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The Working Class Hero
How This Trap Yoga Studio Became A Sanctuary For Black People
Brandon Copeland explains why spaces like his D.C. studio are essential to black wellness and culture.
The practice of Yoga is usually associated with silence, but in instructor Brandon Copeland’s classes, he challenges his students to find inner peace over booming rap beats. In 2013, the 26-year-old opened a Washington D.C.-based yoga studio, Khepera Wellness, after feeling like the essence of black culture was being excluded from majority-white yoga spaces in the area. The outcome: Trap Yoga — a course intended to both challenge the limits of one’s physicality and speak to the culture’s inherent spirituality. In addition to Trap Yoga, his most-popular offering, Copeland and his girlfriend and business partner, Lauren Turner, teach a Black Girl Magic class. It was developed in response to Sandra Bland’s 2015 death and the #SayHerName movement, a social justice campaign intended to raise awareness about the flood of black women who were senselessly killed by law enforcement in the last half-decade.
During a phone conversation with The FADER, Copeland talked about the importance of restorative black spaces, holding yoga classes to cope with police killings in the black community, and why trap music is ideal for finding alignment.
What first led you to the yoga practice?
Brandon Copeland: I started doing yoga in 2010 when my girlfriend at the time asked me to try it with her. I was a junior at Howard University, and during my sophomore year, I found out that she was pregnant. I was taken aback and I didn’t know what to do. I was young and nervous about it, so I started to take the classes in order to be able to be calm and make decisions.
Taking these classes was really the only place where I could feel kind of at peace with myself, and not worried about the future, or just the different things that you think of when you're young and you have kids and don't feel prepared. I practiced more and more heavily as her stomach grew, and once he [his son] was born I just realized how helpful it was for me. I also realized that I had a lot of friends that might be able to benefit from the same type of things that I was learning with wellness.
So I took a teacher training at Yoga District, which is in the area by Howard. My sophomore year I started to teach classes on campus on the yard to spread it so that people would see yoga as something that was cool and that we could do.
Trap Yoga is the opposite of traditional classes that are typically associated with silence. How did you realize that this was something that helped people with yoga, or that it would be beneficial to others?
As I went on in my career, I found a style of yoga called Ashtanga Yoga that is notoriously more physically based, and more challenging in that way. It can get you to breathe and focus on your breaths for the first 5 or 10 minutes of practice, you'll probably focus for that amount of time through the rest of the practice and have a really good experience with or without music. That’s what the experience is really about but I found that it was really difficult to get people to do that. So, when I mentioned that I was listening to trap music when I did classes or when I practiced at home, or even put on Instagram, people were interested. Enough people were interested that on my 25th birthday, I threw a Trap Yoga class at the Lululemon in Georgetown, which for me was a really big deal because it felt really right.
At the time I wasn't sure how the yoga community was going to take it. I was kind of apprehensive because I had gone to the same Lululemon a few years before, and they got me through a couple interviews, and I just wasn't what they were looking for. I didn't know how blackness would be accepted as far as a component to yoga, or if it’d be taken serious — I was really nervous. Later that year, I was able to get an opportunity to teach classes at The Capoeira Spot in D.C., and start my yoga studio. I added the Trap Yoga class to the two-hour regular schedule and it stuck. Those classes are our most popular classes at this point by far. It's getting people into other styles of yoga as a great introduction.
Why were you nervous about blackness being accepted in the yoga community?
The thing about a yoga studio is, it's not like a hospital where everybody who comes in has to be treated despite prejudice. Yoga studios are communities, and for me the greatest parallel that I've found for yoga studios in our community is the barbershop or the black church. It’s like a place where you know that there's an investment specifically catered to helping you. We don't have a lot of those spaces and I think that with yoga being this popular in the white community, it makes it easy for them to create spaces that are not as inclusive. Those things show up, not only within the advertisements but you also see that people who do go into the spaces verify that that’s what it is. You feel it, it becomes tangible. The disconnect from people — the exclusion is tangible.
