At 26-years old Brandon Copeland is changing the way black people practice and interact with yoga.

Copeland is owner of Khepera Wellness in Washington D.C. He opened the studio because he felt “the essence of black culture was being excluded from majority-white yoga spaces in the area” according to Fader.

Copeland runs the business with his girlfriend, Lauren Turner. He says he turned to yoga after his girlfriend became pregnant while he was at Howard University in 2010.

In 2013 he opened his own yoga space where he came up with the idea of Trap Yoga.

Trap Yoga is a course according to Copeland that is intended to both challenge the limits of one’s physicality and speak to the black community’s inherent spirituality.

Over trap beats Copeland challenges his students to find their inner peace.

“A lot of people like to attribute things to yoga that it does not call for always. They want you to think that you need to listen to like ocean sounds, and wear all white, or be vegan in order to really do yoga or to be a part of what’s called “the lifestyle.” That lifestyle is really not reflective of what the practice is about. The practice is: You can be on death row, you can be an old grandma, as long as you’re breathing and joined the practice in order to meditate, you should be healed. It’s not really about a lot of the things I think that we, instinctively or purposely, advertise about yoga.”

“Until someone comes in and creates spaces that are specifically focused on black people or people of color, they won’t necessarily feel and experience the community to the fullest extent,” Copeland went on to say.

Since its inception 130 years ago, Cosmopolitan Magazine has branded itself as a media publication which celebrates the elegant beauty of women. It has always been a publication which prides itself on featuring the best and brightest women that the mainstream dominant society has to offer, which is why the following story should be considered offensive to Melanoid people.

Recently, Cosmopolitan ran a story about a Black female yoga instructor named Jessamyn Stanley, who has billed herself as a “yoga enthusiast and fat femme”. The Durham, NC-based “fat yoga” instructor champions “body acceptance”, and says her social media influence is merely happenstance. When it comes to her influence, she had the following to say to Cosmopolitan in a story published on the media outlet’s site this past summer:

“People need to be able to see that there’s someone out there who’s also in the struggle, because I think there’s something with yoga where it turns into this aspirational thing…You see someone who lives a yogic life and it’s like ‘Oh, be like me, my life is so perfect, I’m awesome, my face is glowing, you can do whatever it is that I’m doing because I’m so cool…I’m like, ‘Actually, I’m just over here next to you eating cheese fries watching that person and also living a yogic life.’ We are on the same level. We are all in this together”

In the article, Stanley also goes on to say that the majority of people who have reached out to her tell her that the yoga photos she’s posted to her Instagram page have inspired them to embrace their bodies, no matter their shape or size.

This is no indictment on Stanley, but rather an observation to show how the dominant society frequently exploits plus-sized/bigger Black women along side smaller, shapelier–and more widely sought after–women of other ethnicities to proclaim this to be the “standard of beauty”…as if all Black women are plus-sized, and thoroughly enjoy being that way. Unbeknownst (or not) to Black women like Jessamyn Stanley who use their size as a symbol of empowerment, these white owned media outlets only use their images to further push their insidious agendas by promoting their own women while ridiculing the Black women that they claim to be “paying tribute to” in the process.

Below is an interview with Jessamyn Stanley via Cosmopolitan’s YouTube channel. In the video, she speaks on “body positivity”, and demonstrates the various yoga positions that she teaches her students/social media followers.

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