Overview: Denice Singleton, a certified yoga instructor and Reiki Master, retired from her corporate job in 2015 and discovered yoga at a local studio. She became a certified yoga instructor in 2017 and now runs her own business, Synergy and Surrender. Despite being a minority in the yoga community, Singleton aims to inspire other Black people to participate in yoga by teaching her classes at the Upland Senior Center and Montclair Senior Center. She believes yoga is not a religion, but an opportunity for self-awareness, self-care, and spiritual exploration.
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A few months before she retired from her corporate job in 2015, Denice Singleton read a quote that stopped her in her tracks and changed the trajectory of her life: “She looked at her old life one last time, inhaled deeply and whispered to herself, ‘It is time. I am ready for my new story to begin.’”
Singleton realized that she was done with her corporate job and with the three-to-four-hour commutes each day. Her retirement gift to herself was to go to a local “hole in the wall” yoga studio that she looked up online, and take her first yoga class. Singleton convinced her neighbor to go to a class with her and while her neighbor wasn’t very interested, Singleton knew upon entering the yoga space, that it was exactly where she needed to be.
Singleton became a certified yoga instructor in 2017 after a year and a half of training. She began teaching at the same studio where she took her first class. She is now a yogi, pilates instructor, certified Reiki Master and runs her own business, Synergy and Surrender. Synergy and Surrender was formalized in August 2024, but Singleton had been teaching private sessions and Zoom sessions since COVID due to gathering restrictions. She launched online sessions after a student asked about virtual classes during the pandemic.
“Synergy and Surrender kind of summed up what yoga is about. Synergy being that we are indeed greater than the sum of our parts, and that’s what yoga speaks to,” Singleton said.
“You have to let go of your notion and all of the labels and things that you may have been clinging to that define who you think you are, who you thought you were. By letting that go, then you have the opportunity to really discover who you are,” Singleton continued.
Singleton also teaches community yoga and pilates at the Upland Senior Center, as well as a pilates, yoga fusion exercise class at a senior center in Montclair. She teaches low-impact classes and a chair class for people who have limited movement or other challenges.
According to research by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) in 2022, of adults aged 18 and older who practiced yoga in the past 12 months, 12.6% of the adults practicing were identified as non-Hispanic Black. A 2022 Yoga Alliance, Yoga in the World report showed Black yoga practitioners, teachers, and studio owners in the United States as a mere fraction in the bar graph. Yoga Alliance noted that of the 11,020 survey respondents, 80% were female and 70% were white across the world in the categories of yoga teachers and yoga studio owners.
Singleton shared that in her work as a yoga instructor, she hasn’t had many Black students attend her classes. She hopes to inspire other Black people to participate in yoga as she teaches. Singleton has observed that when people of color show up to her class, they don’t typically come back.
Singleton attributes her lack of Black students to possibly “old school” ways of thinking since the majority of her students are of an older demographic. Financial circumstances or lack of representation could also reasons for the lack of Black yoga students as well. Yoga studios such as Core Power Yoga offer a full and partial BIPOC scholarship for yoga teacher training in hopes of making yoga accessible and diversifying the yoga teacher community.
“I always try to make sure that the environment is similar to the environment I found when I came through the door the first time…,” Singleton said. “You want to give yourself the blessing of taking care of yourself to the best that you’re able, and to make this an opportunity to not only work on your health, but also to rediscover the joy of having a time and a space where it’s just about taking care of you and all that attends to that.”
Singleton shared that it’s important for yoga novices and those who are interested to know that yoga is not a religion, but an opportunity for self-awareness, self-care and even an opportunity to enhance whatever their existing spiritual beliefs are.
To learn more about Synergy and Surrender visit synergyandsurrender.com or you can reach out to Denice directly via email at synergyandsurrender@gmail.com or by phone (909) 660-6670.