Humans of Fitness - Vol. 2

“I got sober, came out as trans, and did my yoga teacher training. All in the same year.”

Heart pauses, then laughs a little. “In eight months, actually.”

He says it like he’s still mildly surprised it happened that way. One thing leading to another, each unlocking the next, until he looked up and barely recognized the life he was building.

Heart grew up with multiple forms of movement. Soccer from fourth grade through high school. Running cross country in Flagstaff, Arizona – elevation camp, elite competition, $30 shoes – with a team that had been state champions three years running. And then the desert heat of Tucson, AZ. He wasn’t the fastest. He ran anyway.

“I just kept showing up,” he says.

It was that same quality, the willingness to stay in a room where you’re not the obvious fit – that eventually brought him to yoga. He found his teacher, Sri Dharma Mittra, in 2016. Made the trip from DC to New York. Spent an entire Halloween weekend in Flatiron going class to class, immersion to immersion, from 10 AM to 10 PM. Something clicked.

“I started coming up once a month just to practice with him,” Heart says. “I’d wake up at 4 AM, come up for the day, go back, [and] teach yoga the next morning.”

By 2017, he had completed his first teacher training. By 2019, his 500-hour certification. And somewhere in those years, yoga gave him something harder to name, not just flexibility or strength, but the capacity to sit with discomfort. To stay in the in-between.

“I’d had inklings of feeling trans for years,” he says. “But I didn’t have the language. Yoga gave me the ability to cope with the unease of not knowing. Like, you’re in a posture and it’s uncomfortable, but you stay. I think that translated.”

When he came out and began his medical transition, he was living in DC. He’d started teaching Queer, Trans, Non-Binary Yoga, in a group house’s community space where people showed up in living rooms, paid cash if they could, signed nothing. No waivers. No structure. Just bodies and breath and permission.

The pandemic came, and Heart pivoted online. By March 17, 2020 – one week in – he’d offered his first virtual class. He built a website from scratch while unemployed in July. And then, restless and craving nature, he moved to Asheville. He hiked. He connected with queer and trans people in rural North Carolina and across the country through his phone screen on Instagram.

But there were harder years woven through all of it.

He doesn’t linger on them, but he doesn’t hide them either. When he first found Dharma Yoga in DC, he was just out of a hospital stay. Mental health. “I was like coming out of a bubble,” he says. “An eggshell.”

But again, he just kept showing up. He’d lie in a pose longer than everyone else, modify everything, sometimes just stay in legs-up-the-wall while the room moved around him. Nobody made him explain it.

He says, “my teacher would just... let me be.”

Sobriety, transition, yoga, therapy, social work school, a move to New York, the years have a way of building on each other, each one making room for what came next. He’d started running trans-inclusive yoga teacher trainings in 2020. Led workshops for studio communities, then non-profits, governmental organizations and corporate spaces on trans equity. Eventually he applied to social work school in New York, Silberman, NYU and Columbia, and almost impulsively, after meeting a therapist at a queer bodies event in DC who mentioned Silberman’s Center for Sexuality and Gender. (He ended up at Columbia, which ended up just about the same price at Hunter, with the help of a scholarship).

“I was like, I love New York. I’m a little bored in the mountains,” he says, grinning.

He got in. He graduated. Three months ago, he started as a bilingual therapist working with youth and families at a New York youth services organization. He also sees clients at a private practice, in person, in his neighborhood. He brings in yoga, the breath, and the permission to go slow.

“I’m often the only fat person in a yoga room,” he says. “And I feel like that says something. There are still so many people who feel like they’re not welcome to show up.”

He pauses. “People need a space where they feel comfortable to just show up. Whatever kind of fitness. Whatever kind of body.”

He practices yoga every day. He meditates. He’s still working on inversions – with wall assists, modifications, patience, trust, faith, self-confidence.

He is, by his own definition, not someone who popped into a perfect pose in his first class.

He just kept showing up.

And somewhere in the showing up, he got his voice back.