This project was born during COVID restrictions in the hopes that it will grow into a resource and hub where people can share skills. I hope you will see others here in the future.
about ayo
(photo: Maria Baranova-Suzuki)
they/she/ayo like mayo
Hi, i’m ayo.
I’m and anti-racist organizer and a yoga teacher who started this project as a way to make yoga more accessible. I wanted to address inequity, cultural appropriation, and oppression from a healing lens, and find a place for my voice within the deepening complexity of the commodified yoga market.
I’ve been blessed to be in the presence of many great organizers, and my ideas are not from one person. I have been an activist and artist more than a yoga teacher. While I have always believed healing is a process ALL people should have access to, I also understand, due to systemic oppression, we do not have equal access.
Yoga and meditation is not an ‘escape’ or ‘a moment of bliss’ for me, it is a practice to wake up to inequity, to wake up to our basic goodness and humanity, to find healing from what has harmed me, and to be ready to make change in myself and the world around me.
As an organizer, I have been deeply influenced by ideas of Community Accountability and Healing Justice through my involvement with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Creative Interventions, the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), among many other grassroots organizations in my journey. I’m a founding member of the Artists of Color Council at Movement Research because I believe being seen and heard is vital to the process of healing from oppression. I am honored to currently be a trainer-in-training with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) a national network of anti-racist organizers.
I started my journey with yoga in the mid 90’s, dragged to the local gym by my mother (my mom is in her 70s now and still practicing). Fast forward, and in 2005 I certified to teach at OM Yoga with Christie Clark, Joe Miller, and Cyndi Lee, and continued with Leslie Kaminoff at the Breathing Project.
I never registered my hours with Yoga Alliance because I did not and still do not believe in paying an institution to ‘validate’ my already existing credentials. I have over 500 hours of training and 15 years of teaching experience. I believe in education, knowledge, curriculum, but I am appalled by how much profit the western world has been able to make off yoga.
I’ve taught yoga in a variety of settings, with my first teaching experience at Riker’s Island in NYC, and throughout studios, non-profits, grassroots organizations, and public schools including Third Root Community Health Center, The Leadership Program, The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, FIERCE!, and the Audre Lorde Project (ALP). At ALP, I was honored to work under the leadership of Cara Page, serving on the Health and Wellness Collective and acting as Interim Coordinator, helping develop a 3-year strategic plan valuing cultural work, sustainability, and wellness for LGBTQ BIPOC organizers. I’ve worked extensively one-on-one with clients to address injury and pain management, as well as finding freedom and ease in movement.
As a professional dancer, I have nursed many injuries while on tour, and continue to gingerly nurture my aging, albeit generally able-bodied, physical frame.
As a mixed-race and gender fluid person, I grew up in a body that was always in-between, a little too much of this or that. But from a Buddhist perspective, right on the middle path. I continue to live with the ideas that my Bachan, my Japanese grandmother, taught me: complexity, acceptance, compassion. I hope you’ll see her influence, and the influence of other Buddhist teachers, in my teaching.
It’s difficult to ‘sum up’ how all these experiences combined have shaped me, but I know holding the complexity of each person, while appreciating and embracing the collective with love, is part of what it means to be human. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
I live in Brooklyn, NY, Lenapehoking.
If you would like to learn more about me, my art practice, my teaching offerings, please visit : ayoohs.com