By Jacqueline Howard, CNN

(CNN) — If you look closely, you can see a twinkle in her eye.

The Library of Congress image, taken in Detroit in March 1973, shows the late civil rights leader Rosa Parks engaged in the holistic practice of yoga, lying on her stomach and pulling her feet toward her head while looking up toward the camera.

The move, called bow pose or dhanurasana, is associated with fearlessness and grace, and involves reaching back with your hands to grab your ankles, then extending your chest and thighs upward, opening to the world.

The image serves as evidence that Parks, who was born in 1913 and lived to 92, was a true yogi.

“The fact that she did yoga does not at all contradict the other things that I know about her,” said Brenna Greer, associate professor of history at Wellesley College who has studied the life of Parks.

“She was often taking care of herself,” Greer said, which contributed to her strength.

The twinkle in Parks’ eye makes it sobering to remember that almost two decades before the date of that photo, in December 1955, she was arrested at age 42 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger.

To protest her arrest, the Black community boycotted the Montgomery bus system, a pivotal event in the modern Civil Rights Movement.

The way Parks took a stand for civil rights reflects many of the principles behind yoga that connect the body and the mind, such as satya, a practice of truthfulness intended to guide people to think, speak and act with integrity, said Stuart Sarbacker, professor of comparative religion and Indian philosophy at Oregon State University, who has studied the history of yoga.

“Yoga can be defined as mind-body discipline, and it’s rooted in the idea that when you discipline your mind and body, they become very powerful, and then that becomes the basis for having a more skillful and more impactful agency in the world,” Sarbacker said.

“Part of my thinking about Rosa Parks is that this was a very impassioned person who wasn’t tired. She was really fed up. That’s what she was,” he said. “But she was very disciplined in her approach.”

Parks famously has said that she did not refuse to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus because she was physically weak or had tired feet.

“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she once said.

Before her arrest, Parks was active in the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, even becoming its secretary, and in the summer of 1955 she attended a series of workshops on desegregation, including discussions on the use of nonviolent resistance to oppose segregation.

Parks was not an “accidental activist,” according to Greer. In the 1960s, years after her arrest, she worked with Black Panther Party members and the Black Power movement.

“There’s a real strength behind what she stands for,” Greer said. “More so than most, we have a really limited and, I think, inaccurate image and understanding of this person whose history can be so informative and valuable to us — if we allow ourselves to have it.”

When Parks started practicing yoga

Before Parks was introduced to yoga, it had been a popular practice in the United States for many decades, with historical origins in ancient India. The introduction of yoga to the Western world is often credited to Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu teacher who spoke to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.

He made a “big splash” with his spiritual vision of yoga as a “universal practice that was India’s gift to the world,” Sarbacker said.

In the early 20th century, yoga grew in popularity specifically among women. British social activist Annie Besant wrote the book “An Introduction to Yoga” as a collection of four lectures she gave on the practice in 1907.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, the physical aspect of yoga was brought to the fore, being marketed toward women as a way to achieve health and beauty, Sarbacker said.

It was around this time that Parks was likely introduced to yoga.

Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, and “she talks about how her mother really impressed on them the importance of health and being outside and stretching,” Greer said, adding that the civil rights activist had chronic tonsillitis as a child that often waylaid her.

Parks practiced daily stretching and exercise routines, which her mother taught her, according to historian Stephanie Evans.

“Her first exposure to daily exercise actually came from her mother, who was a teacher in Alabama,” said Evans, a professor of Black women’s studies at Georgia State University, national director of the Association of Black Women Historians and author of the book “Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace,” in an email.

“When the school near their home closed, Rosa and her brother Sylvester still benefited from the diverse lessons their mother offered, and she was their teacher until Rosa was eleven.”

By the time Parks was an adult, yoga had grown in popularity among movie stars and artists. Around this time, a yoga teacher named Indra Devi helped make the practice popular among celebrities, Sarbacker said.

“In the ’50s, she taught Hollywood celebrities, really bringing yoga into the cultural mainstream of the United States. And I think that too helped really popularize yoga,” he said. “We still see echoes of this in terms of the relationship between yoga and celebrity culture.”

By the late 1950s, several stars in Black Hollywood — including singer and actress Eartha Kitt and singer and actor Herb Jeffries — practiced yoga.

Parks was not only taking yoga by this time, but she was also teaching the practice, Evans said.

Parks moved to Detroit in 1957, and her niece Sheila McCauley Keys and nephew Asheber Macharia have recounted in writings how their aunt accompanied them to yoga classes and cultivated her own private practice.

Then in 1964, Parks became a deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was a time when there was a link between the Civil Rights Movement, Black churches and Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha or “the seizing on to the truth,” Sarbacker said, referring to the concept of resistance that has ties to the yoga philosophy of satya. Gandhi’s approach directly influenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

“The efforts of the Civil Rights Movement didn’t happen by accident,” Sarbacker said. “It was driven by people who cared deeply about the causes that they were invested in and went to lengths to train their bodies and their minds to be up to the task of effecting change in the world.”

‘Mindful and purposeful’

Yoga remained a prominent part of Parks’ life and activism. She died in 2005 in Detroit.

“Parks was mindful and purposeful in her public presentation of peace work. For example, the legacy of yoga continued in the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute (for Self-Development), which was established in 1987 in Detroit,” Evans said in her email.

“Their signature programs, developed by Mrs. Parks and her longtime friend Elaine Steele, included civil rights history education, advocacy training, and building life skills,” she said. “Exercise is woven into the fabric of the five-week course for youth, and participants are exposed to yoga, as well as karate and other activities.”

There are also many lessons on self-care, communal care and stress management — especially for the Black community — woven into the history of Parks and her yoga practice, Evans said.

Parks’ example of mind-body health not only supports self-care but also the importance of community care.

“The stress of people living in America is at an all-time high,” Evans said.

“Systemic solutions must be put in place in addition to a focus on personal healing. It is not enough for an individual to ‘work hard’ to overcome systems of oppression. Changing the system requires a collective effort to address how those systems were built and kept in place,” she said. “Practices like yoga give individuals and communities the focus and energy to work together and make necessary changes.”

While Greer is inspired by how Parks prioritized self-care and personal healing by practicing yoga, she said she worries about how the message of self-care may take away from the importance of having others contribute to a person’s care and well-being.

“I’m always conscious of how self-care absolves others from caring for us,” Greer said.

“I really appreciate this idea that mental wellness and physical health, for Black women in particular, is radical. For us to take charge of that, it’s radical, because others aren’t. We’re neglected in that way by society at large,” Greer said. “Nobody says to men, ‘Are you practicing self-care?’ So, at the same time that we are committing ourselves to it, and learning and making the time to take care of ourselves, we should not stop expecting it as just a right — and it’s something that we should be able to expect from others.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong date for the Rosa Parks’ Library of Congress image. It was taken in March 1973.

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