Teaching JEDI STATEMENT
JUSTICE, EQUITY,
DIVERSITY + INCLUSION
I view Iyengar Yoga as a practice that impacts the personal and collective.
I practice and teach with a commitment to justice, equity, and accessibility, honoring diversity and inclusion, and strive to use the yoga classroom as a space to actively dismantle racism, oppression, and the cultural appropriation of eastern traditions.
I identify my role as a student, teacher, and community member. I invite everyone who works with me to co-create a space that prioritizes confidentiality, lifelong learning, growth, change, imperfection, accountability, responsibility, and respect.
I recognize that as a white, cis-gendered, able bodied woman who has US citizenship, many of my identities are a part of dominant culture. I am an activist, ally, and co-conspirator. The practice and teaching of yoga I offer strives to uphold the vision, culture, and praxis of social justice.
I am committed to harm reduction as teacher and student, serving people in a way that honors individual needs and boundaries, while encouraging growth, health, happiness, and vitally.
My teaching is trauma-informed and strengths-based with the mission of educating students to feel empowered in class to do whatever is best for them. I ask students for consent before offering physical adjustments and always provide modifications and adaptions for a variety of needs. I pledge to continue to do my own personal work regarding the places I hold privilege and continuing to make conscious all the unconscious biases I hold as a result of messaging from dominant culture and systems of oppression in the hope of continuing to co-create affirming and welcoming spaces for all people.
I hope to make the Iyengar yoga classroom an inclusive, welcoming, interactive, collaborative, creative, healing, and equitable space that values and honors the full scope of human experience and affirms all markers of identity.
Land Acknowledgment: Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land
“Land Acknowledgements are a simple, powerful way to show respect to the original inhabitants of the land where you are currently standing, presenting, about to engage in an activity, etc. We believe that this is a meaningful step toward honoring the truth, making the invisible visible, and correcting the American stories that erase indigenous people’s tribal history and culture. Land Acknowledgements demonstrate a commitment to counter the Doctrine of Discovery and to undo the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism.”
— Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness
I would like to acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory and land of the Nipmuc and Polumtuc Nations on which I live, work, love, and teach yoga. I offer my gratitude to the Indigenous peoples past, present, and future who have lived here and continue to live in this region and acknowledge the lack of reparations and therefore harm that has been caused and the harm that continues.
I aspire to be trauma-informed in everything that I do and feel it is critical to recognize that erasing Native peoples by not acknowledging both their history and their living present is itself trauma. I seek to align myself with the struggle against systems of racism and oppression that have dispossessed Indigenous people from their lands and denied them their rights to self-determination.
To learn more about this important acknowledgment please visit https://www.mcnaa.org/land-acknowledgement
“Yoga is firstly for individual growth, but through individual growth, society and community develop.”