Black Women's Yoga History

Stephanie Y. Evans

Description

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.
Illustrations

Foreword
Jana Long, cofounder and executive director, Black Yoga Teachers Alliance

Preface. What Lies Inside: Writing Myself Well

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Mental Health, Healing, and Wellness: An Intellectual History of Self-Care

Part I: Look Inward. Healing Traditions (A 1975 Portrait)

1. Yoga is Self-Possession

2. Managing Traumatic Stress

3. Medica, cura te ipsum—Physician, Heal Thyself: Meditation on a Fiftieth Birthday

Part II: Look Backward. Historical Wellness (Pre-1975)

4. Blue Zones for Black Women: Centenarians on Mind, Body, and Spirit

5. Weathering the Weary Blues: Enslavement, Jane Crow, and Migration

6. Everyday Violence, Everyday Peace: Civil Rights, Black Power, and a New Age

Part III: Look Forward. Toward Mental Health (Post-1975)

7. Memoirs are Mentors: Narratives of Africana Yoga

8. Survivor Self-Care: Midlife Mindfulness and Wellness Activism

9. The Purpose of Black Women's Studies: Meditation on a Fiftieth Anniversary

Conclusion. Woosah—Remember to Breathe: Ancient Peace, Self-Care Pedagogy, and the Future of Africana Yoga

Coda. My Last Will and Testament: Stress and Inner Peace during a Global Pandemic

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Psychology
• Ethnic studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438483658
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BLACK WOMEN’S YOGA HISTORY
SUNY SERIES IN BLACK WOMEN’S WELLNESS
Stephanie Y. Evans, editor

