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Yogaland Podcast

On Spirituality, Representation, and Being a New Teacher with Quamay Sams

Yogaland Podcast

Andrea Ferretti

Health & Fitness, Yoga, Yogaland

4.81.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, I talk to Bay Area yoga teacher Quamay Sams. Quamay grew up in New York, where he was a dancer before he enrolled in a yoga teacher training program (without ever having set foot in a yoga studio). He now considers teaching yoga a calling -- and a big responsibility. 


We talk about:


* Why Quamay felt like a misfit (his word) growing up and how that impacted the course of his life.


* Dance. He tells us more about a style of dancing called krumping, why he loves it, and how it became an outlet for him.


* Stepping into the seat of the teacher and how he is coping with and embracing being a role model.


* Yoga and representation. His take on why there aren’t more black people in yoga studios, who’s responsible for that, and how we can all work together to bridge that gap.


* His experience as one of Jason's advanced teacher training students.


Show notes: http://www.jasonyoga.com/podcast/episode153


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey everyone, I'm Andrea Ferretti and this is episode 153 of Yoga Land.

0:04.5

Today my guest is Kwame Sams.

0:09.2

Kwame and I met just recently.

0:12.1

He is involved in Jason's advanced teacher training in

0:15.4

San Francisco and he came up and he introduced himself and pitched himself for

0:21.8

the show and I said yeah let me think about it and I talked to

0:25.7

Jason about it and and here we are so Kwame currently lives and teaches yoga in the Bay Area and he's also a dancer. He grew up in the

0:36.8

Bronx and I wanted to hear his story of being a person of color and walking into a

0:45.2

yoga room and what that was like and you might be surprised.

0:47.8

But we do talk about representation, the importance of representation within the yoga community, we talk about what it feels like to be a misfit.

0:57.0

And we also talk about stepping into the seat of a teacher and how overwhelming or daunting that can be at first.

1:08.8

And I offer my thoughts on how to deal with that. So I really genuinely enjoyed the interview. I love talking to

1:19.2

up and coming talented, thoughtful, heartfelt people and Kwame is definitely one of them.

1:27.0

Well Kwame, thank you so much for being here today.

1:31.0

I'm so happy to talk to you and get to know you a little bit better.

1:34.0

I want to kind of jump into just talking about you and your story and one of the things that you said that kind of stood out for me from our last conversation is I was I think I was asking you if you felt like yoga studios weren't inclusive enough and you said the experience is different for everyone

1:54.8

but that you were familiar with being the guy that was different.

1:59.9

And I just thought we could kind of start there.

2:01.6

I wanted to ask you, what does that mean for you?

2:05.2

Like could you unpack that a little bit in terms of growing up and how did you feel different?

2:10.1

Well, even as a child, I don't know, I felt like the term like,

2:15.0

misfit just fit me perfectly in a sense where every interest that I had

...

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