Jacoby Ballard
My journey of self-love begins with two invitations that pointed me toward old wounds and, ultimately, healing.
Invitation #1
“Who hurt you?” was the question that my teacher asked as I approached her through the chanting and candles of the sacred ceremony for my 200-hour yoga teacher training graduation. I didn’t know how to answer her, for I saw others be hurt and in their healing process, but I didn’t think of myself that way. The only thing that I could think of, that I was in relationship to at the time, was my dad’s death when I was six, but that didn’t feel like an answer to the question my teacher was asking. Perhaps because I was raised by an independent single mom, strong and resilient, who just kept on keeping on, regardless of what pain happened in our lives. Or perhaps it was due to my own study and practice of social justice, for as I became aware of my white privilege in the world, how could I possibly allow for my own pain to be valid amongst what seemed like the greater pain of people of color, undocumented immigrants, and incarcerated people. In that moment, I told Jaya Devi, “I don’t know,” but I hung on to the question, it felt like a very important inquiry in my own process of svadhyaya, or self-study. She was inviting me, ushering me, toward my pain—both pain that I had sequestered for years and pain that was just around the bend for me.
Invitation #2
“Now we are going to offer gratitude for the body … thank you, body. Thank you for all that you allow me to experience: the positive, negative, and neutral. Thank you. Thank you, hair follicles, for the warmth and character you create, thank you. Thank you, eyebrows, for keeping the dust out of my eyes, thank you … ” I went to a meditation at a retreat for our worker-owned cooperative, this was how we were starting the day, and I was crying as I sat amongst my colleagues, who were mixed race, disabled, black, Latina, fat, gay, white, able-bodied, straight, trans, in their twenties, in their sixties. This felt like the perfect place to grieve and investigate this pain that my tears were evidence of. I had been hating my body, in various ways, since I was an adolescent, and yet I had already been teaching yoga for a decade—a teaching that includes listening to, appreciating, and coming to understand one’s body. I had studied the impact of media messages of the “perfect body” and politically critiqued it and validated the many other shapes of bodies, but it felt like quite a different thing to offer my own imperfect, healing body love and gratitude.
Not Quite Love
Of course, there are many times when I appreciated my body’s power—in hiking up 14,000-foot mountains in my home state of Colorado, on the soccer field or basketball court, in orgasm, in witnessing the healing process from injuries and sickness. As an athlete, I wasn’t completely disconnected. I learned that my body was something that I could force to do amazing feats—to run ten “suicides” in basketball practice; to bike and hike over mountain passes and peaks, a 5,000-foot elevation gain and many miles; to sprint up hills, from telephone wire post to the next post in soccer practice, training to be able to outrun any other team. I learned a sense of empowerment and awe of my body, but not gratitude, not love.
I honor the way that my own process with my body—the dissociation, self-hatred, the way I hid—got me through difficult times, for as I learn about trauma, I see that each was a coping mechanism that I employed in order to survive. I learned to detach from my body at an early age, at seven when I was sexually abused. I learned that if my mind and attention went elsewhere, I could make it through whatever was happening to my body, rejoin my body later, and move on. In high school, when I faced daily bullying and every day was a trial, I learned that if I could control my eating and therefore my body size, and have something closer to the “ideal” for a young woman, then I could mitigate some of the cruelty directed at me. When I came out as genderqueer and began binding my breasts tightly, beginning with ace bandages and then binding “shirts” with Velcro, hiding my breasts meant I was less often identified as a “woman.” If I could be seen as more androgynous, which was who I was on the inside, I felt sexy, handsome, and invincible.
Each of these techniques was a valiant effort at survival. They got me through immense pain that I was not equipped to address. And each of these techniques produced harm for myself in the long-term, preventing me from being fully present in the moment, avoiding conflict, and harming my body. What was intended as a short-term intervention became a long-term unconscious pattern that I have had to consciously unlearn.
