Social Justice, Inclusion, and Yoga Nidra - with Yoli Maya Yeh
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Today’s conversation with Yoli Maya Yeh, an educator and healer working at the intersection of Indigenous Way, Healing Arts & Social Justice, is a conversation we had as part of the Daring to Rest Academy masterclass series. I’m sharing it on the podcast because It felt too important a conversation to keep just for our Daring to Rest facilitators.
In this episode Yoli offers her thoughts on the sacred destruction happening in our world today, particularly how it relates to racism and White privilege in the yoga world, classroom inclusion, and yoga nidra. She provides a perspective on yoga nidra that you may have never heard before, and she is adamant that this practice is the secret sauce to transformation and deep healing.
She’s also a proponent of knowing the historical context and structure of yoga practices and then breaking that structure, especially as it relates to making these Euro-centric homogenous practices more inclusive for BIPOC folks.
If you are White and work in wellness, or invest in wellness, Yoli provides you with an understanding of the landscape of this billion dollar industry, why BIPOC folks do not feel welcome, and invites White people to stop thinking your way to transformation, stop the spiritual bypassing, and be willing to go into the suffering so we can all live as one.
Exhaustion comes in many forms. As Yoli says, the typical curriculums have encouraged color blindness at best and tolerance at least. This is not good enough. Today’s episode helps you begin to understand why.
Key Takeaways
Why is yoga nidra a healing practice? Because 100% of the healing lives in yoga nidra.
Once we arrive with enough mastery of the grammar (of yoga nidra) then it’s important that we break the grammar.
Right now we’re in a period of sacred destruction – repurposing, remodeling dismantling.
The euro-centric approach to yoga is an incredibly generic homogenous model…whose goal was to create docile followers.
People of color have never been tracked for leadership, as knowledge holders and innovators.
What White people did was they destroyed their indigenous traditions.
BIPOC folks don’t subscribe to scarcity as an economic model and the heart of capitalism is scarcity.
When Black folks don’t want to come to White people’s yoga workshops, it’s because they don’t want to be racially attacked.
Liberal White people are the most trouble because partial knowledge is dangerous.
Every time you practice yoga nidra you open up the portal to spontaneous healing.
You can’t think your way through transformation – you actually have to do the practices.
The whisper of the moment is that we all are one, but that’s such a dangerous statement.
Connect with Yoli Maya Yeh
Resources
The Nap Bishop – The Nap Miinistry: Facebook, Instagram, website
Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown
PBS Documentary series: Guns, Germs and Steel
Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours, Co-authored by Grandmother Twyla Nitch and Jamie Sams
Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Daring to Rest Academy - online yoga nidra teacher training and mentorship program - enrollment is now open.