IMS Teacher

Jacoby Ballard

IMS Teacher

Jacoby Ballard

Jacoby Ballard teaches yoga and dharma as it intersects with social justice and leads trainings around the country on diversity, equity, and inclusion (including at IMS!). As a yoga teacher with 20 years of experience, he leads workshops, retreats, teacher trainings, teaches at conferences, and runs the Resonance mentorship program for certified yoga teachers to find their niche and calling. He has meditated since he was 17 years old, has resided in the Insight tradition for the past 12 years, and trained to teach meditation at the Interdependence Project in New York. In 2008, Jacoby co-founded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, to work at the nexus of healing and social justice. Since 2006 Jacoby has taught Queer & Trans Yoga as a weekly class, a traveling workshop, and an annual retreat, and has offered yoga at the annual Garrison Institute LGBT Meditation Retreat. Jacoby has taught yoga in schools, hospitals, non profit and business offices, a maximum security prison, a recovery center, a cancer center, LGBT centers, gyms, a veteran’s center, and yoga studios. Jacoby lives with his beloved, his gender-expansive child, and dog companion on land known as Co-Karmi to Ute, Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone people, now understood as Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation. More at jacobyballard.net.