Practicing with Pain
At age seventeen, I began meditating as part of a senior project at my high school. I didn’t know anyone who meditated nor read any books or articles about it, but somehow it had seeped into my consciousness. During my senior year, my meditation practice improved my free-throw shot to nearly perfect, cementing my commitment to my sitting practice. At age nineteen, I began an embodied yoga practice as part of a “wellness credit” at my college, taught by a seventy-year-old woman whose photograph remains on my altar to this day, whose life had been completely transformed by the practice. Meditation, asana, and the philosophies of Buddhism and yoga have again and again been healing, directing me toward my shadows, pain, and humanity, and ultimately to love and grace. I have come out as trans through my practice. I have come out as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse through my practice, grieved my grandmother’s death through my practice, and faced breakups in a small queer community through my practice. My practice has led me to forgive my foes and to ask for forgiveness from my ex-partner and my mother. My practice has given me the tools to stay present with the pain of the world, from surveillance of Muslim communities to police brutality against black people to the weekly, sometimes daily, homicide of transpeople, often transwomen of color, to the reality of climate change and environmental destruction, and to offer compassion out of mindfulness.
Dissociating from my body became a habit long after high school that would surface not just at moments when I was genuinely threatened but at times when I needed to be the most present in my body and when conditions were “safe.” My body could not distinguish between safety and danger, and even in the most loving of sexual acts, my mind and attention would travel elsewhere. Conversely, with sexual partners that I was not sure about, I would also dissociate and come back to the moment either during something that I did not actually want to do or afterward, which would produce incredible shame and grief. Whereas if I had remained present, perhaps I could have stopped something that I did not want from happening. I would dissociate in yoga class, and then find myself in a deeper backbend than was safe for me emotionally and physically. I would dissociate on the phone with my mother, during justice rallies and marches, and during dinner with friends. As my yoga practice evolved, I became increasingly aware of this pattern and I would watch it happen, almost like watching a movie.
In my advanced teacher training, during a meditation module, I efforted to stay in my body during one particular day of meditation, two days into Noble Silence. In the early afternoon, as I attended to sensations in my low abdomen, memories of my childhood sexual abuse surfaced, something I had buried for twenty years. I was flooded with tears for the remainder of the day as my body remembered. I stayed present to the sensations of hot tears dripping onto my cheeks, and I used my practice to feel my sit bones on my cushion and my shins on the ground. I knew that I needed to stay with the sensations and the memories associated with those sensations, that staying may lead to healing.
Can I Create Less Harm in This Moment?
In high school, my eating disorder was an effort to control something that was beyond my control: bullying. If I could look cute enough, I imagined that I could have a boyfriend, which would stop my peers in their tracks, for they taunted me and gossiped about me, girls would not change next to me in the locker room, and I had few friends, for being gay. I didn’t really want a boyfriend, I just wanted the endless shaming, blaming, and surveillance to stop. So, I began to hate my belly, specifically, and control my eating and body weight. And it wasn’t until that gratitude meditation with my friend and colleague, that I realized the constant and unconscious harm that I was inflicting.
During a high school soccer practice, one of my teammates had approached me at a break, saying, “Jacoby, why are you doing this?” I had just fallen over from being tackled, but she said that my teammate barely brushed me. I tried to play dumb, but I knew that she saw my pain and vulnerability. I also did not trust her—she was alternately a bystander and a participant in the bullying. Her words did jolt me, not enough to stop but enough to hide my disorder better. This pattern continued into college until a friend told me that she could not be my therapist, and she encouraged me to seek one at the campus health center. Out of a stroke of luck or a godsend, the therapist to whom I was assigned was a woman of color and a justice activist. She connected my eating disorder to my need for control, and she showed me how to examine that pattern in my relationships and activism. She encouraged my yoga and meditation practice, serving to connect my own harmful patterns in my life to the transformation that inevitably occurs on the cushion and mat.
