Yoga Equity offers accessible consultation, training, and strategic planning related to social-political issues and yoga. Services are offered by Tobias Wiggins, a Ph.D. candidate, consultant, and trainer living in the Greater Toronto Area. He holds over 10 years of experience offering anti-oppression education, and a deep passion for creating social change.
Tobias was the distinguished recipient of the 2017 Yoga Alliance Foundation‘s Aspiring Yoga Teacher Scholarship, which are awarded to yoga practitioners with a high level of leadership and/or community service experience. In 2014, he produced and directed the popular open access video You Are Here: Exploring Yoga and the Impacts of Cultural Appropriation. He currently offers yoga-specific social justice education, work which aims to tackle systemic issues like transphobia, sexism, racism, and accessibility. He has been practicing yoga for almost 20 years. You can learn more about Tobias on his personal website.
***
A note on racism and cultural appropriation
To responsibly do this work, it’s necessary to acknowledge the intricate ways that racism and colonization inform how yoga is taken up in the West. As a white settler, Tobias’s relationship to yoga is enmeshed with these complexities, including the power structures that work to appropriate (to take without recognition or honouring), essentialize (to reduce or partition a multifaceted cultural practice), and fetishize (to romanticize and consume through racial stereotypes, white fantasies of cultural difference). Yoga is a Sanskrit word, one meaning of which is to ‘unite.’ This is a spiritual, mental, and physical practice that has its roots in India. There are many different types of yoga, and these varied lineages all have different cultural locations, teachings, and goals. Thinking and talking openly about histories of cultural appropriation, colonization, and racism is an important part of Tobias’s own daily yoga practice, and part of his ongoing journey as a person with intersections of racial and colonial privilege. Please join him in those conversations!
***
Yoga Equity 