Join Dr. Sheena Sood for Foundations of Decolonizing Yoga: A Conversation and Training and apply a critical lens to your relationship with Yoga. Rather than settle for the mere insertion of brown faces in yogic spaces, this Foundations training examines the origins of yoga, the weaponized tentacles of the practice, and how the colonial and imperial layers of yoga are infused in contemporary practices and spaces.
This training disrupts the frameworks that equate decolonization with representation and identity politics and replaces it with an anti-oppressive and anti-imperial framework.
You will be guided to understand the significance of rooting the struggle to decolonize yoga through an ethics of social justice and collective liberation.
In this workshop, you will be invited to:
Relate the framework of decolonization to your own ancestral lineage.
Consider how orientalism, coloniality, caste-based supremacy and other structures of oppression are infused in contemporary yoga practices and spaces
Contemplate how the decolonization of yoga is not simply about race/representation/identity; it is also about its weaponization by imperial and neoliberal structures
Learn how to push back on homogenizing and & monolithic narratives of a cultural practice
Learn how to integrate your yoga practice to movements that advance decolonial and and healing justice ethics
Dialogue around examples of “colonized/weaponized yoga.”
Build your capacity to thoughtfully engage in your daily practice.
Develop a decolonized workshop series that’s tailored to your ancestry/community
You will be invited to co-create this learning space by building community agreements, participating in group work, engaging in reflective practices (such as meditation and journaling), learning through lecture and popular education activities, participating in embodied yoga practices, and interacting with other participants through breakout rooms and assignments.
Please sign up in advance to have ample time for all suggested pre-work.
ABOUT SHEENA:
Sheena Sood, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Delaware Valley University and a Philly-based scholar activist, yoga practitioner, and healing justice visionary. Sheena earned her basic and advanced yoga certifications at Kailash Tribal School in McLeodganj, India in 2011 and 2013. Her research “Omwashing Yoga,” examines how far-right ethnostates weaponize yoga to advance neoliberal, colonial, and supremacist agendas. Her work has appeared in Jadaliyya, Race & Yoga Journal, Al Jazeera, and anthologies such as The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide.
As her research and writings explore the Brahmanical caste supremacist, ethnonational and colonial layers of yoga and its weaponization by far-right ethnostates, Sheena’s offerings harness yoga’s potential for collective liberation. While curating offerings, such as her Decolonizing Yoga workshops, Sheena works to help participants recognize yoga’s oppressive and its liberatory potential as a tool for politicized healing. Sheena serves on the editorial board of Race & Yoga Journal; is a co-founder of Yogis for Palestine - a collective of yoga teachers and students, who strive to embody our practice by politicizing yoga toward action for Palestinian freedom and liberation; and is also the founder of Yoga Warrior Tales, an educational program that uses interactive, adventure-based narratives to teach kids yoga and mindfulness through a social justice lens.