During a visit to New York City at age twenty-four that would lead me to move there a year later, a good friend gave me his old binder. I remember thinking, Am I really going to do this? Is this really who I am? as if donning the binder required both courage and commitment. For the next several years, I wore it anytime I was not in my bedroom. When I practiced yoga in my room, I didn’t wear it, testing out whether my aversion to my breasts was others seeing them or me having them. When I practiced in yoga classes, I wore my binder, testing out how I could move, breathe, and be seen as a genderqueer and trans person. As a yogi, I felt my transition into being trans-identified as a spiritual process, and I wanted to move slowly. In New York City, wearing a binder was a commitment in the summertime, for the sun scorched above and the asphalt radiated that heat up from below. Having something compressing my torso and a fabric not quite breathable meant months of being continuously sweaty, my skin being irritated, and being in a grumpy, exasperated mood.
A few years later, I spoke to my teacher about my practice and the impact of my binder: I couldn’t often take a deep breath, my shoulders were rounding forward, I sometimes experienced tingling down my arms, and chest-openers were impaired. She told me with such compassion, “It’s never okay to hurt yourself.” Those words helped move me toward top-surgery. I clearly felt more myself with a flat chest and binding was creating long-term harm, so surgery seemed the obvious means to have both a flat chest and do less harm to my body. It was a permanent choice that I made with intention, clarity, and compassion, guided by my teacher’s words.
Many trans and gender nonconforming people bind and tuck daily, and those are often the cheapest options to be seen and to feel ourselves for who we are. Some people engage these methods in the short-term, some engage them long-term. Surgeries are expensive, and in order to access them, trans people need a letter from a therapist saying we’ve been living as our gender and do indeed have “gender identity disorder” (recently updated in the DSM to “gender dysphoria”). Thus, we have to be diagnosed with a mental disorder in order to access the care we need for our well-being and, sometimes, our survival. Both class and the medical industrial complex are gatekeepers to the treatments that we need, our striving for self-determination intersecting with further barriers created racism, ableism, and fatphobia.
I was earning eight dollars per hour working at a natural food store, and did not have anything to fall back on. I did not have insurance, and chest surgery cost $7,500 out-of-pocket at the time. I began saving money, which was difficult in New York City, especially on my wage. I was also fired for being trans during that time that I saved for surgery, adding further trauma and financial obstacles just for being myself and seeking well-being. I held two fund-raisers, one as a house party and one as a cabaret, complete with MC and art auction. I turned toward my community for help, baring my story and aspiration, and they showed up; through the fund-raisers, a send-off party before surgery, and care during and after surgery, my beloved community was there for me, a beautiful manifestation of the Buddhist refuge of sangha.
Love As a Daily Practice
My practice has allowed me to be all of myself, and to let all of myself be seen, without regret, guilt, or shame. My practice, supported by my teachers, mentors, and collaborators, has taught me that in turning toward my whole self, all of my experiences, I can relate to so many others who have either been through similar pain or any kind of dissociating or self-harm or suffering in general. I have learned to notice when my old coping strategies resurface, and, over time, they surface less and less or don’t last as long. I greet them as an old friend, and then send them on their way. As I turn toward my own pain, my capacity to bear witness to the pain of the world increases, for I can notice what is triggered or stirred within me, talk through it with friends and collaborators, root into my practices and resources, and respond with kindness, integrity, clarity, and attention. My process is not and will never be perfect, but each moment is an opportunity to practice creating the world that I want to live in, again and again.
Now I know who and what has hurt me, and I try to address that question and forgive the harm week-by-week, not allowing it to be buried but noticing its impact. I offer my body daily kindness and care, moving toward love of even my belly—a belly and a body not portrayed in commercials or magazines as “ideal.” But this is the only body that I will ever have and why waste time not loving it?
Jacoby Ballard, E-RYT 500, is a white, working-class, genderqueer social justice worker who has been teaching yoga and meditation for seventeen years. He is delighted that within the past five years, his worlds of justice and embodied practice are converging and intersecting in addressing trauma, the pursuit of anti-racism, and shifting our yoga and meditation spaces to explicitly address privilege and oppression. Author photo by Laurel Schultheis.