Enriching the Community: "Dawn's Story" from Iyengar Yoga Detroit Collective
Gwi-Seok Hong, CIYT, Level 3
When the teachers at Iyengar Yoga Detroit Collective (IYDC) noticed the racially and economically diverse student community at our center was not adequately represented in the greater Iyengar Yoga community, we wondered what we could do to change this situation. We recognized the richness of our community sprung from the racial, cultural, and social insights and experiences our students and teachers provided. We recognized one effective way of sharing this richness with the wider Iyengar Yoga community was to cultivate a broader community of teachers.
All over the world, anyone with money can get certified as a yoga teacher, sometimes within weeks. In contrast, certification in the Iyengar Yoga system requires years of practice, study, and coaching. This level of time and energy can be daunting and outright prohibitive for many people. Especially for those from communities that have been marginalized, such as PGM (People of the Global Majority, or BIPOC/Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), devoting oneself to a yoga practice can feel indulgent, expensive, and inaccessible. At IYDC, we asked ourselves what obstacles we could remove to make the commitment toward becoming a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher (CIYT) more attainable.
In 2019, we decided to turn the commodification of commercial yoga on its ear, by offering a PAID apprenticeship to BIPOC students who had been attending class for at least one year. Instead of them paying us, we would offer a full scholarship for classes, workshops, and study groups, as well as a monthly stipend to help cover needs like childcare, transportation, and food. The stipend would be available as needed, to any of our apprentices.
To our pleasant surprise, we received quite a few applications, even from students who did not attend class regularly. We created a pre-apprenticeship, providing a complementary class pass for them to build a consistent weekly rhythm. After a year of consistent attendance, they could apply for the full apprenticeship.
Sure enough, we have built a beautiful, racially and economically diverse teaching community that reflects the demographics of Detroit. Graduates of the BIPOC Paid Apprenticeship have become CIYTs, or are actively on the path, bringing the power of Iyengar Yoga to their families, friends, neighbors, and communities.
Such a program does require support. Our teachers donate their time and energy to mentoring the apprentices, or accept a modest honorarium as a gesture of appreciation for running monthly study groups. Nevertheless, IYDC still has expenses of rent, utilities, and teacher pay for weekly classes.
While our weekly classes help support our programs, many of our students participate through our Community Gift program, which provides sliding scale classes, beginning at $5. As a cooperative, IYDC’s economic model cultivates interdependence. Our students know we rely on them to keep our doors open. Instead of coming to class to be served, they come as community and cooperative members, eager to participate and contribute.
We encourage those who have financial means to pay more, so their classmates with lower incomes can still participate. All too often, people who contribute important and necessary unpaid labor to our communities, such as caregiving, art-making, political activism, food-growing, and spiritual practice, find themselves with lower incomes. We want them in our yoga classes!
Our culture of interdependence helped motivate our student, Na Forest Lim, to create this beautiful short film, about our dear apprentice, Dawn Ceballos. Dawn experienced a setback in her studies with a hip injury during pregnancy, but has nevertheless persisted, and remains committed to the path toward becoming a CIYT.
We hope Dawn’s story and IYDC’s story will inspire others within the Iyengar Yoga community to create and/or support similar programs. We know that many CIYTs generously give their time and energy to make Iyengar Yoga more accessible! Thank you for your love and devotion. Let’s keep supporting each other to remove the obstacles to learning and growth. In response, ALL our lives will be ever so much richer and abundant. Remember Guruji’s wise words, “Giving does not impoverish nor withholding enrich us.”