Adeline Yoga’s community agreements are imbedded in the culture of our studio: providing a cornerstone foundation in our attempts to dismantle oppression in our own actions and serving as a key aspect of our organizational diversity and inclusion activities. The history of these agreements actually goes back to before Adeline Yoga started.
My interest in communities – their explicit and implicit agreements – started in high school! That is when I started my first community organization and participated in local activism. As a 16-year-old, I started to take women’s studies classes and study in the African-American studies department at both Berkeley High and then later at Harvard College. I became interested in bell hooks and many other brilliant thinkers on organizational behavior and leadership. Later, in my career in non-profit management, I got to participate more in helping organizations – and myself – get healthy by working together in the community.
When I became the owner of Adeline Yoga, I wanted to use what I had learned at our fledgling yoga studio. Years before the pandemic, we had our first meetings about how to dismantle oppression through social justice initiatives, launched our Yoga Blessings fund, started offering training opportunities for teachers and students on diversity and inclusion topics, and wrote a Social Justice plan for ourselves. In 2017, we began to work directly with Michelle Cassandra Johnson, and then Aaron Johnson’s team at Holistic Resistance also became our mentors.
When George Floyd was murdered, as we were in lockdown watching what was happening with racial justice, covid and healthcare, our social justice work at Adeline Yoga evolved at a greater speed.
In our despair about America, many of the staff decided to focus on what we could do in our immediate proximity to Adeline Yoga. We started several book groups that included studying My Grandmothers Hands and Transforming Ethic and Race-Based Trauma with Yoga. These were critical to allow us to open up channels of vulnerability and education in small groups.
As we continued to do with Holistic Resistance online, but opened it to larger group of staff and expanded the topics to include not just race. Gender became a focus for us. Adeline Yoga’s student and staff community includes many gender non-binary folks plus people in various stages of gender transition. On thing that is unique about Iyengar Yoga is we already help people through surgery and hormonal transitions related to the body, so we are are uniquely sought out to provide physical support. We wanted to deepen this work and to understand in the levels of nuance how to care for each other communally, both emotionally and spiritually. We began working with TransIntimate doing specific staff trainings to support non-binary and trans people in our lives.
Around that time, in November 2020, we hosted a potent workshop with Deidra Demons and Dr. Ebony Duncan-Shippy on the Shadow Work of White Supremacy. In further consultation with Dr. Duncan-Shippy I decided to reconnect with my bell hooks roots and study her books with the lens of how we can use anti-racist pedagogy in yoga. I used Teaching to Transgress and other books to rewrite the parts of the Sadhana Studies program and change my own teaching style.
It was a fertile time! I also had the opportunity to deepen my studies with Michelle Cassandra Johnson by enrolling in an anti-racist leadership training specifically on Race and Resilience Leadership. It was 6-months long and we were invited to write group agreements for the organizations we led. So, thats where this specific document came together. I worked on the drafts with our team until we came up with a document that met the vision of our Social Justice plan and overall studio trajectory.
Since then, our staff and Sadhana Studies program participants have been part of refining and reconfirming our commitments to the agreements. And, the group agreements are a critically important part of training both our new staff and any members of our Seva Squad.
This document has become one of the core ways we make decisions – it guides our business planning and helps us have the hard conversations we need to have. No document can exist in a vacuum. It breathes and takes life because we use it. It continues to evolve because of the ongoing trainings and conversations we have.
We are open to any feedback and thoughts you might have as the reader. Feel free to post any constructive comments below.