Black Women's Yoga History

Memoirs of Inner Peace

Stephanie Y. Evans

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483641, 9781438483634
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483658
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-nineteenth century, with roots in African traditions.

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

PART I

LOOK INWARD

Healing Traditions
(A 1975 Portrait)

BYLLYE AVERY AND A CADRE OF ACTIVISTS in the 1980s created the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP). The project was comprised of ninety-six self-help groups in twenty-two states, six groups in Kenya, a group in Barbados and in Belize, and three groups in the home base of Atlanta, Georgia. Groups assisted with health screenings and referrals, tutoring and job skills, and other programs, including promoting self-development through sharing stories for personal and collective empowerment. Avery recalled, “Sharing our stories or consciousness-raising is an essential form of healing that dates back to the early days of the women’s movement.” In a chapter titled, “Breathing Life into Ourselves,” in the foundational Black Women’s Health Book (1990), Avery expanded on the meaning of project practices, “And we’ll be doing our self-help groups—talking about who we are, examining, looking at ourselves.” At the heart of the modern women’s public health movement, Avery clarified that introspection, “looking at ourselves,” is an integral part of creating healthy people in healthy communities.1

Part 1 offers an inside look at Black women’s healing through main subjects of this book: yogic self-care, stress, and memoir. Chapter 1 outlines yoga as a cultural, philosophical, and multifaceted holistic health practice, found in India and Africa, that includes meditation as a cornerstone. Chapter 2 defines and locates stress with attention to how race and gender impact experiences of traumatic stress, personally, locally, nationally, and globally. Chapter 3 uncovers how these definitions of self-care and stress function in personal narrative, beginning with my own memoir. This look inside stress and self-care sets the stage to more readily learn how these themes have operated historically.

1Yoga is Self-Possession

Through practicing self-care you can empower yourself to become … a woman who is an informed master of her own health, both for her own sake and for her community. This healthy self-possession can take many different forms.

—ELEANOR HINTON HOYTT AND HILARY BEARD,
Health First! The Black Woman’s Wellness Guide (2012)

IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT, it is political for Black women to claim ownership, or possession, of their own bodies. Self-possession is a basic human right, often denied. Numerous popular books, like Health First! The Black Woman’s Wellness Guide (2012), give prime real estate to self-care as a part of a health education. Authored by leadership of the Black Women’s Health Imperative (the only national organization advocating health and wellness for African American women), Health First! is dedicated to understanding self-care in the full life span of Black women. Yoga, as an act of self-care, often represents an attempt for Black women to experience empowerment, liberate ourselves, and reclaim our humanity despite systemic dehumanization.

It is widely recognized that self-care, as “healthy self-possession,” is the cornerstone of wellness. Yet, at the beginning of 2020, only a handful of book-length discussions have been published on Black women’s self-care, even though there has been a serious uptick on articles and online discussions in the years since the 2016 election. Books on the topic of self-care include Sacred Pampering Principles: An African-American Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Inner Renewal by Debrena Jackson Gandy (1997), The Language of Strong Black Womanhood: Myths, Models, Messages, and a New Mandate for Self-Care by Karla D. Scott (2017), The Black Girl’s Guide to Self-Care: A 30-Day Self-Care Workbook by Kristen Hemingway (2018), and The Art of Caring for You! Black Women’s Self-Care Journal by Sharea Farmer (2019). As one of the only academic books on the topic, Karla Scott’s work provides a significant contribution to a deeper understanding of self-care. Her phenomenological study surveyed 107 respondents and conducted focus groups with 39 participants. Her work moves toward a “Black feminist manifesto” and references women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Angela Davis as the path toward a sustainable struggle for individual and collective well-being.1

As outlined in a leading textbook, Managing Stress: Principles and Strategies for Health and Well-Being, federal agencies are finally beginning to acknowledge holistic practices that have long been the focus of culturally diverse approaches to health:

Since the creation of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in 1993 (now called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health), more money and more research has been focused on a host of healing modalities that fall under the domain of complementary or “integrative” medicine. Every technique for stress management is considered at some level to fall into the category.2

B. K. S. Iyengar, a leading global yoga master who began teaching internationally in the 1950s, published one of the most expansive illustrated accounts of yoga postures, in his book titled B. K. S. Iyengar Yoga: The Path to Holistic Health (2001). In Asian and African yoga traditions, “integrative healing modalities” of self-care have been practiced for centuries and holistic approaches are advocated in many cultures worldwide.

