Expecting Unexpected Bodies: Teaching Yoga to Queer, Trans, and Dis/abled Communities
Workshop with Jacoby Ballard and Lezlie Frye
Saturday, January 15th
12:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Tuition: $20 before January 10th, $25 thereafter

This workshop is for yoga teachers who seek to honor and include a wide range of bodies, backgrounds, and experiences in their classrooms. What kinds of bodies do we expect as teachers? Who do we leave out? How do we understand our own bodies as we practice in community? Together we will explore and sit with our assumptions about trans, queer, and dis/abled people as well as the ways that we reflect those ideas in our instructions, adjustments, and language. Angel Kyodo Williams says that “consciousness frustrates oppression.” Becoming present to who is in the room and adapting how and what we teach is part of our own practice and holds the possibility of radically “frustrating” the assumptions and habits that constrain us as teachers and practitioners.

We will also examine yoga lineage, text, and tradition that either makes room for varied bodies or that explicitly excludes certain experiences. Jacoby Ballard and Lezlie Frye offer alternative approaches to teaching and practice that expect and invite dis/abled, queer and trans communities. As we welcome more people into our studios and community spaces, how must our hearts expand?

ABOUT THE TEACHERS:

Jacoby Ballard and Lezlie Frye are committed to slowing down, making room, and holding space for all of the communities and movements they hold dear. Their work merges social justice and embodied spiritual practice, joy and struggle, work and play. Their partnership has been essential both for their individual practice and in the yoga of relationship. In their alliance to one another around dis/ability and gender identity, they continue to find connections and build their capacity to love.

Jacoby Ballard is a yoga teacher, herbalist, organizer, and co-founder of Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, NY. Jacoby has practiced yoga for 12 years and has taught for 10 years. He received his 200-hour certification from Kashi Ashram in Atlanta, and his 500-hour Advanced Yoga Teacher Training at Kripalu Yoga Center. Until teaching at Third Root, Jacoby only taught in non-traditional spaces for yoga: art studios, non-profit offices, homeless shelters, and at conferences out of his commitment to the communities that don’t show up at or are not invited into yoga studios. Jacoby loves working with students of all bodies, genders, and experiences, and offers his students precise alignment, the lessons of yogic scriptures suited to daily life in the West, and physical challenge in an atmosphere of love and compassion for where the body is at right now. He is in love with the study and practice of yoga and has helped to create a socially-just minded atmosphere for the study of yoga at Third Root.

Lezlie Frye is a yogi, activist, performance artist, poet and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. She was a company member of GIMP, a NY-based interdisciplinary dance project and a former member of SINS Invalid, San Francisco–based artist’s collective exploring dis/abled sexuality. In conjunction with yoga, movement work and performance, she leads workshops and teach-ins around the country. Frye is currently a doctoral student in the American Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University. Her work explores embodiment and citizenship, with a critical focus on race, dis/ability, gender, and social justice.