Alone, Justin Rockett can make the flute sound beautiful. When he plays calm, with control, the notes come out clean enough to record and post on Instagram. Put the same flute in front of 15 people at a sound bath, and all of a sudden it squeaks.
His body grips. The thought comes right behind it, a room full of people he imagines wondering what he is doing with an instrument he is not that good at, and he keeps playing anyway.
On a Wednesday at the end of September, the call opens with a joke. Rockett is wearing a button-down with the sleeves cut off, made by a clothing designer he met at the Wanderlust festival, and when he hears he looks sharp, he says, “Of course I'm being interviewed. I could have been naked.”
His camera sits low, so he is looking down into it. I ask him to raise it until I can see his eyes, and he smiles, a question in his face, before he lifts it. “Thank you for the detailed explanation.”
He will say it three more times over the next two hours, whenever a set of instructions runs long. Once he settles into the middle of the frame, his hands go still and stay that way.
The first naked yoga class Rockett ever taught was poolside, at an Airbnb, subbing for a friend. There were three or four men on the mats, and mosquitoes, and the men were laughing as they tried to keep the bugs off their bare skin.
That was about 12 years ago. For years after, a studio where he taught regular vinyasa let him run a men's naked yoga class on weekends, and six years ago he opened his own place in Tampa, next to Ybor City: Ybor Restore Yoga Studio, where he teaches naked yoga, restorative yoga, breathwork, and sound baths. He is 51, turning 52 in December, and he is also a massage therapist.
From the outside, he says, a lot of people read naked yoga as sexual, and some men come in the early stages thinking something is going to happen. “We're just doing naked yoga.”
What comes off with the clothes is everything men use to rank each other: the bank account, the title of doctor or lawyer, the worth some measure by the size of a penis. Nobody is left “trying to display the new jacket that we have,” and he has watched judgment fall away faster than anyone expects. “There's nothing to hide behind.”
“There's nothing to hide behind.”
It is a spiritual practice to him, and spirit, he says, is “in alignment with love and truth.” His favorite part of class comes after savasana, when the men embrace in naked hugs.
Rockett learned the freeze long before he learned to undress in front of a room. Rockett was a gymnast as a boy, in the gym from about 14, and a tall dance major until the jumps and leaps gave him tendonitis in his knees, and the physical therapy he received showed him another way to work with the body.
Physical therapy was the field everyone wanted then, and the schools wanted a 4.0 and an excellent interview. He would sit before a panel of three or four professors, someone would put a potent question to him, and he would leave his body, frozen, every word he meant to say out of reach. He walked out of those rooms feeling intellectually incompetent, and the feeling became one of the foundations of what he teaches now: somatic awareness and nervous system regulation.
He describes the young man in those chairs as a scared child with a closed throat, a boy who had been called a punk and a queer. Some of him still turns up. Halfway through this conversation, Rockett asks for one question at a time, because a question in two parts can overwhelm him.
For about a year he walked to the mailbox every day, hoping for an acceptance letter. “I felt like my forehead had been permanently stamped ‘Denied.’”
“I felt like my forehead had been permanently stamped ‘Denied.’”
A doctor prescribed beta blockers for the freeze, and they slowed his heart enough for him to stay present. On what he remembers as his sixth interview, in Tampa, he took one, went in, and left not knowing, and several weeks later the mailbox finally held the letter: a physiotherapy school in the Netherlands had said yes.
Telling it, he stops to say he is getting emotional, and his lip and chin quiver as his eyes fill. He was living with his parents in Lake Mary, and he is sure they were the first to know. Voices cheered, there were hugs, and he was proud.
In the Netherlands he shared a flat with two other Americans, and his parents called every Sunday. One afternoon they called on a different day.
It was the dial-up AOL era, and emails had given him away, messages to a man he had met at home over Christmas whom he had asked never to phone the house. He had known he was different since before puberty, and he was still dating girls into college. Now his family wanted to know if it was true.
Fear came first, and then, low in his stomach, something else. “Such a relief that I didn't have to keep the secret anymore.” An ocean between them made it easier, and afterward, call by call, they reconnected.
“Such a relief that I didn't have to keep the secret anymore.”
Long before that, he had been a boy in his sister's leg warmers, borrowing her baton and making up dance routines, then bringing his mother in to watch, while she called his father in to stand there, supportive. Nobody pushed him toward baseball or football. At 18, before Florida State, he asked his father, almost forced him, to teach him to throw a spiral, and they practiced in the front yard on many weekends until Rockett could catch the ball without being afraid of it.
His parents never questioned his sexuality or steered him toward more masculine things, which still surprises him, given the dolls and the feminine play. Love and support were always the glue. The only voice that ever scolded him was his own, a frightened child who knew he was different and feared he would be unworthy of love if people knew.
In 2010, on a week of naked yoga in Costa Rica, Rockett and I met. He went to be seen, and to witness other gay men coming together to play, heal, and support one another.
Taking his clothes off was easy. The heart circles were harder: every eye on him, and the fear of not having the right thing to say, or of saying something that would not land as positive. He spoke anyway, and it made him stronger.