Definitions of Yoga and Meditation in Black Historical Context: Convergent and Divergent Cultural Practices

While women looking to improve their mental health may need more than yoga, learning to flex, stretch, breathe and get centered is a good start.

—TAMARA JEFFRIES, yoga instructor, Bennett College for
Women, in Black Women’s Health Imperative, IndexUS:
What Healthy Black Women Can Teach Us about Health (2016)

Yoga as we know it was an evolutionary philosophy and practice from the Indus Valley of Northern India, dating in practice back to at least 3500 BCE and in text to the Vedas in 1500 BCE. Roots of Yoga (2017) locates a complex number of sources, interpretations, practices, and relationships that combined to form modern yoga as it emerged from South Asia. Though the term yoga comes from the Sanskrit word yuj, which is translated into English as “yoke,” “merge,” “join,” or “unite,” yoga can be seen as a “union with the self,” or “journey to the self, through the self,” but it can also be seen as a liberation from self and, therefore, a union with other living beings and the larger universe.

There is no one linear evolution of yoga or consensus on one definition. Yoga can be understood as a practice and as a goal to reach ultimate consciousness or samadhi. In more modern definitions, like one offered by yoga scholar Roopa Singh, liberation is interpreted in more political terms—to resist oppression of white supremacy and colonialism as well as to reach personal enlightenment.3

Practices of sitting meditation (raja yoga), physical postures (hatha yoga), and spiritual devotion (bhakti yoga) were taken up by several ancient Indian teachers as codified in holy texts, from the Vedas (1500–1000 BCE) and Upanishads (700–300 BCE) to the highly influential Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (400 CE).

A survey of the literature situates several styles within these main branches of yoga. By far the most popular branch in the United States is hatha yoga, the physical poses and flows. Geeta Iyengar explains that the Yoga Sutra, or six branches of yoga, “lays down a complete philosophical system for everyone and is not confined to any group.”4 The six branches of yoga are as follows:

1Meditation (restraint, discipline)	raja yoga
2Devotion (spiritual)	bhakti yoga
3Asanas (postures)	hatha yoga
4Selfless service	karma yoga
5Knowledge	jnana yoga
6Chanting sacred scriptures	mantra yoga

Ashtanga, or eight limbs (ranging from social and personal ethics to total transformation of consciousness), are principals outlining a life of self-control through a disciplined mind. The eight-limbed path of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, known as Ashtanga yoga, involves the following:

1yama	principles
2niyama	personal disciplines
3asanas	positions or postures
4pranayama	breathing
5pratyahara	withdrawal of senses
6dharana	concentration on an object
7dhyana	meditation
8samadhi	salvation

The six paths and eight branches permeate the multitude of ways yoga is conceived and practiced worldwide. Interpretation of the eight principles varies in the English translations and there are numerous ways to embody self-possession.5 For example, B. K. S. Iyengar emphasizes that the postures of asana should focus on the inner body (also known as the subtle body), not the outer body.

