The incredible Eunice Laurel is a movement practitioner who founded Movement for Healing, an amazing organisation which provides access to yoga and other healing arts tools to women impacted by sexual and domestic violence. She was also on the faculty during my yoga teacher training at Yogacampus. She is currently studying for a MA in movement psychotherapy. Here, she talks about her background, intersectionality, her experiences with consent within yoga practice, and how teacher trainings need to change moving forward.

Please tell me about yourself and your background with yoga, and about the work you're doing with Movement For Healing?

I was born in the Philippines and did most of my growing up in Australia. I spent a year/year-and-a-half in the Philippines at age 8. I have had a culturally and economically diverse upbringing; I was a working class immigrant in a dominantly white and often sexist society.

I started asana in 2000, having discovered ashtanga yoga. However, my interest in spirituality really began when I was a teenager, and I suspect that was informed by having had a Catholic school education. There was certainly a spiritual inclination in me that had been informed from a Catholic-school upbringing, but later developed and evolved as I became aware of different religious or spiritual philosophies, and was heightened at the death of my father when I was 21. I had first come across the Tibetan Book of the Dead (translation by Robert Thurman) in my late teens, and I guess that informed my interest in South Asian religion.

Movement for Healing was an initiative that formed organically. Ten years ago, I volunteered with an NGO in Rwanda that supported HIV-positive survivors of the ‘94 genocide. My role was to facilitate yoga as an adjunct to their clinical therapies. The experience really helped me to understand the therapeutic potential of yoga as a support tool, and also importantly, it’s limitations.

In private practice with yoga clients over the next decade, I was primarily working with women in a therapeutic setting (menstrual cycle, pregnancy and post natal support), but found that all our sessions were actually informed and built on by their past experiences - many disclosed after years of a trusting relationship.

It was through their encouragement that I decided to reach out to organisations, and work more broadly within the community, and Movement for Healing was born. Clients who also had experience as service-users in rape crisis centres and women’s support groups found that the adjunct support classes such as yoga were either nonexistent or not appropriate.

I identify with a number of intersectional experiences; being an immigrant, a woman of colour, and a survivor. With a recognition of my own privilege, I also felt that the yoga environment we find ourselves in (in the city at least), excludes people that may really benefit from the therapeutic aspects of some of the practises within a yoga setting, either through financial or social constraints.

What are your thoughts on the teacher-student power imbalance - do you notice it and how do you combat it?

I think we have to recognise that there is a partnership in the learning environment. One party has one kind of knowledge that they are imparting and sharing, and the other party is there to learn. That is undeniable. The holder of one particular knowledge is not inherently ‘powerful’ but they may hold a particular type of privilege.

The best way to combat it is to review the kind of pedagogy we want to engage in. And that may mean that yoga teachers need to be educated differently, and to seek training (such as an MA in education, as one example) outside of the yoga spectrum.

What does consent mean to you, as a student and a teacher? Have you had any personal experiences (that you’re happy to share!) that have informed this?

The definition of ‘consent’ means to give permission for something to happen, or there is an agreement to do something. We often think of consent as something solely related to a sexual relationship. But consent is a life skill that permeates through lots of interactions and where any relationship (platonic, sexual, commercial, etc.) takes place.

In the context that you’ve written about previously, consent relates to consent to engage in a physical assist. So if we go from that definition, consent in a yoga space facilitating body-based practices means clear and enthusiastic permission from the practitioner to the teacher to offer support via physical touch. In my life as a practitioner, I have mostly practised mysore-style ashtanga. In that context, I have - for the most part - practised with someone who has been able to get to know my body.

Two times stand out in my mind as inappropriate. One, a mild incident but it annoys me to think of it, was when a well-known male senior ashtanga teacher was teaching a popular workshop at a very well-known studio in London. As we were standing in preparation to do the Primary Series, he walked past me, casually poked me below my navel and said “uddiyana bandha”. The gesture was so casual, and so entitled! I just remembered a feeling of just being an object, made all the worse because he was held to high esteem.

The second was completely inappropriate and violated clear boundaries. The teacher was a male hatha teacher that I had not met before.

Where do you think the yoga community is in relation to implementing consent-driven practices right now?

I think the yoga community is doing its best to navigate through the aftermath of very difficult truths. But I hope that it is not just a fad or fashionable issue to take to hand.

What would you like to see happen in yoga moving forward to implement consent-driven, trauma-informed practices?

Improved teacher training is the most important. Rather than co-opting particular buzzwords (inclusivity, trauma, accessible…) and making them add-ons, teacher trainings need to really re-assess ethics and boundaries and work from that base.

There are also many newly trained teachers or teachers-in-training who have gathered a lot of information, but have not had the experience of teaching. So, putting theory into action is vitally important. We cannot know the theory without the somatic experience of holding space for others.