Yoga Beyond Performance: Identity, Access, And Ashtanga
This conversation explores the lived experience of practicing and teaching Ashtanga as a visible minority, and what it takes to evolve a lineage without losing its heart. We examine how unspoken norms, lack of clear standards, and performance-driven culture can exclude people, and what a more inclusive, structured, and compassionate approach looks like in real rooms.
What You’ll Hear
- Identity, visibility, and belonging in traditional Ashtanga spaces
- Why standards matter, and how “no structure” quietly creates inequity
- Mixed messaging around asana achievement vs yoga as healing
- Practical inclusion: bodies, props, pacing, and permission
- Decolonizing the mat and having necessary, uncomfortable conversations
- Teachers’ responsibility around food, body image, and modeling care
- Reframing progress when life, injury, or anatomy write the rules
- Community dynamics after leadership changes in Mysore
- Privilege, access, and taking practice to underserved communities
Key Takeaways
- Clear standards protect students and teachers and reduce bias.
- Inclusion is practical: adapt sequence, use props, cue options, honor cycles.
- Your value is not your vinyasa. The practice is a lab for self-knowledge.
- Community health > cults of personality. Build learning organizations, not pedestals.
About Our Guest
Jamaica-born and South Africa–based, Shakira Bouwer is an Ashtanga yoga teacher authorized in Mysore. She began yoga in 1999 while working in corporate finance, later earned an MBA, and ultimately followed dharma into full-time teaching. Her work centers on accessibility, decolonizing the mat, and creating spaces where every body can practice with dignity.
Connect + Resources
As shared in the episode:
- Instagram and Threads: @kirasadhana
- Email shared in-episode: kirasadhana@gmail.com
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00:00 - Introduction to Finding Harmony Podcast
00:41 - Introducing Shakira Bower
01:50 - Shakira's Journey in Ashtanga Yoga
04:07 - Memorable Moments in Mysore
09:27 - Reflections on Yoga and Life
10:42 - Challenges and Growth in Yoga Practice
18:32 - Transitioning to a Yoga Career
27:43 - Experiences with Yoga Teacher Training
42:45 - Reflecting on the Purpose of Yoga
43:16 - Memories of Patabi Joyce
44:16 - Challenges in the Yoga Community
44:40 - The Importance of Structure in Yoga
47:36 - Inclusivity and Body Positivity in Yoga
56:28 - Privilege and Accessibility in Yoga
01:00:14 - Decolonizing the Yoga Mat
01:26:26 - Concluding Thoughts and Future Aspirations
Russell A. Case
Painter + Ashtanga Yoga Teacher
Russell Altice Case began painting professionally in 1991. However, as a person who wandered from place to place for over a decade, he didn't establish a permanent studio space until settling in San Francisco. In 2016 he has relocated his studio space to Calgary, Canada, where he resides and continues to create stunning works of art.
Russell has been practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga for more than 25 years. An Authorized level II teacher through Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, a humble and refined teacher, Case is known for his joking spirit, and his perpetual eye toward social justice work. When Pattabhi Jois invited him to his pranayama class in 2007 he considered this distinction to be the highest grade.
First and foremost his work is convincing cynical skeptics to the efficacy of mindfulness practice, and his art work is distinctly post-structuralist as it weaves a range of intertextual connections and cultural motifs through its field of view.
That is to say..
Who are we looking at all these things?
Where does the seer reside?
Who is the one doing the looking at all of these things?
Harmony Slater
Finding Harmony Host / Coach / Spiritual Wellness Teacher
Harmony Slater is a Spiritual Wellness Coach whose mission is to support spiritually-curious entrepreneurs with “science-backed woo” to create a deeply fulfilling life and a business they love.
She's a National Board Certified Health Coach, Certified in both Quantum Coaching and in the Mastery Coaching Methods. She's also Certified Ashtanga Yoga Teacher, one of less than 20 women in the world to hold this honour, after training in India for 15 years.
She began travelling to East Asia in 2002 to study Buddhism, after completing two degrees in Philosophy and Eastern Religious Studies. In 2004, I began a life-long love affair with India, spending the next 15 years living there for extended periods of time immerse in Yoga practice, Vipassana meditation, Ayurveda, and Philosophy.
For the past 20+ years Harmony's been focused on sharing these deeper teachings + practices of multidimensional wellness to support women around the world in eliminating midlife burnout + restoring joy, to create a life and wellness business that nourishes both their soul and bank account. She's taught workshops and retreats in over 30 different countries.
She’s the host of the Finding Harmony Podcast, an active Board Member for the non-profit organization Yoga Gives Back, and has been featured in two anthologies on yoga, pregnancy, and motherhood in: ‘Yoga Sadhana for Mothers’ and ‘Strength and Grace: A collection of Essays by Women of Ashtanga Yoga.’
Shakira Bouwer
Teacher Bio
Shakira Williams Bouwer, Level 1 Authorised Ashtanga Teacher
Sadhana Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga Jamaica
Shakira first discovered yoga in 1999, while looking for a way to find deep peace and relaxation with her busy work, study and fitness schedules. In her journey of almost twenty years, she studied a number of different forms of yoga asana practice including Vinyasa Flow, Iyengar and Anusara yoga before finding the Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga method. A daily practitioner in this method, she believes in the transformative and healing power of yoga both on and off the mat and that the practice and benefits of yoga practice should be available to all, regardless of appearance, body type, ethnicity, creed or spiritual belief. In 2014, she made her third trip to Mysore, India to continue to study with R. Sharath Jois, the grandson of Shri K Pattabhi Jois and director of the K Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute and was given his blessing to teach the Primary Series of Ashtanga Yoga. She continues to make extended study trips to the source of Ashtanga to deepen her understanding of this transformative method. She has also assisted her root teachers Kino MacGregor and Tim Feldmann in further intensives, taught at the Downtown Nassau Yoga Festival in the Bahamas and at Land Yoga in Harlem, New York, in continuing to deepen her knowledge of practical instruction and application of Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga.
Her teaching style is Traditional Mysore-Style and the traditional Counted Guided Ashtanga yoga as well as a fun and challenging Ashtanga-based F…
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