Status Updates From A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Me...

I could remain enraged at all of these people, historic and contemporary, who cause harm. Remaining enraged would not enhance my freedom or well-being, but rather create greater suffering for me, as well as toward those who encounter my bitterness and resentment.

Forgiveness involves vulnerability and nobility, courage and presence, and it moves on its own timeline; you can't force it.

Life is full of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, and our task as practioners is to be present to it all, without attachment or aversion.

Lama Rod Owens says, "The work to turn our attention back to the woundedness is this intense, profound path of transformation, which doesn't feel as good as responding to the anger because the energy of anger makes us feel powerful. Some of us, particularly if we're coming from communities where we feel marginalized, use that anger to feel powerful, to feel valid." There is this vulnerability to being with the pain.

Audre Lorde said, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." The women of the Combahee River Collective foresaw just that when they said, "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression."