I first came across Harriet McAtee, Lead Trainer at Yoga Quota, online. We slowly connected over a shared understanding of the work that needs to be done in the yoga world to move things forward towards a more inclusive, consent-driven idea of what yoga means. Harriet has been heavily involved with this kind of work - she runs Inclusive Yoga Training, Decolonising Yoga workshops at YQ headquarters, and of course has numerous Yoga Quota badgeholders around the UK, who work with charities to bring yoga to underserved populations.
Please tell me about yourself and your background with yoga, and about the work you're doing with Yoga Quota?
My name is Harriet McAtee, I was CEO of Yoga Quota, and am now Lead Trainer of our teacher training programmes. I’ve been practicing yoga since I was 13 years old (now more than half my life!) - a wide mixture of styles, lineages and teachers. I did my initial teacher training (350 hrs) in 2014 in Australia, where I’m originally from, before moving to the UK in 2015. Since then I’ve completed my advanced certificate (an additional 300 hours), pregnancy & post-natal yoga teacher training (85 hours), plus Accessible Yoga Training and Refugee Awareness Training. I teach and practice a wide variety of forms: vinyasa, pregnancy, accessible, restorative, and meditation.
Harriet McAtee, lead trainer at Yoga Quota, with students
What is Yoga Quota?
Yoga Quota is a registered charity in England and Wales (no. 1161833). Our vision is for yoga to be accessible and inclusive for people, regardless of health, wealth, gender, sexuality, religion, race, age or citizenship. We make yoga more accessible by providing high quality teaching to vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, and educating and campaigning for an inclusive approach to yoga.
We were founded in 2014, as a yoga studio with a difference: for every 50 paid students, we would teach one free class for a charity (one “quota”). In the past four years we’ve grown from our busy Oxford studio, and work with a wide range of charity partners to spread the benefits of yoga to their service users.
What does consent mean to you, as a student and as part of your yoga teaching practice? Have you had any personal experiences (that you’re happy to share!) that have informed this?
Consent is so important to me: it’s about recognising and respecting the agency and personhood of everyone around you. As a student it’s about being respected and acknowledged by the teacher. If I feel like a teacher doesn’t respect my agency, it’s likely that I’ll never return. In my teaching practice I see consent as yet another way for yoga to empower our students: yoga may be the only place where their consent is actively and deliberately sought. I think it invites awareness beyond the yoga mat, to other areas in our lives where we may need to question our boundaries and encourage a stronger relationship with our agency and power.
I’ve been in situations where my consent wasn’t sought, and I’ve been adjusted/touched when I would have preferred not to be. I’ve also been a student in classes where the teacher has adjusted other students without consent, and that’s also an uncomfortable experience. The more sensitised I become to consent and agency, the more aware I am of all these (seemingly tiny) transgressions and how they actually make me feel.
Where do you think the yoga community is in relation to this right now? What’s being done well and what’s missing?
Such a good question! I think this is a real journey. When I did my initial training, I don’t remember consent being mentioned at all (and this wasn’t that long ago!) - the culture where I was training, practicing and teaching wasn’t enabling or encouraging aggressive/high-risk adjustments, and certainly the prevailing attitude was that teachers gave basic adjustments (for example, pressing down on the sacrum in child’s pose, or downward-facing dog) freely, without raising discussions around, or seeking consent.
I think/hope this is changing now, but I’m also really conscious that I could also be living in a confirmation bias bubble! Certainly the community I surround myself with is strongly consent-positive, which means that I could be missing what’s going on in slightly more mainstream yoga communities. I think the horrifying stories of abuse in yoga communities that have come to light over the past few years have done a lot to raise awareness on how adjustments and touch in yoga teaching can act as a gateway to inappropriate and abusive behaviour, and I think there’s something in there that we really need to think about and confront as yoga teachers.
What’s being done well (for the most part) at the moment is the supporting, believing and listening that’s happening for people who are coming forward and sharing their stories of abuse and misconduct. Their bravery opens the doors for so many necessary discussions to take place.
