Interrogating Yoga Workshop w/ Bess Prescott

Interrogating Yoga with Bess Prescott

Hosted by Green Monday Studios

We’re honoured to be hosting Bess Prescott for her first teaching visit to Melbourne in many years. Bess is a much-loved teacher whose work brings clarity, rigour, and critical depth to the practice of yoga.

This workshop, Interrogating Yoga, invites us into practice and discussion around the history, politics, and power dynamics that shape yoga.

About the workshop (from Bess)

Brahminisation is a historical process in which local South Asian religious traditions became absorbed into the Brahmanical tradition, which was based in Vedic thought and implemented caste apartheid, with violent and oppressive results.

The caste system lives on today, in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, and continues to harm caste-oppressed peoples. Many practices and traditions of yoga feature elements that were (and, in some places, still are) gatekept from lower and non-caste peoples: the Sanskrit language, for example.

Many texts relied upon by modern yoga teachers are complicit in caste apartheid (including the Bhagavad Gita, the Patanjala Yoga Shastra, and the Dharma Shastras).

Yoga is claimed to be a liberatory practice: but for it to be truly liberatory, yoga needs to be liberated from complicity in violence and oppression. How we might do that will be the subject of this discussion.

Format

2-hour workshop
Lecture-style teaching + group discussion
Please note: this is not an asana (movement) based class.

Pricing & Access

This event uses a three-tiered pricing system:

• Supporter – $75 (helps keep tickets accessible for others- please consider this rate if you're comfortably wage and in a position of privilege)

• Standard – $60

• Concession – $45

We are also holding 4 free places for Dalit or caste-oppressed folk to join this workshop.
To nominate yourself or someone else, please email:
albee@greenmondaystudios.com.au

When purchasing your ticket, you will also have the option to make a donation to Haatemalo Collective - an international community of individuals from various Dalit and Indigenous Nationalities and allies of Nepal supporting the Dalit Bahujan Movement in the annihilation of caste through mutual aid & public discussions.