Ecotherapy for All

There’s a kind of magic that happens when people or groups or movements come into alignment. That’s exactly what my interview with Tony Wiederhold, founder of Indy Community Yoga, felt like when we sat down over tea after a “Midtown Midday Mindful Movement and Meditation” practice one day.

The park we were in perfectly reflected the tone of our conversation. We sat outside Tea’s Me Community Café, owned by a local advocate who expanded her business to include this second location as part of a partnership with the park. Children running around the playground copied dance moves from each other as an inside joke or shrieked and laughed as they raced between bursts of water on the splash pad. People leaving the community yoga practice walked out of the café with their tea and lunches, and waved as they carried on with their Fridays.

It was a space and time that embodied the importance of public spaces for access, inclusion, and community building—all enriched by the experience that Tony himself has in those areas.

Though I think Tony would be the first to point out that it’s not just him who built Indy Community Yoga. That sharing of power and knowledge is kind of the whole point.

I met Tony through a mindfulness hiking guide training we attended through a local park. As I learned more about him and his work with Indy Community Yoga, I saw alignment with the values they practice and what Ecotherapy for All tries to emulate.

Our conversation was full of advice on generating accessibility, inclusion, and community. It feels cheap to try to summarize Indy Community Yoga into one blog post, so instead I’ll be sharing the full interview in multiple parts. We’ll start with the birth of Indy Community Yoga and how affordability and accessibility are baked into everything they do – followed by some reflection on how ecotherapy practitioners and groups can learn from these community-based efforts, too. A special thanks to Tony Wiederhold for taking the time to have this powerful conversation.

Marissa: Something I think about as I develop Ecotherapy for All is “how do we make nature as a support for mental health more accessible to more people?” I recently got excited about this idea about affordability after talking to someone who started a gear sharing platform in Indiana that lets people try something new without having to invest a bunch of money in the equipment you need to try a new activity. I feel like yoga can be similar since you have to sign up for a membership at a studio. Maybe you can do a free trial class, but there’s still a cost to engage.

Tony: Even for “community classes.”

Marissa: Exactly. With the donation-based classes, there’s still an expectation of financial contribution. That’s why I’m really curious about your model and how you got here. Part of what I want to talk about is affordability, and part of it is the community-building piece, because I feel like that can be missing in the membership-model. I’d love to hear about the history of Indy Community Yoga. Where did this idea come from, and how has it been built over time?

Tony: I’m really glad that you mentioned affordability and community-building, because these aren’t unrelated. I think a mistake that a lot of organizations make is ‘Oh, we don’t have to change the way we do business, we just have to change the way we do some things to invite people in.’ Really these are very closely related.

Indy Community Yoga started in 2016. I had been teaching yoga for maybe three years at that point, and my understanding of both yoga and yoga business had evolved a lot over that time. I was a practitioner at studios for a time, then I did teacher training and saw that side of it. It really bugged me that, here’s this practice that had allowed me to come into contact with sensations and feelings in my own experience where I was previously “estranged from my emotions.” [Tony notes that this phrase comes from a member of the Indy Community Yoga book club.]

It’s very adjacent to a religious practice, some would say it’s a spiritual practice, and it just felt wrong to charge people for that. So I said, “What would happen if I offered a class in a park and just invited people to come?” And that’s how it started. The first class was me and 4 of my friends. We tried out different things, like “Oh what happens if I put this on Facebook.” And then that’s when people really started getting into it.

We set up in a circle to be welcoming and inclusive. There’s no front of the room, there’s no teacher as an authority figure who is teaching to people who are less knowledgeable. It’s not about knowledge – we practice with. (Instead of teaching to, practicing with.) That’s how we were from the very beginning. Always practicing in a circle so we all learn from each other. There’s no expectation of spending any money, and it’s in a beautiful, natural space that is open to the public. That creates the conditions for people from all walks of life coming in.

In 2019 we formally registered as a non-profit business in Indiana and got our 501(c)(3) designation from the federal government. So we became an entity. COVID came of course, and COVID hit us really hard. It was early March, it was the last indoor yoga class that I taught. Somebody came to yoga class a little bit sick. A whole bunch of us got really, really sick. I personally got severely sick for two weeks, I was coughing constantly, coughing up blood for the last week. Then I recovered. We took that very, very seriously. So that’s when I started to offer online practice.

