“Abuse in the Yoga Community”: Josh Summers Interviews Matthew Remski

Thank you to Josh Summers for interviewing me about Practice and All is Coming. You can download the mp3 here. Transcript is below.

Trigger warning: descriptions of sexual and physical assault.

Transcript:

Josh Summers: 00:00:06

Hi Matthew, how are you doing?

Matthew Remski: 00:00:07

I’m good. Thanks for having me, Josh.

Josh Summers: 00:00:09

Thanks so much for coming on. Let me introduce us. I am Josh Summers. I’m a yoga teacher and licensed acupuncturist. And this is Meaning of Life TV. You are Matthew Remski, a yoga teacher as well also an industry consultant in the Yoga Industry and an author of several books. Most recently you’ve written a book about problematic group dynamics in the yoga world and it’s called Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga, and Beyond. So I should say, you know, is it’s really nice to meet you. This is kind of an odd sort of endorsement to you, but, right at this point I’d say you’re the main reason I go onto Facebook.

Matthew Remski: 00:01:00

That’s, that’s mixed. I’m happy to hear that. And I’m sorry to hear that all at the same time.

Josh Summers: 00:01:06

No, no. I mean, for me it’s positive because there isn’t that much, worth following on Facebook. But, I came across your work maybe two or three years ago. Someone shared something you had blogged about, about abuse and some of these problematic dynamics in the yoga world. And I just kind of got into following what you had to say about it and it really seemed like you had some trenchant analysis that was deeply missing in the broader conversation. So I want to dive into that. Talk about what’s going on in Yoga land, uh, what’s problematic about it and what might be some ways that things can be remedied. But as way of introduction. You are yourself a survivor of two cults, and I know that part of this work in this book has been a bit of a healing journey for you. But how did you come to a focus on the Ashtanga yoga situation in particular and what was going on in that that you felt needed to be highlighted?

Matthew Remski: 00:02:15

Well, I came to it reluctantly. The project that I had started with was a broader research project into injuries in yoga classes or in yoga practice. And the format was quite broad. I had started interviewing people from all communities and methods. And it had started with the strange realization that everybody that I knew who had professionalized into the yoga world or who was a really dedicated student was injured in some way. There were some people who were suffering from chronic pain or from repetitive stress injuries. And I found it very weird for a so-called therapeutic practice that people came to for spiritual benefit, but they also seem to be working themselves really hard in. And I started to wonder about that.

The book that started to emerge out of that research project was originally called Shadow Pose, and the project name was What Are We Actually Doing in Asana? And I still have Shadow Pose as kind of like a book structure. The first chapter was going to be an examination of the interview data of senior students of Mr Iyengar. And the second chapter was to be an analysis of interview data coming from the Ashtanga world. And at a certain point I realized that the injury question in the Ashtanga world, which is profound, it’s, it goes deep was still a surface question to the abuse issue that had been silent for many, many years, but also carried by a number of women survivors in a kind of whisper network as well. So once I started getting more and more attuned to the fact that that was an underlying story that Mr. Jois had actually assaulted women throughout his career, and nobody had really published on it, I realized that I couldn’t just put that into a chapter somehow. There was going to be a lot more work to do on that.

When I started to get a sense of how grave the issue was, I really resisted going into it because I thought that — my gut was that if it really was true that Pattabhi Jois was a serial sex abuser and that he did it in broad daylight and that there were an untold number of women victims and that none of them had been able really to speak out publicly about it until Anneke Lucas in 2010, and that the community had not done anything about it. And it was probably widely known within the upper echelons of the Ashtanga world, even into, even as early as 2012 — but of course, we now know it was far earlier than that.

But in 2012, there was a big hagiography published of Jois’s life featuring interviews with 40 students, and everybody talked about how wonderful he was and what a grandfather and father figure he was, and a spiritual teacher and all of that. So I had the sense around 2015 or 16 that if what I was hearing was true and I believed that it was true, that it would really rock the foundations of this particular community. And I was scared of that. And I also thought that it would rock the foundations of the broader yoga world because Jois is incredibly influential. Without him, there’s no vinyasa. Without him there’s no sense of the contemporary group yoga class as being a, an intense, ecstatic, immersive, silent experience filled with breath and sweat. Without him, there’s no adjustment protocol. Not that he really gave a protocol: he assaulted people. But the whole notion that the teachers should always have their hands or should have their hands on a student at all times that comes from his particular pedagogy. And so I just was terrified of the implications of what I was hearing and I resisted it for a long time actually.

Josh Summers: 00:06:52

Yeah. Some of our audience is definitely going to be familiar with the names in terms of that you just mentioned, but there’s, there’s probably a yogic un-literate audience, right, that is listening too, so can you put Ashtanga on the map and then put Pattabhi Jois in relationship to Ashtanga on the map in that?

Matthew Remski: 00:07:12

Yeah. So Pattabhi Jois is the innovator of a system that he named as Ashtanga Yoga, but it’s unclear when that name came into usage because it seems that he was calling his classes that he gave to the businessmen of Mysore up until the end of the Sixties, just “Yoga”. He had been trained in the Mysore Yoga Shala at a very crucial point in the development of modern yoga history. He was born in 1915. He met the person who many consider to be the father of modern yoga Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, when he was about 12 years old. And he actually describes being brutalized by Krishnamacharya being beaten as he learned to do asanas. And of course, he’s not describing that in terms of abuse, but rather as a badge of honor. He goes on to further his studies, later on in his life with Mr. Krishnamacharya and assumed a teaching position at the Mysore Yoga Shala sometime in the late Thirties. But also under Krishnamacharya’s tutelage was his brother-in-law BKS Iyengar. And so from this one gym which was set up by the Maharaja Wodiyar in 1934, we have two of the pillars of the modern yoga evangelical movement. Iyengar is responsible for the notion that the bodily postures that we assume in yoga should some sort of geometrical form and balance and symmetry and a kind of architecture of grace. But Jois is the person who puts postures into rigorous sequences and really gives the modern group class its fluid and intense feeling, going forward.

Josh Summers: 00:09:14

And the Ashtanga/Jois form has spawned into numerous side forms, right?

