How Yoga Can Help Support Traditionally Marginalized Populations

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I grew up hearing the refrain “you must work twice as hard to get half as far” from my Black parents. As such, I’ve always been driven to get as much as I deserve rather than just half. And for a long time, that determination showed up on my yoga mat, too.

Each time I walked into a studio where I was the only Black practitioner, it signaled another place I needed to be exceptional, a necessity I’ve experienced in every academic and professional setting I’ve known.

Not surprisingly, I created goals around achieving poses. Reaching the most challenging expression of every posture, perfecting alignment, and bending myself around my body became integral parts of my practice. I hadn’t realized that I’d gotten caught up with not only doing my best but being the best until I experienced what I call “slow and low practices.”

My self-awareness began with yin yoga’s slowed-down practice of seated and reclined holds. In yin, there are no perfect shapes and no achievement. There is only deep listening, contemplation, and surrender.

This presented me with an opportunity to break rules that had been ingrained into me. Here, I was able to let go of alignment and aesthetics. Any pressure to perform dissipated during long-held shapes that encouraged rounding, softening, and receiving. Yin gave me an opportunity to listen to my body, feel sensations, and observe what my body was doing. During these moments of stillness, I continued to have revelations that related to how I hold myself to a standard that has no reward upon meeting it. Something about who I am was very different when I practiced yin yoga.

Yin was my introduction to a different side of yoga and of myself.

The Role of More Contemplative Yoga Practices

Those of us who are BIPOC and LGBTQ+ find ourselves at the intersection of marginalization. We need to navigate the tumultuous experience of being human while also enduring all of the microaggressions and macroaggressions that come with our identities. This takes a tremendous toll.

“As history and current times have revealed to us, the BIPOC community has had extreme levels of exposure to traumatic events, whether this be an ancestral, communal, or personal lived experience,” says trauma-sensitive psychotherapist Lakeisha Gaitling.

She, too, speaks of communities being “met with a message from society that says they must outperform, be stronger, and endure societal and systemic oppression,” says Gaitling. “The effects of these issues often lead to overly activating the nervous system. Therefore, the idea of relaxation often must be a learned concept.”

This is why slower and more contemplative yoga practices can support those of us who are placed in harm’s way simply by existing.

“The more you practice what it feels like to be calm, the easier it is to remember the feeling and to call on it in stressful situations,” explains Dr. Gail Parker in Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-based Stress and Trauma. For those of us accustomed to high-effort coping, she says in the book, the experience of safety in stillness supports the ability to calm the nervous system when we need it.

Watching the news can create a state of fury or fear when people who look or live like we do experience harm. So can enduring unaccepting family and systemic societal failure. These are everyday realities for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ yoga practitioners. So are witnessing moments of social media’s aspirational Truman Show in contrast to our experience of reality. This push and pull of knowledge, partnered with the imaginings of our mind, can create a fear loop that is difficult to escape.

Slow, quiet practices disrupt this.

“As a queer person, I think one of the ways I have responded to homophobia is by people-pleasing and over-working, trying to make up for any perceived deficiency in myself. This means that my nervous system is overactive and what benefits me the most is to really slow down,” explains Jivana Heyman, author of The Teacher’s Guide to Accessible Yoga: Best Practices for Sharing Yoga with Every Body and founder of Accessible Yoga.

While the central nervous system isn’t something with an on-and-off switch, we can learn how to shift ourselves from a sympathetic nervous system state to a parasympathetic one, from stress mode into rest mode. “Restorative yoga stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, strengthens vagal tone, and makes it easier for the body to relax after stress,” explains Dr. Parker in her book.

As a teacher, Heyman is accustomed to trying to help people to move more, although his personal practice includes stillness. “Restorative yoga is the best medicine for being queer in a world that only accepts part of me. It’s a way for me to begin to fully and completely accept myself,” he says.

Why I Practice Yin, Restorative, and Yoga Nidra

“Yoga leads to more yoga.” When I first heard yoga educator Indu Arora say those words, I began to understand the calm, peace, and ability to sit with myself that showed up during my yin practice.

At one time, I needed more fast-paced practices to be able to calm my mind. The more I practice the subtler styles, however, the less I need the active ones to experience profound and lasting inner ease.

Many of us learn to turn to our yoga practice to build resilience so we can withstand the troubling times that we experience as humans. But we also need the experience of being freed from our usual confines.

The poses that led to this state for me were all slower, still-er, more contemplative. Yin yoga gave me somewhere to place my resilience. Restorative yoga felt almost criminal given how work had been coded in my DNA. And the wakeful dreaming state of yoga nidra changed how I experience the world.

Rest, resilience, and radical visioning offered new ways for me to create a reality beyond labor, struggle, and perfection. Here’s what I take away from each style of slow and low yoga.

Yin Yoga

While many confuse yin yoga with restorative yoga, a true yin class offers space and stillness to explore stress and resilience through long-held stretches near one’s end range of motion. The practice of yin yoga offers a place to step into physical sensation, to experience deep embodiment, and to linger there. The chatter associated with movement is quieted, allowing the practitioner to sit with challenge, thereby shifting one’s relationship with it.

Restorative Yoga

Gaitling explains that restorative yoga provides a respite from one of the common symptoms of trauma, which is reliving the past and/or worrying about future possibilities. “Restorative yoga invites the opportunity to cultivate a sense of safety in the body by focusing on the present moment and present emotions,” she says. This experience opposes the tendency to relive events that have happened in the past or engage in fear-based worry about possible dangers in the future, she explains.

With this practice of supported rest, one can experience a felt sense of safety in the body. Gaitling finds that restorative yoga is less likely than intense styles of yoga to bring about the high-effort coping that can be brought about when which ableism is an issue. “I believe the practice of restorative yoga dispels the ideation of yoga being for a specific body type,” she says.

Yoga Nidra

A state of deep rest, yoga nidra bridges meditation and bliss state. Part of the magic of yoga nidra is freedom, explains Arora, also the author of Yoga—Ancient Heritage, Tomorrow’s Vision. “One of the side effects of yoga nidra is it increases the distance between senses and limited mind and decreases the distance between mind and consciousness,” she says. “It is truly the land of the free,” she says.

In a traditionally marginalized reality, freedom might feel foreign. Yes, there is an intellectual knowing of living in a place free of war, but when seeing people who live or love like you as targets of violence, freedom can feel like it’s meant only for someone not like you.

“Yoga nidra nourishes and awakens the truth that we are and always have been worthy of support, ease, deep rest and self-devotion” explains Tracee Stanley, yoga nidra guide and author of Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity and The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices and Rituals to Remember Who You Are. Stanley joins the voices of teachers Octavia Raheem, Tricia Hershey, and Dr. Parker in advocating for deep rest as an act of revolution and opportunity for revelation.

In my ideal yoga world, all people from traditionally marginalized communities would practice still, contemplative styles of yoga. And, in that same world, yoga teachers and studios would be more aware of how to hold space for these students. These opportunities to experience sensation, embodiment, rest, and spaciousness are exactly the right practices for those of us for whom stillness is unfamiliar.