Teo Drake
It’s an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning and I am sweating.
Mind you, I don’t do well with heat. Here I am in flannel pajamas dumbfounded in the midst of my very first attempt at yoga, trying to understand what I’m experiencing. Later I would learn that it was chaturanga and vinyasa flow, but in the moment it seems like I should be throwing my body at the ground at ninety miles an hour, which I have now tried to do four or five times, and all I’ve gotten for my troubles is a puddle of sweat.
I came to this moment having no idea what yoga was. It wasn’t something that showed up in the working-class, Italian Catholic neighborhood I grew up in or in my family of factory workers and mail carriers and nurses. It wasn’t something that showed up in my small-town queer social networks. I didn’t come from places where there would have been an invitation to do yoga. I was far more likely to enter a martial arts studio—which I recently had done, in fact, and it was there that I was running into issues of inflexibility with the compact, muscle-bound, locked-down body that I brought.
People would occasionally tell me that yoga would help me relax or help me with flexibility, and because of this I think I thought that doing yoga meant relaxing, flopping around in shapes, maybe some meditating. I probably confused it a little with tai chi. So because I was thinking it was a relaxing activity and yoga is readily available online and on DVDs, eventually I decided I was willing to give it a try in the privacy of my own home, where I could potentially make a fool of myself and no one could see me. I’d already been to a martial arts studio and been thrown head over heels onto the mat. I’m thinking, “I got this!” with my cup of coffee and my flannel pajama pants on and my $9.99 yoga mat. How hard could it be?
But now, twenty minutes into my completely unexpected and not at all relaxing introduction to yoga, exhausted, in a puddle of sweat, I give up. I retreat into child’s pose and refuse to come out except to once reach for my coffee mug, like a petulant child grasping for a safety blanket. Then I permanently go back to child’s pose and won’t be budged.
_____
If you are thinking that surely this must have been both the beginning and the end of my relationship with yoga, I wouldn’t be surprised. But the miracle in it all is that rather than give in to my wounded pride, I ’fessed up to my defeat to various folks in my life, a number of whom recommended that I check out a beginner’s yoga class, and I was actually willing to give that a try.
The further miracle was that I found my way to a yoga studio located in an industrial district of oil suppliers and machinists, which meant it felt accessible to me in a way that so many mainstream, boutique yoga studios never would have. I am also grateful that I found myself in a gentle yoga class held in the middle of the day, attended by a handful of older folks, and taught by an amazing teacher who had found yoga later in life. A youthful, feisty woman in her 60s, she was a good, grounded, kind soul who taught from a really accessible place. She talked about her own limitations and created space for me and my fellow practitioners to talk about our bodies and where we struggled, and when she discussed ways of navigating all that, she did it from a matter-of-fact place rather than treating our bodily limitations as something to overcome.
And so my first yoga teacher modeled an embodied practice without having to leave a part of myself at the door or pathologize a part of who I was—all of me came to the mat and some parts of me moved differently than others and it was all part of the practice. She brought yoga alive for me from a place of understanding and negotiating bodies that weren’t lithe and sinewy and inherently flexible. To this day I’m grateful for the joy, whimsy, and humor she brought to that imperfect practice.
It’s important to understand what met me on the mat. What met me on the mat was a culmination of a lifetime of being at war with myself and of living in a culture that was at war with me. I had never been comfortable in my own body, and I had lived a lifetime of hearing messages that told me what I knew about myself couldn’t be true and how I understood my body was wrong. As a survivor of childhood physical abuse, domestic violence, and addiction, as someone who at that point had been living with HIV/AIDS for twelve years, the idea of being more physically present in my body was like being asked to move to a war zone—a far more imaginable prospect. Truth be told, my body was a war zone. Around any corner there could be a minefield, and that corner could be the last one I turned, because I couldn’t bear what I might find if I kept going.
I found yoga five years after I had started gender transition, and a few years after I’d had chest reconstruction surgery. It took the threat of dying young from AIDS for me to find the courage to transition from female to male; because now nothing was more frightening than dying, I could risk everything to live in authenticity. At the age of 38, my relationship to my body was new, as was the way other people interacted with me based on what they saw—when I first came to that gentle yoga class, I probably appeared to be an incredibly fit, muscled, and healthy man (although no one would have called me agile, that’s for sure). The class started very slow, but even that was hard for me. I had never moved my body in that way before. I had never been attentive when my body moved. I had played softball, whitewater kayaked, I had been practicing martial arts for about a year, but I didn’t have any ability to move with intention and be present. I moved from a place of reaction. And so those really slow movements were hard to do and stay present.
