Community Guidelines

These are the terms of engagement with CMW work and this community. These guidelines apply to everyone who participates in CMW in any capacity and anyone in physical or digital contact with CMW through its platforms or publications.

  • CMW exists at the intersection of somatic practice and political self-determination. The work draws from yoga, meditation, body sovereignty, and liberation frameworks developed by and for Black and Brown communities. It is not neutral work and does not present itself as such.

    The values CMW centers: courage, vulnerability, compassion, simplicity, patience, cultural respect, community, and sustainability. These are not aspirations. They are the terms on which this space operates.

    This community exists for people who want to know their bodies better, think harder about what freedom means in the body, and be in proximity to others doing the same work. It is not a wellness consumer relationship. Participation asks something of you.

  • CMW is QTPOC-centered work. Black queer people, including trans, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary Black queer people, are centered in this community. This reflects who this work was built for, who it serves most directly, and whose comfort and safety take priority when any conflict arises.

    Allies are welcome. Being welcome means your presence is valued. It does not mean the space orients around you.

    In practice:

    • Listen more than you speak in spaces that aren't built primarily for you.

    • Take cues from the room rather than setting them.

    • Do not expect the community to educate you on its own history or language.

    • Your discomfort with the centering is not grounds for complaint.

    This applies in every CMW context: yoga classes, retreats, online spaces, published work, book club, events, and private engagements.

    Some programs within CMW have more specific membership requirements. Brother to Brother is exclusively for Black gay men. COURAGE is centered for Black queer people. Those program-specific terms govern participation in those spaces. These guidelines govern everything.

  • CMW spaces work because people show up honestly. These are the participation expectations that apply across all programs and contexts.

    Come when and how you can. Belonging is not conditional on perfect attendance, full preparation, or polished presentation. Real life is honored here.

    Speak for yourself. Use "I" statements. Speak from your own experience. Do not offer advice unless it is asked for. Do not summarize or speak on behalf of others.

    Listen with generosity. Let people finish. Sit with discomfort before responding. Make room for difference without requiring resolution.

    Curiosity over certainty. This community is built for learning and unlearning. Come to engage, not to be right.

    Bring your full self. Emotions, contradictions, softness, humor. None of these require apology.

    Keep showing up. Community builds over time and through rhythm, not through single appearances. Consistency is an act of care for the people around you.

  • Pronouns. Do not assume them. Use what people offer. If someone corrects you, adjust and move on without excessive apology that centers your discomfort.

    No assumptions. Do not assume identity, sexual orientation, gender expression, relationship structure, health status, or life experience based on appearance, attendance, or anything else. People name what they name when they name it.

    Language justice. AAVE and Black queer vernacular are not errors. They are not informal registers that get cleaned up for professionalism. In CMW spaces, both digital and physical, these language forms are preserved and respected, not corrected. This applies to how CMW communicates and to how community members engage with each other.

    Reclaimed language. Terms that community members have reclaimed for themselves are used deliberately here. They are not available for general use by people outside the communities they belong to. If you are uncertain whether a term applies to you, the default is not to use it.

    Respectful language. Use language that reflects the dignity of the people in the room. This is the floor, not the full expectation.

  • Consent in CMW spaces is specific, ongoing, and revocable.

    Bodies. No physical contact without explicit agreement. This applies to adjustments in yoga, physical greetings, and any other bodily contact. Agreement once is not agreement always.

    Information. Do not ask people to share more than they have offered. People disclose what they disclose. The rest belongs to them.

    Participation. Showing up for a program does not constitute consent to specific activities within it. People can adjust, pause, or stop at any point without explanation.

    Data. Participant information belongs to participants. CMW is a steward of it, not an owner. The CMW AI Use Policy governs how technology touches participant data, including what never goes near an AI tool and why. The full policy is published alongside these guidelines. A summary is available on request.

  • Explicit, specific, opt-in consent is required before capturing any image, video, or audio of another person in a CMW context. This applies in every setting: yoga classes, retreats, book club sessions, events, road trips, and any other CMW gathering.

    Do not post images or video of other participants to social media or any public platform without their explicit permission. This includes images in which they appear incidentally.

