Practice and All Is Coming
Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond
Authored by Matthew Remski
Through dogged investigative work, careful listening to survivor stories of assault and abuse, and close analysis of the cultic mechanisms at play in the sphere of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga community, Matthew Remski’s Practice and All is Coming offers a sober view into a collective and intergenerational trauma.
It also offers a clear pathway forward into enhanced critical thinking, student empowerment, self-and-other care, and community resilience. Concluding with practical tools for a world rocked by abuse revelations, Practice and All Is Coming opens a window on the possibility of healing—and even re-enchantment.
Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond
Now Available
Advance Praise
"Trouble in yoga paradise . . . In this lucid, measured, incisive and compassionate book, Matthew Remski lays bare the toxic dynamic of manipulation, indoctrination, negation, and deception that oftentimes undergirds guru worship in such complex social systems as the yoga subculture. As he demonstrates, when enabled by their cult followers, mulabandha-adjusting spiritual autocrats posing as enlightened beings can prove just as toxic to the broader culture as pussy-grabbing political demagogues posing as successful real estate developers. More than an expose of the sexual predations of a renowned guru figure, Remski has also provided the yoga community with a road map to self-healing and closure."
David Gordon White
Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara
"In this illuminating book Matthew Remski brings light to the often-bypassed toxic dynamics and deception that occur in the yoga subculture and new-age spirituality. Through compassionate inquiry, Remski provides a platform for honest discourse into cult dynamics, power imbalances, and why as humans we might trade autonomy and authenticity for acceptance under the guise of healing and community. To practice compassion, we must first acknowledge suffering and yet victims’ voices continue to be silenced and edited in order to protect images in the Ashtanga community and beyond. As more abuse and manipulation is uncovered and exposed many schools, studios, and practitioners are reluctant to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. However, Remski challenges us to examine who is the baby and what is the bathwater, separating our own healing and self-awareness practices from branding and systems of power. In addition to providing insight into the psychology of attachment and contemporary distortions of the guru model, this book provides reflections on how to move forward and ensure that these shadows do not continue to undermine equality, empowerment, and healing in the yoga community. To the women who courageously shared your stories may you continue to feel heard, respected, and supported."
Michele Theoret, MACP
President and lead facilitator Empowered Yoga, Mindfulness & Lifestyle, Director BEology Project Foundation
"While Matthew Remski is the courageous, insightful, and compassionate author of this informative, challenging, and thought-provoking book, this book is clearly a group effort. Equal parts theory, training manual, expose, and memoir, Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond is a foray into the difficult topics of personal agency, spirituality authority, and cult dynamics. In addition to his clearly articulated understanding of the problems inherent in many spiritual schools, Remski provides hope for healing the confusion and anguish that arise in the heart of sincere practitioners when they are betrayed by the revered powers in which they have placed their trust. If you practice or teach yoga, please consider this book an essential companion on your path."
Christina Sell
author of Yoga From the Inside Out: Making Peace with Your Body Through Yoga, My Body is a Temple: Yoga as a Path to Wholeness, and A Deeper Yoga: Beyond Body Image to Freedom
"Thank you Matthew Remski and the courageous women who have stepped forward to offer this pivotal work. Practice and All is Coming is a service to humanity, to the yoga world at-large, to long-time practitioners and future generations so that we can evolve into cultivating a safe space that all beings deserve. This incredibly thorough, sensitive and somatically, sophisticated work is ESSENTIAL to the evolution of yoga for the maturity to unpack the shadow of abuse, body-image distortion and power-dynamics effecting many without conscious awareness of these undercurrents while also recommending best practices and a PRISM method to move forward so that we may work towards ending abuse of all forms and transforming dominance-structures so that all beings are respected, safe and empowered in their journey of embodiment."
Shiva Rea
author, Tending the Heart Fire and founder Samudra Global School for Living Yoga
"Matthew Remski has authored a remarkable book. His fair examination of some of the cultish and dogmatic elements in yogic culture — and the impact they've had on women, in particular — is erudite, well-researched and engaging. But what's of particular note in his work is the empathy, sensitivity and respect he takes in addressing the abuse inherent in authoritarian systems. In doing so, he's created a testament to those whose lives have been directly impacted by such abuses of power."
