childhood Sexual Trauma, I began to hear from some students who had actually experienced that trauma that they felt uncomfortable in the class with others who had not. They needed a safe space where they knew that their discussions, their personal struggles as a result of their trauma, their individual and collective experiences, would be understood at a different level – the level of others who have experienced the same thing. It wasn’t that they didn’t want the support of others, or that they were any way “against” the others, only that they wanted that one space, that one ninety minute time frame, where they could let down their guard and just be. To me, that all made perfect sense. We created classes to meet both needs and time marched on. The Samarya Center was in a predominantly black, and heavily Somalian, neighborhood. I knew, right from the very beginning, that I wanted to invite those communities into our space and into our satsang. Within that first year, Stephanie Sisson (who started The Samarya Center with me) and I offered our first free community classes. We walked around the neighborhood inviting folks to come to class, we stood out in front of our studio passing out flyers, talking to and personally inviting, anyone from the neighborhood who we might see walking down the street. In those first few classes, we were elated. People from the immediate community, kids and adults from the largely Somalian housing project across the street, and shopkeepers from nearby stores joined us. But our excitement for welcoming these local communities waned quickly – not because of the communities themselves, but because very, very rapidly the class became dominated by mostly young white people who had moved into the neighborhood for the cheaper rents and shared houses. The black community mostly stopped coming. That same year I went on a training with one of my teachers, Joseph LePage. On the training, I roomed with a woman named Mavis who had the dream of opening up the first all black aqua-yoga studio in Southern California. She was on fire with her dream and would often talk about being the only black woman on the training and how she was the only one who would be able to connect with the communities she wanted to serve. In retrospect, I have even more admiration for Mavis and what it must have been like for her to be on that training. She was, in a sense, different from the rest of the group in every way. She came from a very poor background and had not had access to the kind of education and training that the others had. She talked during yoga class, asked questions when she wanted to, didn’t bow down to the teacher every chance she got, and struggled with other students and their racism, which she had no problem calling out. We would spend the evenings reviewing material, talking about our dreams and aspirations and processing and diffusing the challenges of the day. We developed a powerful connection and when the training was over, Mavis came up to visit me at The Samarya Center. I remember her saying, “Molly, you need to get more black folks in here. This place is so good, your neighborhood has to be able to access it. “ I told her I knew that to be true, and what I had tried and experienced. She laughed at me. “Girl, you need a black person to go out and talk about it. I want to do that. I want to invite people here.” And so she did. Mavis took a bunch of flyers and spent the next couple of days walking around the neighborhood, introducing herself, telling people about the studio and giving them a personal invitation. “Would she be there?” “No,” she would have to respond, “she was just visiting.” No one new came from those efforts. I knew what we needed to do. We needed teachers standing up in front of the room who represented the various communities we were inviting. On the suggestion and seed money from one of our community members, we started the Community Fund – a diversity scholarship for our Yoga Teacher Training. The scholarship was (is) not based solely on financial need, but on a person’s real ability to take the teachings and bring them back to their own communities. The non-negotiable requirement is that the applicant represents an under-represented community. (You would not believe how many white, straight, able-bodied people we have that apply for this scholarship!) Our first recipient of the scholarship was my beloved student and friend, Vester Marshall, a black, 6 foot 7 ex-professional basketball player. This was it! I would have the “ultimate” black man teaching at my studio, this would open the doors to the local black and POC community. But when Vester, or Brian, or Genevieve, or Teresa, or Lia, or JK, or any of the many teachers of color taught, the students in their class were still predominantly white. I would imagine that when the occasional person of color came to class that it was indeed refreshing that their teacher was also a person of color, but it did not change the demographics, or I would also imagine, that person’s experience of being in a white dominated space. In those next couple of years, the studio grew and grew, and I heard over and over again from people that it was still the most inclusive, most welcoming, safest space that they had ever been in to practice yoga. We did everything we could think of – we made sure that the teachers dressed as much in regular clothing as they could, not in special, fancy yoga clothes. We offered free and reduced rate classes. We did an entire photo shoot and gallery in which every one of the models self identified as someone who “if people saw someone like me