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,
lovingkindness, and grounding, and helps readers 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 lovingkindness, 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.