Matthew Remski: 00:09:20

Right. So if you’re new to all of this jargon, and you’ve been to a flow class you are benefiting from and perhaps being injured by Jois’s legacy. If you’ve been to a Vinyasa class, you are probably benefiting from Jois’s legacy if you’ve been in a class where rhythmic breathing has been timed with movement in some sort of coordinated way that’s all coming from Jois. And also I’d say that it’s Jois’s senior students coming out of his tutelage from the late Sixties, but then especially into the 80s that really give modern yoga its aesthetic in terms of its incredible athleticism, its beautiful, but sometimes scary contortionism. When you look on Instagram today at #yoga you will see images that really had their birthplace in terms of their sensuality their, their structure, the whole aesthetic really comes out of the Jois movement. It’s not Iyengar Yoga photographs that get the most clicks on Instagram. It’s really the beauty and the artistry and I would say the sensuality and the sublimated sexuality of — and sometimes not-sublimated sexuality of that imagery that is directly coming from Jois. And I think there’s something in there too around the connection between the yoga posture and a kind of sexualized performance. I mean, objectification aside, and all of those sort of image issues aside, I think the fact that, um, many of Joyce’s female students were learning in an environment in which he sexually objectified them, that’s really pertinent. So when we go to Instagram and we look at yoga images right now we’re looking at least part of a legacy of people really having to perform under the male gaze in more ways than one.

Josh Summers: 00:11:41

So talk about that: the sexual objectification, with Jois. And how did that lead to abuse both physical and sexual under, under him in his classes, and describe what that dynamic looked like.

Matthew Remski: 00:11:57

I mean, objectification is just dehumanizing. What all of the 16 women who gave their testimony for my book I describe is that you know, they weren’t people to him. “TM”, who is the one testimony giver who wanted to remain anonymous described feeling as though she was just a piece of ass who was there for him to hump her or to give him pleasure in some way. And so the assaults actually took place in plain view of everybody, but under the auspices or under this this story that he was adjusting people, that he was helping students attain postures that they couldn’t otherwise attain or even more kind of deceptively, and I would say creepily, that his touch was conveying some kind of spiritual knowledge.

And this really goes back to a very old and sacred idea in a part of Indian wisdom culture called Tantrism where the guru is said to embody a kind of bio-spiritual grace. And that by his, usually it’s his touch, or their gaze or they can strike you with a peacock feather that there’s a literal sort of a transmission of spiritual realization into the student’s body. And that’s a felt, phenomenological experience. And part of the story that started to accrue around what Jois was doing as he was sexually assaulting women and possibly men too, that’s not verified by first person testimony though. But part of the story that started building up around him was that this is what he was doing was that he wasn’t digitally raping that woman, he was helping her find her “mulabandha”, which is a term for an internal muscular, but also esoteric, sensation that is tied to the rise of Kundalini or esoteric energy. So he was doing that or he was helping her heal from sexual trauma. As Karen Rain says, this whole sort of slew of “cryptic justifications” arose around his behavior.

And the weirdest part is that he wasn’t the source of them. It was the students who said these things about him. I actually regret not making that clear in the book. I don’t say that he was the source of the explanations, but I also, I don’t think I’m explicit enough in saying that it’s pretty likely that he wasn’t. I don’t think that anybody asked him directly, what are you doing when you grope these women’s breasts or when you put your hands on their buttocks or when you put your fingers into their vaginas, like: “What are you doing?” When he was confronted about sexual assault, the few times that I have evidence of it, he was very embarrassed. He would burst into tears at one point. And apparently he would stop from time to time, but like somebody who had clearly an illness, he wasn’t able to stop for very long. So objectification was a felt reality by the women who he assaulted.

I think we have to then wonder what it means for his senior students and how they present asana or yoga practice to the world now. Like what were the conditions under which they learned? Because if they were assaulted while they were learning, that’s going to inform their bodily sense of who they are and what this means and what they’re feeling and who they’re doing it for. And if they were watching other people being assaulted, what kind of secrets are their body’s holding and as I said in the beginning, these are some of the reasons why I was scared to go into this material because it’s really deep. It suggests that at the heart of this, you know, venerable, lauded, beloved, you know, spiritual/wellness practice, there’s this really dark problem that, that hasn’t been looked at and hasn’t, and hasn’t been addressed.

Josh Summers: 00:16:39

Yeah. Major dark underbelly. As I’m listening to you, I’m imagining the listener that may not be familiar with the “Mysore” style of practice. So just to say that this is a style where unlike a typical led class: if someone were to go to a regular yoga studio or a gym and the teacher would sort of take them through a sequence, talking them through, maybe adjusting at times — but in the Mysore system, students show up quite early in the morning. Sometimes as early as 4, 4:30 AM. And they’re not following a led series of instructions from the teacher. They’re following a series of postures that they’ve been given in a successive stage-like manner. So you’re basically practicing independently and then the teacher comes around and adjust you or, quote-unquote assists you. And it’s that intimate contact of the adjustment or assist where this is the moment of abuse.

Matthew Remski: 00:17:45

Right. In Jois’s circumstance it becomes really complicated because one of the things that the Ashtanga world has prided itself on for the last 30 years is the sense that the teacher is able to learn and know about the student intimately because they are having personal interactions with them multiple times per morning, every morning, six mornings per week, two hours per session, two days off per month. That’s where we get into the notion of whether or not the method fosters communities that are actually high demand or cultic. How much time is actually occupied? But this feeling that people are getting individual attention and that when the teacher comes around and pays them that close attention. Meanwhile, their colleagues are not supposed to be looking. They’re supposed to be concentrating on their own stuff. They’re supposed to be concentrating on their breath or there’s even eye positions that people are supposed to take. There’s this sense that you and the teacher are alone and there are people who absolutely love and they thrive on that and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t because it sounds like a really good thing. And I know that it works in practice in many circumstances, but it also sets up a very, very vulnerable situation in which, people can be exploited in plain sight.

Josh Summers: 00:19:19

And just to be really explicit about it: you document this in your book, but what were the adjustments that were abusive?

Matthew Remski: 00:19:28

Yeah, well, he would grope women’s genitals and breasts and he would climb on top of them and actually thrust his genitals against their own genitals. He would come behind women and digitally rape them by actually pressing his fingers through their tights and into their genitals. It’s almost incredible to say, but you know, story after story, testimony after testimony, this is what we come up with and it doesn’t make sense for 30 years of such activities to to take place in plain sight without there being a network of complicity that’s supporting and enabling them. And, and that’s why I started to use the language of cult analysis to describe how it actually happened.

