Greetings and namaste. Please don't let anybody ever convince you that namaste is a good bye. Literally, my entire life it has always been a greeting, a hello. I understand that uses change, but it's all good. Welcome to the Critical Yoga Studies podcast. This conversation with Stephanie Yvette Evans is full of life, and sisterhood.

There's testifying here, stories here, about how people come for your neck when you, as a Black or Indigenous woman, decide to center your own health - decide to aim for your optimal vitality. We talk about our own physical home workouts, a bit about sex, music, and of course, we get deep into Stephanie's most recent book release, Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace (SUNY Press, 2021). 

We talk about self-preservation and black and brown relations in "yoga."  Please enjoy. And know that we surely enjoyed ourselves too. 

Stephanie Y. Evans is a Full Professor and director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Until 2019, she served as the Chair of Clark Atlanta University's African American Studies, Africana Women's Studies, and History Department.

#freeprakashalliance

Critical Yoga Studies: Yoga, Children, and the Carceral.

May 3, Rally at Queens County Supreme Court, DA Melinda Katz, Drop All Charges!

This is the first of three episodes with Prakash Charuman who is a Guyanese American young adult.  After immigrating from Guyana, and escaping an abusive parent, Prakash managed to make it to Queens, New York to be with his mother (whom Prakash describes as having low to no literacy). When Prakash was a child, 15, he was abducted from his home with no warrant, unjustly held, and arrested (Dec 9, 2014). That fateful day, Prakash was tortured in the presence of his mother, and coerced into a murder confession. For the remainder of his childhood, Prakash was then wrongfully held without trial or bail at Riker's island and other maximum-security facilities until his childhood ran out -  from December 2014 till August, 2018. 

When he finally received his first trial in October 2018, it was an unjust trial led by a notoriously, maliciously racist judge Kenneth Holder in the Queens County Supreme Court. An expert witness was denied to Prakash, an expert on coerced juvenile confessions such as those of the Central Park 5.  Holder blocked this expert from testifying as to the bogus nature of Prakash Churaman's childhood statement under duress. By blocking this essential information from the nearly all-white jurors, Judge Holder acted unjustly and maliciously.

As a result of this unjust trial, Prakash went back into prison as a youth for another year and a half before this unjust case was overturned by a NY Appellate Court. But he did not give up hope. Prakash continued to organize from the inside, speaking to a trusted music teacher, and WBAI independent radio about his case.  A new trial was ordered. As a result of his organizing, Prakash was released on 150,000 bail on December 17th, 2021. Prakash is now on house arrest back in Jamaica, Queens And i spoke to him just a few days ago In advance of a May 3rd, 2021 rally at Queens County Supreme Court. Prakash refuses to plead guilty, even though they are offering a plea deal that would result in him being free this summer, because of all his time already spent.  Prakash refuses to take the deal, saying his freedom is tied to the truth. Prakash is an innocent child, and now a young man.  In this episode, Prakash and I, and sometimes my son, speaks about the mind-blowing and tragic events of his case. 

Welcome to the final episode of Season 1, the Critical Yoga Studies podcast prototype season. This episode examines powerful myths associated with yoga teacher trainings, with critique and love.

For example, can becoming a certified yoga teacher make you a better human? Not exactly. The yoga teacher training is not going to change you for the better, only you can do that, with time and focus. 

This podcast will be especially helpful for anyone who is going through a yoga teacher training, or who has gone through one, if you're thinking about going through one, or if you're teaching one.

I'm so happy to be bringing it around full circle. Here, I am back speaking with yoga teacher trainer, Felicia Lane Savage of Yoga Roots on Location. My first podcast episode ever was with Felicia at the end of January, 2020. This time, Felicia invited me to be a part of her current yoga teacher training, that's where this conversation comes from.

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Critical Yoga Studies podcast.

