Jivana Heyman
We all have transformational moments in our lives. Those single moments that you can picture so clearly when so many other moments are a blur. I remember one moment when I was about twelve or thirteen, standing in the hall of the house I grew up in, and realizing that I wasn’t like the rest of my family—I was gay.
Thankfully, these days it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to be gay. But, in the late seventies it still was. I didn’t have any positive role models for what it meant to be a gay man—other than Charles Nelson Reilly on Match Game. In that moment, standing in the hall, I remember a feeling of great sadness, grief actually, over the mistaken belief that I wouldn’t be able to have a family and that I wouldn’t have children. I felt sure that I would spend my life alone and isolated from all the things that seemed to offer comfort and security. I had no idea that those things would be possible for me.
I hated my body for being attracted to men. I felt that it had betrayed me, and it was leading me to a sad and lonely life. Ironically, gay men are stereotyped as narcissistic, yet my experience was the exact opposite. How could I love my body, which was the source of so much confusion, pain, and sadness? My body was drawing me away from everything that society was telling me that I needed to be happy—a loving partner and a family.
I came out when I was seventeen, and so did my self-hatred. I was finally being honest about who I was, but it didn’t translate into self-acceptance. Instead, my first relationships with other men were desperate attempts for validation. I couldn’t see myself. It was like I was a ghost, and I would haunt any man who was attracted to me. I would sleep with anyone who showed any interest in me at all, because I was desperate for some kind of acceptance—anything that looked like love. Eventually, I dated one man in college for more than a year, but he finally left me because he said I was just too needy.
On top of my own self-hatred, society was turning against gay men as the fear of AIDS exploded in the late eighties. Suddenly, dear friends and lovers were getting sick and dying. I was living in San Francisco and working with ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, as well as volunteering at a local AIDS hospice. It was an incredibly sad and painful time; I was in my early twenties—finally out of the closet—and surrounded by illness and death. This reality shifted my thinking from the normal twenty-something’s musings to deep questions about life, death, and spirituality.
Luckily, I had recently rediscovered yoga and stumbled into a yoga class with an Integral Yoga teacher in Berkeley. I say “rediscovered” because my grandmother had a strong daily yoga practice—she was way ahead of her time. When I was young, I would watch her practicing in the mornings and sometimes join in. I remember looking at poses in her yoga book with a man with a gold face on the cover. When I rediscovered yoga in my early twenties, my teacher had this same book, and I realized that my grandmother had also studied Integral Yoga with Swami Satchidananda—the book was Integral Yoga Hatha, his classic yoga textbook.
Yoga crept up on me. I was busy with my activism, but I found myself drawn more and more to meditation and the subtle practices of yoga, which offered a new experience of deep connection. Through yoga, my self-image began to shift. I remember one day my yoga teacher stopped me after class and said, “You know, you don’t have to live like this.” For a long time, I had no idea what she meant. I was so used to being angry—hating my body for being attracted to men, hating the world for its homophobia, and for killing my friends with AIDS. I didn’t know how else to live.
As I began to practice more, I could feel my body changing. After years of severe digestive problems, I could feel the knot in my belly loosening. But it wasn’t all positive. One day in an advanced asana class, I pulled too hard in a forward bend and boom I could barely move. I had torn my SI joint, and I would spend years healing it. My self-hatred had found its way into my practice as I pushed beyond my limits. Healing was slow, but I knew that in yoga I had found a balm to sooth my pain.
The pain of my youth was a form of tapas—purification through suffering. In the Yoga Sutras, the great sage Patanjali says the first step in practicing yoga is accepting the suffering in our lives as a catalyst for growth. Rather than feel victimized by what life throws at us, we say okay to the challenges of life and use the suffering as fuel for self-awareness. It is those challenging moments, and the way we respond to them, that help to shape the form of our lives and even create our destiny. This is what was happening to me—slowly I was beginning to accept the suffering rather than fight it, and the result was brief moments of peace unlike any I had known.
In Book 2, Sutra 1, of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali follows tapas with two more teachings: svadhyaya (reflection) and ishvara pranidhana (faith). This yoga trifecta has magical powers of transformation, as we learn to move from pain to peace.
