About this Show

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Yoga Anytime. I'm Myles Barrero. I am so thrilled to be here with you today. Welcome to Beyond the Binary. I wanted to tell you a little bit about why we created this show for you. Even though it might seem like the show is specific to the trans non-binary and queer communities, which it is, it was meant for you, it is also for anyone who feels a sense of cultural homelessness or a sense of homelessness within their families or a sense of homelessness in any regard or lack of belonging in any regard in the world. My thought was to create content that used the tools and skills that yoga offer us to strengthen our deep sense of belonging to ourselves. Maya Angelou says, you only are free when you realize you belong no place, you belong every place, no place at all. The price is high, the reward is great. That sense that we all can belong if nothing else to ourselves and that that can really help steer us and support us in the world has been one of the best skills that I've been able to acquire through my yoga practice for myself as a trans person. The series starts with form. And we look at form because there's a rigidity in form that we all have to negotiate in our lives. And so we look at form and we sort of develop a relationship and a way to work with form. Then we move to space because space is the way that we start to navigate the form from the inside out. And then we look at the way that those two create a relationship to one another that kind of moves in and out from form to shape, from shape to form. There's this idea in yoga of darana and dhyana. So moving from the big picture to the little picture, kind of zooming out and zooming in. So it's similar to that. We kind of look at how we can move with the form and with the space in order to stay relating to both of them. And then once we have that, we go into balance because balance can help us really kind of mitigate and docify and come into some harmony between those two. And then sometimes no matter how balanced we are, we get stuck because life is full of sticky tape, you know, like those flies that get stuck on the tape. Like sometimes there's just a lot of that and we kind of can get stuck to it. So we change the perspective because one of the greatest things that yoga can offer us is a change of perspective, what artists call breaking the eye. So we break our eye by changing the perspective and by seeing that perhaps when we change our perspective, there are other opportunities and other possibilities that we had not yet seen. And then we move into deep rest. Why? Because deep rest is a radical practice. And if we belong to underserved or underprivileged populations, oftentimes rest is the last thing on our mind because we're scrambling to stay afloat, to make do. So deep rest is really a radical practice that also decolonizes your yoga. It's a way of saying, you know, it's a real way of self-care that we all, especially with our lifestyles in big cities can use. And then the final episode is maybe one of my favorite episodes in the whole practice. It takes all of that that we've built and it helps us move from our deep sense of self, from our backbone into our voice, which will help us articulate our needs, our desires, and also how we want to affect the world. There's a wonderful quote in the Upanishads that says, watch your words for they become thoughts. Watch your thoughts for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits. Watch your habits for they become your character. The yogi starts at the inception point. We start way back at the beginning and we make sure that we go aligning things as we go so that when we point the arrow, we're pointing it from the place where it's coming from. And then the arrow has thrust and it can land in the place where it's going. If you took a ship and you started in one place and we're going to a different place, but if you were off, even by a degree, you would land in a completely different place. So we try to bring all of that into integrity so that we're really clear about what it is that we're doing so that we can affect the world in the way that we want to. And so that we can make the change that we need to. So that's pretty much the idea of behind the binary. We look at steadiness versus ease. We look at the idea of being able to zoom out and see the perspective, but also zoom in and see the specific. And I hope that it brings you joy. I hope that it brings you ease and I hope that it helps you no matter who you are, know that you are worthy and that you can navigate this world with all of its challenges. All right. Let me know how it goes.