Orgs! What Are They Good For? A Conversation with Leslie Kaminoff
Look. We need to get into it.
To ask all the questions, to unearth all the possibilities, to sit with some uncomfortable answers.
So I asked Leslie Kaminoff to come on, and we did just that.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
*” Fundamentally it is a governance issue” is my favorite quote about the IAYT issue that is on this entire podcast series. Because they do have a governance issue, and it is important that we talk about it.
To reiterate: a 501c3 organization in the United States exists to serve a public function, and a 501c6 org is a business or trade organization that exists to serve its members. The IAYT is currently the former, not the latter.
*Medicalizing yoga and yoga therapy comes with a whole host of complications. And this series on the podcast will cover some of those complications as we go forward into talking about licensure, the medicalization of yoga, and more.
*Yoga is relationships. This is a quote from this episode of the podcast that I have already used a dozen times since Leslie and I recorded this podcast together a few weeks ago. Because it is so true. We are in relationship with ourselves, our students, our colleagues, and our organizations. It is important that we chose to build the best versions of those relationships that we can so we can all thrive, and also so that yoga and the yoga industry can thrive in this modern world.
*If you missed it, if there is an offer to write a rebuttal of someone wishes to write a position paper about moving towards licensure in the yoga therapy space. Please someone take Leslie up on this so I can read both your paper and his response. I love this kind of stuff.
*Yoga has long taken place within the outskirts of culture. I have said this a lot, but we came of age in the counter-culture movement of the 90s, and a lot of us really liked it that way. I include myself in this group. I don’t know if the 19 year old version of myself that started yoga would have found her way into today’s modern yoga spaces. I think about that a lot actually, especially in the context of all those gifts that a consistent yoga practice has given me over the last 27 years. Leslie refers to this with his assertion that yoga has existed very often between the cracks of general culture.
Comforting or not, that is the reality of what we have been. And I am interested to see if we keep that trend going forward into the future.
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