Updated at 4:50 p.m. April 4
When Linda Wells began her yoga journey a decade ago, she got lucky.
“I started practicing yoga with a Black teacher,” she said. “It was the first time that I had seen a Black woman teaching yoga, having her own wellness business and being someone that was standing in a place of her authentic self. And I was like, I want some of that.”
Today, Wells is one of the yoga teachers in Boston welcoming more people of color to the physical and spiritual discipline. Black Americans may feel unwelcome at white-dominated studios, and some have been unreceptive to the practice because they think its religious origins would conflict with their own beliefs. Another obstacle has been the cost, with classes and teacher training sessions not affordable to those living on limited incomes. To address those barriers, practitioners and studio owners have been having healthy discussions about how to open yoga to more people, such as adding classes that blend cultures, offering lessons on a sliding scale and supporting prospective teachers who are Black, Indigenous or people of color.
“There are more opportunities for BIPOC yogis to get into the field and gain access through scholarships,” said Wells, using the Sanskrit name for yoga practitioners.
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The teacher who inspired Wells was Leslie Salmon Jones, cofounder of Afro Flow Yoga in Cambridge. Since 2008, she and her husband, Jeff Jones, have been offering community classes that incorporate West African music with yoga movements and meditation in what they call a "non-judgmental environment.”
Salmon Jones said that when she began her business, there was a lack of diversity in the yoga world, and it was challenging for many people of color to feel like they fit in yoga studios.
“A lot of people of color would walk in and they didn’t see themselves reflected," she said, “even men as well.”
Salmon Jones comes from a dance background and Jeff Jones' father was a bassist who performed with the likes of Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr. and Tom Jones. In each class, Jeff Jones plays live music rooted in his West African heritage with electric and acoustic bass. With the two of them working together, they create a class that makes yoga fun, healthy and inclusive.
“And so that's been one of our missions is to show that people, all people, can come in all levels and colors and sizes and shapes can do yoga. It's not exclusive,” Salmon Jones said.
In the United States, yoga has become dominated by white practitioners even though people of color in India developed the practice thousands of years ago.
“The idea of yoga really starts … as early as 1300 or 1400 BCE,” said Joseph Walser, associate professor of religion at Tufts University who specializes in Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and religion in early South Asia. He said priests of that era believed they could yoke their minds to a ritual or prayer by sitting down with their legs crossed, a straight back, eyes closed and meditating.
The first yoga teacher in the United States was biracial, an Anglo-Indian living in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1860s, according to Walser. That teacher’s practice included a mix of theater, dance and interpreting chakras, or energy points in the body.
“With yoga, throughout history, people have been mixing what makes sense to them,” he said.
Jana Long, co-founder and executive director of the Black Yoga Teachers Alliance, agreed that the practice has changed over the years.
“It's almost as if that spiritual component of yoga has been stripped away," she said. "It has been now pretty much defined as a physical fitness activity here in the United States or in Western culture."
Long became involved in yoga in the early 1970s while attending Howard University in Washington, D.C. Seeking an experience that would help her better understand the meaning of life, she explored different avenues, “but yoga was the one that resonated the most with me.” But taking up the practice meant facing people's preconceptions about it. She said at the time — and even in recent memory — some people considered yoga a cult practice.
“If you said you practiced yoga, people raised their eyebrows, they thought there was something odd, unusual about you,” she said.
The creation of the Black Yoga Teachers Alliance in 2009 signaled the start of a national movement to diversify the practice through sharing knowledge and resources. The Baltimore-based group became a nonprofit and held its first conference in 2016.
Long produced a film "An UnCommon Yogi; A History of Blacks and Yoga in the U.S.," which looks at the history and progression of yoga. She said it's imporant for teachers and practioners of yoga to understand the disapora surrounding it.
"To expand the knowledge base of people around yoga where they see not only can it support the body, but it can support your mental health — especially now — and it can support your spiritual health, and what that means," she said.
Wells, known locally as the Wellness Warrior, advocates teaching yoga to people of all shapes, sizes and racial-ethnic backgrounds. She has also offered "pay what you can" classes to appeal to people on limited incomes.
In seasonable weather, she teaches outdoor yoga classes on School Master's Hill in Boston’s Franklin Park.
That’s where Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, who has practiced yoga for 20 years, found her.
“I'm an African American woman who's lived in Boston most of my adult life and the [yoga] studio that I was going to had a white instructor, and I absolutely loved her,” said Hamilton-Mason, a social work professor at Simmons University.
But Hamilton-Mason said wanted to be more involved in the African American community in Hyde Park, where she lives, and sought out yoga classes that meshed more with her lifestyle. She enrolled in the outdoors class taught by Wells, who became her yoga instructor and life coach. Hamilton-Mason had found her niche.
“And it just seemed magical,” she said, “because it was outside, and there the majority of the participants were men and women of color. And it resonated with me.”
This story was updated to correct the name of the location where Wells teaches outdoor classes.
