Gail Parker is a trailblazer, and the paths she's opening up are those not in the exterior world but of the interior body. Like most who visit with me on this show, she has been practicing yoga for many decades. She started yoga in Detroit the year after the riots there, and the peace she found in the practice was as immediate as it was thorough.

Gail's work is groundbreaking because it's specifically about how restorative yoga as a practice, like the practice of psychotherapy (she's a yoga teacher and a psychologist!), offers the opportunity to engage with trauma in a humanistic way. As in therapy, the long, gentle, gravity-based holding of restorative poses offer the chance to cultivate your own interoceptive awareness, which is awareness of what your body needs from one moment to the next. As you learn to recognize these messages and sensations, you open yourself up to what Gail talks a lot about in our conversation: the true Self, that's self with a capital S. After reading her groundbreaking book Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, my teaching—and thinking—have never been the same since. I hope this conversation is also transformative for you.

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Terms:

1. Yoga nidra: a form of guided meditation

2. Ayurveda: an ancient Indian medical system that relies on a natural and holistic approach

3. Vata: one of the doshas (a mind-body type) in Ayurveda; controls movement in the body, the activities in the nervous system, and the process of elimination

4. Pitta: one of the doshas; controls digestion, metabolism, and energy production

5. Svadhyaya: self-study and recitation of sacred texts

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References:

1. Gail Parker

2. Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, by Gail Parker

3. Transforming Ethnic and Race-Based Traumatic Stress with Yoga, by Gail Parker

4. Practicing Well with Cyndi Lee

5.Practicing Well with Jivana Heyman

1. Practicing Well with Judith and Lizzie Lasater

2. The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda

3. Oliver Black

4. Song of the Morning

5. Detroit Institute of Arts

6. Acharya

7. Existentialism

8. Humanistic psychology

9. The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer

10. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

11. International Association of Yoga Therapists

12. The Surrender Experiment, by Michael A. Singer

13. Deep Listening, by Jillian Pransky

14. Octavia Raheem

15. Tracee Stanley

16. The Nap Ministry and Tricia Hersey

17. Rhonda Mageee

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Original music by Kim's band Governess.

Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.

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www.weekswell.com.

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