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Happy Day! My name is Stephon Bradberry, a DC based educator, justice advocate, and wellness facilitator. I believe wellness practices, particularly yoga, empower us to discover the layers where we are most, free, and whole by guiding us through loving-kindness confrontation and justice-oriented action. As we mindfully connect breath to movement, stillness to contemplation, we merge together who we are, who we've been, and who we can become.
Through my work on the yoga mat, as a lead teacher and studio manager and off consulting organizations and leading the Black Folxs Wellness Collective, a dc-based organization with a mission to create space for Black folxs be well, I am determined to us rethink our relationships to ourselves and each other. Right now I'm leading our collective as we finalize our non-profit status and build our headquarters in Washington, D.C., with the development of seven new chapters across the nation led by in community Black yoga teachers.
After years working in higher education student affairs and in the United States Congress, I've gotten a chance to meet all types of people, close to home here in Washington, D.C. and across the nation, and what I know more than anything: we are all endeavoring every day to be freer, more healed, and whole. This looks differently across the board, as things like race, socioeconomic status, ability oftentimes determines what access we have to in terms of experiences, healthcare, support, and wellness centered programs. I've made it my mission to break free of convention, going to where the people are, finding ways to empower their practice, which I see, in simplest forms, as their lives and living. After working in studios and wellness spaces for some time, I began to see how we as professionals need to make more of an effort to connect the practice to our students' lives AND the lives of those in our global community. It's putting practice into practice-- to connect our yoga with our living. If yoga is here to get us free, as I believe it is, it should also empower us to create the conditions for freedom. With this in mind, I created the Collective to make programs as free to low-cost as possible, to empower folxs with tools to tend to their wellness while we build capacity to shift our culture to one of care, compassion, and mutual uplift.
I genuinely believe yoga creates a path for this type of transformation; I've seen it every week when I take the mat to teach either in the studio or out in the community. As I continue to blaze ahead, I will continue to build a strong ecosystem of wellness leaders who are doing their part to pull us toward that new world. It may seem aspirational to some but every-time I see a new teacher or member in our collective, or a new student attending one of my weekly classes who decides to come back, I know we are bit by bit, asana by asana, breath by breath, a new thing is possible.
