A yoga revolution in Pittsburgh
Published originally on the Keystone Edge by Kyle V. Hiller.
“My impression of yoga had an emphasis on physical activity and looking good,” says Heather Manning, an instructor at YOGAMOTIF, a creative wellness studio in Pittsburgh. “At the time I enjoyed that, but as my values shifted as I got older, it became a place where I didn’t feel safe.”
Now she, along with a local community of Black yoga teachers and entrepreneurs, is working to change that. Manning, Alecia Dawn, Felicia Savage Friedman, and Maya Savage have all built yoga practices in Steel City that emphasize social and reproductive justice.
For these women, part of becoming a yoga instructor meant challenging some of the ingrained conventions and goals of Western yoga.
“Yoga in the West was about contortions and being flexible, as opposed to being flexible mentally,” explains Savage.
For Dawn, despite enjoying yoga in high school, she knew something was missing.
“Most of the places I studied at were white spaces with white women and that was normalized for me,” she recalls.
It wasn’t until she took a yoga class at the YMCA that it clicked for her what yoga could really be.
“I laughed a lot in the class,” she says. “It wasn’t just this serious space where you had to get every pose right. They were different ages, different body types, different colors and backgrounds.”
That environment was a truer reflection of Pittsburgh and its communities.
***
A certified prenatal yoga instructor, Alecia Dawn is the founder of YOGAMOTIF, which offers art and yoga classes to local youth, pregnant people, and the community at large. Holder of a masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon, Dawn’s work with Black-led arts and culture organizations in Pittsburgh led to a seat on the board of New Voices in Reproductive Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Black women, femmes, and girls. Via having her own children — and experiencing reproductive injustices herself — she’s developed a deeply personal perspective on these issues.
The work is essential. According to Pittsburgh’s 2019 Inequality Across Gender and Race report, 18 out of every 1,000 Black pregnancies end in a fetal death compared with only nine out of every 1,000 for white pregnancies. Black women’s maternal mortality is higher in Pittsburgh than in 97 percent of similar cities. Black pregnancies are also more likely to have adverse outcomes including infection, admission to the NICU, and congenital anomalies such as Down Syndrome and heart disease.