Carrie Owerko
Senior Level Iyengar Yoga Teacher, Laban Movement Analyst, Functional Range Conditioning Mobility Specialist
"As globalized convert yoga finally recovers from the drunken honeymoon of orientalist cultural appropriation it enjoyed for a century or so, it finds itself sober and shocked, #MeToo revelations toppling school after school. Matthew Remski’s deep reporting here on just one of these tragedies offers not a simple indictment of Pattabhi Jois’s person or teaching, but a broad-reaching call for the best of Western theory and activism to be brought to a problem created by colonial encounter and resolvable only by changing the terms of that encounter. The book, like the yoga it deconstructs, unfolds “a vinyasa of meanings,” moving between the psychodynamic implications of the guru-student tradition and the harm-reduction practices that could both preserve and irrevocably change it. Most importantly, Remski centers the voices of women, using his position to witness and amplify their narratives in their own words. Few other books from within the convert yoga community ask so fluently and humbly how sincere non-Indian practitioners might be in wise relationship with the ancient lineages of Yoga, and the culture that developed them. Few outside it describe a tragedy of the modern colonial encounter with such an intimate and heart-rending precision."
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD
"Starting with the first principle of yoga which is non-harming (ahimsa), and applying the clear seeing of meditation (dhyana), Remski offers us a framework for understanding how confusion and messiness around lineage and power has led to so much pain and suffering inside the world of yoga. This is also a guidebook in the yogic principle of self-study (svadyaya) helping us all look honestly at ourselves and our community. I am so grateful that finally, Remski offers us a way forward — with both practical means and inspiration - to remind us that yoga is a living practice and in the end, always about relationship."
Cyndi Lee
author of Yoga Body, Buddha Mind; OM yoga Today; OM yoga, A Guide to Daily Practice; OM at Home, A Yoga Journal; and the OM Yoga in a Box series
"This is a potent treatise, bringing well-needed thoughtful and measured scrutiny to a controversial subject. Remski provides a thorough exposition of one of the icons of modern yoga – not to simply critique or discredit, but more to examine possible solutions to the unveiled issues. The book itself is part of the solution, in that it provides a platform enabling previously-muted voices to be heard. In response to these voices, he goes on to construct a research-grounded framework that elevates safety and inclusivity. This could be the means to propel the field of yoga forward with more integrity, and indeed, more authenticity. This book should be considered required reading for all those involved in yoga therapy training, and I strongly recommend it to all yoga professionals as well."
Cassi Kit
Director, Faculty, & Administrative Coordinator, School of Embodied Yoga Therapy, Yoga Therapist (C-IAYT, PYT)
"The future of yoga depends on our ability to reconcile a past fraught with abuse and injury. If we ignore the pain that was caused in the name of yoga, our communal body will never heal. Yoga will go the way of step aerobics and the power of the teachings will evaporate into the history books. The first step in healing is acknowledging that there is a problem, and that is what Matthew Remski so powerfully demonstrates in Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. This is a text that can heal the wounds of yoga and allow us to re-imagine it as a safe practice for everyone, free from abuse and injury."
Jivana Heyman
Founder and Director of Accessible Yoga
"Amongst the responses to the revelations of sexual abuse that have marred a number of yoga communities, Practice and All Is Coming is unparalleled. Of immense value to both practitioners and academics, the text centers the voices of the female victims of serial abuser Pattabhi Jois and illuminates the wider psychoanalytic and structural conditions that enabled such abuse. Practitioners will be gifted a demystification of transnational yoga and a way to both understand and prevent the toxic dynamics that have produced abuse. Academics will find a strong case for the utility—and even ethical necessity—for bringing cultic studies back into the field of New Religious Movements. With this ambitious and well-executed text, Remski has established himself as one of the most perspicacious and important scholar-practitioners of contemporary transnational yoga."
