Feminism and Yoga: What’s the Connection?

Podcast featuring Dr. Beth Berila and Melanie Klein.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST.

This week’s YBIC podcast features Melanie Klein, Co-Founder of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. Klein discusses her journey to feminism and yoga. Feminism, she describes, taught her cultural analysis and the systematic nature of inequalities. Yoga taught her how to come home to her body. After experiencing disordered eating, abusive relationships, and negative body image, Melanie found herself deeply empowered by both her feminism and yoga.

Klein discusses how feminism and yoga complement and complete one another. Both are about raising awareness, finding ourselves, and developing authentic ways of being in the world. Feminism provides awareness, but yoga lets us live that awareness on a cellular level.

In this stimulating conversation, Melanie talks of self-care, sustainable social change, and “finding authenticity in who you are.”

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST.

 

Melanie Klein, M.A., is a writer, speaker and Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Santa Monica College. She is a contributing author in 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics and Practice and is featured in Conversations with Modern Yogis. She is the co-editor of Yoga and Body Image: 25 Personal Stories About Beauty, Bravery + Loving Your Body and co-founder of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition.

 

Beth Berila, Ph.D., LLC, RYT is the Director of the Women’s Studies Program and Professor in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies Department at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota.  She is also a registered yoga teacher and is completing her 500-hour Yoga Teacher Training program at Devanadi School of Yoga and Wellness.

She is a founding board member of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. Her current projects merge yoga and meditation practices with feminism and mindful education to create a form of socially engaged embodied learning.