How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

Develop a powerful practice of deep relaxation and transformative self-inquiry with this essential guide to yoga nidra, accompanied by downloadable audio meditations. Yoga nidra is a practice devoted to allowing your body and mind to rest while your consciousness remains awake and aware, creating the opportunity for you to tap into a deeper understanding of yourself and your true nature. At its heart, yoga nidra is about waking up to the fullness of your life. In Radiant Rest, Tracee Stanley draws on over twenty years of experience as a yoga nidra teacher and practitioner to introduce the history of yoga nidra, mind and body relaxation, and the surprising power of rest in our daily lives. This accessible guide shares six essential practices arranged around the koshas, the five subtle layers of the body: the physical, energetic, mental, intuitive, and bliss bodies. It also offers shorter, accessible practices for people pressed for time. Each practice is explained through step-by-step instructions and ends with self-inquiry prompts. A set of guided audio meditations provide further instruction. Feel a greater sense of stability, peace, and clarity in all aspects of your life as you deepen your yoga nidra practice and discover its true power.

2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award - Multicultural 2021 Christianity Today Book Award - Christian Living/Discipleship Award Publishers Weekly starred review "People of color have endured traumatic histories and almost daily assaults on our dignity. We have prayed about racism, been in denial, or acted out in anger, but we have not known how to individually or collectively pursue healing from the racial trauma." As a child, Sheila Wise Rowe was bused across town to a majority white school, where she experienced the racist lie that one group is superior to all others. This lie continues to be perpetuated today by the action or inaction of the government, media, viral videos, churches, and within families of origin. In contrast, Scripture declares that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. Rowe, a professional counselor, exposes the symptoms of racial trauma to lead readers to a place of freedom from the past and new life for the future. In each chapter, she includes an interview with a person of color to explore how we experience and resolve racial trauma. With Rowe as a reliable guide who has both been on the journey and shown others the way forward, you will find a safe pathway to resilience.

Gold Nautilus Book Award Winner Restoring your body, mind, and spirit amid change is an act of courage, empowerment, and hope. This warm, powerful guide will help you honor the changes and spaces in your life with purposeful rest and reflection. If you're trying to push your way through endings, beginnings, and places of uncertainty, only to find yourself more confused, disconnected, tired, and uncertain, this book will hold and fortify you. Yoga teacher and activist Octavia Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all sorts of change. Change in our lives—whether it be welcome, joyful, challenging, or more subtle—presents us with the opportunity to pause and gather our energy to work with whatever lies ahead. Drawing wisdom from yoga philosophy and her many years of teaching experience, Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all types of change. She gives us three simple restorative yoga poses (savasana, side lying pose, and child’s pose), and offers short teachings, reflections, and practices to see us through times of ending, beginning, and liminal/transitional space. She shows us how slowing down, stillness, and deeper connection to our own transitions empower us to move through collective shifts with more grace—and what it means to navigate shifts and change with presence and courage.

Presenting ways in which Restorative Yoga can contribute to healing emotional wounds, this book invites yoga teachers, therapists and practitioners to consider the psychological impact of ethnic and race-based stress and trauma. It aids in the process of uncovering, examining, and healing one's own emotional wounds and offers insight into avoiding wounding or re-wounding others. The book describes how race-based traumatic stress differs from PTSD and why a more targeted approach to treatment is necessary, as well as what can trigger it. It also considers the implications of an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse and global yoga community, as well as the importance of creating conscious yoga communities of support and connection, where issues of race and ethnicity are discussed openly, non-defensively and constructively. By providing a therapeutic structure that assists those directly and indirectly impacted by ethnic and race-based stress and trauma, Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma provides valuable tools for aiding in the processing of stressful experiences and in trauma recovery.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "My Grandmother's Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice."— Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system. Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary. Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, is a therapist with decades of experience currently in private practice in Minneapolis, MN, specializing in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert on conflict and violence. Menakem has studied with bestselling authors Dr. David Schnarch (Passionate Marriage) and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score). He also trained at Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute.

Achieve More Focus, Balance, and Peace in Minutes With just five minutes of meditation a day, you can dial down that constant inner chatter and turn up the volume of your true positive essence. Join meditation expert Anusha Wijeyakumar, MA, as she shares the transformative meditation program that she developed for California's world-famous Hoag Hospital. You will discover several five-minute meditations designed for heart opening, chakra balancing, trusting your inner truth, and more. Along with tips for powerful intention-setting and accessible pranayama-breathwork exercises, these meditations will help you create more joy and peace in your life while learning to control negative internal narratives. Raised in the philosophy of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) on her way to becoming a clinician and teacher, Anusha expertly helps you integrate ancient Eastern wisdom into your modern Western lifestyle for a deeper sense of purpose, self-acceptance, and self-love.