This was first delivered as a keynote address for the 2025 Queer Spectra Arts festival in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I’ve memorized by Jalaluddin Rumi’s poem, the Guest House, and recite it often in my yoga classes, meditation sessions, and on retreats. It reminds me to not make an enemy of any part of myself, and to meet all conditions as workable-to use it as fodder to grow my patience, strengthen my courage, deepen my practices of honesty, grow my kindness. That inner practice allows me to meet the parts of people around me with patience and respect, as well. What we practice REALLY matters. What we rehearse in our minds and hearts determine our words and our actions. It impacts our own nervous system and outlook on lives, and everyone around us as well. It impacts who and how we are as COMMUNITY, whether we can be in FLUX, or whether we will fracture. 

***

I love queer people. I love you! Even if I haven’t met you, I consider you a friend I haven’t met yet. I love seeing you at the coffee shops, at the gym, on the mountain, on the playground with our kids. I always send lovingkindness when I see a recognizably queer person (may you be happy beyond measure, may you be safe and protected, may you have a lasting peace) who I don’t know (and sometimes, inevitably, am probably mistaken and send metta to a straight person, but they need it too, right?). I honor what it takes to be who you are, to love who you love, to do what you do, in a world like this right now. We are creative, we are brilliant, I honor our ingenuity, our diligence and insistence on living lives that are meaningful to us. Wow. 

And, I am 44 and I have seen giant rifts within queer community. I have been out for 25 years, and in queer community, I have seen the best and the worst of humanity. When I saw this year’s theme of flux and fracture, what came to mind was our self-imposed fracture as we internalize and reproduce and resist the flux around us. How we turn on each other, cast blame, judgment, how we isolate one another, shut each other down, punish one another socially and materially, how divisions fester. I get why and how this happens. Many of us have been hurt by a heterosexist, homophobic, transphobic world. We turn to each other to heal, in chosen families. We cultivate a radical politic, a divestment from what is harmful in our world, and a reinforcement of creative, beautiful solutions. We hope for the very best. We imagine, we envision. And that is beautiful. And difficult. We weren’t provided with examples or tools of how to build healthy, vibrant, interconnected chosen families, to overcome entrenched systems of oppression that we have all internalized, but we keep trying. This is deep, SPIRITUAL work what we are doing, in building “queer community”, asking us to heal the deepest hurts in our lineages, and become cycle breakers.

I want to talk today about what I see, and what is possible, dreaming of an interconnected, unstoppable, unflappable queer community where our mistakes do not fracture us, but make something more beautiful. As Martín Espada wrote in his poem, Imagine the Angels of Bread, “If the abolition of slave-manacles began as a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year. if the shutdown of extermination camps began as imagination of a land without barbed wire or the crematorium, then this is the year;” May we become like kintsugi-that where we have been broken is repaired by seams of gold.

I want to ask to consider if this rings true to your lived experience: 

• Queer community has saved your life. 
• Artistic practice has allowed you to keep on keeping on
• Queer community has broken your heart. 
• Queer community has provided a possibility model 
• You have witnessed someone else shamed, judged, and punished in queer community. 
• You have been shamed, judged, and punished by queer community. 
• You have shamed, judged, and punished someone out of queer community. 
• Conflict and repair has brought you closer to someone. 
• You have confronted the limits of your own repair and forgiveness toolkit. 
• You seek to heal, grow, and evolve. 

Beautiful. Thank you for your honesty. Honesty is imperative to a healthy, trustworthy community.

Disposability politics is not just isolated to queer communities of course, nor is it a recent phenomenon. As the parent of a trans autistic 6 year old in Salt Lake City, I have also seen this turning away and disposability play out on my child’s experience of daycares and kindergartens. More preschoolers and kindergarteners are expelled than children of any other age group, propelling 4, 5, and 6 year olds into the school to prison pipeline. A forest school, a Montessori school, and a prestigious private school here cast out my child because THEY couldn’t and wouldn’t skill up. The private school recruited us as a “diverse family” telling us they have worked with autistic kids before, but after my child’s first meltdown, they “exited” my child from the school, a school that espouses tikkun olam, a Jewish practice of repair. How do we divest from disposability politics, and turn toward each other? This repairs not only queer community, but repairs communities beyond and intersecting with ours. 

Teaching Queer & Trans Yoga

I have taught Queer & Trans Yoga for 19 years, here in SLC since 2018 at 3 different studios and in the park in the summers. I began “Yoga for All Genders” back in 2006  at the NYC LBGT Center, because I didn’t see yogis like myself. I have taught in queer bars, queer gyms, nonprofit offices, community centers, a prison, recovery centers, and yoga studios. When I began Queer & Trans Yoga in New York in 2006, it was seen by the majority of yoga community as “divisive”, creating separation. Affinity spaces were not common at that time, but I knew that an affinity space, where you don’t have to explain certain things to, where you see people like you, who have survived the hurts you have, who celebrate and make love like you do, who read the same authors and listen to the same podcasts as you do, who are breaking familial cycles of violence like you are is IMPORTANT. Is imperative. Mirroring is a developmental need. 