My body was tight and compact, inflexible to the point of snapping, and unfamiliar. Being present in my body was like going on a trip where someone else had packed my luggage. Every single time someone asked me to simply stand in Mountain pose, roll my shoulders back, and open my chest, I had to confront the fact that I couldn’t do it—my muscles had constricted and my shoulders had rounded in response to physical violence and from decades of hiding my chest. I had to actively see, for the first time, all the ways I had turned in, curled up, locked down on a structural level. I had to experience the waves of agony and grief and loss that the simplest yoga movements brought forward for me.
_____
From as young as I can remember, I hated myself. The violence at home only added confirmation that I was despised and disposable. The terror of the unpredictable violence was inextricable from the fear of knowing I was a boy but believing that to voice that truth would have been the last straw. The only way you can make sense of being beaten in a fit of rage as a little kid is to take it personally. The only power you have in those moments is to believe that it is happening because of something about you and if you could just change, it would stop. If I could just be a girl, if I could stop asking why, if I could stop embarrassing my parents, the violence would stop. But it never stopped.
I spent more than thirty-five years trying to die in all kinds of active and passive ways. I drank. I drank not to feel better, not to feel looser. I drank to die. One particular night, when I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, I was full of rage. Rage that I wasn’t dead yet. I had made a serious effort, having consumed thirty shots of vodka in four hours. That deep agony just called out to be held. If only someone had wrapped their arms around my teenage self and rocked me. Instead I got strapped to a bed and lectured by a priest on how in my queerness I was aiding the devil’s work.
My healing began in my early 20s when I entered twelve-step recovery. Somehow I could again hear that small voice that had spoken to me in childhood, that soft voice of the divine that told me I was loved and wanted, and this led me to seek a new spiritual path as a means of climbing out of the dark pit of despair that I had lived in for so long. From a grounding in twelve-step spirituality, I went on to find Buddhism. The idea of a spiritual practice rooted in compassion and kindness resonated deeply with me after a lifetime of isolation and anger. When yoga came into my life, it tied in so many of the spiritual principles of Buddhism and twelve-step work that it felt familiar. And when I heard yogis such as Seane Corn talk about embodied activism, and also about light and shadow, I felt like they were speaking my language. These yogis came from dark places but didn’t hide that darkness, so when they said they were alive today because of yoga I could believe them.
The gift that gender transition offered me was the possibility that it could be safe to be physically present in my own body. What yoga offered me was an actual pathway to get there. Because of the way that trauma shows up for me in my body, my primary response is to freeze—I get locked down, I get numb, and I can’t think clearly. Physically, emotionally, and cognitively, I can’t move. Finding ways of being present, as someone who has all the reasons in the world to dissociate, was a huge task.
By experiencing discomfort in small, manageable ways on the mat and learning to breathe through it, yoga offered me a practical skill to deal with dissociation. The reality is that painful feelings were happening all the time, but no one taught me how to live with them. When it was so intolerable to be in my body and be present, all yoga asked of me was to breathe and move. And so I would get profoundly uncomfortable and I didn’t have to make it okay. It didn’t have to be pretty, because my life wasn’t pretty. The idea that I could just breathe and move allowed me to start to unlock my frozenness. Until I started practicing yoga, I didn’t understand that the path to healing was that simple and that hard.
Learning to be fluid in my body through a vinyasa flow practice, learning to be compassionate and gentle with my body, is really my spiritual and physical edge. I know how to be strong, locked down, tight, physically powerful—but being physically powerful and emotionally present is something I don’t always know how to do. The physical unlocking of my body is still happening—my dense knotted back muscles can attest to the fact that I’m not “unlocked,” just less locked down. But yoga and martial arts have helped my trauma-frozen self develop the ability to move and be fluid.
