Yoga in Bermuda & Black Lives Matter
Joanne has been a part of the CPY network since her attendance at Prayer of Heart and Body Teachers Retreats in 2005 and 2008. Joanne is the owner of Yoga on the Rock, a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga School and Continuing Education provider in Bermuda. She released this letter on June 12, 2020. We publish it here with her permission.
Letter From Joanne Wohlmuth, Director and Owner of Yoga on the Rock
Hamilton, BERMUDA June 12, 2020 -
Dear Students of Yoga and Yoga Teachers,
As a result of the untimely and most unfortunate death (murder) of George Floyd and the outburst from individuals throughout America then the world; organizations around the world have begun standing up in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and an end to racism and injustice for people who are black. Yoga centers, particularly the larger organizations in America, have started speaking out; hence, on June 2nd, Yoga Alliance (the international accreditation organization for yoga) proceeded to join the movement in solidarity with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
For those of you registered yoga teachers under Yoga Alliance you may have seen this letter sent to its membership entitled Yoga Alliance and Black Lives Matter. Yoga on The Rock (YOR) yoga teachers, also registered teachers under Yoga Alliance, you may be interested to know that I took great offense to their initial letter, and immediately wrote back to them.
Yoga Alliance, an international yoga organization, admitted they received much pushback from this initial letter; hence they regrouped, recomposed and sent a second attempt two days later. Please note, I am not here to point the finger at Yoga Alliance (I truly respect what they do and the standards they are able to hold us to regarding yoga training); however, I found their second response again fell short in my estimation and represented what is typically problematic in the yoga world in the West.
So here I am as a black yoga teacher using my voice - not just to my yoga students and teachers who have an inkling of what I am about - but to any student of yoga (or teacher) in Bermuda who will listen. Yes, it is important that yoga communities stand up in support of black lives matter today. Here are some important reasons why.
As a yoga teacher who happens to be black, I am the longest serving and most accredited yoga teacher in Bermuda and owner of the brand, Yoga on The Rock. I am a certified trainer of yoga teachers (E-RYT 500) under Yoga Alliance, hence my Registered Yoga School (RYS) designation. I am also licensed to provide CE hours to yoga teachers as a YACEP (Yoga Alliance Community Education Provider). In addition, I am a yoga therapist with the International Association for Yoga Therapists and became one of the first crop of 3000 yoga therapists in the world awarded this title in 2017.
I say this to say I have a certain "je ne sais que" about yoga coming out of a lived experience and training from many years of study. I speak from the vantage point of this experience, training and devotion. As a black person (in any field dominated by whiteness) I know also that it is important for me to lay out my credentials to be trusted - so for this reason I state them here. However, I am old and wise enough to know that there are no guarantees that what I have to say will be believed or respected, hence I will take my chances here.
The problems regarding yoga and racism has been around for years. It is not that there were no problems when Indian gurus led yoga communities (ashrams) as was the case during my hay day as a yoga student. However, when these leaders left the yoga scene or passed away in the 1980's and 90's, yoga centers or organizations transferred operation to white disciples or devotees, many of whom later left communities and developed their own brand of yoga, in concert with middle-class American values where white privilege, chai lattes, and yoga mats and pants became the norm.
Mainstream yoga in the West today is whitewashed, culturally appropriated to represent whiteness in denial of its East Indian origins, and (for the most part) it has been spiritually gutted for easy swallowing, a de facto yoga lite for today's post-modern world.
If one were to conjure up a picture of yoga today nine times out of ten it would be a thin white woman performing some challenging tour de force yoga pose. Skinny white women are the mascot for yoga practice today! Yoga Journal, one of today's most popular yoga magazines, overwhelming portrays thin white women as the face of yoga. Since its inception around 2007 to this very day , Yoga Journal has posted thin white women on the cover about 99% of the time. Yoga Journal, to its credit, did have its first person of color on the cover in September 2009; however, this rare face for yoga has always been few and far between. In 2019 Yoga Journal featured black plus-sized yogi, Jessmyn Stanley on its January/February cover. Yet, for the first time in its history, YJ offered dual covers with, you got it, a thin white woman performing some yogic feat! Once people of color and oversized women realized what Yoga Journal had done they went ballistic and Yoga Journal ended up apologizing to its customers.
Recently I listened to a podcast on a popular website, The Revealer, that I patronize from time to time. I like the site because it hails from an alma mater of mine, New York University, and focuses on Media and Religion. I usually find interesting articles there regarding the media and Catholicism and was happy when I saw they were offering a podcast on yoga. The interviewer addressed the subject of yoga with all earnestness however I was floored by what they discussed as yoga. The discussion talked about Goat Yoga and Rage Yoga, clearly western yoga terms and practices.
