This month’s featured teacher is Jaya Aiyer.

My journey with yoga started before I fully knew what "yoga" meant. As a young child growing up in an Indian American household, my grandfather would wake up early in the morning to do his exercises. His routine included what I now know were Sun Salutations, headstands, and savasana. At the time, I thought my grandfather was just being silly! I would mimic his headstands, piling pillows in the corner and attempt to copy him. Or when he was in savasana, assuming he had simply fallen asleep, I would poke and prod him to wake up. My grandfather instilled in me the importance of two core Hindu philosophies: dharma, one's path, and karuna, compassion for all. Only years later, I realized he was my first yoga guru. 

I've practiced yoga on and off since 2010. I started my yoga training in Cambridge at the Breathing Room, where I had the opportunity to also learn Kalaripayattu, a martial arts form from Southern India. After college, I returned home to Boston and found a community in Jamaica Plain at Jamaica Plain Centre Yoga. As of May 2024, I completed my 200 RYT with JPCY where I had the opportunity to delve into anatomy, alignment, sequencing, and philosophy. 

Outside the studio, I have trained in Bharatanatyam, a style originating from Tamil Nadu in Southern India, for over 20 years and continue to perform around the Boston area. I am also a community organizer where my work focuses on progressive, working class AAPI-solidarity building across the Commonwealth. As an instructor and facilitator, I hope to bring a deeper awareness of body, energy, and the modality of movement. I aspire to create a space with participants which moves beyond the student-teacher dynamic and towards mutual love and acceptance for all. 

The Class:

The BIPOC Yoga Collective is an accessible, all-levels practice for those who identify as BIPOC. This monthly class intends to create a safe and familiar space to expose new and seasoned yogis to Boston’s BIPOC instructors, local community of practitioners, and a diversifying studio space. Classes will rotate between different instructors who will take care to ensure students at all levels are able to follow along and create a container that may leave them feeling stronger, empowered, or rested depending on the class design.

Purpose:

To create a shared space where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color may be in community with others who share a deep understanding of their marginalization, because of their unspoken shared experience. The intent is to create a sense of safety in one’s authenticity without the gaze of well-meaning and curious onlookers or “saviors”.

We hope to create an automatic increase of baseline trust simply by holding space for this experience, but continuing to build upon it by leveraging ongoing feedback and representation from the varied perspectives, racial groups and levels of privilege within the broader BIPOC identity group.

Our goal is to have attendees engage in the practice of yoga without the reminders of negatively racialized lived experiences within their racial identities, and create solidarity among us.

Why BIPOC benefit from their own spaces:

Although those who don’t experience racialization or colorism may not see it, systemic oppression and overt/unconscious biases often create division, disadvantaging those not part of dominant groups within various settings. Most Western yoga studios are owned and attended by cis, white, thin, able-bodied people who make up a dominant group. Affinity groups create a boundary for those who have or could experience ‘othering’, microaggressions, or just feel out of place, the space to feel sheltered from that real or perceived threat

How to determine if participation is for you:

You might ask yourself:

• Do I authentically share this identity or background, including lived experience?

• Have I felt unwelcome, unsafe, or unseen in a space similar to the one this affinity space is being held?

• Is my presence adding to that shared sense of safety among those sharing this identity? Could my presence break that sense of safety?

What to expect:

• Rotating instructors

• Visiting instructors

• Mixed-levels

• Back to basics

• Events

• Quarterly workshops

Price: $10

When: Monthly on Saturdays at 2pm