practicing yoga, they might see that it is for them too.” These photos were the cornerstone of our mission, our studio and our website. I began speaking around the country on how to create diversity in yoga classes and studios. I gave a speech on that very topic and received a standing ovation at the Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research. Ironically as Vice President of International Association of Yoga Therapists, and as board liaison to the committee creating the educational standards for the field of Yoga Therapy, whenever I would bring up the issue of diversity and creating a new field and culture in which diversity was specifically addressed and nurtured (and I brought it up a lot) I was met with disinterest, at best. But I powered on. Diversity. Yoga. Care and kindness in our actions and in our speech. I developed the Diversity in Yoga website, I started the Yoga and Social Change workshop to inspire people to use their yoga, to use their practice and their stated commitment to individual transformation to create radical social change. We changed our mission statement to reflect that desire. We greatly expanded our offerings of “specialized classes” to everything from Yoga for Chronic Pain, to You Shaped Yoga (Yoga for Larger Bodies) to Queer and Trans Yoga, to Yoga and Mental Illness, but we still didn’t offer Yoga for People of Color. And while we seemed to have more diversity in our classes than any other studio I knew of, we still didn’t have a critical mass of people of color in our studio. And we still didn’t offer a POC class. Somehow my thinking was still unclear. Circling back to the very beginning: I had come to accept that it didn’t always work for my students with autism or with severe physical illness, or with Down's Syndrome or with Multiple Sclerosis to practice in my “regular” classes. They were not having the experience they deserved. They were often feeling uncomfortable and frustrated in the space I was pushing them into for the “benefit” of all students. I had come to accept that the Ashtanga sequence, no matter how much it was modified, was not a good fit for so many people, and while, yes, some folks experienced a new sense of empowerment, just as many felt discouraged by trying to fit into the box I had created for them with the very best of intentions. I had come to see that it made sense for there to be “specialized” classes – If you were experiencing depression, you might want and benefit from a class that is specific to that issue. I embraced the You Shaped Yoga class, understanding that larger folks often feel shamed or unseen in classes that are dominated by people with leaner bodies. I was excited for the Queer and Trans class because I loved and trusted the people teaching it, although I will admit that in the very beginning, I didn’t really understand the teachers request that allies be respectfully asked not to attend. I still really just wanted us to look beyond all of this, to break down these walls, to practice and be together. And I felt left out. Poor me, I couldn’t go to this ONE class. This one class that in its very title, “Queer and Trans Yoga” told me that it was not a class for me, just like the Yoga for Stroke Survivors class wasn’t for me. And of course, I didn’t feel left out of, nor did I really even think about going to, a class for Stroke Survivors. Because, while I am an ally to people who are stroke survivors, that is not my direct experience. But still somehow, in my mind, being “queer or trans” wasn’t something that made you do your yoga practice differently. In the same way being a person of color didn’t mean you did your practice differently, nor that it was a specific “topic” to be addressed to that group. A person of color didn’t need to learn “best yoga practices for a person of color,” in the way that a person with chronic pain might learn best yoga practices for living with chronic pain. In my confusion and in my own “straightness,” while still being completely supportive of the Queer and Trans class, while still thinking it was great and being happy to have it on my schedule, at my own gut level I couldn’t really, truly see why a special class was needed. By extension, in my own whiteness, while I would have supported a POC class, while I still would have happily offered one of my schedule had I been asked, especially with all I had learned so far about creating and promoting diversity, I still didn’t, at the deepest level, understand why a POC specific yoga class was needed. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have waited to have been asked and instead been proactive in creating the space. But I didn’t. The Samarya Center closed in August, 2015, just a few months before the current POC yoga class controversy hit. A yoga class which, again, had been going on for five years in various open spaces around Seattle, without incident, and for the most part, without awareness from the greater Seattle yoga community. But not so long ago, just before we closed for good, my journey had finally taken me from merely supportive to really understanding and finally to fully recognizing a need for POC classes. Two of the biggest moments in helping me to realize both wisdom and compassion, came from short but very powerful conversations with people of color. The first was with my eleven year old niece, whose mother is from the Ivory Coast. I was lying on her bed near her backpack, when I found a homework assignment on racism. I asked her if she thinks she experiences racism. Her answer brought me right to where I needed to be. She said, “No. Not really. I