[Thesis Research] Accessibility in Modern Yoga: An Intersectional Analysis & Approach to Social Change
Taina Rodriguez-Berardi’s 2021 Yoga Studies Master’s Thesis Excerpt:
INTRODUCTION
Yogalution on the Bluff, Bixby Park, Long Beach, CA – October 17, 2020
“Just a take a moment to take in the moment once again, and remind yourself what a blessing it is to be here. Not just here on this bluff, but here at this moment in your life, at this place in your life. To be here in this place on the planet, of all the places you could be, you are here.” — Dharma Shakti, Yogalution on the Bluff
Under a cloudless, baby-blue sky, I meander the salutation of yoga students to an empty space amidst the Saturday crowd. I roll out my mat onto the dewy grass and silently slip off my sandals, grounding my feet in the damp earth before settling in sukhāsana (easy, seated pose) facing the center of a small grove of mature coral trees. Obliging the opening instructions of our class, my gaze traversed the landscape of the bluff where I sat, and then blinked to beyond the beach shoreline at the mooring boats in the ocean below, towards the uncanny resort facade of an oil-rig island, spotting colorful container ships and cruise liners, and further still, to the rolling silhouette of Catalina Island on the horizon. Yet this eclectic coastal scene was not what struck me as the most diverse spectacle within sight. Surrounded by hundreds of strangers representing all shapes and sizes, ages and abilities, ethnicities and identities, I felt truly grateful to be encircled by such an assorted community. Over the course of a decade or more, I’ve practiced yoga in countless places, and amongst those, there have been many times I felt an oddity amid a sea of sameness — too brown, too big, too broke, too different. Today, not so much. I didn’t stand out for any particular reason.
These and other fleeting thoughts exited the forefront of my mind as we began our āsana (postural) practice following the inspiration-laced, instructive cues of our yoga teacher and Yogalution on the Bluff (YotB) founder, Dharma Shakti, a petite, fair-skinned woman with long, belly-length dreadlocks, and a warm laugh. As she vacillated from postures and positioning to pep-talk poetics, I became absorbed in my practice and allowed her voice to guide me under the warm mid-day sun.
At times, I would break concentration and peer out to the other practitioners: a few older and fuller bodied students using beach chairs as props for guidance and support; two buff body-builders quivering during balancing holds, sweating profusely; the parent with a young child playing shadow on a pint-size mat beside them; an unhoused individual packing up their tent, pausing to listen, and then dropping everything to join the flow. All the while, a busy Ocean Blvd. amplifying the sounds of motorcycle maneuvers, car horns honking, stereo systems blasting, and the surrounding Bixby Park fills with a cacophony of laughter, skateboard sticks, and strums from the capoeira musician playing their berimbau. If yoga is defined as the restraint of the fluctuations of the mind, then this is the requisite training ground. (Chapple 2008, 143).
After a slow and steady movement practice, everyone enjoys a śavāsana and sound bath to the song of seven crystal bowls and the seagulls riding the wind above. Dharma Shakti brings us out of our meditative slumber with these final words:
Honoring yourself, remember you are sacred; your existence is sacred; your life is sacred; your creativity is sacred; your expression is sacred… You are sacred. You and everyone around you. You are all sacred. So, start treating each other this way. When you see a stranger, remember that person wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer, just like me. We may all look different on the outside, but at our core, we are all the same on the inside, we are all good… I honor your sacredness, your greatness, and your magnificence, and I honor your journey and your commitment to yourself. Thank you so much for letting me serve you today. I humbly bow before your divinity. Namaste. Happy Saturday.
Amidst the applause and añjali mudrā genuflections, a peaceful energy envelopes the area. But when that energetic bluff-bubble is burst by the first Beachers to step off the knoll, the collective embodiment of our shared humanity does not disappear; in fact, it diffuses into the surrounding neighborhoods and cityscape as people walk, bike, and wander home, biding by Dharma Shakti’s closing remarks — allowing for a reality where ALL are sacred and deserving.
Yoga for Social Change
On a 1.6-acre green patch of public parkland, sandwiched between a busy city street and an ocean bluff overlooking the Long Beach, California coastline, hundreds of yoga practitioners convene every day at 11 a.m. for what is touted as “the revolution and the solution.” YotB is a donation-based yoga “movement for peace and change,” with a “mission to make yoga accessible to ALL regardless of financial situation, socioeconomic status, race, religion, spiritual or non-spiritual beliefs, age, or gender.” For more than 15 years, YotB has worked towards cultivating a conspicuously multifaceted and open community by means of an intentional implementation of accessibility policies and procedures. Within the wider Western landscape of modern yoga sites, the aspiration and ostensible execution of such multidimensional accessibility and subsequent accomplishment of a uniquely comprehensive participant body makes YotB an outlier.
