Disability-inclusive yoga teaching starts long before your students or workshop participants ever enter your teaching space. It starts before you learn how to adapt asana and before you assess your class or workshop space for accessibility needs.
It starts with taking time to learn about disability culture and history, and engaging in looking at your own attitudes around and experience with disability.
Through a combination of journaling prompts, lecture, and engagement with participant questions this workshop will give you the resources to start on this learning journey.
You will learn:
* A brief history of disability rights.
* The ten principles of disability justice.
* How we are overusing the word accessibility, and what to say instead.
* Some links between yogic teachings and disability justice.**
* Three action steps you can take with you.
** Robin wishes to make it clear that she is not a yoga philosophy teacher. Any discussion about yogic teachings will be introductory at best, and workshop participants who are interested in digging deeper into philosophy are encouraged to seek guidance from well-trained people who have been authorized by *their* teachers to transmit the yoga teachings.
Bio:
Robin Mandell is a writer, yoga teacher, and disability advocate/activist living in Seattle Washington.
At different times in her life she has taught yoga, studied technical and professional writing, answered phones on crisis hotlines, and educated young people around sexual health and relationships.
She uses what she has learned from a lifetime of education, training, and personal experience to make sense of the complex world we live in, hold nonjudgmental space for all people, and help people cultivate comfort when confronted by "the other." Once upon a time she would have described this as helping people walk a mile in other people's shoes, but she now knows that even shoes of the same size fit different feet uniquely, which means that the metaphor doesn't work for helping us be better humans to each other.
In all of her work, she follows the principles of disability justice, including a deep and abiding respect for all human body-minds.
In her spare time Robin enjoys attending symphony concerts, consuming her three favourite things - books, tea, and gluten-free cookies, and mothering her rescue dog Annie.
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