Walking with Whiteness: Workshop for White-Bodied Yogis
10 min. Opening Meditation: Body Scanning & Centering
What are you bringing in to this workshop?
What thoughts/feelings/sensations? Where in the body?
Taking inventory.
Thinking of pulling light up through the feet and exhaling and releasing anything not serving you back in to earth to be repurposed.
Send an individual and collective intention for our time together.
“Black Lives Matter” is a prayer: Opening Poem
10 min. Who are We?
Our identities and paths, how we come to this workshop
10 min. Community Guidelines & Considerations:
Be mindful of your language and how it might impact others, whether they are in the room or not. Most things can be said—however difficult—when spoken intentionally with love.
Vegas Rule augmented: Names and specifics stay in this space. Lessons may be taken and shared.
Remain aware of the quality of your breath and what you notice in your body as we are moving through the workshop today. Be good to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Do what you need to do for yourself, including taking a short break or reconnecting with your breath and body, to allow yourself to stay present in the workshop. This works against white supremacist logics that undervalue the importance of tending to our inner knowing.
Generosity of spirit. Before rushing to judgment or critique, assume that whatever is being spoken is not coming through a place of ill-intent. Sometimes we don’t have access to the language that we are looking for to express and idea or an emotion.
If you find yourself becoming triggered, before projecting on to the speaker, consider sitting with those vibrations coming up in your body and ask yourself what they are trying to show or teach you. Sit with them and learn from them. If after sitting with them you feel like you would still like to share what came up for you, please message me in the chat directly.
This is an educational learning space. This is not about being “right” or “wrong.” This workshop is not about learning to be a “good” white person. As much as possible, please try to remain in your awareness body rather than coming from a place of ego which is expressed as judgement, critique, and frustration. Do your best to guide yourself back into your heart and show up to the discussion from a place of innocent perception, compassion, and kindness, trusting that we are all here together to learn more than we now know.
We all have different paths and starting points. It is not constructive to compare ourselves to others. If you notice yourself moving to a place of inner judgment, guide yourself back into your heart.
We are not here to “solve” racism. We are simply here to be together, in our bodies, and with whatever arises.
We are not responsible for what we do not know from our upbringing. As adults, we become responsible for learning what we do not know, and for locating resources to allow us to learn. Willful ignorance is an avoidance of social responsibility.
15 min. Introductions & Share: 1 min. (Who is in the room)
Name
Pronouns
What is bringing you
One word describing a feeling in your body
10 min. Journaling or Meditation Prompt #1: (Save to discuss later)
What does whiteness mean to you, personally? What, if anything, scares you about examining (your) whiteness? What confuses you?
What do you know about your family history? How much do you know of your ancestry? How do you think that impacts your relationship with whiteness?
30 min. What is Whiteness?: Starting with some basic vocabulary that many of us have learned and which we will discuss today. These are my definitions—there are many, and they are not perfect or complete.
Concepts and Vocabulary:
Whiteness White Supremacist Culture White-Bodied People BIPOC BIWOC White Privilege Colorblindness Intersectionality Structure & Institutional Racism Racism vs. Prejudice Microaggressions Unconscious Bias
Take a moment to check in with your body right now:
o What are you noticing?
o What is the quality of your breath?
o Are you holding any tension in your body? If so, where?
o Do you have any mind stories whirling around? What are they?
Questions & A: What questions do you have so far? Is there anything people would like clarified?
SHARE: Collective sharing of journaling/meditation prompts. Discussion.
How Does Yoga Fit In?
Yoga offers us a perspective to engage with the difficult emotions and vibrations that can come up in our bodies when engaging with the reality of white supremacy, and to learn how to stay present with the “what is” and our bodies
One of the major ways that whiteness impacts white-bodied people is by cutting us off from our hearts. Imagine what happens when we have been consciously or unconsciously taught to believe ourselves to be superior. Imagine the pain that comes with waking up from an illusion and learning that life is not how we were taught, and that we are not who we were raised to believe that we are. Imagine the loss of learning that what we were taught as “social privilege” is actually a form of cultural poverty that has prevented us from freely engaging with people in a heart-based way regardless of their assigned race, cultural background, or creed. Sometimes anger accompanies this, too.