Even when you come in, people look at you. The same people that would be standing next to you in a Starbucks and wouldn't pay any attention to you, but as soon as you walk into the space you're looked at differently. I think that came from accessibility, the way that people that they shape it here [America.] A lot of people like to attribute things to yoga that it does not call for always. They want you to think that you need to listen to like ocean sounds, and wear all white, or be vegan in order to really do yoga or to be a part of what's called “the lifestyle.” That lifestyle is really not reflective of what the practice is about. The practice is: You can be on death row, you can be an old grandma, as long as you're breathing and joined the practice in order to meditate, you should be healed. It's not really about a lot of the things I think that we, instinctively or purposely, advertise about yoga. Even the word “yoga” doesn't lend itself to a definition.
Until someone comes in and creates spaces that are specifically focused on black people or people of color, they won't necessarily feel and experience the community to the fullest extent. Of course I've been in studios that are white and I don't feel that all of them are trying to ostracize me. It's like going to white churches or restaurants, some people are cool but there are a lot of places where people aren't — that's the status quo.
What are some things that you notice in your Trap Yoga classes? How does it impact the people who come to practice?
It’s amazing because I've never seen a multitude of different bodies in the same room like this that are all black people. It’s also great to see someone who is maybe overweight next to somebody who's been doing this forever, or who's never tried it, or does it every now and then. The way that the classes are set up, it's like everyone should be working hard and everyone should be feeling it.
The idea behind it is that it's a power yoga class, so in mirroring the trap music, it's intense. Honestly, while you're in the class, you don't really hear the music until you need to hear it because I'm talking. It may be in the background, but it becomes just that: background music. I'm helping you focus on your breath, and staying focused on the practice itself. It's interesting to see that people recognize, "I didn't even really hear what songs were playing." It wasn't the trap music that was working, it was just the fact that they felt the community ethic.
@Piff Perkins @CrimsonTider @True Blue Moon @GoldenGlove
Brandon Copeland explains why spaces like his D.C. studio are essential to black wellness and culture.
The practice of Yoga is usually associated with silence, but in instructor Brandon Copeland’s classes, he challenges his students to find inner peace over booming rap beats. In 2013, the 26-year-old opened a Washington D.C.-based yoga studio, Khepera Wellness, after feeling like the essence of black culture was being excluded from majority-white yoga spaces in the area. The outcome: Trap Yoga — a course intended to both challenge the limits of one’s physicality and speak to the culture’s inherent spirituality. In addition to Trap Yoga, his most-popular offering, Copeland and his girlfriend and business partner, Lauren Turner, teach a Black Girl Magic class. It was developed in response to Sandra Bland’s 2015 death and the #SayHerName movement, a social justice campaign intended to raise awareness about the flood of black women who were senselessly killed by law enforcement in the last half-decade.
During a phone conversation with The FADER, Copeland talked about the importance of restorative black spaces, holding yoga classes to cope with police killings in the black community, and why trap music is ideal for finding alignment.
What first led you to the yoga practice?
Brandon Copeland: I started doing yoga in 2010 when my girlfriend at the time asked me to try it with her. I was a junior at Howard University, and during my sophomore year, I found out that she was pregnant. I was taken aback and I didn’t know what to do. I was young and nervous about it, so I started to take the classes in order to be able to be calm and make decisions.
Taking these classes was really the only place where I could feel kind of at peace with myself, and not worried about the future, or just the different things that you think of when you're young and you have kids and don't feel prepared. I practiced more and more heavily as her stomach grew, and once he [his son] was born I just realized how helpful it was for me. I also realized that I had a lot of friends that might be able to benefit from the same type of things that I was learning with wellness.
So I took a teacher training at Yoga District, which is in the area by Howard. My sophomore year I started to teach classes on campus on the yard to spread it so that people would see yoga as something that was cool and that we could do.