Josh Summers: 00:20:30

The network of complicity. I want to explore that more. It does hit me on a personal level. I never really pursued Ashtanga yoga myself. I have lots of friends in the Ashtanga Yoga world. Authorized teachers. Um, and I’ve taken a few classes here or there. But when I first got into yoga, just to put a context on this, when I first got into yoga and started hanging around and studios that had an Ashtanga Yoga program, I did hear these whispers around certain kinds of adjustments and that the euphemism that was given for this kind of very intimate genital touch was called a “mulabandha check”. And as you described, mulabundha is sort of this energetic muscular lock down in the perineum, and the teacher is coming around feeling that to make sure it’s in quote-unquote engaged. And I’m appalled at myself in a way, that I kinda joked along like, ha ha, like this is just a spiritual… I don’t understand it because I’m not far enough along to even perceive it myself or to see the value of it, to see how important it is — when it’s just bad shit.

Matthew Remski: 00:21:52

But there’s something plausible about it. There’s something plausible about it. And I don’t think I addressed this in the book either except, except where I get into the fact that especially a Tantric and Hatha Yoga history is filled with analysis and thought and practice around the sublimation of sexual energies. And so there’s a way in which people show up in spaces like this and they are working so extrovertedly with their bodies in very vulnerable positions and they’re told that this practice will have kind of like a total effect upon their bodies, minds, emotions, psyches. Why shouldn’t their sexuality somehow be included in that? Why shouldn’t the intimacy of their, you know, their deepest selves be somehow exposed? And isn’t that where so much strength lies?

This is all the language that surrounds the sexuality of yoga that I believe begins to soften a person up into not really going, Wait a minute! What’s more obvious here is that this guy’s sexually assaulting women. And that he’s doing it for his own gratification and that there’s no therapeutic benefit to this. And you could meditate your way into believing that there was perhaps, but most people are not actually having that experience and we shouldn’t be telling them that they should.

So you know, I appreciate your confession. But I also want to say that, you know, the notion that the notion that people should be liberated somehow in the way in which they conceive of their sexuality within yoga is part of yoga’s appeal actually. And so I don’t think it’s a big leap for people to go, Oh, well maybe I shouldn’t be so uptight about such and such, or maybe I shouldn’t, ask too many questions, or that’s private after all. But also we’re working on our private stuff. And so I think it’s very confusing. Again I’ll refer to TM in the book, who says that as soon as she was sexually assaulted, somebody who saw it happen came up to her and said, “Okay, so you realize that what just happened to you — that wasn’t sexual.” And she was very confused. She was like, “What do you mean it wasn’t sexual?” And they had some explanation about Shaktipat or spiritual transmission. And you know, she didn’t give the impression in the interview that she totally bought off on the idea then, but she bought off on it enough to be confused and to be disarmed and to be put in this position where she felt that her own critical thinking or her resistance to the idea was somehow problematic. And that it was going to stand in the way of her spiritual development or something like that. So it’s not, it’s not a surprise that these things get wrapped up to together and sold on and end up rationalizing abuse to me.

Josh Summers: 00:25:43

In following you, I know that you have your eyes on many different yoga and Buddhist meditative spiritual communities that have lots of these bad dynamics at play. What was it about the Ashtanga situation itself that made you want to put it in the forefront of your case study in the book?

Matthew Remski: 00:26:09

I think it’s really kind of awful serendipity really because it was reportable. The evidence was clear. The network of sources that I began to develop began to send me this cascade of information.

Josh Summers: 00:26:33

Let me interject for a sec. But in terms of evidence being clear, because this sometimes comes up when I have conversations with people about.They refer to the “allegations”. The thing that listeners need to know is that there’s ample video and photographic evidence documenting all of this.

Matthew Remski: 00:26:51

There’s also 16 women who said “He assaulted me, and this is how he did it.” One is enough. There’s no question anymore that we’re in “allegation” territory. That’s a really crucial moment actually because one of the things that comes up in each one of these yoga or Buddhist community, you know, spiritual, physical, emotional, sexual abuse cases is that the behavior of the actual actions of the leader of the perpetrator are always interpretable. There’s always something mysterious or like, or a little bit beyond or childlike or innocent or super spiritual about the leader, about Mr. Jois or about Manouso Manos. Or about Bikram Choudhury, although less so, more and more people would see him clearly for who he is.

But there’s always something mysterious about the leader or the guru — which is probably not a good word for these people — that allows their behaviors to be endlessly bandied about as though, Well, we can’t really know what he was doing. And you know, the relationship between the teacher and the student is sacred. And you know, we don’t know what’s going on. We can’t really interpret… You bring up the video evidence. People argued about that for years. They are watching sexual assault taking place like before their own eyes and they’re saying, Oh, we don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know what’s going on.

So it’s been a combination of forms of evidence that, I think have moved it out of allegation territory, but more importantly, out of the territory of interpretation where the leader who has perpetrated crimes is somehow beyond the realm of the normal citizen who can be evaluated according to the same standards of evidences as anybody else. And it’s something about that interpretability that is like essential to his magic, usually his magic that, that you never know quite what he’s doing. You never know whether it’s actually for your benefit or not. And you know, even if he’s abusing you, maybe he’s helping you get over ego. There were people who would say that.

I guess the other thing that Jois would do is that he would just steal money from students. He would cut short their stays or would say that they owed him more money than they actually did, or he would make up exchange rates between the US dollar and the rupee in his favor. When that came up, that was well known as well. And when that came up, people would say, Oh, he’s helping people with their money issues. You know, they’re attached to money. So people are capable of all kinds of BS when it comes to the interpretability of the magical person.

Josh Summers: 00:29:56

And that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about is what role does a kind of somewhat flaky, soft or even direct interpretation of ancient spiritual texts that draws on particular metaphysics? How do the spiritual metaphysics factor in to this cocktail of toxic group dynamic?