Yet, one needn't check a podcast; anywhere on the internet one can find some strange concoction or cocktail - surfboard yoga, bar yoga - any 'there is a app for that' kind of yoga! Even more modified types - Aqua Yoga or Beach Yoga - is a white western yoga cocktail designed to entice but never quite making the mark other than to give an impression of some semblance of yoga. Please do not get me wrong. Some of these ways of practicing can be fun but to call it yoga is a stretch and an appropriation of this ancient Indian practice masterfully designed to promote wellness, tone the nervous system and settle us at the anamaya kosha level for deeper work thereafter. And besides how and when did we come to believe that yoga was just a set of poses - 108 sun salutations! When did folks come to believe that this, with maybe a little meditation practice to reduce stress and 'get your peace on', and a little chanting to help connect you to your true self was the essence of yoga practice! When did this fast-food yoga become the cat's meow!
It is no wonder that yoga centers and organizations are now waking up to the realization that Black Lives Matter should have been a no brainer for them, but it has caught them completely off guard. Larger leading yoga organizations are now just realizing that they have been white organizations predominantly for years and there is something not quite right in that. How did that happen? Others are finding that they need to have more people of color, more black people on their boards, teaching in their schools as part of the fabric of who they are if they are to catch up the realization of what BLM has unleashed.
Yoga is not antithetical to anti-racism. In fact, learning how to be an anti-racist, using the prism of yoga, should help white folks get clearer about how they ought to behave from a position of privilege - without the need for so much micro-aggression - when confronted about their behavior. It should help black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) too - to say something - and stop being duped by the racist and white-supremist behavior of their white yoga buddies, when they know in their hearts, at their core, what they see before their eyes is not a lie! This is what Mahatma Gandhi did, this is what Martin Luther King did!
I always remind my yoga teachers trainees when teaching the yamas and niyamas that Mahatma Gandhi brought down the British army in the early 1940's using two yamas (constraints) from the Yoga Sutras - satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also used non-violence in the Civil Rights movement. He was influenced toward non-violent protest by Howard Thurman, a black Christian mystic, ahead of his time at the time. Thurman had some years earlier travelled to Indian and met Gandhi. It was this approach from Gandhi of non-violent protest that he passed on to MLK, the rest is history.
The BLM movement is waking up yoga centers and reminding those who know about the richness of these ancient teachings that we must retract and reclaim some of the essence that we have lost, lest we lose ourselves while hanging out is some pasture with smelly goats licking at our feet!
The BLM movement is a reminder to yoga centers that spiritual bypassing is not acceptable when it comes to yoga or studios that call themselves teaching centers for yoga. I remember an article last December (2019) in the local newspaper where there was much discussion about a Santa Claus hat on the head of the deity Ganesh (Lord of Wisdom) to promote some Christmas cheer. Many students of yoga, mostly black or Asian students by the looks of it, were livid and rightly so. This gesture was not only a disrespect to yoga or Hinduism but also an affront to Christianity as well!
With white Western yoga, and let us call it like it is, there is an ugly underbelly. This is not to say that Western yoga today does not have some good advantages. Its promotion of health and wellness and its accessibility - making yoga available to most - has been a good thing. However, beyond the poses, beyond the upward-downward dog, there are multiple layers to yoga that help get you back to wellness, back to peace. This more wholesome approach to yoga, the way it was intended, helps show students a way to make greater connection with all that is around them. Yoga is about union. The avoidance of this fact or spiritual bypassing of how yoga really operates at its very core, has brought about this garden variety white centering approach to yoga, that is myopic, self-centered and self-absorbed.
Yoga keeps us well. It brings us back to balance, makes us healthy and peaceful -- but only as much as we will allow it. With the koshas we know that we need to work through 5 layers in order to obtain full health and wellbeing - body, mind and spirit. The 5 kleshas (the causes of suffering), such as raga (likes) and dvesha (dislikes) - help us understand that yoga is not about eating pumpkin pie every day and finding our bliss, but about working through our stuff, balancing out our emotions, our traumas and our anxieties that consume us. It is about mastering them, not letting them master us. Yoga is not just about coming back to peace after your yoga class. It is about every second, every moment, coming back to peace, coming back to balance.
