A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation - Jacoby Ballard, Susanna Barkataki

Written by Jacoby Ballard, Susanna Barkataki
Read by Phil Corin, Jacoby Ballard
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
Release date: 04-12-22

Queer critique, queer practice: embodied teachings for healing from trauma and social injustice.

Jacoby Ballard provides an empowering and affirming guide to embodied healing through yoga and the dharma, grounded in the brilliance, resilience, and lived experiences of queer folks.

Part I deconstructs the ways mainstream yoga perpetuates queer- and transphobia and other systemic oppressions, exploring the intersections of yoga, capitalism, cultural appropriation, and sexual violence. Ballard also addresses the trauma - complex, vicarious, historical, and collective - perpetuated against queer communities. In response, he offers tools for self-compassion, tonglen, loving kindness, and grounding, and helps listeners explore questions like:

What is trauma? How is it a product of injustice - and how can healing it create justice?

The world won’t stop being homo- and transphobic, so how do I encounter that in a way that does the least harm?

How do we love what is uniquely trans about us?

What are affinity groups, and why do we need them?

In part II, Ballard offers a queer-centered, fully embodied, and equity-rooted practice with meditations, practices, and sequences for processing and healing from trauma individually and in community. He explains concepts like loving kindness, letting go, compassion, joy, forgiveness, and equanimity through a queer lens, and pairs each with corresponding meditations, practices, and beautiful line drawings of queer bodies.

Enhanced with stories from Ballard’s personal practice and professional experience teaching yoga in schools, prisons, conferences, and his weekly Queer and Trans Yoga class, A Queer Dharma is a guidebook, reclamation, and unapologetically queer heart offering for true healing and transformation.