Sheena’s Site for a Healing Justice Visionary
I first met the activist-scholar and yoga teacher through the Maple Creative client community. I’d see Sheena around in webinars.
As a yoga enthusiast, I was always intrigued by Sheena’s work. But it wasn’t until interviewing Sheena for the Equitable Welllness podcast that I got better acquainted with her work elegantly knitting yoga, social justice, and shared anti-imperial values.
Not until that podcast did I consider that ‘scripture’ from the likes of Patañjali and other sages could be colonial, supremacist propaganda. She’d have much more to say and the scholarship to draw from.
It is really an honor to have worked with Sheena, a true healing justice visionary.
Table of Contents
Sheena’s Testimonial
Sheena was so kind as to answer the following three questions about working with me on her website rebuild.
Before
Since Sheena’s rebuild assignment was a Maple Creative collaboration, I can’t take all the credit. Ryan Clover set the initial template of her “sapling” website by choosing the theme, configuring Sheena’s design choices, and giving us the starting point of her header and footer.
Sheena then hired me as a contractor for custom building of the pages. We worked out of a website outline document provided by Maple to insert and design the content.
The main challenge with Sheena’s project is that she had a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of content, as someone who has published in journal articles, book chapters, and editorials for news outlets and magazines, and also somebody featured in interviews, podcasts, and public talks.
(And also someone working on her own book project and various research papers and editorials at any given time.)
We needed to find a way to organize her vast body of work.
On Sheena’s past website, her bibliography looked like a series of links on a list. I’d hoped to display those works in a way that vividly illustrates Sheena’s brilliance.
On the past site, I also had to dig around to find her media appearances, which I thought should be brought out boldly and clearly in the navigation menu.
Finally, Sheena has extensive yoga experience. By the end of our collaboration, we were finally adding content to her yoga section, which includes:
- retreats
- healing justice work
- decolonizing yoga workshops
- her kids’ program called Yoga Warrior Tales
There was still just a lot of content to finish adding.
We worked together in a three-month “holistic marketing” retainer that included weekly check-ins as accountability partners to stay on track with finishing the website.
After
What I’m most proud of is that we were able to organize Sheena’s work in a way that has flow and structure.
The crest jewel of Sheena’s website, in my opinion, is her publications. I’m glad we were able to separate those or distinguish them from her research and from her earned media.
I’m also glad that we were able to highlight but distinguish her university teaching from her yoga teaching, and how all of her yoga offerings are also differentiated.
Since publishing the new website quietly, Sheena has been named to the American Yoga Council’s advisory council, along with such “yoga celebrities” as Leslie Kaminoff, author of Yoga Anatomy.
But the invisible outcomes I celebrate today are shared in her testimonial:
Working together with Shayna really allowed me to see that there are people out there who (inner)stand me, my work and my purpose in fusing yoga with social justice scholarship. The benefit is that Shayna allowed me to see myself and helped me find the confidence to put myself, my site and my programs out in the world in a way that helps me build on my future.
—Sheena Sood