    Recording of any kind in body-centered programs is prohibited without exception. This applies to COURAGE and any clothesfree programming. The documented pattern of platforms removing and penalizing Black, queer, trans, and nude content makes this prohibition non-negotiable. No exceptions exist for personal use or private archives.

    Charles may document programs for CMW's own records and publications. When he does, this is disclosed in advance. Participation in documentation is always optional.

  • What is shared in CMW spaces stays there.

    This applies to yoga classes, retreats, book club sessions, private sessions, online conversations, and any other context where people share personal information, stories, or experiences.

    Confidentiality covers: names and identifying details, health and medical information, relationship and family information, sexual orientation and gender identity (especially where someone has not publicly disclosed), financial information, and any disclosures made in the context of community trust.

    Breaking confidentiality is a serious violation of community agreement. It is grounds for removal under Section 8 and will be treated as that regardless of intent.

  • When harm occurs in a CMW space, through action, inaction, language, or behavior, there is a process for addressing it.

    Naming harm. Any CMW participant or community member who believes harm was caused has a direct way to say so: in person with Charles, through a program facilitator, or by email. The threshold for naming harm is not severity. Mishandled details, language that erased something intentional, an assumption that caused exclusion, all of these meet the threshold.

    Charles's responsibility. When harm originates from a CMW process or decision, Charles corrects it, states plainly what changed, and ensures the affected person sees the correction happen. This is not conditional on the scale of the harm.

    Response to harm from outside CMW. When harm comes from a platform, vendor, or system CMW's community encounters through participation in CMW programs, the response is proportional. Minor and isolated: documented, monitored for pattern. Systematic or repeated: reviewed, corrected where possible, and the source put under real scrutiny. Any tool or partnership feeding into systems that criminalize, target, or expose QTPOC communities: refused, not reviewed.

    Community input. Community members, especially those whose bodies and stories are most directly affected by CMW's decisions, are invited to weigh in on how these guidelines evolve.

  • 9. What Gets You Removed

    The following result in removal from CMW programs, events, and online spaces. These are not subject to debate or appeal.

    • Harassment of any participant, including Charles, in any form: verbal, physical, or digital

    • Discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, body size, health status, or any other dimension of identity

    • Physical contact without consent

    • Photography, video, or audio recording without explicit permission

    • Sharing confidential information disclosed in a CMW space

    • Repeated disregard for the centering outlined in Section 2, particularly by allies who have been asked to adjust

    • Any behavior that creates a credible safety risk for another participant

    Removal is a decision Charles makes. It may be immediate or following a conversation, depending on the situation. In cases involving the safety of QTPOC participants, there is no warning process.

Artificial Intelligence Policy

Charles Mindful Wellness (CMW) is a wellness practice serving Black queer communities, and it uses AI tools in parts of its work. This policy sets the rules for how. The idea underneath every rule is called AI Heterosis: intelligence gets stronger when honest difference meets honest difference, and weaker when everything converges on one optimized answer, which is the path most of the AI industry is chasing. The stakes here aren't abstract. AI touches actual bodies: program participants, retreat guests, and the archive of Black queer knowledge CMW is building through its published work. When CMW uses an AI tool, two kinds of human knowing meet. One is present and accountable, trained on lived consequence. The other is millions of people whose words were collected without credit or consent and compressed into the tool, with the machine as the filter between you and them. A crossing where everyone consented is exchange. A crossing without consent is extraction. Every section below exists to keep that difference visible and enforced.

  • Your data belongs to you. CMW is a steward of it, not an owner.

    • Sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV or health status, race, and any nude or clothesfree imagery are never entered into a third-party AI tool without explicit, revocable, informed consent from the person the data belongs to.

    • Consent is asked for the specific use, not collected once and reused. If AI use expands beyond what you agreed to, you get asked again.

    • If your words, images, or stories are used in AI-assisted content, four commitments apply: your consent before use, compensation where the material generates revenue, control retained by you over your own material, and credit given by name unless you ask for anonymity.

    • Data use has to serve the community it came from, not just CMW, and CMW answers for how that data is handled.

