My Story

Hi! I am Serina Payan Hazelwood {she/her}. I am a daughter, mother, sister, wife, prima, and friend. My wife and I have three dogs and two cats. She is a chef and I love food! :-) I am passioinate about gardening and finding ways to make our home sustainable. I love to dance, karoke, laugh, and pull an oracle card to catch a vibe. We love to travel, eat good food, and watch the sun slip into the ocean from our patio. 

My Social Identity Statement, Proximity to Power, and Positionality

I am a queer Indigenous Chicana with European settler ancestors. I am a 50-year-old Pisces in a femme-presenting, menopausal, gender-queer body with an undiagnosed heart condition. I have mobility and joint pain, yet I am able-privileged in that I can, mostly, access activities and spaces I desire to take up space in. My matriarchal ancestors are from the Pueblo lands known as New Mexico, the Apache lands of Mexico, and Spain. My patriarchal settler lineage traces to Germany, Scotland, and England. My first language is English. I am practicing my mother's first language, Spanish. As a US citizen residing on Kumeyaay lands known as Rosarito, BC, Mexico, I am pursuing dual citizenship through marriage. I was born into Catholicism and then converted to Seventh-Day Adventism as a teen and am no longer associated with organied religion. I am healing from traumas of organized religion through earth-based, Indigenous-led spirituality. As a first-generation college graduate, I have the privilege of furthering my scholarship as a PhD student in Sustainability Education. I am a mother to an adult daughter who, as a single mother, navigated through poverty. Through my recent marriage, my financial and social capital has situated me closer to the proximity of privilege and power. 

If you are wondering what this statement has to do with yoga, please continue reading. 

Through the systems of imperial colonialism, yoga was taken, appropriated, and commodified into what is now known as the "yoga lifestyle." This is how I was introduced to the practice of yoga. The yoga lifestyle is a billion-dollar business created on the backs of faceless Indian bodies. Even so, yoga was the pathway to finding my sense of belonging in my body. I know this now to be called the path toward liberation where yoga led me to the land and re-membering my ancestors and what they had hoped for me. 

I offer this section of my website to publicly acknowledge that the impact of my participation in perpetuating cultural appropriation (willfully) ignorant or not, outweighed my intent to "honor" yoga. In 2016, I was introduced to decolonial theories that taught me about the systems of colonialism and how I could unlearn them and replace them with ancestral knowledges and values. In 2019, I paused teaching yoga publicly to pull my head out of my asana to self-reflect through my ancestral knowledge. I wasn't sure if I would or could return to yoga. 

Systems of Colonialism

The systems of colonialism have two main branches, capitalism & supremacy. Capitalism and supremacy have many more branches and leaves of oppression that include racism, ableism, patriarchy, ecocide, epistemicide, genocide, and countless more. The yoga lifestyle was created out of these systems that seeks to dehumanizes the bodies, hearts, and souls of those who show up to the yoga lifestyle with the promises of a practice where mindfulness, strength, agility, and the ability to manifest the peace and joy in life that belongs to you (spiritual bypassing).  

Belonging and Transformation

As a community gatherer, showing up in a queer, fat body in fitness and wellness spaces since 1998, I have always found my community by creating community. Belonging is the exact opposite of what I experienced in the yoga lifestyle. Have you felt this way, too? After much heart work and reflexivity, my yoga practice has transformed in a way that honors the ancestors. I am ready to share my transformed practice of yoga, where I have integrated the Mexican Knowledge of the Nahui Ollin with the spiritual practice of yoga. 

I commit to remain reflexive and center and support Indian voices, faces, and knowledges. I promise to use my voice to call out the systems of oppression and am devoted to making yoga practices accessible. In reciprocity, I invite you to be open to learning the spiritual practice of yoga and how you can intertwine your ancestral knowledge in your yoga practice. I am devoted to providing creative payment options that honor our humanity. This includes sliding pay scales, bartering (trueque), or donations of the heart. 

More about my journey

If you want to read more about my journey, click here for my 2020 capstone project, "The History of Yoga and the Impact of Colonization in the United States," . Through my spiritual and academic journey of my Indigenous ancestral knowledges of the Nahui Ollin, I integrated my experience of creating a sense of belonging and a profound connection between the body, earth, and cultural heritage. I shared my story in a chapter titled "YOGA: A Liberatory Praxis," in the book "The People's Book of Human Sexuality: Expanding the Sexology Archive (2023).