We hold so many stories, so much history, as a community—both current and past circumstances for queer and trans people in the world. Queer and trans people get killed every day. We get ostracized from our families of origin. We lose jobs for being who we are. We are at greater risk for suicide and greater risk of assault. We are surveilled by police—more or less so

depending on the color of our skin. We may be wrongly gendered in prisons, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and immigration detention shelters, and we have a bigger fight to face than our straight and cisgender peers in similar circumstances. And we hear about these stories every day, as that is the lived reality of our lovers, friends, coworkers, families. Of course, for queer and trans folks of color, these realities are more grave.

It can be a lot to hold all these truths and realities in our own lives and that of those around us and close to us—we can become overwhelmed. Perhaps you had a wave of overwhelm *just* sweep over you. Having a yoga or meditation practice can expand the presence that holds those difficulties. When a teaspoon of salt is put into a cup of water, the water may taste quite salty. However, when a teaspoon of salt is deposited into a barrel of water, we may not be able to taste that salt at all. That is what our practice does—it creates expansion and spaciousness, which leads to resilience. I strive for a world in which we do not need to be resilient, for resilience is “the ability to thrive despite conditions not being ideal.” I want us to keep working toward those ideal circumstances, toward a queer utopia. 

And yet. Here. we. are.

I started Queer & Trans Yoga because I wanted my students to not be misgendered like I have been in yoga classes, when they came to move and heal and breathe. Because I know we as queer people need a plethora of healing practices in our toolkit, especially in this political era. Because I didn’t want to field an entitlement to this Indian practice manifesting as cultural appropriation, when I wanted to sit humbly at the feet of the teachings of this 6000 year old tradition. And during my time teaching, I have witnessed folks meet and fall in love in my class, and break up and claim custody of my class. My class has been dismissed from studios. Now, there are Queer & Trans Yoga classes in Denver, rural Iowa, Minneapolis, Durham, Buffalo, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Rochester. Some are led by my students, other colleagues that I have trained with.

And, what I didn’t expect but have now seen again and again, is that because Queer & Trans Yoga exists, queer folks fall in love with the practice, then they take their tools and go to other teachers and classes, then they want to know why we do what we do in class, so they sign up for a yoga teacher training, and then there are more queer and trans yoga teachers, holding more space for our community who needs spiritual practice to carry us through this political repression and targeting. THAT is the impact of affinity spaces-our communities have more and more of what they need.

***

Beloveds, we hold our leaders to a high standard. I’m not saying we shouldn’t all strive to be the best version of ourselves-we should, and I think we DO. But we all are human, which means, we ALL will make mistakes. Each of us here has hurt people. And each of us here has been hurt by people. Our most brilliant leaders make mistakes. Our historical idols-Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Audre Lorde, bell books, James Baldwin, Leslie Feinberg, made mistakes. The more light that is on you, the more your mistakes and errors are seen. These mistakes can be heartbreaking, it hurts. It sucks. But in queer community, we often turn on one another when we make mistakes. We give up. We often don’t come back to one another. We call for accountability, but lack internal practices of forgiveness. Efforts toward repair are regarded as never good enough. Each queer space is filled with broken webs of connection- former friends, former colleagues, former lovers. Look around this space, and feel the presence of that web here. 

A West African elder, Malidoma Somé says, “Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.” Pause, and consider, when has conflict deepened your connection with someone? 

One of my close friends and I have been through two major ruptures, one as co-owners of a worker-owned cooperative in Brooklyn, and one in which we didn’t speak to one another for 2 years. There are identity differences between us, which are recognized and spoken to. Currently, Kate is a co-director of the organization that brought us back together, and I am the Board President. In the last 5 months, we have kept a 46 year old Buddhist organization, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, from collapse. Without our history of conflict and the bond that was created through repair, this organization that created the term “engaged Buddhism”, which brought Thich Naht Hahn to teach his first American retreat in 1983, would have likely “sunsetted”. We run courses like activist training for Buddhist leaders, a “U Mad” course after Trumps first election to presidency, a grief course in January as Trump began a second term, and an upcoming “Now what?!”, all blending and intersection social justice and Buddhist practice, bringing together Buddhist leaders and social justice movement leaders. Our work is NEEDED. We shouldn’t sunset. And we didn’t partly because Kate and I have been through it personally, know each others edges and wounds, trust each others intentions, and we trust that we have each other’s back. Not because we have never betrayed or disappointed each other, but because we HAVE turned our backs on each other AND we have repaired. We deepened our relationship through conflict, and what was possible with a REPAIRED relationship was incredible. 

