Daring to Rest Ethics & Accountability Statement
The document that follows reflects our community's core values, our current areas of action and inquiry, and the paths of accountability. This is a living document, intended to be revisited over time.
The process of gathering these anchor points began in 2021 with an opt-in Leadership Circle of Daring to Rest facilitators mutually committed to collaborating on two key areas: defining our commitment to social justice, and how to hold ourselves accountable.
Land Acknowledgement
Daring to Rest is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, The place called Santa Fe is recognized and known as Oga Po’geh, meaning White Shell Water Place. This is the unceded land of the Northern and Southern Tewa (often identified as Tanos). We recognize that this land is one piece of a larger, boundless terrain for Indigenous peoples: the Nambe Pueblo; the Tewa; and the Jicarilla Apache, the Diné (Navajo), Cochiti, Taos, and Hopi Pueblos.
YOGA NIDRA ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We train and profit from teaching the practice of yoga nidra, a practice that originates in India. We do not own yoga nidra. We train our facilitators to acknowledge the origins of yoga nidra and understand cultural appropriation, and make individual decisions on how and if they teach it. We do not have how we acknowlege and teach yoga nidra all figured out and continue to tweak our programs and our profits to respectfully teach yoga nidra.
Our Core Values
Rest is fundamental, including as the entry point for transformational conversations. Resting together is the starting place in all Daring to Rest programs as well as discussions within our Leadership Circle. Rest supports each person's unique transformation.
We value stories from every body and culture. We recognize the silencing of the voices of people with marginalized identities and strive for all stories to be heard.
We believe a person’s personal paradigm informs the collective paradigm and that it is possible to change personal and collective paradigms with deep rest.
We invite people into the mystery, sitting in the unknown and having the courage to not change anything.
We are committed to dismantling anti-blackness through rest practice.
We value presence over perfection. We support the practice of “showing up” - being emotionally, mentally, and physically present. We value letting go of perfection, something we call “chucking perfect.”
We believe in the power of truth telling and sharing your story.
We believe deep rest leads people back to their essential selves. Through Daring to Rest, we help people rediscover their wholeness. This looks different for every body.
Daring to Rest is primarily a space for all women to come and take rest. We believe that due to patriarchal constraints, social expectations, sensitivity, and/or accumulative trauma, transformation is often not easy for women in the presence of men.
Healing and joy are a person’s birthright. Through our Daring to Rest programs, we support people who identify as women to take back their health and find pleasure.
We believe and teach in our Daring to Rest programs the benefits of holding opposites. In feeling both light and dark, and the spaces in between, a person finds liberation.
We are committed to voluntary vulnerability. There is no pressure to share in our programs; there is no expected outcome from our work. Our community is supported in arriving as they are; there is no expectation to change anything.
We encourage our students and teachers to be authentic.
We believe it is possible for any person to change their lives; to write a new story, if they choose. We support, but never push, transformation in all our Daring to Rest programs.
We foster empathy. We encourage everyone in our programs to care about other people’s feelings - cognitively, emotionally and compassionately. Our programs create intimate places to share to foster empathy.
Accountability
How we hold ourselves accountable to the work/ how the community holds leadership accountable
We create spaces where all participants can feel vulnerable in providing feedback. We are creating multiple pathways of soliciting feedback.
We have created a Leadership Circle to lead our accountability process composed of a circle of women who are Daring to Rest facilitators.
We are committed to cultivating BIPOC leadership within Daring to Rest. We recognize that BIPOC (Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color) is not a monolithic category.
The Leadership Circle is dreaming into how we manage conflict in our spaces. This includes examining restorative methods of addressing conflict. As we continue to explore how best to offer welcoming space for all BIPOC, we realize that there is a learning curve - we are open to feedback, imaginative suggestions, alternative perspectives, and co-creating the future together within our Leadership Circle.
Current Actions & Inquiries
A Leadership Circle meets quarterly to discuss ethics and accountability within Daring to Rest and ourselves.
We are committed to integrating learning and practices for decolonization into the Daring to Rest Facilitator Training curriculum.
We are committed to meeting with and addressing conflict. Holding restorative space in response to conflict is important to us. Defining the right restorative processes for our community is currently under development.
Daring to Rest is challenging ourselves to examine the systems of oppression within the individual as well within our organization. We commit to continuing to transform Daring to Rest programs to be more and more aligned with our social justice values.
We recognize that the word “woman” needs to be defined and this is a work in progress within our Leadership Circle. Right now, we invite people who identify as a woman to take our Daring to Rest programs. Many of our Daring to Rest facilitators serve women, men, non-binary, and children.
We are open to receiving feedback that identifies how our programs are meeting the needs of marginalized people, and creating ways to receive conflict during a program. We are committed to growing from conflict.
If you have questions about our Daring to Rest Ethics and Accountability Statement we welcome you reaching out to us at hello@daringtorest.com.
A more complete history of our Daring to Rest Ethics & Accountability Statement
In 2020, a month and half after the killing of George Floyd in the United States, Daring to Rest offered our signature 40-day Daring to Rest program with the theme of social justice. What became apparent is that we had not designed the program optimally for many reasons and we were uneducated and not equipped internally as a small business to understand how oppression shows up in wellness space and how it shows up inside Daring to Rest.
As a result, in January 2021, we gathered a group of four women who had taken our facilitator training, in addition to Daring to Rest founder Karen Brody, to discuss, with the support of decolonization facilitator Yoli Maya Yeh, what we felt was working and not working in Daring to Rest programs from a social justice context. After meeting six times, and many rich discussions, what became clear is that social justice work, and a social justice statement we can stand by at Daring to Rest, must be on-going and include embodied inner and outer work. At the end of 2021 we produced the first draft of our Daring to Rest Ethics & Accountability Statement.
In January 2022 we set up an Ethics & Values Leadership Circle to enter a year-long inquiry into decolonization of ourselves, the practice of yoga nidra that we teach, and Daring to Rest as a business. All Daring to Rest Facilitators were invited to commit to the four times we met over the year. Yoli Maya Yeh facilitated the space. At the end of the year, we reviewed the Daring to Rest Ethics & Accountability Statement. The statement you now see has been through this review. This is an evolving, living document.
In 2023 we plan to continue our Leadership Circle and focus on building capacity within Daring to Rest to facilitate a conflict resolution process, if needed from any program participant. We are using the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg and his book, “Non-Violent Communication: The Language of Life” as the foundation for our conflict resolution process.
In 2024 our facilitators and rest coaches were invited to explore the Decolonization of Yoga Nidra in a 5 session online course with Dr. Aicha Serghini Idrissi.
Thank you for an interest in our history and this important work. This space will be updated yearly with our history.