This month’s featured teacher is Kiera Penpeci.
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 Kiera
I began my practice in studios in Boston in 2013 while in search of community. The practice was a soft landing when navigating corporate life and training for long-distance cycling. Since then my practice has evolved right alongside my professional work, spiritual awakening, and healing. Part of yoga, for me, is a way to embody healing in its various forms, so as an educator I naturally gravitated to facilitating this experience for others. To support my instruction, I completed a 200-hr YTT at JP Centre Yoga and more recently completed a certification at Threes Physiyoga.
My instruction is based on the Physiyoga approach, which combines physical therapy principles and yoga. In my classes, I use knowledge of joint mechanics and muscle physiology to teach movements for longevity and injury recovery. Students can expect sessions that prioritize sensory awareness, strength and stability before deep stretching and using props as neuromuscular feedback. In a typical class I will break a pose or movement down by each joint to make it as simple as possible, then gradually build back up adding in more resistance, compound movements, and complexity. My aim is to support students in recognizing that each joint/muscle area can perform a movement with strength and control by starting small, then progressing to more challenging poses where the whole body shares the work.
When I’m not teaching yoga at studios in Boston and privately, I’m working as an Organizational Psychologist, facilitating organizational healing and equal opportunity, and a professor in the Organizational and Leadership Psychology department at William James College where I’m focused on multicultural and inclusive leadership and organizational assessment.
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