Matthew Remski: 00:30:30

I think I have two feelings about this question. One is that it’s hard to say, how pre-colonial, especially Indian wisdom tradition metaphysics play any kind of role in this at all because I don’t think global yoga practitioners have access really to those metaphysics. I don’t think we know the kinds of relationships that they’re grounded in. I don’t think we have a clear idea of what the commitments, the social and economic and relational commitments, there are or were or were supposed to have existed between teachers and students that might ground all of this stuff. I do know that whether they’re accurate interpretations or not, there are all kinds of yoga or Buddhist or pseudo-yoga or pseudo-Buddhist ideas around, emptiness, interpretability, the play of Lila, karma, all kinds of, of terms that are correctly or incorrectly used to describe or to rationalize things that we would rather not confront as being abusive.

I’ll give an example of a concept that carries both of these histories. I go into detail in the book, on a Sanskrit word that is “parampara”. Now, parampara in precolonial terms, and up until this point, even now in contemporary India, means something very specific about how knowledge is transferred, especially spiritual knowledge in this context. It can apply to other forms of knowledge as well. But it implies this unbroken, usually familial, certainly intimate relational transfer of knowledge that depends on a whole series of social commitments and contracts in order to keep it stable. Now it also implies that the knowledge that’s being transferred goes way back in history and has been tested by time. Well, modern yoga ashtanga practitioners or Jois method practitioners from America and Europe have started using the word parampara to describe what they belong to. And so what that means is that they’re saying that a technique that Jois developed in the late sixties and changed several times as his shala got busier, they’re implying that that is traditional in a way. They’re implying that it has the weight of several generations of validation behind it. They’re implying that they belong to a heritage rather than a branded family business. And so we have this beautiful word that carries an ancient heritage that I personally don’t have access to how that actually works, but I know it’s there and I hope that it can be recovered in some way or it can be made more known, or I can have more access to it at least. And then we have this sort of like contemporary bastardized version of the term that’s used to pretend that the people who are the people who are using it have something, you know, magical or special when that’s really deceptive.

Josh Summers: 00:34:10

And the deception around it too. I mean in the yoga landscape at large, at least in my experience, Ashtanga, has held this kind of vaunted position as the legit, hardcore, no nonsense, real authentic practice.

Matthew Remski: 00:34:31

Well, every group does say that though. Like the Iyengar fold will say that This is authentic. This is true. This is hardcore. It’s hard to know. I mean, every group makes proprietary and sort of like advocacy claims, self-advocacy claims. I don’t want to interrupt. I would agree.

Josh Summers: 00:34:56

Okay. Did you get into this in your book about the, like Mark Singleton’s work looking at the origin of modern postural yoga of which Jois’s system comes as part of?

Matthew Remski: 00:35:09

I refer to it here and there throughout the book because you can’t really avoid it. Singleton’s work I think dated 2010 really blew the lid off of the notion that postural sequences or postures themselves or the way in which they’re practiced in group class formats with adjustments, that any of that has any pre-modern heritage. It’s more like Indian anti-colonial activists in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to indigenize physical culture influences from Europe. Actually colonial influences: gymnastics, harmonial gymnastics, weight lifting, bodybuilding. They wanted to indigenize these physical culture practices, as forms of national physical culture, but also anti-colonial pride building. And it worked. It was really, really effective.

But what we have is something that pretends to have a stronger linkage to the medieval history of Hatha Yoga than it actually does. And then that’s what gets exported to the world is the notion that Jois’s system is ancient or that it goes back to Patanjali, or something like that when there’s no evidence for that at all. But it becomes a very powerful selling and marketing point. You know, it’s so common within the modern yoga world, and this is why I think Singleton’s book was so riveting and so outrageous to many people. And also so earth shattering is that you know — he doesn’t phrase it this way — but the research as he lays it out basically says what we have believed about the modern posture, about the modern yoga movement is mostly deceptive. It’s mostly a kind of clever elaboration or —

Josh Summers: 00:37:20

It’s an invention.

Matthew Remski: 00:37:23

It’s an invention. And we have endowed it with a kind of orientalist idealistic mysticism, and that has become one of its main selling points. It’s also what has made it resistant to contemporary biomechanics and contemporary kinesiology and contemporary physical therapy. So it’s really, it’s really complicated. Here’s another example. There’s part of this invocation of tradition that also shielded Pattabhi Jois from scrutiny because one of the things that his students would say, and they say it to this day actually, is that his adjustments, as brutal as they were, as injurious and as intrusive as they were, were traditional. Well, they might’ve been traditional in the sense that that’s what Krishnamacharya did to him. But we don’t have any evidence that physical adjustments in yoga existed prior to the 1920s. I proved that I think in my book by citing the work of several historians of medieval yoga, or one in particular, Dr Jason Birch, who says there’s no evidence for anybody physically assisting anybody else in a yoga posture prior to the 20th century.

Josh Summers: 00:38:46

And just to jump on that for a second — around the nature of the adjustments, because we’ve discussed how there’s a component of sexual assault in them, but the physical assault too… the stories of people just hearing ligaments snap or rip. I mean that was just sort of sending shivers down my spine as I read, the whole book in a way. It’s harrowing to read.

Matthew Remski: 00:39:17

And it also shows how effective and immersive the propaganda was around Jois’s power that the senior students openly joke about how they all crawled crying out of practice everyday. They all openly talk about how, Oh yeah, he blew out my knee and he was doing this, but I got the posture or he led me towards a more advanced position in the series or something like that. The way in which this group of people was inculturated to withstand pain is extraordinary. And I think it’s had a huge ripple effect. Or kind of like a trickle down effect into the next generation with regard to how we regard the body and effort and pain in general. You know, there are very few, I would imagine in North America and Europe, yoga teachers who are cranking people today the way that Jois cranked people in his day. But I think that the basic ideas around what pain means, what injury means, what pushing yourself means, what being pushed by a teacher means: those have all remained intact in places.

Josh Summers: 00:40:47

So you’ve sort of discussed a little bit about the spiritual interpretation and reframe of a lot of this behavior. What has been some of the response you’ve received or seen in light of the stuff coming out and also in light of your book. How is the community both within Ashtanga and th yoga community outside of Ashtanga receiving this?