Svadhyaya: Reflection
I soon found myself training at the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute to become a yoga teacher, and I was mesmerized by the yoga teachings. The concept of svadhyaya was new to me—the idea of witnessing my mind rather than being the thoughts. This meant that I could begin to look honestly and openly at the way my mind was working. What a gift. Previously, I felt victimized by my own relentless negative and critical thoughts. Then, I started to realize that I could step back and observe the thoughts instead of being them.
In 1995, I started sharing yoga with the HIV/AIDS community in San Francisco, and I taught in local hospitals. I was struck by my students’ reactions to the yoga teachings. So many of them seemed to be on a spiritual fast track, speeding through life lessons that normally take decades to learn. It was an incredible gift to spend time learning from them as they faced the reality of death—some in utter fear and some in peace. I wondered what allowed some people to die so peacefully. How could they come to such a deep acceptance when death is so terrifying?
According to Swami Satchidananda, our true nature is happiness, and any unhappiness or stress we experience is caused by our attachments—things outside of ourselves that we think we need to be happy. An attachment can be shallow or deep: shallow like wanting to buy a new shirt or deep like the desperate need for someone to love us. The ties that bind us are created in our mind. We tether ourselves to these things in a desperate attempt to be happy when, in fact, it’s the tethering, the desiring, that is keeping us down. It’s the desires themselves that cause the unhappiness.
Non-attachment, on the other hand, is freedom from these endless desires: the experience of universal love. As the Bhagavad Gita explains, it is freedom from “the wishing and selfishness fever.” 5 This concept of non-attachment became a touchstone in my life when my closest friend, Kurt, died of AIDS in 1995. Kurt was a student of yoga philosophy, and he loved the concept of non-attachment. He said that it encapsulated all the spiritual teachings in one simple idea—releasing the material world and holding on to Love.
A few months before his death, Kurt knew that his time on earth was limited, and he decided to approach death with a sense of inquiry and reflection that is the core of svadhyaya. He was a writer and lover of lists. When we would spend time together, he would inevitably start making a list about something, “Let’s think of all the places you’ve ever lived,” or “Name all of the people you’ve dated.” So I wasn’t surprised when Kurt announced that as a way to wrestle with death, he was going to make a daily list of all his attachments—things he needed from the world to be happy.
At first, his list of attachments was very long. After a few days, he announced that he got his list down to just four things:
1. His partner
2. His dog
3. His apartment (he did live in San Francisco after all)
4. Me, his best friend (I was honored to make the top four!)
For a few weeks, he was stuck on those four, and he couldn’t seem to get the list any shorter. Then he got really sick: He had Kaposi sarcoma, skin lesions, all over his body and face. He had lymphoma, which made his face so swollen that he was unrecognizable, and he had retinitis, which made him blind. He was in the hospital for weeks, and one day when I went to visit him, I was surprised to see that he was in a very good mood. He said that he was happy because he got his list of attachments down to just two things:
1. His partner
2. His dog
I was a little taken aback by this announcement. I was off the list. I asked him why that was a good thing, because it kind of felt like I was being abandoned. He turned to me and said, “You are my dear spiritual friend. I love you, and we’ll always be together.”
I still didn’t get it. I kept visiting him in the hospital as he got sicker and sicker. One day he slipped into a coma, and then he died the next day. He was never able to reduce his lists of attachments, and for good reason. Both his partner and his dog relied on him so much and both of them really suffered after his death.
Surprisingly, I had the opposite experience. I expected to be devastated when Kurt died because he was the friend who was always there for me, listening to me, and taking care of me. But, for some reason, I was okay. Kurt’s love stayed with me in a way that I didn’t think was possible. Kurt’s conscious good-bye was deeply healing for me on a subtle level. He taught me what non-attachment really was—deep, pure, unselfish Love.
Ishvara Pranidhana: Faith
Yoga was doing its magic. By 1997, I had been with my partner, Matt, for four years. Our relationship was getting stronger, and we wanted to build a family together. I found I had a new faith that I had never experienced before.
We wanted to have a commitment ceremony (the idea of gay marriage didn’t even exist yet!), and we thought that the Integral Yoga Institute would be the perfect location. Of course, there had never been a gay marriage at the Institute, and no one knew what Swami Satchidananda would think of the idea. Luckily, he was visiting San Francisco about six months before the date that we were considering for the ceremony, so I had an opportunity to ask him in person.
