Our Mission
Joyful Liberation Collective is a 501(c)(3) grassroots organization that creates liberatory spaces to transform internalized oppression into personal joy, community care, and social awareness.
Last year, we served 5,000 people directly through our programming, reaching almost 50,000 with our award-winning content; and raised $43,000 just from our community.
Our Founding Teachers
Joyful Liberation Collective was founded by a team of mindfulness teachers who felt displaced and disempowered within the wellness industry — and the world. Founded in India, raised on Lenape land (NYC) and now breathing online, this passion project grew into a community. BIPOC-and-Queer-led, our Founding Teachers saw the need to create spaces where people could explore their sense of belonging and wholeness within themselves and the world. Read more about Joyful Liberation Collective’s founding story.
The Joyful Liberation Collective teacher network spans across the country with teachers coming from many backgrounds — Black, API, Latinx, white, straight, queer, fat, skinny, she, he, they. It’s with this diverse insight that we have developed a wide range of mindfulness programs that explore the intersections within ourselves and the world.
Kim Thai
(she/her)
Linda Lopes
(she/her)
Felipe Gonzalez
(he/him)
Meesha Sharma
(they/she)
Tisha Samuels
(she/her)
We Believe
- A compassionate and loving community is essential for feeling safe
- Intersectionality allows us to see ourselves in others
- The most marginalized need to be seen and heard
- A dedicated mindfulness practice is essential for healing
- And constant action is necessary for the liberation of all
Joyful Liberation Collective's Core Practices
At Joyful Liberation Collective, we have created and developed six core practices that live and breathe at the intersection of mindfulness and social justice. programming is developed with much care to uphold these practices in all that we do.
Embodying social justice is the active practice of everyday equity through unbiased compassion towards others, deep dismantling of the systems we participate in and listening to our bodies.
Understanding our social location is the active practice of turning outwards to cultivate awareness around our unique positionality, power and privilege; looking deeply at the biases we carry; and seeing the interdependent nature of our world.
Embracing your authentic self is the active practice of turning inwards to fight against the narrative that your expression is not good enough and to honor all the identities we hold by showing up in spaces as we are (as safety allows).
Honoring our ancestors and reclaiming spiritual traditions is the active racial justice practice of not forgetting our own personal history or the land in which we occupy; and to share existing rituals and practices through an accessible and inclusive lens.
Radical rest is the active practice of pushing against the capitalist world we were born into and fighting the ingrained compulsion to dehumanize ourselves through work.
Joy is Liberation is the understanding that joy is attainable and accessible to us in the present moment and lives within us and is also the radical practice of alchemizing our suffering into joy and light.
Our Impact
Our Teachers
Kim Thai (she/her) is an Emmy-award-winning producer; writer, social justice advocate and mindfulness teacher. She founded Joyful Liberation Collective because she was seeking a community where she could be her most authentic self in her healing journey. As a queer Asian woman and a proud kid of Vietnamese refugees, she shares Buddhist teachings to help people find the freedom and power that lives within themselves. She has personally experienced how our breath can change the way we see and show up in the world and believes deeply that equity is possible and can be achieved if we start reflecting and taking action now.
Linda Lopes (she/her) is a yoga, meditation, and Reiki practitioner based in Brooklyn, New York serving youth and adults. She discovered her mat a decade ago through a mentor, who she always refers to as the catalyst for change in her life. While in search of happiness, joy, and love; she soon realized that what she and most of us long for can be found within. As a Founding Teacher at Joyful Liberation Collective, she actively creates and holds spaces for BIPOC to come together and heal. She strongly believes that it is in power of brave, authentic, trusting, and loving communities that we can create change in the world.
Felipe Gonzalez (he/him) is a certified 500 ERYT, Katonah Yoga teacher, and Founding Teacher at Joyful Liberation Collective. Based in Santa Monica, California (Tongva land) he has spent the last six years learning, unlearning, and exploring the intersections of yoga, mindfulness, and social justice. His mission is to rewrite the narrative around wellness and healing. He believes that Yoga is a practice of activism. By allowing oneself to engage in practices and techniques of self awareness, self regulation, and self care, it awakens the desire to make the world a better place than you found it.
Meesha Sharma (they/she) Hi! My name is Vuzmal Sharma, but most folks call me Meesha. My name Vuzmal means lightning in Kashmiri, the land of my maternal lineage. Meesha is a pet name I was given at birth. Sharma comes from my Punjabi father’s lineage. I am the first of my family to be born outside of South Asia. I believe all people are ever-evolving, shape-shifting multi-dimensional entities, so it’s hard to encapsulate who I am in a few sentences. However, the key words that come to mind right now are: writer, disruptor, yoga sadhaka and guide, community space holder, queer trans lover, and creatrix. My passion lies in alchemizing our sacred and inherent creative energy with the indigenous medicine of yoga to dismantle harmful systems within and without, while co-weaving new ways of being with my peers and allies. I am the founder of a virtual community called Alchemystic Studio (www.alchemysticstudio.com) where we come together to do the work of healing and change-making in a joyful and supportive way. It is an honor to be a part of this incredible collective. May we all have access to liberation. IG: @alchemystic_studio
Tisha Samuels (she/her) is a Founding Teacher of Joyful Liberation Collective. She is a a yoga and ayurveda student and teacher in Pittsburgh, PA (originally Iroquios, Lenape and Shawnee land). She strives to create space for students to learn and use mindfulness tools to bring them back to their highest and truest selves and to discover how that affects and connects them with the world around them. Becoming a part of Joyful Liberation Collective was a necessity, not a decision. With so much hatred and misunderstanding built within the systems that we live, it is a priority to Tisha to be part of the movement towards collective change. It is true dharma to participate in an organization that is centered around mindful action.
Our Board
We’re so lucky to be supported by an incredible, compassionate board.
Kerri-Ann Wright (she/her)
Board Lead
Jessie Anne Zayas (she/her)
Marketing/Comms Lead