Embrace Yoga's Roots Quotes

“It’s for you, if you’ve ever been unsure, insecure or curious about how to practice yoga without causing harm. Even the best-intentioned can cause harm by taking yoga out of context or diluting the practice. Harm can also be caused when people aren’t aware of the culture and traditions from which yoga comes, and unintentionally disrespect cultural elements of yoga.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots

“If our thought, speech or action is not bringing us right there, toward connection, it is not yoga.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots

“When we mistake yoga for a workout routine, reduce it to physical fitness or even practice some of the deeper practices without an eye to the whole system of liberation it offers, we rob ourselves and each other of the potential of this practice.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots

“Yogic civic engagement invites a joyful paradox. Civic engagement invites us to get involved and to act within the world without getting too attached to being of the world. Civic engagement is connecting, acting and caring beyond the sphere of our own lives, into a wider circle of influence and impact.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice

“Healing justice is a practice that acknowledges our illnesses or maladies are not individual events, but are socially created, so healing must take into account justice in order to create wellness.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice

“Inclusion is an intention or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those who are disabled or non-neurotypical, or racial and sexual minorities. Inclusion, like diversity, is a step in a better direction, but often is problematic. Though well-intentioned, inclusion presumes there is a group that is in power that has the ability to “bring in” others with less power. This is often a white normative group, so this approach becomes white centering. It uplifts the white power-holders and power-brokers as the ones at the center of the narrative who get to pick and choose who they “include,” while they get rewarded for being “inclusive.” An analogy for why inclusion is problematic is when we say, “Invite us to the table.” Who owns the table? Who sets the rules, manner and way things happen at the table? Contrast this to a model where the disadvantaged people create, set and furnish their own table.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice

“Communities that heal, grow, care and inspire together, wire together, and bring us all higher together.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice

“For example, you could tie in the theme of ahimsa when describing how the goal of the practice isn’t perfection, or doing what someone else is doing or even what they did last week or last year, but instead it’s experiencing the shape they are in right here and now, with compassion for themselves rather than competition.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice

“You see, to be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land and culture.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots

“progress and not perfection.”
― Susanna Barkataki, Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice