Episode 3: Understanding Yoga Exclusion, Fatphobia + Racial Trauma with Leah Saliter

Written By Harpinder Mann

While mainstream yoga culture reduces the practice to a physical fitness routine, we dare to ask: what magic unfolds when yoga becomes a celebration of the body and the self, just as they are? In this episode of the Liberating Yoga Podcast, host Harpinder Mann is in conversation with Death Doula & Yoga Instructor, Leah Saliter. They discuss the often-exclusionary environments that yoga studios create and explore the healing power of yoga for Black and Brown abundant bodies.

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE:

  • Yoga as a lifestyle that cultivates curiosity, peace, growth, and safety through divine forces and human community

  • How centering revenue makes it nearly impossible to teach yoga in its depth and fullness at studios

  • The violence, fatphobia, and racism that pervades yoga studio marketing and practices (even and perhaps especially among those that claim to be “accessible,” “diverse,” and “authentic”)

  • How ahimsa (non-violence) encourages yoga practitioners to reckon with their internalized fatphobia and make peace with their bodies

  • Why facilitating yoga practices specifically for abundant bodies is so powerful

  • The ways in which yoga can provide an anchor for processing racial and generational trauma

Access this episode’s transcript here

Pre-order Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to HealinG by harpinder kaur mann today!

Yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann shows American yoga practitioners a path to reclaim yoga from appropriation and recenter the practice where it belongs.

In Liberating Yoga, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann draws from her own perspective as a Sikh-Punjabi woman who was alienated by the way yoga is practiced in the United States, but found her way toward reclaiming the spiritual practice for herself. Mann demonstrates that moving away from appropriated forms of yoga and back to yoga's roots is the only true path to healing--both for yoga practitioners who desire to engage responsibly in the practice with cultural appreciation and, especially, for marginalized yogis who wish to reconnect with ancestral spiritual practices and reclaim their full identity.

ABOUT Leah Saliter:

Leah Saliter (she/her) is a Death Doula, Digital Creator, Yoga enthusiast, and certified Yoga-Asana instructor who teaches Yoga as a source of healing for Black and Brown, abundant bodies. She is the founder of Unity in Healing, an organization that creates safe spaces where folks can experience the power of healing in community through movement practice, tarot, divination work, and ancestral practices. Leah's mission is to create accessible healing communities that support the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual exploration of self. 

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Harpinder Mann
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Episode 4: Embodying Yogic Activism with Reggie Hubbard
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Episode 2: Yoga vs. Commercialization: Can We Reclaim It? with Susanna Barkataki