I think in general I’d like to see more consistent training and more open discussion around adjustments and consent. Culturally it seems to be something that yoga teachers seem to be really clinging to as an element of teaching practice. I’m not convinced that adjustment is necessary for effective and empowering teaching, and think that all too often teachers use adjustment because they’re not able to effectively communicate in other ways.
Talk to me about your teacher training and how you teach things like use of language, informed consent and so on?
In our teacher training I often make the analogy that giving an adjustment is a little bit like using a baseball bat to try and mould a vase out of wet clay: it’ll get the job done, but there are probably more subtle and effective ways to do the job.
So right from the outset, I encourage my trainees to really interrogate why they want to touch, why they want to adjust. I think this is a really necessary approach, as it helps them approach consent with clarity on what they’re doing and why.
Then I invite them to become aware of consent in their practice and life: have they been to classes where they teacher adjusted without explicit consent? How did that make them feel?
I teach them that consent has to be:
Informed: explain in plain language what you want to do
Enthusiastic: no response means no
Ongoing: check in as you perform the adjustment, reaffirm consent throughout the class if you offer more than one adjustment
Yoga Quota offer a 200-RYT training programme, inclusive of a retreat
I think consent is a practice just like asana or meditation: as you practice more, you become more attuned to situations where students might be giving consent even when they don’t want to, or a situation where a different approach to consent might be necessary (what if your student isn’t able to communicate verbally?).
It’s damaging and restricting to think that there’s only one way to attain consent. It needs to be a skill that’s developed as a teacher, practiced, refined and honed, so that you’re able to adapt to the situation and student at hand.
What techniques do you employ in class on the back of this?
If I seek consent at the beginning of a vinyasa class, I use opt-in consent in a low peer pressure moment like child’s pose, or seated with eyes closed. This means that I ask students to raise a hand of give me a wave if they are okay to be touched (most consent practice these days seems to be opt-out, i.e. wave if you don’t want to be touched).
This as the first level of consent, and I see it so much more as a primer: it’s letting my students know that there’s a possibility I’ll be moving around the room touching throughout the class. I always saying touching, because I feel that ‘adjustment’ is an abstraction, and it’s all too easy to misunderstand what that means.
Generally speaking, this level of consent I feel covers me for general adjustments like child’s pose, and non-sensitive areas like arms/feet. If during the class, I feel like I want to offer a deeper adjustment or touch a sensitive area like pelvis/waist, I’ll tell the student what I’m planning to do, and reaffirm their consent.
If I offer adjustment in savasana (forehead massage/shoulder press), then I always seek consent again, and make sure I say if I’m using an essential oil on my hands and what scent it is.
Primarily though, I’ve moved away from a teaching style that uses adjustment excessively, to one where instead I can be creative with my language, sequencing, posture understanding and communication.
How do you maintain boundaries with students while also building community?
This is such an important question. And you know, it’s hard. I definitely gave too much of myself when I was first teaching, and I think it’s a process of discovery and learning.
I think it’s really important that you know your values and know yourself. Be open and honest about what they are and who you are. I think it’s also important to know that your teaching practice and your personal practice don’t have to be the same thing, and often it can be really healthy to have separation between them.
Boundaries (like consent) are also something active: you get to decide what they are and put them in place. I think so many people are too passive with their boundaries, they don’t set them firmly, or proactively, and it’s only when they’re burnt out and exhausted and depleted that they think of them. You can be flexible with boundaries, and you can change them, but it’s so important that you take the time to intentionally think about them.
Another way I’ve found to actively build community is by being a champion and supporter of others. Who else is doing amazing work that you love? Make friends with them, share their work, comment, engage and discuss. I’m in the really fortunate position that I can bring people to our community, to teach, talk and share, so I try to do that with people whose work I respect and admire.
To bring it back to values, I think it’s also really important that you’re explicit about what they are. At Yoga Quota we have our teaching ethics guidelines on our website, open for everyone to see. We communicate who we are, and this makes us more accessible, approachable and inclusive.