Gail Parker is a trailblazer, and the paths she's opening up are those not in the exterior world but of the interior body. Like most who visit with me on this show, she has been practicing yoga for many decades. She started yoga in Detroit the year after the riots there, and the peace she found in the practice was as immediate as it was thorough.

Gail's work is groundbreaking because it's specifically about how restorative yoga as a practice, like the practice of psychotherapy (she's a yoga teacher and a psychologist!), offers the opportunity to engage with trauma in a humanistic way. As in therapy, the long, gentle, gravity-based holding of restorative poses offer the chance to cultivate your own interoceptive awareness, which is awareness of what your body needs from one moment to the next. As you learn to recognize these messages and sensations, you open yourself up to what Gail talks a lot about in our conversation: the true Self, that's self with a capital S. After reading her groundbreaking book Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, my teaching—and thinking—have never been the same since. I hope this conversation is also transformative for you.

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