The workshop conversation here was originally titled: Online Yoga Pedagogy: Technical and Cultural Competency. In it, I sketch out best practices for online yoga teaching. I apply guiding principles from Paolo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to online yoga instruction. I also integrate long term forecasts for the crises and phases of online higher education. Christa Kubery, Vice President of YA Standards, introduces me.

In this episode, I continue to focus on online education, specifically online offerings of yoga. The conversation here is based on a Yoga Alliance Continuing Education (CE) Workshop featuring Roopa Bala Singh, originally recorded via live Zoom (4/9/20) with hundreds of participants who self identify as yoga studio owners, yoga teachers, and yoga students. 

This is very much the beginning of this conversation. There is need to thoughtfully consider practices in teaching online yoga education, being a student learning yoga online, and governing online yoga education. As ever, there are many levels to the conversation. 

Key takeaways:

1. Co-learning: How do you integrate co-learning into your online yoga offering so that students have a chance to teach one another, hear one another, learn from one another, see one another, or experience learning together as co-teachers?
2. Transparency: How do you make your practice more transparent as an online yoga instructor? How do you share about who you are, how you came to this practice, why you do it? Can you make space to discuss how yoga is governed and how that affects the offering itself?
3. Accountability: How are you making sure that folks are doing all the hours that they've signed up for? And how do you do that without surveilling or gathering data that might eventually be used inappropriately and non-consensually? 
4. Intervening in binaries: Yoga is generally about challenging binaries, about finding the in between, the balance in an era of widening extremes. In a yoga offering online, how do you challenge the binary of "teacher" and students? It's a dynamic that has been long identified by people like Paulo Freire who wrote that students aren't just there to be empty vessels to be filled, but instead co-teachers in the space. And, the  "student body" of a yoga class always includes the teacher themselves. We will all, always, be students of yoga. 

In this episode, I give an introductory grounding exercise and then we get right into it. 

The music offering today is an "om." I've avoided doing so till now, lol. The use of "om" in industrial yoga is problematic, layered. But, my own experience with "om" is that is something I heard in my mother's voice, practiced by my grandmothers, great grandmothers. And so I practice "om" from a place of familiarity, of habit, and family. 

Enjoy. Please let me know if you have any questions, or how you may have put this to use. 

Welcome to the September 2020 episode of Critical Yoga studies, the podcast. I am honing the direction of this podcast toward best practices in online education, including online yoga education. 

• In this episode, I'm talking to Shaunak Roy, founder, and CEO of Yellowdig - it is an app that's used on learning management systems like Canvas in order to facilitate open-ended and free discussions among students so that they can engage with one another, and learn from one another in an ongoing way. 

In this episode, we talked about best practices with online education. Some main takeaways:

1. First, asynchronous is a best practice to utilize in online educational offerings (including yoga), just right off the top. A simple definition: asynchronous is when everything is prerecorded and there's no specific time at which a student has to be present. Asynchronous education allows for the most flexibility. It also allows for the most compliance with ADA standards. Students can "attend" and engage "class" at any time convenient to them. For this reason, asynchronous offerings also equalize things for students who might be in households, where they have many people or many people sharing one or just a few devices. 
2. The second best practice is to try hard to listen to students. Actually, the opposite is happening. We discuss how with the massive pivot to online learning, a lot of professors are just pouring on the work on their students is a way of "making sure" that they're still engaged. Actually that tactic - of pouring on work and making the course work really "loud" in the lives of students - ends up doing the opposite of engaging students. People get overwhelmed, they disconnect. We all have a bullshit meter where we can tell, you know, is this really veering into busywork? Or is this something that's helping my learning? 

Those are just some of the really helpful takeaways from this conversation. The yoga space is going to be a really important realm for best practices with online education to develop. Episode 10 of the CYS podcast has to do with exactly that. 

A note on the music for this episode: The song thread I wrote and perform for this episode is about time and feeling the need for transformation, for change. The lyrics are, "itching for a switching, of my time." Within myself, I am asking: How do I spend my time? How do I organize thoughts, my emotions? I notice that I am ready for some transition and growth. 