YotB sets itself apart from the mainstream yoga industry (often referenced to as modern yoga industrial complex) by inviting its participants to engage yoga as a holistic experience of shared humanity. Instead of using exclusionary business tactics and exploiting the profit oriented modern-traditional brick-and-mortar studio model, YotB lowers the barrier to entry for its students. To accomplish this, YotB meets people where they are at: physically, financially, operationally, and spiritually — from its pop-up style assemblage on public parkland in the urban-center of one of America’s most diverse cities, its simple free/donation-based business offering, and a teaching style that welcomes a gentle mix of all-ability, low-impact postures (āsana) alongside confidence building affirmations, and come-as-you-are meditations. In doing so, YotB provides a refreshingly radical viewpoint and pushes back against neoliberal capitalist norms and intersectional social justice issues that have become deeply embedded within modern manifestations of yoga in the West. Even further, I contend that YotB utilizes accessibility as a platform to facilitate personal transformation that aides a movement of collective liberation. For these reasons and many more, this modern yoga site is a model towards yoga’s future.
But, how does YotB succeed in cultivating such universal accessibility?
To answer this central question, I intend to investigate the prevalence and patterns of YotB as a site-specific outlier in terms of accessibility that contributes to broader adoption of yoga amongst historically marginalized populations and those outside of normative race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class identities. In this thesis project, I employ ethnographic methodologies to deconstruct modern yoga practices, spaces, and the American industrial yoga complex through a critical yoga studies lens and upon a framework of intersectional social justice to cultivate a pivotal awareness of who is not welcome on the proverbial modern yoga mat, why they might be systemically excluded, and how effecting universal accessibility may be key to creating formidable change.
In doing so, I focus on four thematic areas of accessibility:
1) socio-cultural location
2) ability inclusiveness
3) economic equity, and
4) identity diversity.
Consequently, I argue that implementing universal accessibility within key yoga spaces is crucial to effecting social change in the wider modern yoga community.
Overview
In section II, ‘Methodologies,’ I will define the approaches utilized in my research, followed by section III, ‘The Modern Yoga Industrial Complex,” which includes a brief analysis of the modern yoga industry. Within section IV, ‘The Revolution and The Solution,’ a hermeneutic for interpretation will be presented. Section V, ‘Socio-Cultural Location,’ will then look at key YotB ethnographic and survey findings within a narrative structure. In section VI, ‘Lowering the barrier to Entry,’ I discuss how YotB has implemented ability inclusiveness, economic equity, and identity diversity as tactics towards universal accessibility. I will then end with section VII, ‘Conclusion,’ focused on applications toward implementation and insight into potential direction for future research. Section VIII includes ‘Notes’ and section IX is a full ‘Bibliography’ of all cited sources.
METHODOLOGIES
“ ‘Insider going outsider, going native in reverse’…that is to say a prior practitioner of yoga who subsequently joins the academy and subjects yoga to academic scrutiny, rather than an ethnographer or social scientist who develops a professional interest in the topic. As we shall see, it is also increasingly the case, particularly perhaps in North America, that these same scholars then take the knowledge and insights from their research back into their practice communities.” — Mark Singleton and Borayin Larios (S. Newcombe and O’Brien-Kop 2021)
Critical Yoga Studies
To undertake the analysis of accessibility within modern yoga, one must consider its multidimensional past and contributing factors, as well as the dialogue yoga has participated in with other cultural phenomena overtime. Rather than a compartmentalized scholarship of language, history, philosophy, religion, and health sciences, the burgeoning field of Critical Yoga Studies employs a broad range of analysis in order to contextualize the whole of yoga as an interconnected system within a larger understanding of cultural dynamics.
In their study of race, othering, and yoga’s entry into American popular music, social scientist Roopa Bala Singh summarizes critical yoga studies as:
…a rising interdisciplinary field that brings yoga studies, mobility studies, cultural studies, critical musicology, film studies, performance studies, critical race studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical geography, globalization studies, sustainability studies, critical tourism studies, South Asian studies, and African and African American studies into conversation together through empirical examinations that consider historic and contemporary developments in yoga…on such aspects of yoga as embodiment, performance, caste analysis, gender studies, and Black feminism. (Singh 2020)
For far too long, yoga studies have been a separate endeavor of the historian, the philologist, or the public health scientist, leaving the contextual interweave and impact of yoga as a social phenomenon outside the academy and reserved for popular discourse. Here, Singh implores the importance of interdisciplinary cultural analysis when examining yoga’s movement into American popularity.
Today, many more scholars are practitioners themselves and recognize the importance of investigating yoga with an intersectional lens. Herein, I leverage my journey as a yoga studies scholar-practitioner engaged in both analysis and activity at the intersection of modern yoga communities and social justice movements. As a second-generation, medium-brown, Mexican-American, able-bodied, full-bodied, cis-gendered women, yoga was something I came to with reserve. I started my practice as a means to alleviate stress, move my body, and connect with friends. And, though I have at times experienced exclusion, alienation, and disillusion within modern yoga spaces, I have also found healing, compassion, spiritual focus, and a continued calling to expand my practice over the span of 15 years. Additionally, as a teacher-trainer, yoga therapist, and now as a yoga studies scholar, I am steadfast in widening the reach of modern yoga systems beyond who and what have traditionally defined yoga in the contemporary era to those most disenfranchised communities who would look to benefit from its many physical, mental, and spiritual health attributes.