Friends, when we are divided, we are easier to conquer, to take advantage of.

We currently face unprecedented bills against us nationally, 6 that have passed in Utah, in a state that is the testing ground for Project 2025, with a federal administration that puts forth an Executive Order stating that there are only two genders “male” and “female”, banning trans folks from serving in the military, funding an investigation into trans healthcare. In 2023, 615 anti-trans bills were introduced around the US, tripling the previous year. 2024 was the fifth consecutive record-breaking year for total bills considered. We are not even halfway through 2025, and there are 886 laws up for discussion in 50 states and federally, taking away our right to pee in public bathrooms, to compete on athletic teams or gendered extracurriculars, taking away healthcare that saves lives, each bill making us more vulnerable, more exposed, more targeted. Each bill communicates to us that we are not worthy of healthcare, that we threaten women, that we do not belong, that we should not exist.

And yet, we do. We always have. 

It’s a tactic of the Right, right, to target and blame 1% of the population, so that the  other 99% look away from who is ACTUALLY responsible, as illuminated by Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Wednesday May 7 Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hearing on the inclusion of trans athletes in female competitions, dubbed “Unfair Play: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Crockett asked  Fatima Goss Graves, the CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, to play a game, naming who is responsible, Trump or trans people for  “gutting medical research,” “kidnapping Americans and sending them to foreign countries,” “driving us into a recession,” and “increasing the cost of everything.” Goss Graves answered “Trump” to every prompt, illustrating Crockett’s point, that this fight is not about trans people, it is about the fight for all freedoms-to inhabit our bodies, to make decisions about reproduction, raise and care for our children, and to resist and heal violence. As Chase Strangio of the ACLU says, “trans people did not put our lives and bodies up for debate. We just existed and became the target of disingenuous debates about sex and power.”

I want to ask us, queer fam, can we afford to turn AGAINST each other in this moment? Real talk.

So much more will be lost if we are divided. So much more creative resistance will prevail if we stick by each other.

Adrienne Maree Brown wrote in We Will Not Cancel Us, “I have had experiences where I absolutely wanted to take someone down, to expose them as a liar, cheater, manipulator, assailant. In each of these situations, time, conversation, and vulnerability have created other possibilities, and I have ended up glad that I didn’t go that route which is generally so short-term in its impact.” 

What qualities and practices do we need to cultivate in this intense political moment, to stay with each other, to remain clear on who our opponent is? (psst It’s not each other, boo!)

I have a few to name, coming out of my work at the nexus of social justice, trauma, and embodiment.

• We need to grow our capacity to be with discomfort, difference, contradictions, conflict and disagreement.  This entails practicing intentionally being with discomfort, as we do in every yoga class that I teach rather than dodging discomfort at every turn. Discomfort is not abuse. Discomfort is not even necessarily unsafe. How do you practice being with discomfort?
• We need to get effective and efficient at repair. Study conflict mediation. Take a forgiveness workshop. We got thrown some heavy wrenches through systems of oppression, and it’s time to skill up. What you do to skill up is not just for you, it’s for the betterment of all of us. 
• We need to own up to our own mistakes, to practice accountability, and to internally forgive ourselves for being human (pssst humans make mistakes). I’ve learned that the sooner I name my own mistake, the more I calm the nervous systems around me, cuz they don’t have to point out what I don’t see. I see it. So then we can move on to repair.
• We need to call each other IN, in person, rather than publicly shame each other on social media or even communications over text. In calling in, we trust that we can elevate one another, support one another into our best selves, rather than buy in to the carceral logic of shaming, blaming, punishing, and isolating one another into “doing better”. Our PIC demonstrates that that method doesn’t work, yet it’s in our nervous systems, so we have actively work against it, to turn toward and elevate rather than light each other up in flames. 
• We need to learn about and work with our nervous systems such that we can be curious and tender with one another, rather than judgmental and hostile. Take a breath of hesitation. Take one now: deep breath in, deep breath out. And then another-slow down the fight, flight, freeze, appease reaction and instill connection and groundedness as your MO. 
• We need to support one another in taking care of ourselves, by any means necessary. Yay, a day off work! Yes, you being at retreat means you miss the protest! 
• We need to support our healers. This means not paying the minimum of sliding scales. Offering meals, a stay at your family’s vacation house, an extra ski ticket. Healers and spiritual leaders are doing VITAL work right now. Without them, we won’t make it through.
• We need forgiveness practices, guided by spiritual teachers, therapists, and mediators, and for that to be considered sacred, imperative political work. I do this, I teach them live, I have recordings online, I discuss forgiveness and offer practices in my book. Many other folks do to. Forgiveness isn’t about the other person-it’s about freeing YOUR heart from resentment, a resentment that WILL bleed out on others that you’re close to, if you don’t heal and release it.
• We need to remember, with determination: we are fighting fascism, not each other. May we not abandon each other. Put down your hackles, and stay WITH one another. WE have so much more in common than what distinguishes us. Beloved ancestor Bernice Johnson Reagon taught about “coalition politics”, to find the overlap, and use that to build power. This is how the US organization Life After Hate works, and what the movie Pride is about. Study solidarity to become more determined in your solidarity.
• Ethics. Principled struggle. What are you committed to? What are lines that you would not cross, what are the practices you have when noone is looking, when you could “get away with something”? I have the yogic yamas and the Buddhist precepts to guide me and spiritual friends that hold me accountable for that-what do YOU live by? 
• Become fierce protectors of one another, keeping each other healthy, well, fed, resourced, even protecting each other from making mistakes, from self harm, from the guilt of having made a mistake. “When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal.  Fractals— a way to speak of the patterns we see— move from the micro to macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards. We are microsystems.” — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. If we believe in interdependence over individualism, we are responsible for each others’ transformation from broken to healed.