    • Small groups carry a specific risk: a retreat cohort or a book club is small enough that even de-identified data can point back to someone. Any AI-assisted analysis of participant data accounts for that risk before it runs, not after.

  • Clothesfree, nude, and other body-based programming carries the highest-risk data CMW touches, in any program where it appears, present or future. The documented harm is real: platforms and AI systems have repeatedly flagged, removed, and de-monetized Black, queer, trans, and nude bodies at rates far above general content, and moderation systems routinely treat HIV and sexual-health material as inherently dangerous.

    • No participant image or video from clothesfree or nude programming goes through an AI image tool, a general cloud AI service, or any facial-analysis system, ever. No exceptions.

    • No biometric or facial-recognition processing of any kind touches CMW's community. Peer-reviewed research has documented facial-analysis error rates of 34.7% for darker-skinned women against 0.8% for lighter-skinned men, a 43x disparity built into the design. That is not a risk CMW is willing to run.

    • Participant names are never linked, in any AI prompt or document, to nudity, HIV status, or sexual orientation. If a name has to appear in AI-assisted work, the sensitive detail gets stripped from that instance first.

    • Anything tied to clothesfree or body-based programming is stored locally, not synced to a cloud AI service by default.

    • AI tools can be given aggregate patterns, general accessibility needs, and program logistics in service of program design. They are never given any specific participant's body, health status, or identity details, unless that participant has consented to that specific use.

  • AAVE and Black queer vernacular are not errors to be corrected. Peer-reviewed research has found AI systems flag African American English as toxic or offensive at roughly twice the rate of standard English. That bias runs directly at CMW's own writing voice and at the language of the communities CMW serves.

    • AI tools do not get final say over CMW's language. Anything an AI tool flags, corrects, or "cleans up" in Charles's words or in participant language gets human review before it's accepted, and the default is to keep the original.

    • Culturally specific language, reclaimed terms, and ballroom and Black queer vernacular are preserved deliberately. If an AI tool suggests replacing them with more "neutral" phrasing, that suggestion is rejected as a matter of policy.

  • The pattern is documented: major social platforms have removed or suppressed content from Black creators, queer creators, trans bodies, sex educators, and fat bodies at disproportionate rates. TikTok has publicly admitted to restricting LGBTQ+ hashtags, and an annual industry safety index has given failing grades to five of six major platforms for three years running.

    • Platforms are treated as untrusted distribution, not primary storage. Owned channels (the newsletter, the zine, charlesnarles.com) hold the real archive. Platforms are where CMW shows up, knowing the content could disappear without explanation.

    • Every takedown, shadowban, or unexplained reach drop gets documented: date, content, platform, what happened. CMW keeps its own evidence rather than relying on platform transparency that doesn't exist.

    • Where deliberate word substitution is needed to avoid moderation flags, it gets used, and the original uncensored version is always preserved in CMW's own archive.

  • This covers newsletters, zines, long-form guides, and any AI-assisted content CMW publishes.

    • Disclosure: work that involved substantial AI drafting, editing, or research assistance says so. Charles retains full authorship and final judgment on all content regardless of AI involvement.

    • Bias review: AI-assisted content gets checked for stereotyping before publication. One major study found a leading generative model produced negative associations for queer people 70% of the time. CMW's content does not get to reproduce that pattern by accident.

    • Fact-checking: claims sourced through AI research get verified against the primary source before publication, not taken on the AI's word.

    • Credit: where a framework or methodology is original to Charles, that origin is stated plainly. Where it comes from someone else, they are credited by name, not absorbed as CMW's own.

  • Not every AI tool is equally trustworthy with CMW's material. Every tool gets checked on two fronts: what it does, and where it runs.

    What the tool does. Before a tool touches CMW work, four questions get asked:

    • Has this tool, or a close relative of it, been documented targeting or disproportionately burdening a marginalized group?

    • Do the tool's default outputs assume a demographic that isn't CMW's community, treating everyone else as an edge case?

    • Does the tool claim to protect privacy while actually increasing surveillance of the people using it?

