Practicing Yoga and Social Justice

It’s been awhile since I posted on my blog. I broke my wrist in March and for about a month it was really challenging to type, so I just managed to do what my work required and nothing else. Then came one of the busiest times of year for me, late March through the end of April and now I’m trying to get back to it. The national association for my yoga tradition is IYNAUS and we have a national convention every three years. This year – in April 2019 – a group of us worked together to organize a session on yoga and social justice. It was called Ahimsa In Action  (non-violence in action). It was super challenging and super exciting. Challenging for all the reasons you can imagine – we had to work together as an all-volunteer committee, align our different visions and perspectives and come up with an agenda that could never be comprehensive enough and would only scratch the surface of what we need to do. We didn’t know who would come and what they were inter...

Earlier this year, I decided my theme and intention for the year would be to create/dwell in a feeling of lightness. I wanted to do that, in part, because I knew I would taking on some heavy stuff as I continue to explore white privilege and white supremacy in my work and life. As soon as you try to locate your place in these systems as a white person,  it can feel paralyzing and overwhelming. I thought that it would be good to take them on, while simultaneously maintaining some sense of lightness in how to move forward. And already it turns out, I need that! I’m diving deeper into how my practices of yoga and meditation connect to white supremacy. With a group of friends, I’m working through the Me and White Supremacy Workbook . It’s a set of reflection prompts, some videos and background reading that are especially targeted to white women who think they are allies in the fight for racial justice (but who too often prove disappointing or unreliable to our...