Multiple times in her life, Alabama yogi Adi Devta Kaur has built homes of healing from the trenches of trauma.

Her first residence was within herself. Back in 2015, she decided to give yoga a try while living in Florida. Tears flowed from her eyes as she felt connected to her body for the first time – a gift manic depression tried to take from her.

In 2020, when a global pandemic left her stranded in the yoga capital of the world, Rishikesh, India, Kaur found home by taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge surrounding her. She returned to Alabama in 2021 as a registered yoga teacher with 500 training hours.

Kaur’s latest home project is historic in nature. She celebrated her 32nd birthday on Nov. 21 with a grand opening ceremony for Inglenook Yoga, the first Black-owned yoga studio in Birmingham, Ala. Kaur and her husband, Victor, spent the past year transforming an abandoned mother-in-law suite on their property into an oasis of healing where anyone can find peace and power within themselves. On Dec. 3, Kaur will be alleviating holiday-related stress during a free, 90-minute “Breathe Easy with Black Joy” virtual yoga session. Inglenook Yoga will be opening to the public on Dec. 4.

“Not to be all biblical, but when God creates a work inside of you, you have no choice but to go out and spread that energy. Be empowered to go do something else, baby. If you want to be the first Black-owned toenail polish place or whatever, go do it.”

The Black community’s interest in yoga has increased slightly, the National Center for Health Statistics reported. The percentage of Black adults practicing yoga rose from 2.5 percent in 2002 to 9.3 percent in 2017. White adults still make up the majority of both clientele and instructors with white participation in yoga classes climbing from 5.8 percent to 17 percent between 2002 to 2017. About 71 percent of instructors are white, while only seven percent are Black.

Black yoga instructors nationwide have echoed multiple barriers preventing Black people from participating in yoga classes, such as costs, microaggressions in the studio and lack of accessibility. Kaur’s studio is named after an East Birmingham neighborhood where she lives with her husband. But the majority of the city’s yoga studios are congregated in the same gentrified and affluent areas.

Coming back from India in 2021, Kaur daydreamed about how she would fix these problems. She was going to join forces with the other studios in the city to help attract more Black people to yoga. She founded her own yoga brand called The BLK Yogi Tribe with a mission to make the practice more inclusive.

But a heavy discouragement started to take over as she was rejected over and over from white spaces. It felt like a slap in the face considering Kaur’s training, but she just turned the other cheek. Then, a studio hired a white instructor after telling Kaur that no positions were available.

“That’s when I knew, like, ‘Ok. cool. Y’all don’t want me here,’” Kaur said. “That was blatant. That was obvious.”

It was Kaur’s grandmother, Josephine, who restored Kaur’s hope.

We’re gonna pray, Josephine said. We’re gonna put it on the altar and God gonna give you this.

Kaur felt restored as she followed Josephine’s advice. And on April 9, 2022, Josephine’s birthday, Kaur decided to launch a $20,000 GoFundMe campaign to raise money for materials, cost of heavy duty equipment and start-up costs for her own yoga studio. Kaur went to social media to ask her community for a simple request: Just $1 towards a yoga studio that would be a safe place for Black and brown people who want to find peace. The reason why they shouldn’t be mistreated is in her DNA.

“I am a Black native. My ancestors built this land,” Kaur said. “We deserve a space and the right to rest and to be celebrated. Not tolerated.”

Kaur didn’t just sit on her hands and wait for all the money to come. Over the past few years, Kaur has become a gentle force in Birmingham. Kaur has increased the ranks of Black yoga instructors through her yoga school, which is registered with the National Yoga Alliance. So far, Kaur has taught 50 certified yoga instructors through her 200-hour yoga teacher training school and her trauma-informed yoga class.

Instead of working in predominantly white studios, Kaur brought BLK Yogi Tribe to businesses and public places that were safe for the people she wanted to serve. Black men embraced their emotions during her restorative yoga sessions at a Black-owned gym called PK Fitness. She shied away from using the city’s gentrified parks which were further away from the people she wanted to serve. She increased accessibility by hosting free yoga sessions called Sunday Funday at East Lake Park, which is closer to her community. Black people – many of them experiencing a Black yoga instructor for the first time – would smile as they stretched in the sunshine and listened to the calming hum of Kaur’s singing bowls.

As she cultivated these spaces of peace and rest, Black people who have taken yoga before confided in her about the trials of practicing yoga in environments that lacked diversity.

“They’ve been mistreated in these white yoga spaces, and that will never happen again. Not on my watch,” Kaur said.

Kaur believes she was called to create the yoga studio in Inglenook. Media stories about gun violence in Inglenook would often turn people away, but for Kaur, it was prime real estate. She said some people would call Inglenook the hood, but she saw an opportunity to bring healing to a space in need.

“For the past three years, there’s been a murder in this neighborhood every single year. That is the main reason why I feel like it is absolutely necessary in this neighborhood,” Kaur said. “We have a thousand churches in this neighborhood. We have schools, a fire department, a library, and a Buddhist temple. Of course we need movement and it needs to be right here.”

Keeping Inglenook Yoga on Kaur’s property was a decision that was financially smart and spiritually sound. Instead of pouring money into a lease for a commercial space and other overhead costs, Kaur and her husband used donations to renovate a space of their own.

They didn’t hire a contractor either. With more than 20 years of contracting experience, Victor was able to do a lot of the work himself with Kaur helping out where she could.

Just because the space was their property didn’t make the renovation easy. The mother-in-law suite was essentially abandoned and pest infested. Victor decided to wait until the weather was cooler to handle all the wasps nests and start tearing down rotten wood. Kaur said they had to tear down walls and build new ones. It was like building a new foundation – one based on intentionality and healing for their community.

Along with accomplishing her yoga duties throughout the day, Kaur worked alongside her husband to make Inglenook Yoga happen. She learned how to install drywall, how to use a saw, she didn’t mind getting dirty as she learned about caulking, painting a wall and which way to place a pipe to produce better drainage. She documented their journey by posting clips on social media. It gave her a space to celebrate small victories with her community, like the moment she received her french doors for the studio or the first time running water flowed from the sink and toilet..

It was a lot of long days and nights to make Inglenook Yoga Studio a liveable space, but everyday Kaur said she would look at the blueprint she designed at the very beginning of the renovations.

“So the intentionality behind the blueprint was my grandmother’s words, ‘Write it down. Make it plain,” Kaur said. “So every single day, I looked at it. I imagined healing. I heard the cries of my community, and I channeled all of that energy when I was visualizing.”

Then came the day when she no longer had to visualize. After more than a year and a half of asking for donations, Kaur hit the halfway point of her GoFundMe campaign on July 22. Less than two months later, one donor gave her the other $10,000 she needed to hit her goal and finalize a space where Black people can gather and show each other they can heal. Visibility is key, Kaur said. It takes seeing someone doing what you want to do in order to know that it’s even possible.

“This space is a true statement of visibility that black people are doing yoga. Black people are peaceful. Black people have worked and are working through the systemic trauma and oppression,” Kaur said. “We’re building up our space and instead of begging for a seat at somebody’s table that doesn’t want us to be there, we’re creating our own table.”

A few days before the grand opening, Kaur revealed the Inglenook Yoga Studio logo: A lotus flower blossoming from muddy waters. Its petals are untouched. Kaur believes the symbol perfectly illustrates what her journey has taught her about healing.

“The Black woman is very strong, and in that strength is also vulnerability,” she said. “Everything that I went through was for this. It built character. I am so strong now.”