Who we are as individuals, how we show up, impacts our households, grows a stronger community, grows stronger resistance movement. What we practice grows stronger. 

Not all of us have to be directly responsible for every other one of us, but let us never give up on one another in our hearts. Let us get curious about our judgments, our doubts, our distrust of one another, and practice loving one another into the best version of ourselves-sometimes from afar. Let us not talk trash.  Kazu Haga, author of Healing REsistance and a dear friend, says, “If you are not struggling to love people, if you are not trying to build understanding with those you disagree with, then you are not really doing the work of building Beloved Community. The work of building Beloved Community is understanding that we’re not trying to win over people, we are trying to win people over.” Beloved Community IS transformative justice, and it can yield a deeper trust, resilience, and interdependence than the carceral politics of blame, shame, isolation, and punishment. 

“We are in the very infantile stages of learning how to be in transformative justice practices with each other, to be abolitionist in real time, because we are still beginning, but the crises are so big, urgent, and constant, that there is some leapfrogging, rushing ahead of ourselves,ahead of understanding a clear, shared framework, clear distinctions.” (amb p 26 we will not cancel us). I want to invite us all to get curious when you hear a friend or colleague gossiping about a person in community, that they did this or that, that they are “problematic” or “fucked up”, and ask questions rather than blindly add fuel to the fire. Talk to both sides of a conflict, and be part of the mending, rather than the break. Remember, broken apart, we are more easily taken advantage of, and we simply can’t afford this internal bullshit in this political moment. We cast people OUT of social justice work when we do this, making our movements smaller, not larger and more powerful (which is what we need to survive and to build something different). We do the dividing work for our opponents, and become thereby easy to castigate and throw under the bus. What would it take for us to cultivate communities and movements that are INDIVISIBLE and UNWAVERING in our love, as Spencer said the other night or as another artist said Thursday night, “when I say god, that means all of us.” Or as stated in Lake Bodies, “we don’t have to keep doing it this way.”  How do we skill up in this political moment, using the hatred aimed at us for unbreakable KINDNESS and bondedness with one another? What qualities do we need in our hearts and minds in order to NOT break apart? 

My contribution to social justice and queer community is to provide spaces that keep us well, where we can cry and move, where we can gather tools and skills, where we can reflect and integrate. I also train the institutions that we turn towards in DEIJ practices, so that they are skilled to receive us in our wholeness when we turn to them to heal. My goal is to keep the changemakers healthy and innovative, and in that practice, to be changing what yoga looks and feels like and where we can do our healing work-more spaces more of the time. I have watched one institutions that I have consulted with go from being predominantly straight and white to running programs, sometimes at the institution’s financial detriment, that are really called for in that moment, like a Black men’s healing retreat, and my own retreats for queer community and queer leaders. 

I want to ask you, what are you practicing, in queer community? 

Come up with 3 words, right now, that hopefully help get us to what we can be, the force that overcomes an unprecedented tally of dehumanizing bills aimed at us, that finds creative solutions to our most pressing problems? 

I want to close with a poem, a response to Rumi and an invitation us all:

Queer Home

This being queer is a guest house

Every year a new arrival. 

A law, a romance, a rift, 

Some emergent extravagance arrives at our doorsteps. 

Welcome and entertain us all, 

For we bring the darkest traumas and greatest possibilities

Invoking imagination and integrity: expansive souls. 

Still, treat each one of us honorably, we each deliver part of the answer. 

The problematic one, the incessant flirt, the complainer, 

Meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. 

Practice what the Right will not:

Each of us is part of the whole, 

and only in collective wholeness will we forge our way forward.