Queering Yoga: living in the liminal

Content note: This piece touches on themes of childhood sexual abuse, queer identity, and trauma. Please take care of yourself as you read.

I was ten when we cycled to the forest. A long ride from our school in the bigger town to a small village surrounded by pine trees and silence. Our bikes lined the gravel path like a row of crooked teeth, clammy t-shirts, cheeks red from the wind. It was meant to be a celebration, our first real school camp. A few days of games, group activities, bunk beds, and bonfires. A time to bond, they said. To play and be kids together.

And we did the usual camp things. We roasted bread on sticks, played capture the flag in the woods, sat around the fire telling stories and pretending not to be afraid of the dark. There was laughter, teasing, jokes and stories. Some kids moved like they had always belonged, loud, easy, unafraid. I tried to join in. I laughed when I was supposed to laugh. I followed the rules, ran the races, smiled on cue. But it always felt like I was just a step behind the rhythm, like music I could hear but could not quite dance to.

I wasn’t grown-up, but I didn’t feel like a child either. Not in the way they did. I noticed too much, sensed when something was off, felt the weight of things I didn’t yet have names for. At home I was used to holding things together, reading moods, adjusting my behaviour to whatever version of reality was in the room that day. That didn’t stop just because we were on camp. I still scanned for danger, still checked if it was safe to speak or better to disappear.

With adults, I often felt too strange, too intense. With kids, I was too serious, too quiet. I floated somewhere in between. Trying to belong to both worlds, and never fully landing in either. I did not know the word for it then, but I was already living in the liminal. In the space between roles, between ages, between ways of being. Watching, translating, never quite arriving.

At some point, during a loud game I could not make sense of, I slipped away. No one noticed. I walked into the trees until the noise softened behind me and found a tall pine with roots like open arms. I sat. Back against the bark. Breathing. I didn’t know it then, but I was meditating. I just wanted stillness. A place where I didn’t have to make sense. A place where I didn’t have to be anyone but myself.

That space under the tree was the first place I ever felt real. Not watched. Not performing. Not trying to belong. Just breath, body, and the quiet hum of something I wouldn’t have words for until much later. The disconnect I felt from others and from myself came from more than just shyness. It was rooted in childhood trauma, and in the tension of having a mind that learned quickly but differently. Being both diagnosed as highly gifted and deeply sensitive made it hard to connect with other kids. But in nature, and especially in solitude, that tension eased. Alone under that tree, I didn’t have to fit anywhere. I could just be.

Coming Home to the Self

For a long time, I didn’t ask myself who I really was. My attention was turned outward. I was focused on helping others, staying safe, being someone that would not disrupt or disappoint. I shaped myself around others’ needs, tried to predict their moods, kept myself useful and invisible.

After experiencing childhood sexual abuse, I learned to disappear in plain sight. I made myself small, quiet, careful. I feared being seen, being touched, being wanted. And beneath all of that, I feared myself. I feared what might happen if I allowed myself to feel what I felt or want what I wanted. So I became a stranger to myself.

But self-erasure is not a safe place. It might keep us hidden, but it does not protect us. In fact, silence often invites more harm. I ended up in relationships in my teens and twenties that mirrored the wounds of my past, not because I wanted to suffer, but because I hadn’t yet realised that love could begin within. I hadn’t learned that the deepest love is not something we find outside ourselves, but something we return to within the Self; what yoga calls the ātman.

When I burned out (emotionally, spiritually, completely) it was not just exhaustion. It was an unraveling. The only way forward was inward.

Svādhyāya: The Practice of Returning

In the Yoga Sūtras, there is a concept called svādhyāya, one of the five niyamas, or personal observances. The word translates to “self-study,” but it also refers to the study of sacred texts. For me, those two meanings became one and the same. I began reading myself as scripture.

I studied my body as if it were ancient and holy. I listened to my breath, to my desires, to the parts of me I had silenced for years. And slowly, I began to understand that my queerness was not something that arrived later in life. It had always been there, tucked quietly beneath layers of performance and fear. I am what some people would call bisexual, but even that label has never felt like a resting place. It is more like a bridge, a movement, a liminal space between. I do not belong to one side or the other. I live in the space in between.

For years I mimicked heterosexual love. I followed scripts I had internalised. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. But the first time I truly allowed myself to love a woman, it felt like silence after static. It felt like returning to the place under the tree again, where I didn’t have to pretend.