Enjoy, and of course, I would love to hear from you. 

Welcome. Salaam alaikum. In this episode of the Critical Yoga Studies podcast I talk love and strategy with the matriarch and patriarch of the Brooks family, Scott and Kara Brooks. Dr. Brooks is an authority on sports and race. He is the director of the sociology department at Arizona State University. Kara Brooks is a visual artist and lecturer in drawing at ASU, working on the impact of climate change in the global South.

The guiding question of our conversation: What are the spectrums we can identify in our lives and how did these spectrums affect our everyday ability to live?

The spectrums that we look at include. for example, redlining, we look at how redlining continues to operate as we black and indigenous people navigate institutions such as academia. We look at a spectrum of gratitude: there's benefits of gratitude practice, but how much can we be grateful for? To what extent can we practice gratitude in our lives sustainably? We look at love, the spectrum of love, Kara talks about the pressures of being a black family, navigating the ivory tower, navigating these racist cities in America and the pressure that puts on black love on their love and on self-love. 

Of course, we look at the spectrum of yoga, how industrialized yoga can both heal and hurt our bodies. 

At the end of this conversation, there is a wonderful guided meditation. It was wonderful for us anyway, going through it. 

In this episode with the brother Lumumba Bandele, we discuss tactics. This is a beautiful dialectic on tactical considerations. We address the questions: 

(1) What defines this moment of global uprising, what are the peaks and the valleys we see unfolding for now and for the future? 

• (Answer: All 50 states? BLM went from radical to performative. Unimaginable shifts in policy. And troubling but telling signs that the U.S. nation-state wants people to advocate for change in chaos and danger.) 

(2) What are the pluses and minuses of a tunnel vision focus on the United States and the social change that needs to happen in this colonial center? 

• (Answer: We must address the privileges and responsibilities that come with being U.S. residents. Global solidarity takes action and is a requirement for any hope of lasting change in these terrible imbalances of power.)

(3) Black citizenship?

• (Answer: Every generation consists of events that highlight the fallacy of Black citizenship. Just as the physical statues are being felled, so too must our mistaken visions of citizenship and investment in being of this country in certain mythological ways that keep us complacent, complicit.)

(4) How do you define: abolition?

• (Answer: I am an aspiring abolitionist. I am learning. There are lots of new terms used to describe the associated ideas of abolitionist principles, but the concepts were tried and true under segregation.)

(5) We talk about fireworks and the use of pyrotechnics in Black and brown core locales in America's largest cities - NY, Philly, LA and more. 

In this episode of the Critical Yoga Studies podcast, two desi sisters, one Indian American and one Sri Lankan Canadian talk sci-fi, race, motherhood, and multi-scalar power. Rajni Perera is definitely a favorite of a few of your favorite hip hop artists. Her work is world-renowned, her style is ever-evolving - but one thing does not change, she is dedicated to racial solidarity between Black and Brown peoples of this world. Her very name is an interruption, an unlikely bridge between Sinhalese and Tamil people, against all the odds stacked against unity amongst us. Rajni's visual and multi-media series document Black and Brown yoginis, traveling beings navigating the reality of displacement, mothers, dancers, planes, dimensions, the porous skin between human and spirit. Between all of life, and all the death. 

(A few deep breaths to start and then...)

In this episode of the Critical Yoga Studies podcast, Roopa Bala Singh speaks with viral writer, Jill Louise Busby, who is the author of a forthcoming book, a collection of essays that spends time noticing what goes unsaid. Jill is one of those unique influencers who grapples with the power and powerlessness of having gone viral, with having access to a #hashtagbag. Jill and Roopa build on their ongoing conversation on yoga, race, being Indian, being Black, being writers, being daughters, being "Indian hair," being "Black Don't Crack," bearing witness, and the trickiness of dehumanization.

Jill can be found @jilllouisebusby on it, and at https://jilllouisebusby.com/ on the interwebs.