Dear Root family,

At Root, we have always been dedicated to sharing Yoga as a radical means for challenging and re-writing the embodied narratives we internalize and perpetuate in the world. Yoga is a practical method for making REAL the ideals of social justice, as the tools can help us expand our resilience to be with what IS — and therefore our capacity to be uncomfortable, to be honest, to shift and learn and grow.

To make a difference, we must first be willing to do the work within that expands our capacity to stay the course. We are all wounded when we mistake our habits and conditioning of culture, family, individual experience with our actual nature, and when that remains unchecked, it gets writ large in the body of the world. As a Yoga community, we have a responsibility and opportunity to use the tools we have to dismantle embodied systems of oppression and inequality — which operate like insidious cues to which we align without question — in our breath, our nervous system, the words we say/refrain from saying, the actions we take/refrain from taking. It's time to question and make very clear that an actual Yoga practice can give us the tools to practice conscious, transformative action in the world. 

As part of our broader re-centering at this time, the summer and fall seasons of Breath, Bhakti, & Samadhi will be explicitly devoted to exploring Yoga as a way of making real the principles and ideals of anti-racism and social justice in breath, mind, and action, diving into teachings and practices we can use to build our resilience and capacity to make meaningful change in our lives as individuals and as a global community. This series will be recorded and offered as an online bundle for those who cannot attend live or wish to revisit the teachings at a later time. 

For those who have been asking for an "advanced training," I have long said that such a training would be focused on what advanced YOGA (not just asana) as a living tradition is in our contemporary lives. This year-long program, which I hope to introduce this fall and will be entirely online/virtual, will be an UN-training: a collective journey of un-learning and re-centering the teachings through the lenses of embodied social justice, ecology, trauma, therapeutics, and other critical cultural lenses through which we will begin dismantling our own embodiment of commodified, hierarchical, performative, and appropriated practices in favor of developing a culture of respect, reverence, interdependence, humility, and service as yogis.

Advanced practice asks, "What is it to BE a yogi in the world? To what am I devoted? How do I align with that and take action on that? How do I make that action of service in the ways that most matter?"

Announcements for this RootEd 2.0 will be coming in August.

Until then, read on for more Root announcements.