It is this depth of yoga teaching that speaks to the spiritual aspect of yoga. It is this approach to yoga that my teacher Sri Swami Satchidanada said makes you a better Christian, a better Jew, a better Muslim, housewife, husband, citizen of society...you catch my drift. And this is not New Age stuff! These ancient teachings (5000 years old) have existed for years. As modern day mystic and Christian spiritual teacher Richard Rohr would say, "If it is true, it is always true.” In other words, it never dies!!!
I might caution that embracing the spirituality of yoga does not mean that one should run out and become religious, take on Hinduism or Buddhism as a de facto belief system or start going back to church if that does not appeal to you. As with anything else in yoga, one must begin where they are at. However, these spiritual practices, whether we like it or not, that are meant to lead to a genuine enquiry about the self, who we are or who we are meant to be (our swadharma). This allows us to "wake up" and "grow up" as Ken Wilber would say.
Students of yoga (or yoga centers for that matter) not engaging in this self work, this positive mirroring or shadow work, stop short of igniting the flame within required to help heal racism in our society using yoga practices!
The shift in consciousness, initiated by the raised awareness of BLM, is jarring and will have a lasting impact on yoga communities and individuals (those that would be woken). So if you are white or black, and closing your eyes to this, you might want to start paying attention. An email from a St. Ignatius yoga website that I follow jumped on to this right away. They took the would-be impact of BLM to heart and immediately quoted resources to educate their community about racism with recommended reading of books like White Fragility etc. They directed yoga students to podcasts like Yoga Is Dead and a host of others - to bring them up to speed on ongoing conversations being had about the whitewashing of yoga in America. As a spiritual yoga group they held zoom conferences (facilitated by persons of color) to discuss racism and what they would need to do as Catholics and as practitioners of yoga to change their way of thinking and seeing. This is the work that is being talked about now, this is the work that the BLM movement has thrusted front and center into yoga spaces today! Yoga on The Rock has always incorporated diversity and race relations training in its yoga teachers training. As a black teacher and diversity trainer it is inherent to know and appreciate the importance and relevance of anti-racism/diversity work as a part of yoga trainings.
So now once again after many years of drifting, thanks to BLM, yoga communities are being called to do that deeper work; to take the plunge, the deep dive from anamaya kosha (physical body) to anandamaya kosha (bliss body). This getting to bliss cannot and will not happen by flowing in a sea of whiteness. We get there by truly understanding the richness and full spectrum of our common humanity, our diversity and our communion with others who are both like and not like us.
I have stopped short of sharing personal experiences of racism throughout the years studying and teaching yoga in white centered communities and Western society. These stories are graphic as are stories from my students both black and white. The truth of the matter is that yoga, when we embrace it fully, allows us to use these experiences to deepen our understanding of ourselves, the world in which we live and our yoga practice.
The BLM movement is giving us an opportunity to deepen our practice to grow our yoga. The teachings of yoga as a wellness and wellbeing tool can help us make sense of the feelings that arise in us as a result BLM - good or bad - both are valid and have to be worked through. Even Satya must be overcome! Our breathing practices can also help with this. Our meditation can help us hold the paradox and not rush to the need for answers before we are ready. This is not a walk in the park kind of deal. There will be rocky times ahead, but as the saying goes today, 'we are all in this together.’
BLM is giving us a wonderful opportunity to face some challenging times ahead both within and without. As a type 7 on the enneagram chart, my favorite go-to sutra during tough times like these is:
“The Pain that has not yet come is avoidable.”
So let's get to work, doing both our inner work and working together as community to help heal the scourge of racism. If not now, the uprising from our youth community - our children, grandchildren or great grandchildren - may come back to bite us (as history and karma would have it) and the disorientation that may follow will be far greater, far more disconcerting than anything we are experiencing today.
Om Tat Sat,
Joanne
About the author
Joanne is a 40 year veteran yoga teacher, and trainer. She commenced her study and practice of yoga under the guidance and direct discipleship of Yoga Master Sri Swami Satchidananda and The Integral Yoga Method. She also has a BA degree in Journalism and a double Masters Degree in Management and Human Resources. Much of her career life has been as a human rights investigator and diversity trainer and consultant for corporate Bermuda.
Joanne co-manages Bermuda's oldest yoga studio, The Yoga Centre, and is the founder of her own yoga studio Yoga on the Rock. She is a E-RYT 500 yoga teacher and trainer and YACEP provider, under Yoga Alliance and a certified yoga therapist with the International Association of Yoga Therapists. She is a trained long-term teacher of meditation and is a graduate ( and ongoing student) of both Eastern and Western Mysticism, studied through the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
She brings all this training to bear in her yoga work and hope for the world - a place where justice, peace, mindfulness living and prophetic witnessing continues to grow as we live, move and breathe.