_____
Over the years, my understanding of what it means to have a yoga practice has evolved, and my practice has included vinyasa flow, restorative practice, and the Bhakti practice of chanting. There have been periods of physical wellness where I have enjoyed four-days-a-week vinyasa flow classes, and there are times where all I can manage is breathing in child’s pose. Living with AIDS means there are many times when my physical ability and my stamina are beyond my control. It’s in those moments that I’m grateful for the early lessons I received that taught me yoga was about landing physically, spiritually, and emotionally in the same place, on my mat. If all I can manage is child’s pose, that’s yoga. If Bhakti chanting is where I’m at, that’s yoga. If it serves to open my heart and my mind and my spirit and allows me to be compassionate with myself and with the world around me, that’s yoga. I don’t know if I’m ever truly going to not be at war with myself on some level. But I do know that yoga never fails to help me negotiate a gentle truce.
Every one of us has a relationship with our body that is negotiated; we just aren’t all equally aware of it. Some of us are incredibly aware of it because we’ve had to have open negotiations with our bodies simply to survive. I happen to have a conscious understanding and a language for talking about this because I’ve had to examine my physical form in such a raw way. But I think we all do it. Some of us do it with greater intention than others. Some of us do it in ways that make us whole, and some of us do it in ways that tear us apart. For me, yoga was the one way I found to bring compassion into those negotiations with my body.
Because of this, I struggle with the lack of awareness in mainstream Western yoga culture about what it takes for so many of us to show up, about the sheer courage it takes to have that negotiation in a public space, and about what it takes to make spaces fully accessible to the huge numbers of people who will never feel comfortable coming in to your typical yoga studio.
Every time I enter a mainstream US yoga studio, I feel barraged by an emphasis on pretty spaces and pretty clothes and pretty bodies. I feel the weight of constant messaging that yoga is about incredibly complicated poses that only a certain percentage of bodies are ever going to be able to do. I am faced with the financial inaccessibility of memberships and cost-prohibitive drop-in classes, and the worse inaccessibility in terms of what it feels like to walk in with oil under my nails, work boots heavy and noisy on the polished floors, being greeted by the assumption that I must be new to yoga because I don’t look like someone who practices yoga. And every time I have to struggle with whether there’s a space that’s physically safe for me to change in—nine times out of ten there’s not. When I’ve approached studios about catering classes and spaces to queer and trans folks, I’ve had to hear, “Everyone’s welcome! We don’t need a separate class for queer and trans people.” Yet I can’t even get into my yoga clothes safely to make it to class.
If I somehow do navigate all of these obstacles, there’s the equally difficult hurdle of trying to get into my body while facing a new onslaught of inaccessible language from the teacher. I’m hearing language about men’s bodies and women’s bodies that deny my existence. I’m hearing “if you’re an advanced practitioner …” instead of “for those who want more sensation …” or “to move to another level …” If your next level is putting your legs behind your head and your thumbs in your ears and wiggling about on your butt cheeks, I’m all for it, but don’t call that “advanced.”
Because my advanced is that I’m here; I got through all of those personal and cultural barriers and showed up. I guarantee you that being in my body, as stiff and as rigid and as terrified as I am, and simply bending over and having a conversation with my toes from eight inches away is pretty damn advanced. If all that yoga represents is being able to fling your feet behind your head without requiring any emotional presence whatsoever, then we’ve taken yoga away from its true intent.
My deepest hope is that the voices from the margins—those who are practicing yoga and those who could be practicing yoga—will be heard as we continue to come forward and that the mainstream Western yoga community can adapt and change. What I don’t want is the mainstream yoga world to make room for us, in its version of yoga. What I want is for our experiences to shape and shift how yoga is currently practiced. I want us to come back home to an understanding of yoga from a place of embodiment and service. I don’t want to be invited to assimilate. What I want is a call and an invitation into a universal process of radical welcome and transformation.
_____
Despite all of the healing that meditation, Buddhism, twelve-step recovery, and therapy utilizing somatic experiencing have brought me, to this day when I put my forehead to my mat in child’s pose to begin my yoga practice, this is the only place where I ever feel truly physically present in my body, and as at home as I can ever get. Child’s pose is the place I always go where I will without fail hear that loving soft voice of the divine, telling me that I am loved, that I am needed, that I am wanted.
Teo Drake is a spiritual activist, an educator, a practicing Buddhist and yogi, and an artisan who works in wood and steel. He is affiliated with Off the Mat, Into the World and the organization Transfaith. When this blue-collar, queer-identified trans man living with AIDS isn’t helping spiritual spaces be more welcoming and inclusive of queer and transgender people or helping queer and trans folks find authentic spiritual paths, he can be found teaching martial arts, yoga, and woodworking to children. www.rootsgrowthetree.com. Author photo courtesy of the author.