Yoga for Collective Liberation: From Courtroom to Breath

Two feet on the floor. Eyes softened, or closed if that feels better. The breath is not being fixed or improved, only noticed: where does it register most clearly, in the rise of the chest, the cool edge of the inhale at the nostrils, the faint sound of air leaving the body? That is how a conversation about spirituality and social justice opens in the Coco's Sanctuary episode "Yoga for Collective Liberation," with yoga teacher and life coach Itzel Hayward guiding listeners through a short breath practice before the host asks her to talk about the road that brought her there. The episode ends the same way it begins, with a silent wish that all beings know peace, and in between Hayward traces a path that moves from the adversarial machinery of the courtroom toward a question she keeps returning to: how do you respond to harm without adding to it? This piece follows that arc, from the lawyer's desk to the meditation cushion, and draws out the ideas that make the journey worth hearing.

What does a breath practice have to do with justice work?

Hayward does not treat the breath as a retreat from the world. Early in the conversation she offers a practice she uses whenever she notices herself feeling "disconnected or discombobulated or just not present" (Rooted in Love, around 3:00). Her instructions are plain. Let the breath happen without changing it. Notice where it is most distinct. Then set an intention to come back to it at different points during the day, simply noticing that you are here.

The reason this matters to her becomes clearer when she talks about the speed of modern life. "Colonization, capitalism, all that is by design to keep us so busy, so worried, so distracted," she says, and so a practice has to be deliberate if it is going to hold up against that pressure. In her framing, the return to the breath is not self-absorption. It is the precondition for seeing the people in front of you and asking how you can be of service. "We can only do that if we're here," she tells the host.

The host frames the whole episode around a single question: what practice lets you stay rooted in love when there seems to be so little of it around? Hayward's answer begins with a definition. For her, love is a non-judgmental awareness brought to the people and experiences around her, a kind of attention that allows her to be fully present. She calls that presence "love in action." It is a useful phrase because it moves love out of sentiment and into conduct, and conduct is exactly what her earlier career was about.

How did a lawyer end up teaching yoga?

Hayward is direct about the first half of her working life. She practiced law for about 13 years in San Francisco, and she is clear that she loved the work. She worked in several settings, but the common thread was support for low-income communities of color in California, particularly in regulatory roles. She describes helping to prosecute unethical attorneys who were targeting limited English speakers, and she says she was proud of the organizations and people she worked alongside.

The turn came from inside that success. She reached a point where she felt something fundamental needed challenging about the justice system itself. What she saw was a conflict model built on a binary: there is a victim, and there is a villain. Her question was not whether justice mattered, but whether the familiar tools were the only way to pursue its goals. She still believed in a functioning society where people are cared for and harm is addressed. What changed was her sense of what addressing harm could look like.

"I really started to see that there were other ways that we could address the harm that weren't punitive, that weren't pushing people out of the circle or of the community, but actually bringing people back in."

(Itzel Hayward, Rooted in Love podcast with Coco's Sanctuary, early in the conversation)

She describes a second layer of that shift. Restoring the harm that occurred is one task. Looking at the conditions that existed before the harm, the circumstances that led someone to act in the first place, is another. That double movement is what drew her into restorative justice and transformative justice, frameworks she began studying as she looked for an alternative to punishment that still took accountability seriously. She describes taking "a big step back" to ask what justice meant to her, what community meant, and what her own role would be when harm happens inside a community.

Why does regulation matter before you respond to harm?

The most useful section of the conversation is also the most practical. Hayward talks about what happens inside a person when they are confronted with harm, and why responses so often escalate. Her point is that a body under stress does not reason well. When a person is shaken and dysregulated, they tend to respond from a survival state rather than from what she calls higher cognitive function. The first task, then, is not to win the argument or correct the other person. It is to settle the nervous system enough to think.

She connects this to her own practice. When she encounters someone who is not recognizing the divinity in others, she says she is not going to try to force them into seeing it. She does not need to shout at them. This is not passivity. It is a refusal to meet aggression with more of the same, which is exactly the pattern she spent years watching inside adversarial systems.

Later, the host raises a harder version of the question: how do you hold compassion for someone who has caused harm while still being hurt by what they did? Hayward treats this as one of the central problems of her work. She describes the importance of finding a way to hold the part of yourself that wants to lash out with compassion, and of recognizing that the person who harmed others was shaped by the same forces that shape everyone. The aim is not to excuse the act. It is to keep the response from becoming another act of violence.

Where does the "silent wish" fit in?

Hayward closes each of her practices with a silent wish. In this episode she invites listeners to bring their palms together at the heart and send out the wish "that the entire universe and all beings everywhere know peace. Peace and only peace" (Rooted in Love, around 6:25). The host says the wave of peace in that moment was physical, and the exchange is a small demonstration of the episode's larger claim: a shift in one nervous system is not private. It becomes part of how a room, a community, or a case is handled.

That is the throughline between the courtroom and the cushion. Hayward is not describing two careers that happened to overlap. She is describing one commitment, to reduce the harm that people do to each other and to address its roots, pursued through different tools at different points in her life. The law gave her a view of how conflict is organized. Restorative and transformative justice gave her an alternative model. Breath practice and presence give her a way to show up inside the work without being pulled into the same reactivity that produced the harm.

Where is Hayward's work now?

The episode description identifies Hayward as a life coach and yoga teacher focused on holistic healing, and as an Adjunct Professor at UC Law San Francisco. That combination is itself a kind of answer to the question the episode asks. She has not left the legal world behind, and she has not kept her spiritual practice in a separate room. Her work now sits where those two commitments meet. Her own public channels, including her Attuned Living website and social accounts, carry the practice forward for listeners who want to continue.

What makes the conversation worth returning to is its refusal to treat collective liberation as a slogan. It is built from very concrete habits: a breath you come back to when you lose your footing, a refusal to shout at someone who is wrong, a question about what conditions produced the harm, and a wish that begins with yourself and extends outward. Hayward's journey suggests that justice and presence are not competing approaches. Each makes the other more honest.

Where to go from here

If this conversation resonated, the most useful next step is to try the practice itself. Pick a single moment in your day, a transition or a difficult exchange, and simply notice the breath before you respond. Then, if you want to go deeper, watch the full Coco's Sanctuary episode "Yoga for Collective Liberation" with Itzel Hayward, where the host and guest develop these ideas at length. Listen for the points where Hayward moves from describing a legal system to describing a human response to harm. That shift is the heart of the episode, and it is available to anyone who wants to practice it.