“Rosa Parks” by mattlemmon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Black History Month is drawing to a close, and although yogatherapy.health will continue to celebrate the contributions of people of the global majority* all year, now is the perfect time to recognize a famous yoga teacher—someone you might not have known engaged with the practice at all: Widely regarded as a key catalyst of the U.S. civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, Rosa Parks was also a yogi who taught the practices to others!
According to CNN, Parks was likely exposed to yoga as it was being popularized by Hollywood celebrities through the mid-20th century, although her mother had always emphasized the importance of daily exercise and tending to one’s health.
A practice of integrity and impact
In the CNN article, professor Stuart Sarbacker, PhD, explains,
“The way Parks took a stand for civil rights reflects many of the principles behind yoga that connect the body and the mind, such as satya, a practice of truthfulness intended to guide people to think, speak and act with integrity…
“Yoga can be defined as mind-body discipline, and it’s rooted in the idea that when you discipline your mind and body, they become very powerful, and then that becomes the basis for having a more skillful and more impactful agency in the world…
“The efforts of the Civil Rights Movement didn’t happen by accident…[They were] driven by people who cared deeply about the causes that they were invested in and went to lengths to train their bodies and their minds to be up to the task of effecting change in the world.”
Managing stress, building healthy resilience
In “Why Rosa Parks Did Yoga,” published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, scholar Stephanie Y. Evans, PhD, says that yoga is among the practices that Black women elders have turned to for stress management.
This is not to say that a therapeutic practice of yoga is a cure-all. Dr. Evans writes, “I am not saying, ‘Well, if you just shore up your personal practice with yoga—if you just meditate—it will all be OK.’” Instead, she describes an approach of collective self-care, an idea that’s “not about self and survival only.”
All of the tools of yoga, from physical postures and breathwork to meditation and subtle practices such as mudra and mantra, create a container in which we can explore objective reality. Yoga helps us to cultivate discernment, or viveka, which in turn supports the deep awareness of ourselves as part of a collective whole that equally deserves fair treatment and freedoms.
In challenging times, yoga as therapy can support the resilience essential for wellness, not to mention change-making. The practice supports not just physical but also mental flexibility through several specific mechanisms, including improved heart rate variability, cognitive function and memory, and immune-system function.
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*People of the global majority, or PGM, refers to the more than 80% of the world’s population who are Black, Indigenous, and/or of color and encompasses the term BIPOC.
