EVENT PREVIEW
Atlanta Pride Parade
1 p.m. Oct. 11. The parade begins at Peachtree Street and Ralph McGill Boulevard and heads north on Peachtree Street and turns right on 10th Street. The parade ends at Piedmont Park at 10th Street and Charles Allen Drive. atlantapride.org/pride/parade.
While many of the participants in the annual Atlanta Pride Parade revel loudly, boldly and brightly, expect one grand marshal in particular to experience it all with a sense of calm. After all, she meditates for a living.
Swami Jaya Devi Bhagavati, the founder and executive director of the Kashi Atlanta Urban Yoga Ashram, has become a spiritual leader of sorts in the Atlanta LGBTQ community. While opening its doors to all walks of life, Kashi offers yoga programs, meditation programs and spiritual studies.
One of these is its Immune Yoga for AIDS and HIV, created by Bhagavati and believed to be the first of its kind in the Southeast. Kashi also recently hosted an event on National Coming Out Day. The Fire Puja ceremony allowed participants to let go of their shame and unworthiness by tossing their negativity into the flames of transformation.
These types of programs and events have helped develop a strong group of LGBTQ individuals participating at Kashi. Bhagavati recently chatted about her role in that community.
On working with those with HIV and AIDS:
“I started working with the HIV and AIDS community in the early ’90s. I started by wanting to teach yoga to people with HIV and AIDS, because I saw that there was so much suffering in that community. But as I got more into it, I realized that the suffering was not only physical, but mental, emotional and really deeply spiritual. I started a class for people with HIV and AIDS at the Grady infectious disease clinic. I developed a class in meditation and spirituality, because many of the people who would come to the classes would be facing their own death. They needed some guidance, and they needed someone to talk with them about that whole process. So for me, it was definitely a process of learning on my feet about those kinds of things; how it felt to walk through a conscious death and in some ways learn how to be fearless around it.”
On the National Coming Out Day event at Kashi:
“The idea behind that was to create some events around Pride. One of the things that I’ve seen so strongly in the LGBTQ community is they struggle with overcoming shame. And that’s something that I really focus on in my work as a spiritual teacher, to help people learn how to stand strong from within themselves and believe that this is the right path for them, whether they’re gay or going through the process of gender reassignment. I tell them I think God made them gay, and (I help them) learn how to stand in that and let go of shame. Part of the fire ceremony was to use this ancient Vedic ritual to burn away shame and to be able to love yourself as you are. We did a two-part series. We started with some meditation and self-inquiry work the first week and ended it with the fire ceremony.”
On the rewarding aspect of her work with that community:
“It’s really rewarding to see people feel more confident in themselves as a lesbian, gay or bisexual person and feel more confident in their own skin. Sometimes you see people and that light switches on kind of quickly. They begin thinking, ‘It’s OK for me to be this way, even though my faith tradition that I grew up with told me it wasn’t.’ And sometimes it’s a slow process. I’ve been working with a woman, and she’s been my student for about 15 years. She’s a lesbian woman and married to her partner, but she’s just really coming into her own as far as being able to say in her work environment that she’s gay. And sometimes it’s a long process, but it’s really rewarding to see somebody be who they are and not be ashamed of that.”
On Kashi being a welcoming community:
“We’re an interfaith spiritual community, and it’s based in the teachings of yoga called the Vedic tradition. It’s really a community where there’s a tremendous amount of diversity. There’s that acceptance, that feeling that you have a spiritual home as a LGBTQ, and I think that’s really important. And that’s something that we provide. We’ll have a Muslim person meditating and practicing next to a Christian, a Hindu and a Jew. Or I’ll have a mom of three, whose kids are downstairs, doing our yoga practice next to a transgendered woman. So we have that kind of richness of diversity, whether it’s the diversity of faith or the diversity of gender. We have a lot of international people as well. You can experience a sense of being welcome as you are, and accepted and loved as you are.”
