By Dr. Tyeese Gaines
While a mother of three children, Maya Breuer was dealing with a brother sick from AIDS, another brother with drug addiction, and her own health issues when she first found yoga 25 years ago.
“I remember lying on my belly and feeling waves of relaxation wash over my body and mind,” she says. “I had never known such peace.”
Breuer, now 62, says that back then she worked too hard and played too little. That’s when a friend gave her a pamphlet about yoga and a weekend retreat at the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts that changed her life.
Something shifted in her that day, she says, and she returned as often as she could to practice and learn yoga.
Breuer now shares the peace she found with other women, by teaching classes — she has over 5,000 hours of teaching under her belt — and with her Yoga Retreat for Women of Color held in various cities.
Octavia Raheem, 30, who has participated in several of Breuer’s retreats, was over a decade younger, and a college senior living in Boston, when she was drawn to yoga.
“It was a particularly stressful, confusing and challenging time in my life; lots of new beginnings and endings,” she recalls. “I literally felt disconnected from myself — mind, body, heart, soul, voice and power
She searched the Internet and found a Bikram hot yoga class — a type of yoga taught at room temperatures between 95 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Raheem says when she left the class, she felt brand new.
“I felt like I was breathing through new nostrils, or better yet breathing for the first time,” she says. She no longer felt the desire to rush back to the train. Instead, she walked patiently, taking in everything around her.
“I went back the next day,” Raheem says. “And the next. Ten [consecutive] days became 20. Twenty straight days of yoga became 30. Thirty became 40.”
Raheem ultimately practiced yoga for 60 days straight, taking advantage of student discounts and cleaning the studio in exchange for free classes.
What attracted her most is that the studio owner didn’t try to sell the concept of yoga to her. He did, however, make sure that she could practice as much as she wanted. It worked.
Gayle Pollard-Terry’s experience, however, was not as pleasant.
“I was apprehensive the first time I tried yoga,” she says. “As the only black woman and the only plus-sized woman in the class, I felt out of place.”
She explains how she was turned off because the other students already knew the poses, yet the instructor provided no additional guidance.
That was 15 years ago. She stayed away from yoga for 12 years until she met a teacher she describes as “positive, patient and gentle.”
“[Both that teacher and my current teacher] help me and push me to master poses that I thought were beyond my abilities,” she says.
Making believers
Raheem also wanted to share her experiences with others, repeatedly inviting friends to join her. But, she found resistance.
“[My friends] had excuses for days, or they thought it was a waste of time,” she says. “They would say, ‘What? You want me to spend money to lie around stretching?’”
Some black women aren’t interested in yoga because they assume they have to have a certain body type or have a certain level of athletic ability.
“Often, those pictured doing yoga are thin and athletic — not full and voluptuous and curvy as many black women are,” says Breuer.
Breuer adds that some black women also avoid yoga because they are fearful that it is an occult practice or a Hindu religion that conflicts with their own beliefs, usually Christianity.
“Eight years ago, when I started yoga, my very Southern and very Christian family thought I was finally going over the edge,” says Raheem. “Eight years later, when I can still fit into the clothes I wore in college, clear-eyed, clear skinned, but most importantly, clear minded, they are asking, ‘Okay, what’s this yoga stuff again?’”
In September, Breuer and Raheem co-coordinated a Yoga Retreat for Women of Color in Atlanta. Twenty women, ages 30 to 67, participated. One woman traveled from as far as London, England.
“The beauty of the retreat is that all of these women who are relative strangers show up, and we leave like family — having held one another’s hopes, fears, hearts and longings for a weekend,” says Raheem.
Breuer’s attendees describe her style of yoga as soul-infused, with music to match.
“She plays everything from Chaka Khan to the Isley Brothers to chants to tribal beats to India Arie,” says Raheem. “She plays music that feels like home, so we feel at home.”
And, she teaches them to “wobble” — a popular line dance created for the 2008 song by rapper V.I.C.
This past weekend, 15 women gathered at the Kripalu Center, including Pollard-Terry. She says it won’t be her last.
“I loved the retreat — the extra help when I couldn’t do a pose, the different forms of meditation, the lack of competition and the bonding.”
One of her favorite moments involved the Sacred Circle. “We trusted each other, opened up and told our personal truth,” she said.
“[One woman] stated that she felt she finally had an understanding of yoga and its benefits for women of color,” Breuer says about a Kripalu retreat attendee. “She added that she was happy that she was finally able to do yoga with a teacher of color — one with a lot of curves, too.”
The center sold out two weeks before the retreat, leaving many women without the chance to participate. Another retreat is planned for October 2012 in Detroit.
Blending in
Despite the fact that black women are not the faces of popular yoga culture, Breuer doesn’t feel that racism in yoga is any different than the understood racism in America today.
