I felt vulnerable.  Vulnerable yet safe. My right leg trembled under my own weight as I tried to keep it slightly bent, stretching my left leg out and raising my left arm up to the sky. I was in a room with a few other queer identified folks, and we were all fumbling and tumbling around trying to navigate a world of stretches and postures at Kula Annex‘s Monday night QueerYoga. 

Kula Annex has been around for quite some time, but the concept they promote through a plethora of different yogic styles and classes is rather new to the yoga scene, especially here in Toronto. I came to the class half thinking I knew what to expect, and half thinking it’d be a breeze. I was wrong on both accounts. I am a self-proclaimed yoga nut, but the yoga I practice is in very different spaces, with very different energies and emotions. I’m used to the aggressive heat of a stifling hot yoga studio where emotional challenges are brought in only by myself, to either let go of a bad day or some stagnant anger or resentment that has lingered inside for days or weeks. I’ve not experienced a yoga space where I’ve felt safe enough to let intention come to me, rather than bring intention into the room and into my yoga practice. 

At Kula Annex’s Queer Yoga, I found a space that allowed me to experience my own emotions and my own body, and truly begin to explore it. It is rare in this world for spaces to not be built on assumed aggression, chaos or the busy rush of an urban city. The walls of the places we frequent are enclosed in a hectic, capitalist world in which being a woman requires defense and protection. These thoughts all came to me as I was lucky enough to be present in a space that was created to negate these aspects of city life—and specifically city life for women and queer folks.

I found myself reflecting on the ways in which I engage with the world, and I realized that most of my interactions with the external world seem to be those in which I am fighting: for survival, to be heard, to not be leered at, to not be assaulted, and for freedom from homophobic slander and hatred. The queer yoga space at Kula Annex let me experience the world in a profoundly different way, one that is perhaps safe, for the first time in my life. 

The heat rose and built within me through a series of yoga sequences, and I was certainly sweating. While of course this was a great body workout, it was very much also a workout for the soul.  Queer yoga at Kula Annex offered a truly spiritual, emotional, and mental yoga practice—one that I have never found in my 10+ years of practicing yoga. The instructors offered calming guidance for both the physical and emotional sensations that arose, urging their students to accept these sensations without judgment, and instead with love and joy. It is no surprise that Kula Annex’s Queer Yoga will soon be celebrating its one-year anniversary (during Toronto’s Pride weekend). And I certainly plan be there to partake in their celebrations and express my gratitude for this queer woman’s comfortable and challenging experience within their walls.

Suffice it to say, Kula has constructed a space in which women and queer folks have the opportunity to be and to explore their being. 

At Kula Annex, I felt vulnerable. As a woman, I felt safe.  As a queer, I felt appreciated. As an emotional and spiritual being, I felt peace, for the first time in my life.