Generally, Swami Satchidananda was a busy guy, and the only time I had the chance to speak with him was when he was at the airport, arriving or departing. In those days, you could go right up to the gate, even if you didn’t have a ticket. So, in the airport I waited in a long line of people who were going up and speaking to him about all their various problems. Nervously, I asked him if it was okay for Matt and I to get married at the Institute. His response was, “Okay, when?”
I was a little surprised by his immediate positive response, and I muttered, “Well, we’re thinking of August 31.” Then I moved away and many other people came up to speak with him. About half an hour later, he got up to board his plane and walked over to me. He looked me in the eye and said, “August 31st, I’ll be thinking of you.” I was blown away by his loving acceptance and the fact that he remembered the date from our earlier discussion. In that moment, I felt that I was finally being seen after a life of invisibility.
The Yoga of Parenting
In the following years, Matt and I adopted two children through open adoption, and now they are fifteen and eleven. I was working as a yoga teacher, and so my schedule gave me the flexibility to stay home with the kids when they were little. I feel blessed to have had the experience of being the main caregiver, which most men don’t get to do. Yet, parenting was, and continues to be, the most challenging experience of my life.
It’s easy for me to be peaceful when I’m alone, to do my practice, and get quiet inside. It’s harder for me to keep that peace in the face of daily life. When my daughter is angry about something at school and turns that anger toward me, it takes a lot of self-awareness to remain neutral enough to see the dynamic unfolding rather than reacting. This is the secret power of yoga—helping us keep calm in the storm.
In my daughter’s adolescent mind, I see a reflection of my own self-doubt and insecurity. The pressure on girls and women to be good at everything (and look amazing while doing it) is preposterous. When it gets to be too much, she goes for self-doubt and self-criticism or she lashes out. I worry about her self-image and wonder how yoga can help her to stay connected in a disconnected digital world.
The other day, she called herself fat and I didn’t know how to react. On the one hand, denying it and saying, “Oh, no, you’re not fat,” is simply playing into her body issues. Instead, I asked her why she said that and if she feels pressure to look a certain way. She laughed it off, as she often does whenever I start getting philosophical. But the issues are impossible to avoid. She wants to buy makeup and go shopping for clothes all the time, but I notice in the midst of shopping there is a basic unhappiness there. Shopping brings up the insecurities, and even though we shield her as much as possible from the media, she is mesmerized by the media’s messages around self-worth, beauty, and the roles of women and girls.
I try to balance those messages with a different story. The messages I give her come out of my own experience of healing from self-hatred. I tell her that each of us is a spark of the Divine. We each have special skills and talents that are needed in the world. Our job is to uncover that special calling and embrace ourselves, regardless of what the world is telling us.
As parents, we need yoga even more. We have such a difficult line to walk, and I think we end up sending mixed messages to our kids. We want our kids to listen to us and behave a certain way, yet we want them to be free and to be true to themselves. It’s like we’re saying “Be yourself … but only the version I want you to be.” What is incredible about yoga is that it gives parents the tools we need to connect with the truth within ourselves so we don’t look to our children to fulfill our needs.
Ironically, the actual teaching about yoga and body image is that we’re not the body. Swami Sivananda used to sing, “I’m not the body, not the mind, immortal Self I am!” Connecting with the immortal Self sounds daunting, but that’s really what yoga is about. My goal is not simply to teach my kids yoga, but to teach them that there is a way to connect with the immortal Self. Once we are connected there, we can find a balanced relationship with our physical body—a balanced relationship of acceptance and gratitude.
Being a friend, parent, and partner has offered me so many lessons that sitting in meditation could only begin to teach me. The challenges of coming out as a teenager, losing my friends in my twenties, and parenting through my thirties and forties has helped me learn more about myself. I see that my challenges are opportunities for growth (tapas). If I reflect on what I’m learning I see where I’m attached (svadhyaya), and eventually I see that the answer is always to let go, have faith, and connect with love (ishvara pranidhana).
Jivana Heyman is the founder of Accessible Yoga, which is an international organization dedicated to sharing yoga with all. Currently, Accessible Yoga offers annual conferences, teacher training programs around the world, ambassador programs, and an online directory. Jivana is also co-owner of the Santa Barbara Yoga Center, manager of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute, and is an Integral Yoga Minister. His passion is making yoga accessible to everyone and empowering people with the yoga practices. For more information visit www.accessibleyoga.org. Author photo by Sarit Z Rogers.
5. Easwaran Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985).