This month’s featured teacher is tRISHA Smith
Join us for a transformative day of yoga designed specifically for the BIPOC community, where we’ll explore the connection between our bodies, the earth, and our collective resilience. In this workshop. Just as a tree flourishes when grounded in good earth, we too can thrive when we cultivate a strong foundation of support, safety, and self-acceptance.
Throughout the workshop, you’ll be guided through a carefully crafted sequence that emphasizes grounding poses, mindful breathing, and restorative practices. Each movement will invite you to connect deeply with your body, helping you feel fully supported and uplifted, no matter where you are in your yoga journey.
This is more than just a yoga class; it’s an opportunity to nurture your spirit, celebrate your heritage, and embrace your unique path. Together, we will create a space that honors and uplifts each participant, allowing you to bear the best fruit in your life—be it strength, joy, or connection.
Come as you are, and leave feeling rejuvenated and empowered. Let's root ourselves in the present moment, grow together, and celebrate the beauty of our diverse community.
All levels welcome! No prior experience required.
Price: $35, sliding scale available by emailing hello@bostonyogaunion.com
When: Monthly on Saturdays at 6pm
Where: Coolidge Corner Studio, 1297 Beacon St, Brookline, MA
About tRISHA
For tRICIA, yoga made everything else in life fall into place. With her well-being in order, everything started to make sense. It was a first date that brought her into South Boston Yoga, where she became connected to the yoga community. After 2020, she joined Boston Yoga Union and became committed to her yoga practice. Encouraged to explore the desire to teach, she completed YTT in 2023 at BYU. The feeling of fulfillment tRICIA receives from the practice is spread through her excitement in facilitating the enriching parts of yoga's physical and thoughtful practices of movement and breath work. She became a teacher to motivate people to nurture their own vessel taking all the time needed for themselves. It serves as a mindful reminder that “I’m not there anymore, I’m here now!”. Her teaching style is purpose-driven and she prioritizes self care. In her classes, tRish will provide an edgy, feel good class and offer hands on adjustments and words of encouragement to encourage you to modify and only take what you need. When practicing with tRICIA, you will find a safe and accepting space filled with the joy of life.
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