Matthew Remski: 00:41:13

There’s a huge spectrum and there’s kind of a line in the sand as it were, of that spectrum between people who identify as Ashtanga practitioners and people who don’t. Amongst the people who do, this is a difficult book to read and some people have really negative reactions to it. Although it’s not like the reactions that they’ve had to my more informal blog work over the years, which a lot of people have just been able to dismiss or to say it’s agenda driven or something like that or that, “You just hate our community”, or something.

Josh Summers: 00:41:56

Again, this is very personal for me. I have friends who I’ve tried to talking about your work with both here and in Europe and there has been this view that you’re, this opportunist, you’re your swooping in on this thing just to elevate your own work and your own, your own profile, and I’ve always gone cross-eyed when that’s come up. I’m like, this is not what he’s doing.

Matthew Remski: 00:42:20

It’s opportunist in a sense that nobody was doing it for one thing. And I would say that anybody in the Ashtanga world who calls me an opportunist should really ask themselves the question, “If you knew about this, where was your book? Where was your newspaper report? Why didn’t you go to a journalist? I mean it didn’t have to be me. Why was it me? Why was it me? It’s like, it’s 2010 and Anneke Lucas published her account and it got buried on Facebook. There was like five likes to it. Nobody shared it. You know, there’s one comment saying, “You know lot of people are going to say you’re a very brave person sometime in the future.” Fast forward six years later, she republishes her blog. By that point, I’m talking to Karen Rain for two years. People asked for like a decade. “Where did Karen Haberman go? Where did she disappear to?” She got so far away from the Ashtanga scene in the yoga world in general, she changed her name and it’s like nobody wanted to ask a little bit further?

So I mean, okay. Opportunistic. Yes. But that’s because there’s this great big vacuum. And with regard to my profile, well, we all have jobs and you know, my job as strange as it is and as self-made as it is, is that I look at abuse and spiritual communities. And so, yeah. Does it raise my profile? Yes. Does it make me fame and fortune? Um, no. I mean, anybody who thinks that somehow I’ve gotten rich on this just doesn’t know anything about what writing a book means or what it means to sell it or anything about it. And, and, you know, it’s like, did you, did anybody say that, Ronan Farrow was opportunistic for reporting on Harvey Weinstein? I don’t think so. They looked at the work and they said, Wow, he gained the trust of, what was it, eight women who he published on in that first New Yorker. He gained the trust. He was able to publish their testimonies. He pretty much stayed out of the way. And he created a victim-centered narrative. And so I didn’t actually — you asked the question and I didn’t want to go on a rant about —

Josh Summers: 00:44:43

Well actually, you know, I just want to interject too, is that the people that I’m in contact with, that had said that actually have read the book and have actually completely changed their tune. Oh, okay. So even with people that were initially critical, they’ve read the book and they feel that this is a very fair, balanced treatment and important that it’s out now.

Matthew Remski: 00:45:05

Yeah. I hope that slowly gets in. I think part of that maybe the threshold has to do with, it’s not like I was a professional journalist in sports or something like that, and I got wind of this story and people didn’t know who I was, but, you know, I’ve been writing as a cultural critic within the yoga world for the last five years. My book on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras was in 2012. And there’s been a lot of divided opinion about the value of what I do ever since then. So as a cultural critic, as I’ve reported on various abuse stories, the Anusara implosion, the Jivamukti lawsuit, the Satyananda Yoga thing, Shambhala, Rigpa… As I’ve done that work, I’ve made a lot of allies and I’ve made a lot of enemies. And all of that really is in the sort of public, very jousty sphere of blog work and social media.

A book is a different thing, you know, when it’s editorialized and fact checked and there’s legal backing of publication behind it, it’s 380 pages long and there’s 380 foot notes or whatever, it’s well-cooked. And so I think it’s unfortunate that I already had a name coming into this particular work, that I carried the baggage of past work with me. But at the same time, I don’t think I would’ve gotten the book contract without that. So it just is what it is. I hate that phrase, but I think there’s there’s nothing to have been done about it.

Josh Summers: 00:47:13

Well I won’t repeat it is what it is, but, one of the things I really appreciated about the book was the level of analysis that you went into, sort of deconstructing the dynamics in these high demand groups that that broadens the conversation from just saying, Oh, well the perpetrator was just a bad apple. Like he was, he was a bad man. And, we can throw him out but keep, keep this very valuable and integral practice intact. Right. Or the opposite, which I hear a lot too is Okay, well if these people, like with Karen Rain going back again and again and getting continually assaulted: What’s going on in her psychology or someone’s psychology like that, that keeps them there? Why aren’t we talking about that more? And I know you’re excellent at eviscerating both of those, those, those veins, right?

Matthew Remski: 00:48:18

Yeah. So on one hand, yeah, on one hand the bad apple argument just doesn’t work because nobody assaults… Jubilee Cooke estimates that there’s 30,000 — her conservative estimate is that there’s 30,000 distinct episodes of abuse or assault —

Josh Summers: 00:48:35

Just briefly take me through the math on that.

Matthew Remski: 00:48:42

Jubilee Cooke is one of the women who gave testimony and she was one of one of the women who was there for eight months. And so I’ll talk about her in the second section as well, in the second part of this answer, and she was assaulted repeatedly, but she said, you know, this happened to me in three different postures every single morning. This is the number of mornings. Every morning that I was there in Mysore, I saw three other women who, who got assaulted in those three postures. So she starts to build numbers out of what she personally experienced and what she personally witnessed. And then she just counts up the years she counts up the tours. I think she uses, no, I don’t think she uses my research to try to figure out how many women he actually came into contact with when he’s away from the Mysore shala on world tour, you know, in California or New York or Boston or whatever, or Hawaii. And she comes up with a conservative estimate of 300 or, sorry, 30,000 individual sexual assaults over what’s likely a 30 year period.

That’s not a bad apple. That’s a whole orchard. That’s like a bad apple and a whole bunch of people saying, No, this is great. This is a great apple. This is a great apple! In a more contemporary story, what we’re seeing with Manouso Manos right now.

Josh Summers: 00:50:21

Just for reference, who is he?

Matthew Remski: 00:50:24

He’s probably BKS Iyengar’s most famous, most prominent, most senior student, and the one who most embodies his own teaching persona. BKS’s gruffness, his shouting, his way of both electrifying and terrifying a room at the same time. He has recently had allegations, numerous allegations of sexual assault verified against him by an independent investigation that was commissioned by the Iyengar Yoga Association of the United State, or IYNAUS. And so in that ongoing story, which is still unfolding, we have this sense administratively within IYNAUS that you know, he’s been delisted, he’s been decertified and the Iyengar family has removed his right in light of these crimes, which can’t be prosecuted — they’re all outside of the statute of limitations — but in light of these behaviors, he’s been prevented from using the Iyengar trademark in his teaching going forward.

And that’s it, right? Like, this is not a regulated profession. He can go on and teach whatever he wants. He can teach Manouso Manos Yoga tomorrow and open up shop wherever, maybe in Bali or something. But the thing is, is that administratively we have this sense that while he’s been excised, somehow he’s been amputated and, you know, we’re all fine now. Well, here’s somebody who had such teacherly influence for such a long time and such administrative influence over the entire organization for such a long time. Now I would say what the organization has to do is say, “Okay, who actually trained under this guy and who would attribute their certification to him and who was tested by him?”

Because everybody involved in that is going to have to answer some questions about, Well, what did you actually learn from him? Here’s somebody who is probably less of a yoga teacher than a sexual predator posing as a yoga teacher. “What did you actually learn? And how can we help you learn some more? Or how can we help you mitigate this educational stain?”

And then on the other side of it, it’s like anybody who asks, why did Karen Rain keep going back to get assaulted by Pattabhi Jois every, every year — doesn’t know anything about trauma, doesn’t know anything about domestic violence, doesn’t know anything about a trauma bond, doesn’t know anything about being gaslighted. That response, which is very common and I would say, you know, it’s so common, it shouldn’t be shameful. I just think people should be open to correcting it.

People who have that response really have to get educated in what it means to be in a toxic power dynamic, that confuses your basic capacity to feel as though you have agency. Like I bring up the metaphor in the book that if you broke a person’s leg and there they were on the ground, you wouldn’t blame them for not running away from you as you came in to damage them further. But somehow with sexual assault, we look at the survivor or the victim or the survivor and we say, why didn’t you run away when actually the sexual and the physical assault have deprived them in many cases of their capacity to feel as though they are autonomous, to feel as though they can have individual agency, to feel as though they have their own bodies even.

Josh Summers: 00:54:41

Right. That’s a huge, hugely important piece that I think gets overlooked. I know you’re not found at this guy and I think I have mixed feelings about myself, but I was glancing through Jordan, Jordan Peterson’s book and he makes some comment that I think is really relevant here where he says you know, if we deny a victim response, some responsibility, we deny them agency.

Matthew Remski: 00:55:04

Right? Yeah. Except that he’s going to use that to say that we somehow as observers of the victim have to give them responsibility within our assessment of what happened during a particular crime. Right. The problem with that is that there might be some, some therapeutic application of that principle of well, You know, in this moment, do you feel as though you have agency with regard to how you’re moving forward coming out of this experience. That might happen privately in therapy later, but what happens is, and I can hear it in that quote, is that the notion of victim is turned into a kind of psychological state instead of a label for somebody against whom a crime has been committed.

The further problem with assigning responsibility, regardless of what that even means — like what does that mean? Is it about the clothing? Is it about the fact that you went that morning? Is it about the fact that your voice froze when you wanted to say No? Like what, what responsibility are we actually talking about and can that discussion survive the fact that one of the reasons that Karen Rain was assaulted over and over again was because the group had deceived her about what was going on?

The problem that I don’t think Jordan Peterson or any of his kind of like alt right bros want to really face is that you cannot be responsible for having been deceived. I’d even say his own fans aren’t responsible for him deceiving them! It’s very, very difficult to protect yourself against being deceived. That’s what deception is. It happens to intelligent people. It happens to mediocrely educated people. It happens to people who aren’t educated at all. If you are deceived about why you are in a place, about what is going to offer you, then you’ve really already had your agency taken away. It’s not like you’re going to give it. In both cults that I was a recruited into, they presented themselves as, other than what they actually were.

No, there’s no part of Ashtanga Yoga that said to Karen Rain, Hey, this is a cult in which you’ll be sexually assaulted every day! No, that’s not what they said. They said: This practice will give you spiritual liberation and if you follow this teacher’s instructions as closely as you can and you surrender your body up to them, your process will go a lot faster. That’s what they said. That’s what they said. And if she’s to blame for believing that, well, you know, let’s have another conversation about what people actually end up believing.

Josh Summers: 00:58:38

Yeah. I thought that that part in the book was great. And you also from there, you then expand into an analysis of sort of structural, systemic conditions that do kind of disorient and confuse and create this kind of vertiginous internal phenomenology for the person that makes it very difficult to see one way or the other.

Matthew Remski: 00:59:06

And I think I really have the work of Alexandra Stein to thank for that because she uses this basic — so just a caveat here, when we talk about the psychology of person who’s victimized by a cult, it’s not to say that, you know, there was something inside them that made them more vulnerable. The deception is the threshold. And then there are a psychological processes that can take over that make recruitment easier, dependency, easier, dread of leading, easier — but what she says is that the main thing that the cult does is it rewires your way of relating to people, to everyone, really towards the end of the attachment spectrum, known as disorganized, where you’re actually in a constant state of love and fear of approaching, but withdrawing, of going to a person for love who on some level is also hurting you, but you feel dependent upon.

And one of the things that she says this creates is this amazing — I say it’s amazing, it’s awful, but it’s amazing to me because it articulates my own cult experience so well — she describes a triple isolation in which you’re isolated from the outside world. You’ve lost your old friends probably, or you’ve written them off or they’re not enlightened enough for you, or you’re just separated from them because you’re in an ashram or something. And then you’re isolated also from people within the group because there are certain things that are taboo to talk about. And in the Ashtanga world, you couldn’t say around the breakfast table at Mysore: He sexually assaulted me. Or if you tried to, you’d be told, Oh no, that’s not what it was.

And then that second layer of isolation leads to a kind of internal isolation from your own moral sense, where it’s like you had values that helped you navigate the world. You had a compass that was a shining light for you, but now it’s kind of broken or it’s been occluded and the wisdom of the group has entered in and has kind of overwhelmed what you’ve been able to decide for yourself in terms of your moral values throughout your life. So that triple isolation is like this amazing idea. You’re with other people, but you’re totally all alone at the same time. And the only person who really is the reality principle is the leader, is Mr Jois, is Mr Iyengar, is, Manouso Manos. In my case, it was, in my case, it was Michael Roach of the Asian Classics Institute or Charles Anderson at Endeavor Academy. Like that guy was the reality principle.