Trap Yoga is the opposite of traditional classes that are typically associated with silence. How did you realize that this was something that helped people with yoga, or that it would be beneficial to others?
As I went on in my career, I found a style of yoga called Ashtanga Yoga that is notoriously more physically based, and more challenging in that way. It can get you to breathe and focus on your breaths for the first 5 or 10 minutes of practice, you'll probably focus for that amount of time through the rest of the practice and have a really good experience with or without music. That’s what the experience is really about but I found that it was really difficult to get people to do that. So, when I mentioned that I was listening to trap music when I did classes or when I practiced at home, or even put on Instagram, people were interested. Enough people were interested that on my 25th birthday, I threw a Trap Yoga class at the Lululemon in Georgetown, which for me was a really big deal because it felt really right.
At the time I wasn't sure how the yoga community was going to take it. I was kind of apprehensive because I had gone to the same Lululemon a few years before, and they got me through a couple interviews, and I just wasn't what they were looking for. I didn't know how blackness would be accepted as far as a component to yoga, or if it’d be taken serious — I was really nervous. Later that year, I was able to get an opportunity to teach classes at The Capoeira Spot in D.C., and start my yoga studio. I added the Trap Yoga class to the two-hour regular schedule and it stuck. Those classes are our most popular classes at this point by far. It's getting people into other styles of yoga as a great introduction.
Why were you nervous about blackness being accepted in the yoga community?
The thing about a yoga studio is, it's not like a hospital where everybody who comes in has to be treated despite prejudice. Yoga studios are communities, and for me the greatest parallel that I've found for yoga studios in our community is the barbershop or the black church. It’s like a place where you know that there's an investment specifically catered to helping you. We don't have a lot of those spaces and I think that with yoga being this popular in the white community, it makes it easy for them to create spaces that are not as inclusive. Those things show up, not only within the advertisements but you also see that people who do go into the spaces verify that that’s what it is. You feel it, it becomes tangible. The disconnect from people — the exclusion is tangible.
Even when you come in, people look at you. The same people that would be standing next to you in a Starbucks and wouldn't pay any attention to you, but as soon as you walk into the space you're looked at differently. I think that came from accessibility, the way that people that they shape it here [America.] A lot of people like to attribute things to yoga that it does not call for always. They want you to think that you need to listen to like ocean sounds, and wear all white, or be vegan in order to really do yoga or to be a part of what's called “the lifestyle.” That lifestyle is really not reflective of what the practice is about. The practice is: You can be on death row, you can be an old grandma, as long as you're breathing and joined the practice in order to meditate, you should be healed. It's not really about a lot of the things I think that we, instinctively or purposely, advertise about yoga. Even the word “yoga” doesn't lend itself to a definition.
Until someone comes in and creates spaces that are specifically focused on black people or people of color, they won't necessarily feel and experience the community to the fullest extent. Of course I've been in studios that are white and I don't feel that all of them are trying to ostracize me. It's like going to white churches or restaurants, some people are cool but there are a lot of places where people aren't — that's the status quo.
What are some things that you notice in your Trap Yoga classes? How does it impact the people who come to practice?
It’s amazing because I've never seen a multitude of different bodies in the same room like this that are all black people. It’s also great to see someone who is maybe overweight next to somebody who's been doing this forever, or who's never tried it, or does it every now and then. The way that the classes are set up, it's like everyone should be working hard and everyone should be feeling it.
The idea behind it is that it's a power yoga class, so in mirroring the trap music, it's intense. Honestly, while you're in the class, you don't really hear the music until you need to hear it because I'm talking. It may be in the background, but it becomes just that: background music. I'm helping you focus on your breath, and staying focused on the practice itself. It's interesting to see that people recognize, "I didn't even really hear what songs were playing." It wasn't the trap music that was working, it was just the fact that they felt the community ethic.
@Piff Perkins @CrimsonTider @True Blue Moon @GoldenGlove