Jacoby Ballard -- A Queer Dharma -- Professor Phoenix -- SIGNED
A Queer Dharma
Jacoby Ballard
(North Atlantic Books, pb., 288 pp., $18)
The November 2021 pick for Professor Phoenix -- an educational spin-off of The Inky Phoenix, the book club from internationally known yoga teacher, author, and Charleston resident Kathryn Budig.
SIGNED (bookplate)
About the Book:
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.
About the Author:
As a yoga teacher with 20 years of experience, he leads workshops, retreats, teacher trainings, teaches at conferences, and runs the Resonance mentorship program for certified yoga teachers to find their niche and calling. In 2008, Jacoby co-founded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, to work at the nexus of healing and social justice.
Since 2006, Jacoby has taught Queer and Trans Yoga, a space for queer folks to unfurl and cultivate resilience. Jacoby received Yoga Journal’s Game Changer Award in 2014 and Good Karma Award in 2016, and an award by Reclamation Ventures in 2021.
Jacoby has taught in schools, hospitals, non profit and business offices, a maximum security prison, a recovery center, a cancer center, LGBT centers, gyms, a veteran’s center, and yoga studios. He leads workshops and trainings around the country on diversity, equity, and inclusion and consults on DEI for yoga and meditation organizations. He is the author of A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation, released in 2021.