Claiming Space on the Mat:
Exploring Inclusion in the Yoga Community
I’ve been practicing yoga for more than twenty years. For me, it’s served as a fun physical practice, a way to connect with community, and an outlet for de-stressing.
Over the years, I’ve practiced all over the United States (during work travel, my first order of business was often finding a local studio), and have even had the opportunity to practice during travel outside the U.S.
I love yoga.
But, during my two decades as a yogi, I’ve noticed time and time again how homogenous yoga spaces often are. And it troubles me.
I am a white woman.
I am also deeply committed to promoting equality and to decolonizing my own mind.
In thinking about spaces where there is work to be done (and goodness knows there are too many to count), yoga spaces are definitely among them.
Recently, I reached out to some other yoga practitioners to see how they think the yoga community is doing in terms of inclusion. I was particularly interested in hearing from practitioners of color.
The first time Maryam Ansari attended a yoga class more than twenty years ago, it was at a California community college gymnasium.
Ansari was struck by the experience. Originally from Pakistan, Ansari spent most of her childhood in Malaysia, where she’d never been particularly physically active. But with yoga, Ansari says she found “a different way of being in my body that I’d never experienced before.” Over the years, she found herself coming back to it time and again.
While attending graduate school in New York, Ansari began taking classes at a studio with friends. It was there that she noticed a glaring omission, “[T]here wasn’t like any kind of acknowledgment that this was a practice from South Asia. It was like, we have yoga, we’ve discovered yoga, and we’re offering this to everybody. Isn’t it amazing?”
Ansari calls the experience “disorienting,” but says she kept up with the practice because she found it physically empowering.
Beyond Fitness
In the West, yoga is frequently viewed through a fitness model lens. But yoga and meditation are about more than just postural practices and deep breathing. With roots in India and Africa, the practices may foster a deeper mind-body connection, or even a spiritual one.
Recently, Ansari began a deeper exploration of the practice. And when COVID-19 hit, she found herself pursuing interests that may have felt out of reach pre-pandemic. Last year, Ansari took the plunge, registering for a year-long yoga teacher training.
Her motive? To increase representation in yoga spaces. Ansari notes that most studios continue to be, in her words, “very homogenous, mostly white people, mostly white women.”
Ansari completed her yoga teaching training at a local studio, The Summer Moon. Ansari was drawn to the studio based on its mission statement, which includes the owners’ dedication to “breaking down the status quo.” For Summer Ward, co-owner of The Summer Moon, fostering inclusion is key. Still, Ward admits retaining teachers of color hasn’t been easy.
“Unless you’ve got some other form of income, like, just straight up teaching classes is exhausting. Most teachers get burnt out,” Ward laments. “There’s not a huge amount of sustainability in this industry where we’re teaching people how to live sustainable lives. It’s a little bit backward.”
The Summer Moon offers donation-based classes to increase access to yoga in a world that Ward feels is in desperate need of it. Still, she says it’s difficult to gauge how the greater yoga community is doing in terms of inclusion.
After the increased push across the nation for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the wake of the summer protests of 2020, Ward says “The racial stuff just put a light on the industry in the way that it is. So dominantly white female.” She says she welcomes a shift and sees signs that it’s happening. One such sign? Afro Yoga.
Where Wellness, Inclusion, and Entrepreneurship Meet
Afro Yoga was launched in 2017 when its founder and CEO Angie Franklin had an “a-ha” moment after conducting a yoga class at a local college. Three Black women who’d taken the class approached her. They were surprised — and grateful — for the opportunity to have taken a class taught by another Black woman.
For Franklin, the experience was powerful. She began to ask, “What else can I do for my community?” She tested the waters by offering a class in a local park. Sixty people showed up. She knew she was onto something. The first couple of years were a struggle to grow her business while making ends meet. Then came 2020.
Afro Yoga evolved during the pandemic, reaching a global audience through online offerings including yoga, meditation, and plant-based recipes. Franklin offers several yoga styles, including Kemetic yoga, a practice originating from Egypt. The studio launched with 100 members and is holding steady at around 150 almost three years in.
In addition to yoga and meditation, Franklin offers “Well-Founded Retreats,” which cater to founders and entrepreneurs of color. To date, Franklin has curated half a dozen retreats to destinations like Lake Tahoe, Tulum, and Jamaica, with more on the horizon. Her 2023 offerings are already sold out.
From the beginning, Franklin’s focus has been on “creating and increasing access to wellness spaces created for the community, for people of color specifically, and really to disrupt the status quo of the wellness industry.” Key to meeting those goals is training more yoga teachers and mentoring budding entrepreneurs of color.
Franklin’s success, both in forecasting the market for a Black-centered yoga business and meeting the evolving needs of that market, is further evidenced by partnerships she’s formed along the way. Among them are collaborations with venture capital firms that prioritize investing in minority businesses work, as well as Microsoft and the NBA.
Most recently, Franklin was selected as part of a small cohort, from among close to 100 applicants, to participate in a Black women’s summer entrepreneurship program, Build in Tulsa’s W.E. Build, which seeks to rebuild the legacy of Black Wall Street.
Educating Aspiring Yogis
Tucson-based Professor of Religious Studies, Caleb Simmons, has seen the interest in yoga, both the practice and its history, skyrocket in the last few years. Simmons, who also serves as Executive Director of the University of Arizona’s “Arizona Online” program, regularly teaches a class on yoga. When he first offered the class in 2017, about 50 students enrolled. Now, the number stands at roughly 1,300.
For Simmons, the class serves as a “canvas” for having what he sees as important discussions. His syllabus states, “As with any powerful social and cultural force, yoga is embedded within systems of power and inequity. In this course, we will force ourselves to think about the ways that caste, gender, race, socio-economic status, etc. all shape how people throughout history have experienced yoga differently.”
For Maryam Ansari, representation may not be the destination, but she sees it as a step along the way. And she wants to be among those looking toward the horizon. Reflecting on the broader yoga community, she asks, “What else are we going to do?”
Whatever the answers are, she notes, “inclusion is top of mind for a lot of people.”
Lindsay Bennett is a human rights lawyer and freelance writer. As a lawyer, Lindsay focuses on a range of social justice issues. As a writer, Lindsay focuses mostly on essays and opinion pieces, like this piece in Ms. She and her two sons live in Northern California with their beloved Australian shepherd and a bunny named Pedro.
