As a soothing and healing exercise, restorative yoga has been popular among people recovering from serious illness and other forms of trauma. There is now increasing take-up of it in marginalised communities to increase resilience, which can help people overcome stressful experiences, including encounters due to their race and ethnicity.

These experiences could include microaggressions, profiling or being worried about how one might be perceived in a certain space. Data from a recent survey by CIPD suggests around a fifth of employees from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background believe that discrimination in the UK workplace is holding them back from career progression, while race-related hate crimes reached a new high last year in England and Wales.

In the US, research published by the American Psychological Association indicates certain ethnic and racial groups experience higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than white Americans. In the UK, less is known about the scale or shape of the link between mental health and racial discrimination.

As race-based stress and trauma is thought to be ongoing and cumulative, however, Black and other people of colour get used to adapting to stress rather than releasing it, says Dr Gail Parker, a US-based clinical psychotherapist and certified yoga therapist who wrote the book Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma.

PTSD and yoga: how restorative yin yoga can help to heal race-based trauma