Josh Summers: 01:02:01

Right. They have all the answers.

Matthew Remski: 01:02:04

Right, and that’s part of what alienates you from your own, even your will to, to propose an alternative or to ask questions, which of course you’re not allowed to do.

Josh Summers: 01:02:19

Yeah. I thought the inclusion of attachment theory there was, was pretty helpful, for just for shifting the blame on the victim and, or the blame on the leader,

Matthew Remski: 01:02:34

Yeah. It’s a system. They’re working together. I would like people to just reflect on the fact that you have no idea who Jim Jones was. You have no idea what was going on in Chogyam Trungpa’s head, you have no idea what, what the inner life of Bikram Choudhury is like. The, what is it called, the Eisenhower Rule? What psychiatrists came up with in the 1950s where they self imposed — they’re starting to break it with Trump now — but a lot of professional clinicians, have this self-imposed rule that they’re not going to diagnose people that they’re not in clinical practice with. I think that’s a really sound principle. You don’t know, I don’t know what’s going on in Pattabhi Jois’s head. I don’t know what his internal constellation is like. I’ve spent two years interviewing Karen Rain. I feel like I know her a lot better than I know him, but I still wouldn’t presume to know why she makes choices that she does. All of that intentionality, all of that speculation on people’s internal states, what it usually does is it overshadows the fact that a crime has been committed and we can obviously set up ways of preventing it from happening again. [Correction: it’s the Goldwater Rule. Woops.]

Josh Summers: 01:03:58

I know we’re closing in on your time a bit and I do want to get into maybe the path ahead. You know, I know you hold that intention in the book of, of offering some sort of roadmap forward with better practices. So one of the things that I as a teacher, myself, and I do trainings in various yoga studios. One thing that’s come up from me is that I’ve had some studios on my schedule that still have photographs of Pattabhi Jois in their altar corner of the studio. And there haven’t been, to my satisfaction, statements of distancing and denouncing and separation and all that. And I have to say, I’m deeply grateful to you for your work because it’s helped me sort through how to engage with that. But one of the things that has come up for me and trying to talk about it with these hosts and these other studios is, it’s hard to escape a little bit the idea of or the dynamic of virtue signaling, where you kind of come off pious or sanctimonious: Look, you have this photograph up and you’re silencing victims and doing your part of an institutional enablement. And I think that’s really all important to say, but it actually hasn’t gone very well for me with these places. I get labeled as being judgmental. I’m not understanding them, not letting them handle it in their own way.

Matthew Remski: 01:05:33

You know, but you don’t have to do that work because the survivors have done it for you. Really. Like, Karen Rain and Jubilee Cook published this amazing — I hope this goes into the show notes — this amazing essay in Yoga International that the title is something like “What do survivors of sexual abuse in Yoga communities need?” And it’s like a white paper that basically lays it out and says, Look, here we are, we’re sexual assault survivors of a 20th century yoga master. And this is what happened to us and this is how we feel about what will create safety and respect, not only for us, but for students going forward. And, you know, I think anybody who reads through that and you know, there’s stuff around: don’t venerate people who are sexual assaulters or rapists. That’s not safe for the people who come to your studio. You know: you have to make a distinction between people that you love because you love them and people who are triggering to your students. I mean, that’s just, that’s basic adulting for one thing.

But anyway, their list of the things that you can do is all laid out for you. And I don’t think you have to be worried about virtue-signaling by referring to what survivors of sexual assault need. To me, virtue signaling is, you know, some sort of opportunistic self aggrandizement based upon associating yourself with you a fashionable social cause. But you’re not getting anything out of those confrontations if you’re trying to teach there.

And as far as like being judgmental goes, I mean, well, asking for basic justice and respect isn’t judgmental. What’s judgmental or perhaps the better word is just inept, is to continue to keep your head in the sand about what the person that you love did to people. You can still love him, but it doesn’t mean that you have to venerate him or say that he was somebody that he wasn’t in public terms.

You know, I think the whole notion of the veneration of the photograph is so difficult for so many people because there was an intensity with which he would gaze at them or they would gaze at him. And often that would happen within the of adjustments. And I believe that if, if in some cases, if those portraits on those altars are looked at from just the right angle, the person might go, Oh my God, actually he’s not who I thought I was, who he was after all. It’s almost as if the portrait will stay on the altar to preserve something that if it cracks will crack the entire world along with it. And that’s a tough place to be in. I would acknowledge it.

But if you’re running a public space, and people who are sexual assault survivors are going to it and they can Google Pattabhi Jois’s name and that story is the first thing that comes up… how are they going to feel safe and how were they going to feel as though you’re not somehow excusing or aiding and abetting or minimizing or just not caring about sexual assault. That doesn’t make sense. Right? If one in four women are survivors of sexual assault — and it’s probably higher than that — do you really want to almost emotionally haze or gaslight a quarter of your potential practice population? It doesn’t make any sense. My main point is that is that you don’t have to do that work because it’s already been done for you in, in Rain and Cooke’s essay. And so that’s really cool.

Josh Summers: 01:09:44

That crossed my desk a little while ago and I did very much appreciate that. I feel like if I’m going to these places,I’m coming in not as a regular teacher, I’m coming in for a workshop or a training. I feel like if I’m going to a place that still venerates put a Jois-type figure that in some ways my, my showing up is complicit with this network of complicity.

Matthew Remski: 01:10:10

That’s a hard one, right? You’d have to make some personal choices around whether you’re using that privilege, the fees that you’re getting from the training to push back against that idealization. There’s going to be a lot of calculations in there. There’s people who are at certain points in their career where they can say, well, I’m not going to work with so and so anymore, and they can make that public and that will be very, very effective. And they won’t hurt because of it financially. But, you know, I think people who are in different financial circumstances might find it more effective to preserve the relationship with their Ashtanga Yoga shala hosts than to separate altogether and to slowly encourage them to change. So, you know, those are individual choices for sure.

