How Fiore Bran Aragón built a yoga community for refugees in Albuquerque

The Afghan woman had never practiced yoga, but she arrived at the class ready to learn.

A refugee with few English words, she brought homemade treats for the class and kept coming to master some poses and, sometimes, just to have a place to rest.

It was a point of pride for Fiore Bran Aragón, co-founder of Kula Yoga ABQ, which offers bilingual classes for immigrants in Albuquerque that are free or on a donation basis.

“The fact that she chose to just stay there and sleep and relax when everybody else was moving, to me, that means she was learning to hear, to listen to her body and her needs,” says Bran Aragón, who grew up in Nicaragua. “But I also felt like it was really a recognition of the community that we had — that she felt she could trust us, that nobody was going to harm her.”

Kula Yoga, which has served 100 people from 20 countries in its three years of operation, uses a trauma-informed focus that doesn’t care what its students wear or what their poses look like.

“I had a student tell me, ‘Oh, I can’t do yoga. I don’t twist like that. I can’t wear those Lululemon pants,’” says Bran Aragón, who earned a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico and is now an adviser at UNM’s Global Education Office.

She took up yoga more than a decade ago because of arthritis. “I could not even go up stairs without feeling a lot of pain.”

Eventually, she “fell in love with the philosophy of yoga” at a time when her job was providing services to refugees in Nicaragua. She combined both passions after seeing the benefits yoga brought to those who didn’t have access and began teaching the practice to immigrants in Mexico and then Albuquerque.

“I want to create this community where people can feel that they are welcome, even if they don't look like a typical yoga practitioner or they don’t speak English or have never done this before.”

How did Kula Yoga get its start?

When I moved to the United States to be a grad student in 2019, I continued my own (yoga) practice, but a couple years after graduate school, I just decided to do it more formally, especially since I had a partner, Alejandra Cruz. We basically met at a yoga class in the South Valley. And she co-founded Kula Yoga with me.

What is trauma-informed yoga?

The yoga that I practice is Vinyasa, but also, in my years of training, I specialize in chair yoga and restorative yoga with a focus on trauma-informed care. Of course, yoga offers physical benefits, but there’s also the benefit of gaining a sense of groundedness, mindfulness, more awareness of your own breath, and that all can facilitate regulation of the nervous system and a sense of presence. Why we do yoga specifically with the refugee population is that some may not have the space or the capacity to explore how it feels to be in their bodies, especially when there’s a lot of stress or trauma around. And we know that the experience of migrating can be quite difficult. So we try to bring yoga to people so they can explore how it feels to just be with themselves without having to talk about experiences that they may not want to remember, or maybe just feeling happy for a little bit of stretching.

How is Kula Yoga funded?

Right now, with the funding that we have, thankfully, we already have all the equipment we need, but we don’t have a studio. Our public classes are located at First Congregational Church at Lomas and Girard. And we partner with nonprofits for yoga at other specific locations around town. We cover most of our costs from our own students in donation-based classes and also through the private classes with the nonprofits. Our website is kulayogaabq.com/home. 

Why did you decide to come to New Mexico?

I came here to pursue a master’s program in Latin American Studies (at UNM). Since I had been working on immigration and refugee issues for a while, I felt like it made sense to come to a place that was close to the border in case I wanted to continue doing that type of work.

What inspired you to do the yoga work?

I really care about the immigrant community as an immigrant myself, and I also believe in the benefits that yoga practice can offer. Unfortunately, in yoga studios, the immigrant (and) refugee populations sometimes feel like they cannot go because it’s either not accessible financially or because of language barriers or cultural barriers.

What has been a difficulty for you in establishing Kula Yoga?

I believe one of the main challenges has been to find the consistent time and energy, especially because I work another full-time job and (have) my family. Also trying to figure out the schedule and … what works best for the community, what’s a place that they can access more easily by transportation when they're coming from work? But there’s a lot of enthusiasm around it. People really love having classes and being together. So that’s what keeps us going.

What do you do in your free time?

I spend a lot of time watching birds. Why? Because somehow they give me hope. I feel like just looking out the window and seeing them chirp or sing or play outside, I think, “Oh, wow. That’s so interesting.” One of the reasons I was drawn to birding is because I’ve been working with the immigrant population for a while. And birds are also migrants. They come back and forth, and I noticed how some of the patterns of human migration, like coming south to north, are kind of similar to the patterns that birds have been doing for thousands of years — especially for migratory birds. The Rio Grande is one of the biggest corridors in the United States. So that drew me in.

Ellen Marks, a former Journal editor, writes One-on-One profiles and Scam Watch. You can reach her at emarks@abqjournal.com.