My life in the last decade plus has been, “how do I make things easier for people to reduce harm in the community? How do I make accessible these practices that may seem intimidating for various reasons, like monetary or cultural barriers?” Indy Community Yoga was the integration of all those aspects of my life into this organization, and now inviting other people into helping.

With COVID we started offering meditation and yoga every day. We’ve now expanded to where we have community partners like Tea’s Me and the Catch the Stars Foundation, the Indianapolis Public Library, and Thrival Academy. They’ve invited us into their places and now we’re creating these access points for the communities THEY serve to also come into contact with these practices and try them out. The practice is just, “this is how I can become aware of the experience of being myself as a human being and everything that comes with that. Just being an ordinary person.”

Marissa: I feel like for yoga in particular, there’s a very specific image that has been curated and sold of what yoga “is.” That makes it really hard for people who may think “Oh my body is not that size,” or “I don’t have that specific kind of clothes,” or all the mats and gear that makes it hard for people who are wanting to try it. The signs that you have say “Every body welcome.” Even today [during practice] we’ve been talking about safety and vulnerability in coming together as a group. I’m curious about what y’all do intentionally so that people know every body is welcome. How do you create that space where anyone can come and feel comfortable?

Tony: We hope we don’t have to tell people. We hope people can tell through the way we cue things. Through the foundation and the placemaking, hopefully I don’t have to tell people that!

This is a question that we are asking ourselves constantly. Our approach is certainly the things that I mentioned, removing any and all barriers. There are things we’re looking to improve on–being in spaces that we weren’t before. We’ve been in the 100 Acres [a local greenspace without an admission fee] since 2016. We were in [a different park] for a few classes out of convenience, but it costs $5 to enter the park. That’s a barrier. …We picked the 100 Acres because you can get there for free, but [we realize] you can’t walk there unless you’re adjacent to the towpath. Otherwise it’s only by car. So [our newest practice location] is one of our efforts to be more accessible. Just being in a place where people are, and being visible.

Our leadership structure also prioritizes inclusion. I invite everyone who completes our practice leadership training program to join our board. The people who are providing labor also have a say in how we operate. And we vote using a system called Fist to 5.

[Tony then mentions the first person I met at an Indy Community Yoga practice, who shows up every week to set up the tripod and camera for anyone who wants to follow along on Zoom.] had never heard of her before and one day she was walking by and was like “Oh, look at that!” and then she joined us, and now she loves it! It’s doing stuff like that – we’re trying all kinds of things. My thing is let’s just try it and invite people in and let people know about it. And if people want to come great!

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There is so much from this conversation that ecotherapy practitioners can use to continue broadening access to healing in nature. In the U.S., our mental health care system is full of challenges to access and affordability, and I believe nature- and community-based practices fill an important gap in mental health care and support.

It starts with us as an ecotherapy community. When we decide to get involved in making spaces more inclusive, it is easy to start by looking at external practices and ways to help others, without realizing what harmful practices we may be using internally. Organizations and independent practitioners can start by evaluating (and perpetually reevaluating) our own models and identifying barriers to access and inclusion. Ask,

• Who makes decisions in our organization, and how?
• Whose perspectives are represented on our team, and whose are missing?
• What values do we hold? How does this show up in our work?
• Are there characteristics of white supremacy culture we are holding onto that we can let go of?

Once you’ve thought deeply about your practice or organization’s decision-making and power-sharing strategies, you can move on to things like communication (am I using accessible language and media?), logistics (can people reach our practice without a car, and how do we provide that access if not?) and funding (are our fundraising strategies in line with our values?).

I hope this conversation with Tony inspires you to recreate some of Indy Community Yoga’s practices in sharing power and creating safe, affordable, and inclusive community spaces. We’ll continue the conversation in Part 2, where we’ll dive into partnership building for community wellbeing.

Before you go, take one minute to create an action/accountability plan. What is one way you’ll apply what you’ve learned in your own ecotherapy community?

There’s more to this story – learn more about this framework in Part 2 of the series.