just notice that when anyone says “black” everyone tenses up.” I asked her what she meant. She continued, “Well, like if my best friend (who is white) asks me about another girl and what she looks like, and I say she is black, everyone tenses up.” I knew exactly what she meant. She went on. “Yeah, I guess that and also sometime people say stupid things. But they’re just kidding.” My heart broke into a million pieces for her. Eleven years so far of people tensing up and saying “stupid things” that are excused for being a joke. I could only imagine what that would feel like at 21, 31, 41 and beyond. A lifetime of having to tense up, to watch and care for the reactions of others, to hearing “stupid things” said by the people who love you the most, in the name of humor. I can imagine well wanting a space, Lord, just every so often, where you could let your guard down. I wanted her to have a space, to practice yoga, or anything else, where sometimes, at least, she could just be. It didn’t mean the yoga would be any different, per se, just that the space would be one where she didn’t have to be on all the time. I see the same thing in my community here in Mexico. Sometimes I will hear other ex-pats saying, “ I don’t understand why the local community doesn’t come to this or that function. We have invited them, they are our friends.” Yes, they are. And sometimes, when they show up, its puro gringos and they leave. Not because they don’t like us, but because they just aren’t up to it right then, to speak our language, to understand our customs, to be in the minority in their own town. The second conversation was with a black woman I met at a consortium on Anti-black Racism that I attended with a friend and fellow studio owner in Washington, DC. At the very end of the evening, after each of the groups (white, black and other people of color) had come back together to eat cookies and snacks and to close out the evening, I was sitting next to this woman as we sang the Freedom Fight song. While we were singing, I couldn’t help but notice that the woman was taking her Oreo cookies and scraping all the white out of the center. I looked at her and laughed as we sang. When we finished she said, “I didn’t even notice that! You know, these are double stuffed Oreos. I don’t actually mind the white, there’s just too damn much of it.” Yes, there is just too damn much of it. There is far too much white domination in every single thing we do in this country and beyond, including yoga classes. We can’t yet change the total domination, but we can begin to allow and encourage spaces where people of color do not feel like they have to fit into the dominant culture. And yoga classes are a perfect place to start. Yoga is said to be both the means and the end. Meaning we practice to get to the state which we are seeking. I see POC yoga classes, among others, to be that means and end. We create spaces of healing, of relative ease, of open conversations, of celebration of self outside of a dominant paradigm, so that that very healing can occur, and in that space of recalibration of self and self-worth outside the oppressive watch of the dominant culture, that same essential sense of self and self-worth is developed, acknowledged and celebrated within the dominant culture, until that culture itself is no longer dominant. But we are not nearly there yet. And if I ever thought we were close, and I did, reading the comments about the POC yoga class in Seattle reminded me just how far we are and how much work we have to do, and how necessary these spaces are to create the critical mass of power we need for a true revolution. And finally, some of what I read is from other well meaning yoga students who hold on to their opposition of POC yoga classes in the name of yoga. “It’s about oneness!” “We shouldn’t be separating, then it’s not yoga!” Let me end with something else I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, also once (and probably sometimes still) being well intentioned but immature and lacking true knowledge. Yoga is indeed a practice of oneness. Of the individual self with the Divine. Yoga is not that “we are all one,” it is that we all come from the same essence. Yoga as a practice recognizes our individual differences on a material plane, and it recognizes that these individual differences will lead us to different battles, different roles and different practices while we seek to arrive at the same place – that sense of our own essential and unchanging perfection within the Divine. If you really want to practice yoga, then practice viveka, discernment. Practice svadhyaya, self-study. Practice chittavritti nirodah, managing your thoughts. Practice tapas, abyasa, dharana, working hard and with laser like focus to see the difference between the real and the unreal. Practice vichara, reasoning. Practice vitarka, reflecting. Practice shruti, listening. Practice smirti, remembering. Practice svadhyaya, humility. Practice pratyahara, being very quiet, or even mauna, silence.  And finally, practice accepting from greater authority, even when you don't understand. If you practice this yoga, the yoga of the scriptures, not the yoga of handstands or tight abs, or even the yoga of deep relaxation, you will undoubtedly come to a new awareness. I hope it’s one that understands what is happening now and how you can contribute. And that sees, as I have through my process, that POC safe spaces are needed and should be welcomed and supported. And that as white studio owners and teachers, we too should be offering and asking for these spaces. We are all in this together.