Several ninetieth- and twentieth-century gurus have translated the Yoga Sutras, including Swami Vivekananda (1896), B. K. S. Iyengar (1966), and Swami Satchidananda (1978), making it the most widely impactful text on yoga worldwide. These teachers interpret a variety of styles or paths to yoga, but all in some way reinforce the eight branches of yoga and the art and science of self-development. In short, there is a wide variation in yoga traditions, including some that emphasize service to community (karma yoga), knowledge (jnana yoga), or sound/vibrational focus (mantra yoga). However, most styles or paths to yoga include asanas (postures or poses), pranayama (breathing), and dhyana (meditation). These three aspects of mind, body, and spirit (though woefully incomplete when extracted from the whole conceptualization of practice) are popularly known as yoga as practiced in the United States and other Western countries.6

As B. K. S. Iyengar notes, yoga is “an art, a science, and a philosophy.” As such, yoga is a humanistic endeavor, which explains enduring international interest. However, yoga expression now includes capitalist, material-centered yoga studios and vanity yoga on social media outlets to attain or increase celebrity. On the other hand, yoga communities have also developed consciousness-raising political activism as demonstrated by yoga events like those held in Ciudad Juarez in June 2019 at the US-Mexican border to protest holding children in cages, organizations like Off the Mat into the World that address multiple global social justice issues, and several Black Lives Matter yoga protests in Washington, DC, and Indianapolis. There are also multitudes who flock to traditional ashrams and retreats to work with classically trained South Asian gurus just as there are self-taught or culturally diverse communities in the African diaspora, South America, and other parts of Asia.

International Journal of Yoga, founded in 2008 in the Vivekananda tradition, acknowledges yoga’s established popularity around the world, but it is also a thriving area of interdisciplinary research that centers India’s contribution to the scientific exploration of yoga. Much contemporary research focuses on documenting and measuring holistic health, especially the physically healing properties of yoga.

This system of practice, which has a diverse set of origins, approaches, and interpretations, has gained worldwide popularity and has come to the United States in several generations, ultimately settling with the arrival of Swami Satchidananda’s founding of Yogaville in Buckingham County, Virginia, in 1980. For an overview of yoga in the United States, Stefanie Syman provides a sweeping account in The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America (2011), which traces yoga through major (White) American figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and popular Indian gurus, from Vivekananda in 1893 to Yogananda in the 1920s to Bikram in the 1990s. Her focus is primarily the Americanization of yoga. If yoga is defined as a serious practice of holistic health—a yoking of mind, body, and spirit—then African American women’s yogic practices predate both the current millennial self-care movement and the 1970s New Age movement.

For better and for worse, yoga is popular in the United States. Americans have created beer yoga, whiskey yoga, and goat yoga. Yes, there are even people doing alpaca yoga—really. Alpaca yoga is doing yoga in a field, where the alpacas are just chilling around you. In African American communities, we have trap yoga, hip hop yoga, and according to Janelle Monáe, those who just “let your booty do that yoga.” Several in Indian international communities have voiced adamant objection to the cultural appropriation of, commercialization, lack of understanding, and the sexualization of yoga. I agree with those who raise objection to “branding” yoga especially in ways that erase Indian culture and echo the call for an interrogation of the profiteering investment in creating a yoga industry. But, to be clear, yoga has been an industry from the moment it reached American shores. That is one of the reasons I have limited myself to home practices; studio yoga classes are notorious spaces for aggression and body shaming, especially for women of color. Yet, I also agree with those in places largely responsible for creating and developing yoga that yoga is a gift for the world and I only hope to encourage its popularity and diverse, creative cultural expression. There is, I believe, fruitful discussions to be had about yoga in Black communities outside of the purview of White construc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• llustrations
• Foreword Jana Long, cofounder and executive director, Black Yoga Teachers Alliance
• Preface. What Lies Inside: Writing Myself Well
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Look Inward. Healing Traditions (A 1975 Portrait)
• Part II Look Backward. Historical Wellness (Pre-1975)
• Part III Look Forward. Toward Mental Health (Post-1975)
• Conclusion Woosah—Remember to Breathe. Ancient Peace, Self-Care Pedagogy, and the Future of Africana Yoga
• Coda My Last Will and Testament. Stress and Inner Peace during a Global Pandemic
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover