My name is Bonnie (she/they). I have practiced yoga in the United States, mostly on the west coast, for over 20 years. I was a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher from 2016 – 2020. I don’t teach anymore, at the moment. I am working to rebuild my practice after experiencing abuse in yoga, a drunk-driver motor vehicle assault (not related to yoga, but still impactful on all aspects of my practice), blowing the whistle on abuse, and, well, a pandemic (you know the one!).
This website is about my yoga journey, the good and the bad together. I’ve been stuck in my practice, not really re-starting, not really ending, for a couple years. I think I got stuck and stayed stuck because I was trying to compartmentalize. I wanted to have one outlet to discuss the abuse and bad experiences, and a separate one about my current practice, and potentially teaching, if I ever return to teaching yoga.
I was actually reading the preface to a new cookbook when I realized, we have to take the good and the bad together and we can’t separate it. In “Everyone’s Table,” Gregory Gourdet wrote in his preface, “When I cook food from cultures other than my own, I hope to deepen my connection to other people, but this only works if we embrace the good and confront the bad“.
The only way to overcome the effects of colonialization, cultural appropriation, and abuse in yoga is to keep them together, in the light, with the things we value about the practice. As Susanna Barkataki and Ignite Yoga like to say, “We can love a practice and still question it.”