If you haven’t yet read Melanie C. Klein’s inspiring book, Yoga Rising, you might want to check it out. A beautiful compilation of personal essays by “Yoga renagades,” as she calls them, who are, as Dianne Bondy describes in her foreword, those who “resist and, more importantly, we persist in challenging and changing the limited narrative of who does Yoga and #whatayogilookslike as represented in the dominant culture—and far beyond the practice, culture and business of Yoga into the culture at large. I believe there is a Yoga renegade in all of us…”
Part One: Yoga, Body Image, and Self-Worth, features Rev. Jivana Heyman’s (Integral Yoga teacher/Accessible Yoga Founder) “Living Yoga” essay. It’s so personal, profound, and raw in the description of his journey as a young gay man and AIDS activist in San Francisco, the path that led to his eventual marriage and fatherhood, and how Yoga became the doorway that led to a self-acceptance he would have never imagined.
