Yoga As A Tool For Personal Liberation
SHOW NOTES
Today I'm doing something a little different. I'm reading you a passage from Stephanie Evans's Black Woman's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, a book that traces how yoga, meditation, and mindful movement have been used for generations by Black women as both self-care and quiet resistance.
What struck me is the sheer range of practices she names, and the reminder that something as simple as lying down, stretching, or sitting on a back porch can be an act of liberation. In this episode I talk about why that matters, even if your life looks nothing like mine, and about reclaiming yoga from the westernized image of workouts and cute clothing back to what it actually means: stilling the fluctuations of the mind. Whatever heavy burdens you're carrying, I want to invite you to explore how these practices might become part of your own freedom.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro & Why I'm Reading to You Today
Hi, I'm Linda, emotion coach and hypnotherapist, who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
I want to do something a little bit different today. I want to read to you a small passage from this book that I got not too long ago. It's called Black Woman's Yoga History and it's by Stephanie Evans. It's subtitled Memoirs of Inner Peace, and it focuses on the history of how yoga, mindfulness, and mindful movement have been used as a form of resistance, as well as self-care and self-empowerment, within the history of Black women's health care. But kind of health care they employ on their own, and how it relates to other efforts to resist oppression, incredible amounts of stress, and so on.
So this passage that I'm going to read to you today is actually from the conclusion. And she's talking about, or giving a summary of, how she answers the question, you know, how have Black women elders managed their stress? And so I'll start here, page 341, if you decide to buy the book for yourself too.
[01:44] A Passage on Self-Care as Resistance
Linda: It says: We lay down, sit, stretch, chant, walk, and practice Tai Chi and Qigong. We write, read, play the piano, listen to Motown, and ride a bus, train, or airplane. We scuba dive in the Indian Ocean. We luxuriate in red velvet rooms, pray in churches and mosques and ashrams, breathe in private sanctuaries, and love freely in hippie communes. We sit in Paris coffee shops and on our back porches. Ride horses and contemplate rocks and sand in Japanese gardens in Tokyo.
We meditate to heal from debilitating illness and to gain strength for athletic victory. We sip tea, drink wine, smoke herb. We fast, purify with water, eat vegan, or embrace vegetarianism. We cook and we eat. We draw, paint, dance, and sing. We meditate to remember, to forget, to honor God, and to honor loved ones. We practice yoga, we meditate to relax and to live. And we relax and live to resist the forces that have been trying to kill us for centuries.
Black women's memoirs show that before 1975, self-care strategies like yoga and meditation were valuable for personal, professional, and collective liberation. Black women elders have learned, as Anna Julia Cooper suggests, how to stand aside from the human rush of human interests and passions, and have left memoirs of how taking time to listen to the voice of God calmed their nerves.
[03:26] Why This Resonates: Privilege, Stressors & Shared Burdens
Linda: So I wanted to share that with you because I love the vast, the vast array, the vast examples that are given here of ways that self-care has translated into the healing of the body and the mind, whether it's through what we are ingesting, how we're moving our bodies, the spaces that we decide to take up space, what we allow our eyes to see and to focus on. And I think this is particularly relevant, obviously, for Black women, of which I'm obviously one, because of the different forms of stressors that we face regularly, even if we don't necessarily have disadvantaged lives.
I would say that I am a fairly privileged Black person in some ways, just the community that my parents decided to raise me in as African immigrants who were looking to make sure they gave their kids the best education possible, and kind of just worked their butts off to live in a safe neighborhood, and all these different things. There are certain privileges that I have now as a result of multiple sacrifices that they made early on.
And even with that, even with those privileges and the opportunities that I have been given, I certainly still continue to face stressors that are unique to me as a Black woman. And so I think, take that as you will, whatever position, whatever place you inhabit in society yourself, you may look the same as me or may look very different from me. Almost all of us have something that we struggle with that gives us just ongoing challenges that we may find hard to manage at times, are heavy to carry. And everyone's challenges look very different.
[05:38] — Reclaiming Yoga From Westernized Fitness to Liberation
Linda: But I love the way that she dives deep into how yoga and mindfulness have played a very specific and ongoing role in the liberation of Black women, because I think that can be translated out to lots of different experiences. It's amazing how something that can seem so, I don't know, everyday. I mean, at this point, yoga has been so westernized. And the way that we think about yoga can be very different from the actual origins or the actual purpose of it in terms of being a tool to enhance one's ability to settle their minds. Yoga actually means the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, and how it can become a workout, or like cute clothing, or having a certain body type, or being a certain body altogether. But it really is so much more than that if you let it.
And I'm very proud to be a yoga instructor. I do not consider myself to be a traditional yoga instructor. And when I say traditional, I guess I mean more modern-day, where the focus is on some of those things I just mentioned. You know, I think all the most inspiring yoga teachers really have a different handle on what it's all actually about, right? Really loving your body, caring for your body, loving your mind, caring for your heart, right? Taking care of your vagus nerve, your parasympathetic nervous system, and all these big terms I could use.
And I do explain a lot of these inside my course Self-Love Skills, but basically all different ways to support the health and well-being of your body, and to make sure that your mind is intact, so you can handle the stressors and the challenges that come up in everyday life. And it's a tool that can even be a form of liberation. Like, that's how powerful it is.
[07:52] Using Yoga & Mindfulness as Your Own Liberation
Linda: I want you to explore for yourself, maybe in the upcoming days and weeks, how you might be able to utilize yoga and mindfulness as part of your own liberation, whatever it is that you're facing, whatever heavy burdens you're carrying. I do think it is just a powerful, transformative way of being, a process, a way of being with yourself, that I would like more people to take advantage of and really experience in a really genuine way, in a really authentic way.
So this is very different from my usual discussions with you. But it's something I do want to talk more about with those of you who are interested in sticking around and listening. Of course, I talk about lots of other things too. And I feel like this is just a really important piece for us to explore more together. And, yeah, you know, I just feel strongly that if I come across a good thing, my first instinct really is just to share it with the next person. I don't ever want the good stuff to stop with me. That just feels foolish.
When I come across something good, valuable, meaningful, something that has impacted and changed my life, like yoga, like some of the other things that I talk about on this channel and on the podcast, I want to tell you all about it. So that's what I'm doing. Anyway, I hope that this blesses you in some way, and that you enjoy the rest of your day. Bye.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
[Editing Note: The Love Yourself Liberated! group program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
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