    • Is the tool marketed as helping wellness or community organizations while its actual function is data extraction? This is the pitch CMW is most likely to hear directly, and the one easiest to miss when the sales copy sounds warm.

    Alongside those: Does the vendor train on user input by default, and can that be turned off? What is the retention policy, and does CMW's data get deleted on request? Is there a stated way to report harm? Has the tool been documented, in peer-reviewed research or credible reporting, to carry racial, gender, or queer bias?

    Where the tool runs. A tool can pass every question above and still be built on infrastructure that harms CMW's community. The compute behind these systems runs somewhere, on land, drawing power and water, and the documented pattern is that the burden lands on majority-Black neighborhoods and communities that look like the ones CMW serves. Before adopting a major vendor, CMW checks the public record for documented environmental or community harm from that vendor's infrastructure. Avoiding all cloud computing is not realistic for a solo practitioner, so this check is weighed rather than treated as automatically decisive. Weighed, not ignored.

    Tools that fail more than one check get used cautiously, with more human review, or not at all for sensitive material.

  • CMW sorts AI-related harm along its Spectrum of Harm: inconvenience, exclusion, surveillance, misclassification, violence. The response scales with the tier, and this section is honest about what power a practitioner of CMW's size actually has.

    When CMW's own process causes the harm. This is the one place full repair is entirely within CMW's control, and it applies at every tier. If you believe AI-assisted CMW content or process caused you harm, you have a direct way to say so: email, in person, or through program facilitators. CMW corrects the content or process, states plainly what changed, and you see the correction happen. This is not conditional on the harm being severe. A misapplied name, a mishandled detail, a language "correction" that erased something intentional: all get the same standard. Named, fixed, shown.

    When the harm comes from outside CMW (a platform, a vendor, a system the community is forced to navigate):

    • Inconvenience: logged. No further action unless it becomes a pattern.

    • Exclusion: documented with specifics (what happened, who was affected, what it cost them), the immediate case corrected where possible, and the tool's continued use for that function put under real review. A repeated pattern from the same tool ends that tool's use for that function.

    • Surveillance: use stopped immediately on discovery. No review period. Anything that tracks, profiles, or logs behavior beyond the specific task it was asked to do does not get a second chance.

    • Misclassification: permanent disqualification, consistent with the standing ban on biometric and facial-analysis tools in Section 2.

    • Violence: categorical refusal of any tool or partnership that feeds into systems capable of this tier (policing, family separation, bail-setting), even indirectly. Where CMW's community is exposed to a violence-tier system through no choice of CMW's own, that gets documented and the community is warned directly.

    What CMW does with the power it has. CMW cannot sue a platform or force a vendor to change its training data, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What CMW can do, at exclusion tier and above: feed documented incidents into existing coalition evidence pools rather than letting them sit in a file, file formal complaints with regulators when a pattern repeats, and name vendors publicly in CMW's published work when CMW declines to renew and is confident in the claim. None of this moves a company by itself. It is testimony as resistance, applied to a domain where legal and economic leverage isn't available at CMW's size.

  • This policy is not Charles's alone to hold. The operating principle is a simple one: nothing about us without us.

    • This policy is reviewed at least annually, and any time a new AI capability or tool enters CMW's practice.

    • A standing invitation exists for QTPOC community members, especially those in clothesfree, body-based, or identity-specific programs, to weigh in on how AI touches programs that involve their bodies and stories. This is not a survey CMW runs once. It's an open channel.

    • Charles holds final decision authority as founder, and community input on this policy is sought deliberately, not incidentally.

  • Retreats and programs held outside the United States carry cross-border data risk that domestic programs don't.

    • Participant consent for AI-assisted data handling is confirmed under the laws of both the participant's home country and the host country, whichever is more protective.

    • Participants traveling from or through countries with anti-LGBTQ laws are flagged internally, with their knowledge and consent, so that no AI-assisted communication, marketing material, or data storage creates a paper trail that could expose them. This is not paranoia. AI-assisted surveillance has already been used to track LGBTQ+ people in some of the countries CMW's community travels through.

    • Local data protection law at the retreat site is researched and followed in addition to CMW's own standards, not instead of them.