Today we’d like to introduce you to Susanna Barkataki.
Hi Susanna, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Susanna Barkataki is a game changer shaping the way we understand and do yoga today. She speaks and teaches to form a bridge for all people to experience yoga as a path to personal power and collective liberation. Her experiences growing up in the San Fernando Valley as a young Desi immigrant shaped her life’s journey. Though she experienced bullying and discrimination based on race, she also found incredible multicultural community alongside organizers like Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter, Mark Anthony Johnson, Director of Dignity and Power Now among many others. This community helped guide her back to loving her own Indian heritage. She delved deep into Vedic traditions, training in yoga and meditation through month long silent retreats and deep sadhana, spiritual practice. She says “The very things I was made fun of for later became the tools for my liberation. Yoga helped me decolonize and love myself and I want nothing more than to share this power with others.”
She began speaking up about how watered down yoga was in the West – and how much potential yoga has to help others find their own power, path and voice – turned her passion for equity into a cry for change. She is the founder of Ignite Institute for Yogic Leadership and Social Change, where she runs 200 hour foundations and 300 hour advanced yoga teacher training. This learning institute she describes as “Yoga school, not school, school” where participants of all experiences learn how to lead and live a life based on yogic principles to uplift themselves and others.
In 2015, after coming home from her aunt’s home in Artesia, she penned the now viral article “How to Decolonize Your Yoga Practice” that was shared over 500K times and published in over 50 journals. The article that brewed inside her turned into a book, and in 2020 she published the breakaway #1 International Bestseller “Embrace Yoga’s Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice.” She is currently on a virtual book tour speaking at places like Omega Institute with Seane Corn, and Kripalu with Jessamyn Stanley about her work and book that is #1 on Yoga Alliance’s Anti-Racism Resources list. She also co-founded the podcast Radical Resilience: How to Live Well in a Sick World” with Dr. Neelam Pathikonda, and helped combat the rampant anti-science misinformation raging through the yoga and wellness world by offering compassionate and factual perspectives based in science.
Susanna Barkataki is a huge contributor to the field of honoring the roots of yoga while showing folks that yoga is a powerful practice where you don’t have to be flexible, skinny, a certain race, or be able to touch your toes, has resonated as she points back to the roots of yoga to help make yoga more accessible today.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
There are a lot of misconceptions about what yoga is that make it hard for people to see themselves doing it. Susanna experienced this personally, and is passionate about ensuring everyone knows that they are welcome and needed in yoga. Often South Asians are ignored or erased in the site of their own cultural wisdom and Susanna works to reverse this holdover of colonization. Susanna works to combat these misunderstandings and show us that a yoga practitioner can look like anyone! She continued this work all through the mid 2000’s and then, in 2018-19, frustrated by the continued lack of diversity and representation in yoga, she created the groundbreaking and powerfully diverse “Honor {Don’t Appropriate} Yoga” Online Summits with two seasons and over 12,000 Sign ups. You can check it out for free at www.honordontappropriateyoga.com.
We’ve been impressed with Ignite Institute for Yogic Leadership and Social Change, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
She runs one-of-a-kind, 6 month online LIVE 200 and 300 hour Yoga Teacher Trainings to bring authentic yoga education to everyone. She works to make these trainings accessible, online, and also to offer equity based scholarship programs. This training is for anyone who wants to deepen in yoga, for those with a heart for service, who want to grow personally and socially and be a part of the change for an equitable world and feel a deep level of wholeness and well-being living the roots of yoga philosophy, ethics & practices in your life every day.
She’s passionate about training leaders who live their dharma and stand out by the depth of understanding and embodiment of yogic values, and your ability to create true unity by standing for social justice in very real ways. It’s time for the Roots of Yoga to be understood & honored in the West. . She teaches so yoga can be what it truly is meant to be: a path to freedom and unity both personally, and socially. And it begins one student at a time creating a movement for equity, inclusion and diversity in yoga. It’s time for modern Yoga practitioners to have access to the heart of Yoga, where the real healing, growth and power thrives.
Any big plans?
She envisions a world where there is a yoga teacher on every block, yoga curriculum in every school, where millions of yoga practitioners, who look like us, are culturally aware and utilize yoga tools to bring unity and equity.
Her mission with Ignite Institute’s educational training, which you can find at Embodyyogasroots.com is to offer equity based educational training to help yoga practitioners cultivate a yogic mindset to become yoga leaders.
She is dedicated to create leaders with access to the tools of yoga for social change through the provision of educational programming. She’s sure that a full, authentic yoga practice will change the world for the better, equip and uplift diverse voices, and support teachers to powerfully apply this ancient practice to social change and create a fulfilling life for all.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.embodyyogasroots.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/susannabarkataki
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/susannabarkataki
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/susannawellness
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnmo11Akz6vktcN_dRkE1iQ
- Other: embodyyogasroots.com
Image Credits:
Images Copyright Ignite Yoga and Wellness Institute Photographer Daniel Aharon