Consequently, I happened upon YotB in 2019 as a new resident of Long Beach and felt both welcome and wonder at the sheer number of concurrent YotB practitioners and their unparalleled visual diversity in terms of race, age, gender, ability, body size, and other sub-culture identifying qualities. That is to say, this is the premise by which I encountered YotB, as both a place for personal practice and a field site for my current research in the quest to understand accessibility’s role and/or other contributing factors to the multifaceted diversity of this unique yoga site.
During a nine-month period, September 2020 through April 2021, I conducted research for this project both onsite and online utilizing four methodological pillars including literature review, ethnographic participant observation, primary research interviews, and online survey. These scholarly tools of discovery and analysis allowed me to combine my personal knowledge of the industry, engaged experience of the field site, and commitment to community activism toward several unique findings to make yoga more accessible.
Literature Review
Though this specific thesis project took place over the course of two semesters, the literature review could be understood as the result of two years of critical yoga studies scholarship during my participation in the Loyola Marymount University’s Master of Yoga Studies program from 2019-2021.
While the breadth of the program covers historical and philosophical Yoga, Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu texts and commentaries, Sanskrit language studies, and health science and yoga therapy applications, as reflected in the topic of this paper my research interests have focused on exploring the dynamics of health-wellness culture and social justice movements in modern yoga communities. Accordingly, I incorporate books, articles, podcasts, and other digital media from critical yoga scholars whose areas of research include religion and capitalism, global spirituality, the exploration and circulation of South Asian religions, comparative political thought, and the history of modern yoga practice.
Additionally, I look to practitioners outside of the academy — leaders, advocates, community organizers, writers, and teachers — who have engaged broader public conversations on such topics as critical race theory, cultural appropriation, accessible yoga, trauma informed yoga, decolonization, modern yoga policy, and transformative justice. It is my conviction that in order to facilitate greater accessibility, diversity, inclusivity, and equitable opportunity in modern yoga spaces, we need the applied learning and implementation science from scholars and practitioners. As Singleton and Larios so eloquently stated in the open quote of this section, it is the individual that can weave a narrative from both that can impact the industry as a whole.
My research for this project also included gathering digital content and data from publicly available websites, social media pages, and event and news sites that displayed information with regard to YotB class announcements and descriptions, workshops, trainings, teacher biographies, and more. This information was utilized as material to verify stated timelines, provide context to interview accounts, and corroborate additional details from dialogue with the my interlocuters.
Ethnographic Participant Observation
As the opening segment of this manuscript exemplifies, I selected YotB as the base of my research and primary research site because as a participant my experience was entirely unique in comparison to years of practice at other more typical modern yoga sites. As a scholar, I yearned to understand more fully how this site came to be, what specific attributes make it different and sustainable over the course of 15 years, and if we might replicate its success in other locations.
As a basis for the ethnographic study, I attended more than 20 1-hour yoga class sessions at YotB from August 22, 2020 through April 3, 2021. For 12 of the field visits I formally observed and recorded experiential details and context within which the classes took place, the students that attended, and the style and form of instruction the teacher delivered. I was able to attend and observe classes led by four different instructors with YotB founder Dharma Shakti’s weekend classes being those I most attended over the course.
That this period of participant observation took place during the 2020-2021 coronavirus global health pandemic furthered my conviction that YotB is unique. YotB is the only previously existing, physical location of yoga practice that I saw expand their student-base during the post-shelter-in-place re-opening period. I witnessed YotB become a respite for individuals looking for ways to practice yoga, exercise, contemplate, connect, and be in community while staying within government safety protocols. Where other yoga studios and businesses struggled to create outdoor spaces and incorporate disparate online platforms, the large expanse of grass, prominent sea breeze, 100% mask mandate, and ability to easily socially distance mats, allowed people to continue their practice or begin a new relationship with yoga altogether.
Primary Research Interviews
In addition to ethnographic participant observation, I conducted virtual interviews via Zoom with four individuals who are connected to the YotB research site, specifically two teachers and two students.
Online Survey
In order to investigate YotB as a microcosm site representative model of accessibility implementation as juxtaposed to the larger macrocosm of modern transnational yoga, I felt it necessary to go beyond personal observation and qualitative interviews. With permission from YotB founder Dharma Shakti, and IRB approval, I created an online survey from which to gather anonymous quantitative demographic data, perceptions, and preferences from YotB participants. The survey was hosted online for a period of 16 days (Saturday, March 27, 2021 – Sunday, April 11, 2021). I was also afforded the opportunity to address the student body of six YotB classes directly and speak about the online survey at the end of class. The participation criteria necessitated that a respondent have attended at least one YotB class in the past two years and be age 18 years or older. The survey received 157 valid response submissions. Data analysis proved beneficial in assessing the aspects of the field site that are invisible to the eye and provided substantial insight into perceptions and execution of accessibility.
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For more information on my research or to read my full thesis, please feel free to reach out to me directly at: TainaBerardi@gmail.com or set up a time for us to discuss here.