While these losses are important and necessary, and do not come close to the pain and harm inflicted on BIPOC bodies every single day—it is REAL. It is important to allow ourselves to feel whatever we need to feel without minimizing it or thinking that somehow we are not worthy of feeling our own emotions. Shame and guilt are very low, dense vibrations, and they will remain in our bodies until we are ready to do the work to excavate them.
In fact, that’s exactly why we are in this situation in the US today. Years and years of denial, guilt, and shame have been trapped in the bodies of Euro-Americans for centuries, even predating arrival to Turtle Island
We know that intergenerational trauma is passed down to us through our DNA. This also means that to a certain degree our energetic blueprint is influenced by our ancestry— whatever belief systems they held, and/or were taught to them by their families and cultures. If they chose to “buy in” to concepts up white superiority, then energetically, those belief systems are also in us. And we will FEEL those remnants in our bodies, whether we “believe” in racism or not. The history of white supremacy is in our bodies, along with any other ancestral traumas that we carry.
Regardless of whether our families have personally invested in “white is right” belief systems, as a collective white-bodied people are responsible for being accountable to acknowledging and transmuting this receive cultural lineage at this time. Even if we do not personally believe the racist ideas that we have inherited from our family and culture, we have A LOT of work to do in our minds, our bodies, and our souls, to clear away the residue from the received legacy of racism. If we take a yogic perspective of understanding this to be part of the received individual and collective karma of white-bodied people at this time, then it becomes understood as just one of our lessons and part of the path.
We need to be brave enough and trust ourselves and our skill set enough to deal with centuries of repressed emotions and vibrations that are housed within our physical bodies. Until we do that, we will be stuck in this endless cycle.
It’s also not isolated to white-bodied people—everyone will need to go through this collective purge of ancestral traumas, but it IS the responsibility of white-bodied people to “go first” at this moment to address this repressed collective shadow self and come to a place of acceptance with the cultural inheritance of white supremacy. It is avoid taking personal responsibility and remaining in a place of victimhood and denial until we do so.
Doing so is a practice of Ahimsa—a posture of non-violence towards all living people and things, avoiding harm, and a deep regard for all life
Fear Responses to Confronting Whiteness
Go over the 4 Fs:
--Fight: defensiveness, “devil’s advocate,” challenge of worldview met with panic and fire
--Flight: minimizing reality of a situation, avoiding discomfort at all costs, colorblindness
--Freeze: white silence, bystander effect
--Fawn: “can’t we all just get along,” “we’re all really one”
Recenter & Process:
Think of a time when someone called you on your whiteness, or when you were very aware of it. Bring yourself there now. What was the “data” or the facts of the event? How did it feel in your body? What stories swirled around? What were your fears? How did you respond?
Write down anything that came up during that somatic processing
Recenter.
Microaggressions
The most common way that whiteness operates through white-bodied people who consciously disagree with racism is through microaggressions. Microaggressions are unconscious belief systems that show up in our language or how we engage with those we perceive to be different from us in ways that are based in stereotypes.
For instance, assuming that a Black person plays basketball and likes hip hop, and grew up in a low-income, urban community. While any of these things could be true, the problem is in the unconscious ways in which these stereotypes tend to be projected on to all members of a marginalized group. Think about it—white people are given lots of cultural space to play any number of spots, listen to all different types of music, and grow up in any number of environments. That’s actually an example of white privilege in action: the privilege of having your background and interests being seen as unique to you, rather than a representation of our race.
Feel and Process: Rewrite Earlier Memory
Pull back up one of the memories you worked with for your journaling prompts, a time you were called on your whiteness, were very conscious of your whiteness, or when you committed a racial microaggression. Try it back on.
Get the “data” of the situation as if it’s playing out now.
Notice what you are feeling in your body and where
Notice any mind stories or old fears playing themselves out
Notice your fear response
Work to accept that all of these thoughts and feelings are inside of you. The “what is.”
Ask yourself how did you want to feel in that moment? What did you want to say without acting out your fear response?
Watch yourself say and do those things.