The Story of Yoga Radicals Inspiring Stories from Pioneers in the Field by Allie Middleton

The Story of Yoga Radicals Inspiring Stories from Pioneers in the Field

by Allie Middleton

It’s an amazing time to appreciate the emerging global impact, personally and collectively, of how a sustained yoga practice seeds personal wellbeing and innovation at scale.

Growing up in family observing spiritual practices and feeling grateful for that background, it was almost a surprise when the idea came to help make the impact of practicing yoga more visible to others. It was at SYTAR 2018, the annual Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research conference hosted by the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT.org). Invited by Matthew J. Taylor PhD, I served on the small team to design the inaugural half-day forum on Community Healing and Social Activism. In this forum, emerging yoga leaders shared personal stories of how their personal yoga practices created the stage, seeded the soil, and ultimately co-created the potential to develop innovative yoga-based programs to initiate community healing and social impact in various settings.

A design emerged that employed the path of Joseph Campbell’s hero/ heroine’s journey; each emerging yoga leader responded to a set of questions formulated to illustrate their inquiry of yoga, their experience of moving from a “me” to a “we” focus or consciousness. Awarenesses shifting from personal practices as well as collectively engaging in group practices, each shared moving stories of how, while practicing yoga regularly, they each found ways to bring their internal awarenesses to life and expand their insights to enable community healing with creative social impact projects to be born. They each glowed as they told their inspiring stories of how others might also rest and relax into the benefits of a regular yoga practice and lifestyle.

As we deepened the conversation with questions from the Presencing Institute’s Theory U systems approach to awareness-based change, PI’s prototyping model formed the perfect mudra for our investigation into embodied change-making. The group was on fire about how to unearth and move the genius of yoga-inspired creativity and embodied innovation into the evolving yoga therapy space. A scribe documented our explorations on the wall with a beautiful graphic map of our shared journey as we practiced together the core movements of the Theory U awareness-based change model: embodying the journey across time and space while sensing, presencing and crystalizing with Social Presencing practices. It felt like a co-creation was happening in real time, yet it felt timeless. I remember taking my shoes off… :)

After the conference, there was strong interest in continuing the project. A year-long refinement process resulted in IAYT-sponsored blogs and a feature magazine article. This sparked the idea for interviews with additional innovators in the emerging global yoga therapy space and

somehow to find a way to curate those conversations into a book of stories. On what seemed like a whim, after a brief conversation, Singing Dragon Press commissioned me to write the book, Yoga Radicals: A Curated Set of Inspiring Storied from the Field, released in August 2021.

The 36 featured Yoga Radicals have played a major role in developing global yoga therapy schools and trainings, bringing the process of transformative, yoga-based practices into health care, business and not-for-profits integrating the emerging collective theatre of embodied leadership. Many others are following suit as the global pandemic has wrought such stress on our minds, bodies and spirits as we learn to navigate the stress of change in this new time on the planet.

My heart’s desire is to share these different jewels of personal and collective wisdom from the yoga tradition each of these practitioners has experienced in the hope that each story will nourish your yoga practice. Perhaps it will warm you up as well as further cultivate your interest in contributing to the growing field of yoga therapy and Social Presencing through embodied leadership practices. For the sake of our planet, we need this now more than ever.

Through the curated interviews, in these personal stories, you will find something that is simultaneously very specific and very nebulous, obvious yet hard to pin down, entirely universal yet deeply personal. You may also discover how a deep commitment to a personal embodiment practice may inspire something new to be born at a larger scale.

Just before this project, a first collection of my poems, A Wayfinder’s Wanderings, Lulu, 2020 was published. Some of these poems are included in this book. They were written after decades of meditation or while on retreat in nature. The interview process was a similarly shared embodied experience of being present with something miraculous. This mutual aesthetic of experiencing a WE space is different for everyone. It happens when we connect with something natural and spontaneously co-creative, so spacious and timeless. It feels somehow different, not on an emotional level, yet perhaps from a deep place of sensing, this space of connecting together to something deeper, something still unknown, perhaps. Each project was anchored in the deep bliss of connection to the ancient teachings and the deeply rooted wisdom now being illuminated by words emerging from so many warm-hearted places and spaces of people connecting together with spontaneous and fresh seeing, feeling and sensing. Embodying presence.

The interviews were conducted virtually between April and August 2020, as everyone on the planet was adapting to ‘corona time.’ These stories have landed now because of our shared dedication to deepening our practices, telling our stories from the heart. May these seeds of transformation invite flourishing and invoke healing and wellbeing for all. Yoga practices that each Yoga Radical spoke about helped them dream a new project into being. How might we all find inspiration from them as we continue to deepen our yoga and contemplative inquiry practices now?

The voices emerged from each continent as a beautiful collective and universal acknowledgement of the power of embodied presence through yoga.

Allie Middleton is an experienced somatic coach and creative facilitator/teacher with a local and global clientele, Allie is a writer who loves offering embodied learning experiences following the Theory U process, Social Presencing Theatre and ancient yoga and energy medicine practices. Allie has been meditating and practicing yoga for over 45 years, ever grateful for growing up in an extended family immersed in the wisdom traditions and deep ecology. Her father was a pioneering immunologist, teacher and researcher and her mother was a community activist and spiritual seeker. Inquiry and reverence about the nature of everything was a constant family conversation and she and her three brothers continue the living dialogue throughout the extended family to this day.