And yet, even in queer spaces, I sometimes felt misplaced. Too fluid. Too soft. Too uncertain. Too “in-between”. I believed at times that I had to choose. Be straight or gay. Be masculine or feminine. Be strong or delicate. But yoga taught me something else entirely. Yoga showed me that I have always lived in the liminal, not as a phase to pass through, but as a home.

The Self, yoga teaches, is not confined by opposites. It is not something you find by choosing one fixed identity over another. It is something you return to, again and again, beneath the surface of all roles and expectations.

As the Kena Upaniṣad says, “That which cannot be spoken with words, but by which words are spoken, know that alone to be Brahman.” In other words, truth lives beyond categories. It cannot be captured by labels. It can only be known in silence, in breath, in the space between.

The Sacred Space of the In-Between

In a world increasingly obsessed with binaries, with certainty, with fitting into neat boxes, the most radical act might be to remain undefined. In the philosophical tradition of advaita, or non-duality, we find a kind of liberation that transcends categories. And queerness, to me, is inherently non-dual. It resists reduction. It honours complexity. It refuses to fragment the Self into manageable pieces for the comfort of others.

To queer yoga is not to add something new to it. It is to remember what was always there. It is to peel away the layers of colonialism, capitalism, and gender essentialism that have covered the roots of the practice. Before yoga became an industry, it was a path of personal liberation. A way to sit under the tree and listen.

In the teachings of non-dual Tantra, divinity is not one thing or another. It is both stillness and movement. It is consciousness and energy. Śiva and Śakti. These are not rigid masculine and feminine roles. They are dynamic expressions of the same source. They are fluid, like us.

Swami Sivananda once wrote, “You are not this body. You are not this mind. You are the immortal Self.” And that Self does not have a gender or a label or a role to play. Yet this life, this body, this path of longing and joy and grief; it is sacred. It is not separate from the spiritual path. It is the path.

How I Practice and Teach Queer Yoga

In my teaching, queering yoga is not a theme or a gimmick. It is a return to what feels true.

I use inclusive language, and I also embrace intentional silence.
I do not gender people’s bodies. I do not assume anything about someone’s experience. I try to speak with care. And I also let there be moments without words, where we can just feel what is present.

I avoid using binaries like “feminine” and “masculine.”
These words carry too much weight and too many assumptions. They have been used to cage people, to assign value, and to prescribe behaviour in ways that often create more harm than clarity. In a time when gendered roles are once again being worshipped online, where the idea of feminine empowerment is increasingly shaped into ideals of submission, control, and surface-level beauty, I feel it is especially important to question this language. I explore this more deeply in my article about the shift from so-called feminine energy to the tradwife archetype.
When I describe energies or qualities in yoga, I choose words that feel more spacious and less attached to identity. I speak of moon and sun, of yin and yang, of activating and softening. These are not roles to perform or categories to fit into. They are ways of noticing the movement of life, ways of describing energy that do not limit who we are.

Consent in touch is sacred.
At the start of each class, I invite students to indicate privately if they would prefer not to be touched. I ask again if I offer a physical adjustment. This is not just etiquette. It is ahiṃsā, non-harming. It is a practice of care.

My classes make space for all of you.
Whether you are grieving, questioning, joyful, tired, transitioning, neurodivergent, or soft in ways the world doesn’t understand; you are welcome. You do not need to shrink to be seen here.

I continue to study the roots.
I study the Yoga Sūtras, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Tantrāloka and any other ancient texts I can get my hands on. I learn from Indian teachers and queer yogis, and I remain aware of the cultural and historical depth of this practice. I challenge the idea that yoga needs to be rebranded to be relevant. It already is relevant. It only needs to be remembered.

The root is already alive. The root is already queer. Yoga was never meant to be a performance of purity or perfection. It is a path of direct experience, of questioning, of turning inward and breaking open.

As Krishnamacharya said, “Teach what is inside you, not as it applies to you, but as it applies to the other.” That is the heart of my practice. The root of yoga is queer.

To live the practice is to be free

To queer yoga is not to dress it in rainbow colours or package it for Pride. It is to let go of everything that was never truly yoga to begin with. The marketing. The binaries. The rigidity. The fear.
It is to return to your breath. To your body. To the space beneath the tree where you sat, before you had the words for who you are. It is to trust that your liminality is not a flaw. It is a doorway.

To all of you who live in the in-between, I see you. You are not waiting to arrive. You already have. Your path is not outside of yoga. Your path is yoga.

Come practice. Come home.