Cover image, My Cup Runneth Over. Photo reproduced with permission of the Annie F. Lee Foundation. Abe Ilo, president and CEO.
Disclaimer and Trigger Warning: This book discusses yoga for informational and educational purposes only. This book does not offer physical, mental, or spiritual health advice. This book also includes some detailed accounts of sexual abuse. For health support in any area, consult a licensed physician, counselor, or therapist.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Evans, Stephanie Y., author.
Title: Black women’s yoga history : memoirs of inner peace / Stephanie Y. Evans ; foreword by Jana Long.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: Suny series in black women’s wellness | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050105 (print) | LCCN 2020050106 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438483634 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438483658 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women, Black—Social conditions. | Older women—Social conditions. | Stress management. | Yoga. | Peace of mind.
Classification: LCC HQ1163 .E93 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1163 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050105
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050106
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to
my families,
my sisterfriends,
my teachers,
my students,
my colleagues,
and my love.
AN ODE TO ALL WHO WORK IN BLACK WOMEN’S STUDIES TO SAVE OUR LIVES.
[Makeda] and her people bow down in prayer to greet the rising and setting sun.
— JACOB LASSNER , Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (1993)
Again and again I had traversed those dreary twelve miles, to and from the town; and all the way, I was meditating upon some means of escape for myself and my children.
— HARRIET JACOBS , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Auntie Rosa had interests that not too many people knew about.… This was especially true when she decided to join us at yoga classes.… Most people could never picture the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement doing “upward-facing dog” or any of the other poses, but the older Auntie Rosa got, the more it seemed she evolved.
— SHEILA MCCAULEY KEYS AND EDDIE B. ALLEN JR ., Our Auntie Rosa: The Family of Rosa Parks Remembers Her Life and Lessons (2015)
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Foreword
Jana Long, cofounder and executive director, Black Yoga Teachers Alliance
Preface. What Lies Inside: Writing Myself Well
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Mental Health, Healing, and Wellness: An Intellectual History of Self-Care
PART I Look Inward. Healing Traditions (A 1975 Portrait)
1 Yoga is Self-Possession
2 Managing Traumatic Stress
3 Medica, cura te ipsum —Physician, Heal Thyself: Meditation on a Fiftieth Birthday
PART II Look Backward. Historical Wellness (Pre-1975)
4 Blue Zones for Black Women: Centenarians on Mind, Body, and Spirit
5 Weathering the Weary Blues: Enslavement, Jane Crow, and Migration
6 Everyday Violence, Everyday Peace: Civil Rights, Black Power, and a New Age
PART III Look Forward. Toward Mental Health (Post-1975)
7 Memoirs are Mentors: Narratives of Africana Yoga
8 Survivor Self-Care: Midlife Mindfulness and Wellness Activism
9 The Purpose of Black Women’s Studies: Meditation on a Fiftieth Anniversary
Conclusion. Woosah—Remember to Breathe: Ancient Peace, Self-Care Pedagogy, and the Future of Africana Yoga
Coda. My Last Will and Testament: Stress and Inner Peace during a Global Pandemic
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
P.1 Letter to Gramms, 1972
3.1 Evans, youthSpark Yoga Class, July 2017
3.2 Evans, St. John’s College Library, 1994
3.3 Evans, Passport Photo, 1976
4.1 Evans and chef Leah Chase, 2018
9.1 Black Women’s Studies Booklist, 2019
FOREWORD Jana Long
THE AROMA OF COFFEE BREWING fills the kitchen where two women sit at a small table. It is the dark side of dawn and they sip cups of the hot, bittersweet velvety brew, awaiting the break of dawn. They share a dissected morning newspaper, one snagging the crossword puzzle, the other skimming local news headlines. When they speak, it is in hushed tones, succinct and substantive, penetrated with long silences pregnant with nonverbal communication. This is their morning ritual. They are my mother and grandmother. I witnessed this exchange between them many times as a girl. This was one of their wellness practices that taught me to start each new day in quiet ease.
I discovered yoga in the early 1970s in my late teens. In fact, yoga was doing me before I was doing it. There were organic ways I liked to move my body that simply felt good. It was by happenstance that I discovered a public television program and saw the host of the show moving into a posture that exactly replicated the same moves I enjoyed. It was the first time I ever heard the term hatha yoga; I was hooked from that day forward and became a devoted follower of the program until it was taken off the air.
Hatha yoga opened the gateway to deeper yoga studies that extended beyond physical practice. I became a voracious consumer of books and lectures on yoga philosophy and the ancient texts. Svadyaya or self-study was the path of yoga practitioners in those early days because there were no yoga studios, mats, or formalized trainings. Yoga was not widely available, was often misunderstood, and practitioners were seen as cultish or weirdos, especially in Black communities.
During my householder years, I focused on the approach of jnana y oga to seek knowledge, and this anchored me throughout years of turbulence and contraction in my adulthood as a mother, wife, worker, and embodied Black woman. Yoga taught me how to manage my emotions, moods, mental agitation, and physical being. When I looked back into the lives of my mother and grandmother as I sought my own wellness, I saw they had absolutely nothing to do with a yoga on the mat but demonstrated a more elevated practice of how to live yoga, not do yoga.
I cofounded Black Yoga Teachers Alliance (BYTA), a nonprofit membership organization, with the primary intention to support the educational and professional development of Black yoga teachers and to serve as a catalyst to connect Black yoga teachers with opportunities to train, teach, and travel. Since its inception in 2016, BYTA has become an institutionalized voice in the broader yoga community to elevate the presence of Black yoga teachers and practitioners in the yoga world and fulfills an unmet need to increase the diversity of those who teach and practice yoga in the United States and to elevate our voices in the unfolding yoga narrative. 1
The historical legacy of yoga practice among Black people in the United States lies at the foundation of BYTA. It was important to know when and how yoga reached Black people who had been restricted from full participation in American society, from the initial introduction of yoga in the United States by Swami Vivekananda in 1893 to the vibrant, expanding and emerging numbers of Black yoga teachers today. We have a responsibility to identify, appreciate, incorporate, and disseminate the myriad self-care practices rooted in our history and the practices of our ancestors.
My research was compiled into a short documentary, The Uncommon Yogi: A History of Blacks and Yoga in the U.S., which was made widely available on YouTube to anyone who might be interested in a historical perspective that filled an information void. The thirty-minute documentary has been viewed worldwide and has served as a resource for yoga teachers, scholars, and practitioners. 2
I am deeply grateful for the scholarship of Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, whose research in Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace has revealed the healing and wellness practices of African American women ages fifty, seventy, and older so that we can share this history and these practices with our daughters, and their daughters, and those to come in the future. These important narratives underscore that for these women self-care can come in many forms—yoga, meditation, quilting and sewing circles, harvesting and canning foods together, and supporting each other and their communities with child and elder care. These ways of being, joining, and sharing, though not always systematically codified or categorized, were their wellness practices—the things they did that kept them sane in spaces where they were not always able to live fully free and fully human.
Dr. Evans’s work is part of the continuum of narratives that unveil the hidden gems and treasures of self-care practices by elder Black women, some under considerable social and political duress, and how they managed to stand tall, endure, and continue to lead full, productive lives. The narratives shared are rich in the inhe