Josh Summers: 01:11:12

Yeah. Within the Ashtanga world in general, what reforms do movements do you see happening and what, what gives you a sense of hope?

Matthew Remski: 01:11:27

The reform so far has been strong in some areas in the zone of sentiment, rather than action. But that’s gonna take a long time. It’s not like it’s not going to happen. I’m sure. I’m sure things will improve. But when you asked me that question, I think of an amazing accountability statement made by Sarai Harvey Monk who is authorized by Sharath Jois sometime in the 2010s, something like that. And you know, she laid out this five point, “this is how my participation in this organization is complicit with this abuse history and here are the five things that I’m going to do now in my classes to make sure that I don’t carry any of those impacts on.” There has been a couple of other statements like that, but hers is a real standout. There’s a guy named Guy Donahaye, who actually was the co editor with Eddie Stern of a very popular book in 2012 called Guruji which I describe in my book, and I criticize very closely and heavily as being a hagiography of Jois that was published with the cultural knowledge of what was being left out. So, Guy is the co-editor, Eddie Stern is the other editor, but Guy has gone on kind of like this solo truth and reconciliation tear on his blog. And he’s published a lot of really beautiful pieces about that are basically, What the heck were we doing? What did we overlook? Who did we not listen to? What does Karen Rain have to say? How can I make this up to her? Like he’s doing an amazing amount of public vulnerable, accountability work.

And he recently also sponsored a petition that’s on Facebook, trying to get Ashtanga certified and authorized teachers to make accountability statements. That’s moving kind of slowly because I think there’s a lot of fear around the control that the family still has over the finances and the copyrights and the ability to practice, uh, or to teach the, the, the method, quote-unquote legally or with the validation of the family. So that’s moving slowly.

And then on the logistic or the sort of material front, there is a group that’s in formation and I think it’s called the Amayu collective. And two of its leads are Scott Johnson from London and the UK. And Greg Nardi from Orlando or Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They’re coordinating with a few other second generation of Ashtanga teachers. So it’s a young group, I think about five, and one of them isn’t a teacher, I think her name is Emma. She’s actually a women’s studies professor in southern England somewhere. And she’s a student and I think she’s also an educational specialist. I think this group of five people are putting together a kind of alternative training program to what’s on offer through Sharath Jois and KPJAYI. I don’t think that has really gotten off the ground yet. There’s a lot of aspirations involved there. I know that the group will have some challenges with diversity with inclusion and also. I would say that they probably have to do a better job of making sure that they’re professionally consulting with survivors like Karen Rain and Anneke Lucas and Jubilee Cooke. Because I think that’s essential. Any reform movement that isn’t asking Jois’s survivors exactly what to do and exactly what they need and exactly what they would have needed to keep safe is not really a reform movement at all.

Josh Summers: 01:15:43

And in Yoga at large, I know yoga is kind of like the wild, wild west of, industries. What kind of reform… I know you mentioned things like more of a consent culture in terms of adjustments and scope of practice considerations. What would you like to see, see moving forward?

Matthew Remski: 01:16:04

Well the last part of my book is written as a workbook for the yoga teacher training industry. It summarizes the analysis of the Jois event and the cult literature that I use. I try to lay out a number of tools that I think — I’m not an expert in this — but I think will be helpful as teachers, students and administrators and yoga service providers and yoga academics as well go forward in figuring out how to identify toxic group dynamics. So there’s tools in there and the tools are accompanied by personal essay questions for review. So there’s something in there called the PRISM method. There’s eight best practices for avoiding cultic dynamics. There is also, as you mentioned, a scope of practice for the yoga humanities that I think would be a good idea.

And it’s something that Yoga Alliance may adopt in part, not because I wrote it or anything, but because it’s in the air now they’re doing a renovation of their standards after 19 years. Scope of practice or defining a scope of practice for a yoga teacher is a keystone of that effort. And that’s super important because one of the reasons that Jois was allowed to be who he was is that nobody gave him any limits. He was given kind of free reign to pontificate about every aspect of a person’s life, you know, so it’s not just that he was teaching people asana, but he was also telling them to stop taking their medication or he was telling them that their back didn’t need surgery or, you know, he was giving them spiritual advice perhaps or, or what have you. It’s like the modern yoga movement has been built on the charismatic personalities that did not have a scope of practice because it was thought or they assume they could do anything. And that is about to get checked. And that’s a really good thing. Like if you’ve trained as an asana, a teacher, let’s stay in our lane: let’s not give dietary advice. Let’s not pretend you’re a marriage counsellor. Let’s not start talking about the chakras. Let’s not give psychological advice or talk about people’s medications.

Also let’s not BS about history and philosophy either because it’s becoming increasingly clear — and I want to cite my colleagues Theodore Wildcroft here for coming up with this analogy — it’s becoming increasingly clear that Yoga teachers are not physiotherapists. They’re not going to be trained to take care of your subluxated disc in your back, and they’re not going to be trained to fix your labral tear. Now that’s new. What the public is less aware of is that it’s fairly easy for your run of the mill yoga teacher to manipulate a whole class of people intellectually and then psychologically by claiming that they know more about yoga philosophy than they actually do. So one of these tools that I offer in the sixth part is: are you really clear as a yoga teacher about what the limits of your humanities knowledge is? Or are you giving people the impression that you know, what yoga philosophy says when actually very few people know what or understand the depth and breadth of yoga philosophy? So I hope those are helpful ideas. I hope that people are able to begin to look at the communities that they live in a little bit more critically, to look at the kind of leadership that they have a little bit more critically and start modelling that critical thinking.

Josh Summers: 01:20:26

I think it’s a great direction forward. I’m getting drowned out, I think, I don’t know if you can hear, I’m getting drowned out by leafblowers, lawnmowers, unfortunately. But look, it’s been great. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I’m really super appreciative of the work you’re doing. I know it’s tough sledding. I follow you also in the common threads and you’ve rolled up your sleeves, the knuckles are out and it’s bit of a knife fight in there, but you’re fighting the good fight. And I just want to thank you for that.

Matthew Remski: 01:20:55

Thank you, Josh. It’s a pleasure to talk with you. Great questions. Thank you.

Josh Summers: 01:20:58

Great to chat.

Ashtanga yoga Manouso Manos Pattabhi Jois