The two of us were buddies that week, someone to go to for reflection, so not everything had to go to the whole group. On the flight home, looking down from the plane, he was bawling, his heart cracked open by every small exchange of love he had watched, and he wanted to carry it back to Tampa. He calls that week the catalyst for teaching naked yoga and tantra.
Asked for an object that says something about him, Rockett asks for one second and leaves the frame. He comes back grinning, with a giggle, holding a wooden phallus, and names it bluntly before he names it properly. “This is a lingam. It's a phallus.”
He found it at one of the Cuban shops near Ybor City, sold as an ashtray, though he does not smoke. On his altar it wears mala beads and scarves, sometimes incense, and it stands for Shiva, the masculine energy that discerns, decides, and cuts through bullshit. He holds plenty of the feminine too, he says, Shakti, the aliveness and the divine play.
Then the video freezes. Rockett says the screen is stuck and offers a theory: it might be the energy of the lingam.
Before a client lies down on his massage table, Rockett asks what has been going on beyond the physical pain, because so often it arrives as pain. Many times the answer is grief: a spouse, a job, a pet.
He took a six-month Grief Educator Program with David Kessler to hold those stories better, and it helped him honor and integrate some of his own grief. “We're not there to fix them. There's nothing to fix.” Grief has no timeline, he tells them, and no one's loss can be compared with anyone else's.
“We're not there to fix them. There's nothing to fix.”
His grief workshops open with consent, boundaries, and confidentiality. Then come movement, breath, sound, singing, and people telling their stories, and the instruments: the buffalo drum, grounding, helping a closed heart open; the rainstick, water for emotions that need to move; and the 38-inch gong, which he does not strike but draws a friction mallet across until it makes the sound of whales.
“They're not crying out, but it's the… they're singing out.” He thinks of a person in so much grief that they wail, and the whale is the symbol of it.
As the room settles, he watches jaws unclench, hands come away from chests, arms open, breath go deeper, tears roll down faces. “It becomes emotional for me, too, to see them soften.”
“It becomes emotional for me, too, to see them soften.”
He is careful about what he claims. “It's not me healing them as a healer, it's me creating a safe space and a container for them to feel safe enough to let go with the music, with providing breath cues.”
To do this, he had to stop needing everybody to like what he offers, and get past an early idea that femininity or softness is weakness. He mentions that he is human and occasionally makes mistakes and boundaries are what he keeps learning to tighten up, so everyone can feel more safe.
The person who saw him at his lowest was his first love, who ended their relationship when Rockett did not see it coming. Rockett wrote him a two-page letter listing everything he hated him for and handed it over, because he wanted the man to feel his pain. The man looked at him and said he was not going to read it.
He looks sad telling it, and disappointed in himself. “I don't consider that a very high point in my life, with being mature, or being responsible, or treating another person kindly.” It was like a child writing that letter, he says, and it feels icky now; he wishes the man well, and he has kept his name out of this story so that nothing here costs him a relationship.
Seven days a week, Rockett works for himself, teaching, massaging, training at the gym, and his mind pushes his body past what it can take until it answers with back pain, careless driving, sometimes illness. He naps. He goes looking for nature, even if nature is the garden center at Home Depot, and fear and guilt follow him into the time off.
The belief underneath says he has to be sweating and exhausted for anything to come back to him, and he places its root in a fear of not having enough money. “The kindest thing I can do for myself is to allow myself to rest… not be critical of me not making financial goals.” The line he is practicing now is shorter: “I am enough, and I don't have to offer more or give more in order to be worthy of love.”
“I am enough, and I don't have to offer more or give more in order to be worthy of love.”
After 25 years in Tampa, he says something he does not think he has ever said out loud. He would like to leave for a while, not forever, for Portugal, Costa Rica, or Hawaii, where he once lived, and work there, immersed in nature; then the reasons to stay arrive, a license that will not transfer, the MBLEX all over again.
There was a time, probably in his forties, when every vacation seemed to wait on his family's “yes,” though he had his own house, his own checking account, his own car. At some point he stopped asking and started telling them where he was going. He is still close to them, and he wishes they could see him lead a room.
The room he keeps imagining is a ballroom, with microphones and audio equipment, full of business leaders lying on the floor, listening and breathing together before they break into small circles to speak about the people they loved and still love. Asked how he would feel if a company called with the room already set up, he answers, “I'd be, I'd be like, hell yeah.”
Asked for the sound of the years behind him, he jokes about fetching his whoopee cushion, then lets out a big sigh. For the season he is in now, he reaches into his throat for something guttural, thunder and a lion's roar, earthy, with a rooting depth.
To his 16-year-old self he would say that he is beautiful, that he does not have to be super macho, that it is okay to be feminine, to be big and loud or quiet, to want to feel pretty or handsome. As he says it, his face softens and his shoulders sink a little.
Twenty years from now, a man he will never meet walks into a room like his, in a city Rockett has never visited, measuring himself against the alpha male, the super macho man, the perfect body. “I just want to teach him that he is lovable and how he's showing up right then at any moment.”
“I just want to teach him that he is lovable and how he's showing up right then at any moment.”
It took him a year and a half, maybe two, before the flute could squeak in front of a room. “When it does squeak, it doesn't freak me out.” Now, when the note breaks, he laughs, and plays a little more.
