These Black men are forging meaningful bonds through yoga

A yoga session for Black dads takes place on Saturdays at the Barack Obama Presidential Center.

On a crisp Saturday morning on Chicago’s South Side, a group of about 30 Black men are lying down on yoga mats in the shadow of the newly minted Barack Obama Presidential Center. Shoes off, the men are waiting patiently for their next set of instructions.

“It’s OK if we fall out of balance as long as we what?” yells their guide, Jason Campbell.

“Get back in,” the group responds as they move into crow pose.

The men, all Black and brown fathers, are listening intently to Campbell, who serves as the primary yoga instructor for Fathers Flow, a wellness initiative hosted by the fatherhood mentorship organization Daddy Victory Club, Axon Yoga and Brand B Sports.

“It’s really about providing an opportunity for Black men to engage and commune without the expectations of society,” Campbell, a longtime yoga instructor, tells HuffPost. “It allows us to tap into our inner selves and create a space, a safe space, for us to be vulnerable.”

Building that community is key for Kouri Marshall, founder of Daddy Victory Club. “Black dads, dads in general, who are intentional about fostering growth with their families, with their children, are also looking for ways that we can fill our own cups,” Marshall, 44, explains. “People who are intentional about pouring into their families in our communities also understand the importance of filling our own cups so that we can pour into others.”

Marshall launched Daddy Victory Club in the summer of 2024, shortly after the birth of his son, when he struggled to find resources and organizations that could help him prepare for fatherhood.

In 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic. Social isolation can increase the risk of heart disease by 29%, according to his office’s report. The statistics are far more dire for Black men, who are already at significantly higher risk of dying from heart disease than the rest of the U.S. population.

The group launched Fathers Flow three weeks ago, and about 20 dads showed up. The most recent yoga session saw about 65 sign-ups. And the mothers are thrilled.

“Out of all the things we’ve done, [Fathers Flow] is the thing that most seem to be interested in. Mothers are contacting us, asking, ‘How can my husband come and do this? When is the next one?’” he adds.

Women are generally socialized to form and maintain communities with other women, while many men lean on their partners for social support as male social circles shrink.

“We did this as an opportunity for us to gather, but now, obviously, it’s something that needs to be a programmatic area for us to focus on, which I’m a bit shocked,” he says.

The weekly meeting may be adding years to their lives. According to a nearly 90-year-old Harvard study, meaningful, high-quality relationships, like those fostered in Daddy Victory Club, are powerful predictors of long, healthy lives.

Marshall “understands the importance of community, particularly around healthy meetups and healthy connection. And so, he came up with the idea that we should collaboratively do a yoga session,” Campbell says.

Marshall also makes sure attendees understand the well-documented health benefits of mindful exercise such as yoga. “At the start of our instruction, we talk about the health benefits of yoga, and how it can help process endorphins. It can help our synapses,” Marshall explains. “It helps us respond better to our families. I find that yoga and working out help me to show up as a better husband and as a better father.”

In Cincinnati, Blu Cauthen brings yoga directly to her community — literally. The yoga instructor drives around neighborhoods in her hometown with mats, looking for people outside to join her Pull Up N Yoga sessions. After she finds a group, she beckons them from her vehicle to stop whatever they’re doing for a yoga session.

For Cauthen, a firefighter, paramedic and mother of five, these Pull Up N Yoga sessions are her method of teaching young Black boys and men how to process their feelings and love on themselves.

“When was the last time you gave yourself a hug?” Cauthen asks the teenagers in one of her viral videos.

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“I ain’t give myself a hug in about … my whole life,” one of the participants, a 14-year-old, responds.

“It takes a lot to be vulnerable, but in most of the videos, they’re always like, ‘You know what? Let’s do it. I’m here,’” she explains. “And then their other friends follow suit.”

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Cauthen recognizes that many men may not naturally see yoga as a viable outlet, since it isn’t typically associated with traditional norms of masculinity.

“Somebody that’s on the streets, they are not going to just walk into a yoga class. So I was like, ‘Let me go ahead and bring this to people on a block or in the people who’s outside,’” Cauthen says. “These are people who need to decompress, who needs to de-stress, and they need to understand that you can find peace in your environment.”

Yoga helps “you to calm down and relieve some of that anxiety, helping you be less likely to deal with heart disease in the long term,” she says, explaining the health benefits of the exercise. “Once you start focusing on yourself, you’ll start thinking, ‘I wanna eat better, I wanna do better, and I wanna feel better.’”

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.