Yoga Spaces Have Not Always Been Safe for Us

Let’s be honest about that.

For queer and gender-expansive people, walking into a yoga studio has often come with a particular kind of calculation: Will I be welcome here? Will the language be gendered in ways that erase me? If I disclose who I am, will the vibe shift? Is this teacher equipped to actually hold my experience, or will I end up holding theirs?

The wellness industry has a history of centring a narrow vision of who gets to be well — and who gets to guide others toward wellness. Yoga, at its commercial mainstream, has often replicated that same narrowness.

This is not an accusation. It’s context. And it matters because safety is not just psychological — it’s physiological. When your body doesn’t feel safe, you can’t receive the practice. The most beautiful yoga sequence, taught by the most technically skilled teacher, will not land if your nervous system is spending its resources scanning for threat.

What Trauma-Informed Means — Really

Trauma-informed yoga gets talked about a lot, but it often means different things to different teachers. Let me tell you what it means in this practice.

It means that every choice you make in the room is honoured. You don’t have to close your eyes if that doesn’t feel safe. You don’t have to adjust into a posture if your body is saying no. You’re never touched without explicit, enthusiastic consent. Your presence is not required to look any particular way.

It means the language is chosen carefully — not because we’re avoiding discomfort, but because words are not neutral. Language that assumes gender, that centres a single kind of body, or that unconsciously positions some experiences as default and others as exception is not trauma-informed. It’s just traditional.

It means the teacher has done their own work. You cannot hold a space that is safer than you are. Teaching trauma-informed yoga to queer communities requires a practitioner who has examined their own relationship to power, privilege, belonging, and the particular textures of oppression that shape the lives of the people they’re serving.

What Kundalini Yoga Offers This Community

Kundalini Yoga, as a practice, doesn’t ask you to look a certain way or move a certain way. It asks you to show up and breathe. The emphasis is on internal experience — on what’s happening in your own nervous system, your own energetic body — rather than on the external shape of a posture.

This orientation makes it, in many ways, a natural fit for people who have spent their lives being evaluated, categorized, and sorted by external standards. You get to be the authority on your own experience. Always.

The 11 bodies of the Kundalini tradition are not gendered. The breath is not gendered. The kriyas — the specific sequences of movement and breath — work with the nervous system, the endocrine system, the electromagnetic field of the body. None of this requires you to be any particular version of yourself.

A Note on Safety and Specificity

General inclusion isn’t enough. Saying ‘everyone is welcome’ doesn’t tell a queer person or a trans person or a Two-Spirit person what to actually expect in the room.

At YogaVision, I serve women and 2SLGBTQIA+ people specifically. This isn’t marketing language — it shapes every aspect of how I teach, what I name, and who I’ve built this community to hold. The women in Harmony Within include queer women, non-binary folks, and people who’ve spent years in spaces that claimed to welcome them while subtly asking them to be smaller.

My own queer identity is not incidental to this work. It means I’m not working from a theoretical understanding of what it costs to belong in a world not built for you. I know that cost. And I build spaces that try, genuinely and specifically, to reduce it.

Where to Begin

If you’re curious about yoga but haven’t found a space that felt right, or if you’ve had experiences in yoga rooms that left you feeling unseen or unsafe, I’d invite you to start here.

Harmony Within offers a monthly live Kundalini Yoga class, recorded practices you can access any time, and a community of people doing this same work of coming home to themselves. You can join at any tier, including an entry-level option that gives you access to recorded practices to try on your own terms, in your own space, before committing to anything live.

And if you want to work one-on-one — to have a practice built specifically for your body, your history, and your particular kind of healing — yoga therapy is available as well.

You deserve a practice that was actually built for you.

Learn more about Harmony Within — or explore 1:1 Yoga Therapy.