Dancing with Fire

Redefining what wellness looks like, sounds like—and can achieve

When Reggie Hubbard walks into a room, he is often mistaken for being an NFL tight end—but he delights in breaking the stereotype.

The six-foot-two, globally popular, 270-pound yoga and meditation teacher and wellness entrepreneur is a Yale University grad and served from 2017 to 2021 as MoveOn’s senior political strategist and congressional liaison during Donald Trump’s term in the White House.

Political organizing for progressive causes during those years convinced Reggie to start taking yoga classes to battle stress, but also persuaded him during the pandemic and following George Floyd’s death to create a new wellness model to help more people work through trauma and call more people of color into action during this global election year, and beyond.

“My model is called Active Peace but it was born out of a tremendous reckoning with anger,” Reggie says. “If our communities are not well, I am not well, and neither are you.”

I first met Reggie early last fall on the Omega Institute’s sprawling, 250-acre Hudson Valley campus, where I was filming a short-form documentary on racial healing for a British news organization and the Harlem Wellness Center nonprofit. I met up with Reggie again before Christmas by inviting him to our podcast studio in Manhattan to learn more about his work to help influence the $5.7 trillion global wellness industry to become far more inclusive and supportive of those leading social causes.

“It’s a very important time in the world to reimagine what wellness can look like in political communities, in Black and brown communities, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in what has traditionally been a monochromatic environment,” Reggie says. “The merger of wellness and civic activism is essential to achieving community health, which is the transformation we so desperately need at this moment in our history.”

What follows are some short, edited takes from our conversation. My full interview with Reggie will be featured in its entirety, as an audio episode in our forthcoming #NewRules podcast, set to launch soon.

---

MARCIA: You say that when you first discovered yoga, it didn’t fit you. How so?

REGGIE: I’m over six feet tall and weigh over 250 pounds, and I’m a Black dude with an attitude and a charming smile. That’s not normal, right? That’s not studio couture and it’s not what yoga and meditation have been seen as.

When I started practicing yoga physically, I just didn’t see a place for myself. The wellness industry in this country has mostly been a monochromatic, and homogenous environment from a gender perspective. It was like everyone there was competing to be the next person on America’s Got Talent rather than get serious and centered in spiritual practice.

The other part to this, too, was that I wasn’t feeling welcome in these spaces. I wanted to be coming into this wellness world as I am, not as others wanted me to be.

Yoga is an ancient practice and those in ancient times who led the practice were revolutionaries working to achieve social justice. Today’s wellness industry has gotten away from that. It’s like it’s an enlightened revolutionary experience that got commoditized and put under the province of suburban culture.

MARCIA: How does your class model break with tradition?

REGGIE: …Music, to connect us, is one way. The patron saints of my teaching are Prince and Jimi Hendrix (laughs) and partially because they were black male creatives and died way too soon but just lit this country on fire with their unabashed creativity. It was like, ‘You got this rule? I’m going to distort that.’ Jimi used the wah pedal to distort sound, and Prince bent gender norms and creative norms because, like, this is masculine, too. And so I’m using those same principles like spirituality to disrupt wellness spaces but also to disrupt political spaces and nonprofit spaces, right? I’m a unique mixture of yoga dude, but also a hardcore activist who has been working in the political sector since the early two thousands. My activism has been made more powerful by merging these two practices. And it gives me a chance to be, like, wicked creative.

We’re living now in a moment that is both very terrifying and very exciting. That’s not to diminish or to down-play the climate crisis, the movement for racial justice—those things. But we can begin to view these things as frightening and constricting, or we can start viewing the turbulence as opportunity. A climate of disruption creates some very fertile ground to try things out. We’re wasting opportunities to keep trying new things if we look at the situation in the world now and stay scared. Our dreams need to be taken out of the attic and put out now into the world. It’s the transformation and engagement we so desperately need at this moment.

I’m trying to make this all more accessible to brown and Black people so I use hip hop and all sorts of things and movements to different soundtracks that open people up to their culture and possibility. Rather than being seen as exclusionary, we’re not. We’re all in this challenging world together whether we like it or not. It’s about helping each other. We as a nation have to have tough conversations and love in order for us to evolve, and I really believe there’s an opportunity to do that more widely now.

MARCIA: How is GenZ taking to your changes?

REGGIE: They’ve got the right ideas, like the gender norms aren’t their thing. Racism isn’t their thing. There are all these different things that we consider to be struggles that aren’t really struggles for them. I cannot imagine having grown up with the concussive series of events they had to experience, like 9/11, the global financial crisis, the Trump era, and then the pandemic. I love working with them. They’ve been forced by circumstance to live from the heart.

MARCIA: What is it, though, that anger and conflict can create?

REGGIE: After I’d been teaching for a while, I remember attending a retreat at the Himalayan Institute in Pennsylvania, and this guy I never knew before comes up to me and says he’d heard a lot of things about me, and then asked if he could offer me some advice. I told him to go for it. So he says, ‘I’ve heard you talk about everything you do as a fight. But what if you looked at your activist work as more like a dance, as a creative endeavor that you invite people into, to share with you more boldly?’ I said tell me more. So he says, like, ‘It’s easier to recruit people to a dance. But a fight? Nobody wants to be part of that.’ So now, I’m having a ton of fun breaking these rules of engagement. I’m inviting people to break the rules with me. It’s like a break rules party, where I invite people to start dancing, at least just once.

Conflict doesn’t have to be hostile. There’s so much pain in the air that I can feel doing some of these workshops. I don’t really call myself a teacher that much anymore, but rather a translator, helping us to revisit the ancient wisdom of wellness in a modern setting, and making it more accessible to more people in the process. I’m getting me into the blackest and brownest places that the wellness business, in many ways, has written off, to show people there that wellness can be done as a form of activism, and to equip these communities with the tools they need to do the work themselves. I want to be removing some of the pretense and the branding of the wellness business, to bring wellness back, more clearly, to yoga’s origins as activism.

Conflict can inform but it is more powerful to make it a dance that inspires more people to create something new for us all.

© 2024 #NewRules Media