Being, Nothingness & Suchness with Jivana Heyman
What a beautiful podcast to kick off Pride month!
This is an important month to celebrate our common humanity, diversity, and unconditional love and acceptance of one another.
Jivana coined the phrase, “Accessible Yoga,” over ten years ago, and it has now become the standard appellation for a large cross section of the immense yoga world.
He brought the Accessible Yoga community together for the first time in 2015 for the Accessible Yoga Conference, which has gone on to become a focal point for this movement.
Russell’s tendency of over-relating to our guests has been noted. And this episode is no exception. It might seem he’s attempting to “out gay the gays,” so to speak. But it opens this conversation into an incredibly intimate and deep portrait of a young man stepping into a cultural identity during a particularly traumatic time in our collective history, the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Today, you’ll hear Russell ask our guest, the incomparable Jivana Heyman, (founder of the Accessible Yoga Foundation) about how his favorite black gay science fiction author Samuel R. Delany managed to stay alive during the HIV/AIDS crisis despite having had sex with over 50,000 men.
(*Russell whispers “Oral sex is also sex.” So those of you unbelieving Size Queens and Power Bottoms buckle up, or sit back, or do what ever yoga thing you are doing this morning and enjoy this very special conversation with Jivana, who shares his deeply heartfelt story about coming of age in this crisis).
Jivana talks about his anger as an activist and how it informed his beliefs. It gave insight to some very important decisions around how he could best serve, offering a unique way to practice yoga within a community of practitioners of varying identities, capacities, or abilities.
You see, this world is not a one way mirror. We are all reflections of one another. When we are angry, we project and see anger in the other, and that’s who we become.
Jivana has specialized in teaching yoga to people with disabilities with an emphasis on community building and social engagement. Out of this work, the nonprofit Accessible Yoga Association was created to support education, training, and advocacy with the mission of shifting the public perception of yoga. Accessible Yoga offers Conferences, Community Forums, a Podcast, and a popular Ambassador program
He’s the author of Accessible Yoga: Poses and Practices for Every Body (Shambhala Publications), and Yoga Revolution: Building a Practice of Courage & Compassion (Shambhala Publications, Nov. 2021).
Jivana is also the creator of the Accessible Yoga Training and the co-founder of the online Accessible Yoga Training School with Amber Karnes, which is a platform for continued education for yoga teachers in the field of equity and accessibility. They also created the Accessible Yoga Podcast in 2020.
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The Finding Harmony Podcast is hosted, edited and produced by Harmony Slater and co-hosted by Russell Case.
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Opening and closing music compliments of my dear friend teaching Ashtanga yoga in Eindhoven, Nick Evans, with his band “dawnSong” from the album “for Morgan.” Listen to the entire album on Spotify - Click Here.
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