Ann Gleig
Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Central Florida
"For those of us who consider ourselves yoga teachers it may be especially important to scrutinize ourselves and our community with clarity and honesty, in particular when to comes to the issue of power. Yoga, with all of its promise, is as susceptible as any other human institution to becoming an environment for the abuse of power and all the suffering this engenders. With Practice and All is Coming, Matthew Remski has done us a great service by applying intellectual rigor to help us see how destructive power dynamics can set in and fester, and then by suggesting how we can make yoga practice a safe, respectful, and empowering experience for all who show up."
David Emerson, YACEP, TCTSY-F
Director: The Center for Trauma and Embodiment at JRI, author Trauma-Sensitive Yoga in Therapy and co-author Overcoming Trauma through Yoga
"I welcome the powerful voices of the courageous, truth-speaking women that are heard so clearly in this valuable study. I applaud Matthew’s sensitive and subtle exposure of power imbalance, and his impeccable intentions to bring the voices from the margins to the centre. I give thanks that his moral compass guided him to reveal a crucial issue at the heart of modern yoga, and I hope that everyone who has ever shown up to a yoga class reads this book. I recommend it as required reading for every yoga teacher training course on the planet."
Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, Ph.D., Ph.D.
Author of Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra
"Matthew Remski has written a painstaking and unflinching book that details multiple women’s first person accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of Ashtanga yoga founder K. Pattabhi Jois, and the subsequent denial and cover up within his community. This is a vital read that highlights the courage of the women who came forward within a culture of cognitive dissonance, unquestioning obedience, and magical thinking, in which pain is re-labeled as healing, injury as opening, and isolation as enlightenment. At the same time, Remski thoughtfully navigates how yoga teachers and practitioners can continue to practice yoga today in all forms, while acknowledging the darker side of its origins. A heartbreaking and illuminating read."
Sarah Court, PT, DPT, e-RYT
"Matthew Remski opens a window into a part of the yoga world most people have never seen — a world where trusting seekers with open minds and full hearts are cruelly betrayed. He explores how this happens, what the sometimes debilitating and pervasive after-effects can be, and how to heal from it all. By interviewing many former followers and experts in the field, Matthew offers the reader a wonderfully rich and up-to-date synthesis of data and practical information. His book is unique, as it provides a significant amount of hard-hitting personal stories and facts while simultaneously being infused with sensitivity and an awareness of the impact these can have on those reading the book who have been through trauma. I will certainly be recommending this book to my clients and colleagues."
Rachel Bernstein
LMFT, Educator and Therapist, Cult Specialist, Host of the “IndoctriNation” podcast
"Packed with interviews of horrific abuse and real stories of recovery, Remski presents us an authoritative guide on the effects of sexual abuse, misconduct and trauma in the modern, globalized yoga world as well as analysis that invites the possibility of change to this culture of abuse. The struggle and resilience of the interviewees make for an intense and powerful read. It is in the context of colonial, plundering and appropriation of yoga culture that yoga has come bearing the scars of its violent impacts with the West. Remski does not pretend to separate himself in some false veneer of objectivity. He reflects on and owns his privilege as a cis white man and speaks to his learning curve in becoming an ally and even accomplice to those more often targeted for abuse. In fact, this is what makes the book so powerful: Remski himself is committed to unpacking and transforming the cult dynamics and cultures that surround such abuse and in doing so, shows us how we can do our part as well. Practice and All is Coming offers hope and practical solutions for those who seek — and I do hope this is all of us — an end to the cycle of trauma, abuse of power and sexual violence in yoga culture today."
Susanna Barkataki
Founder & Director of Education, Ignite | Yoga and Wellness Institute
"This is a horrifying and necessary tale that all current yoga practitioners and teachers need to know and reckon with. Jois and Ashtanga had a significant influence on what yoga is today in the U.S. and worldwide-from the ethics practices of teachers, to the way we pedestal (and isolate) teachers, to assists, to studio culture. This centers Ashtanga yoga, but as Remski suggests, it is relevant to every yoga lineage, and of course we know that it's culture-wide. Remski recognizes the qualities of isolation, lack of agency, victim-blaming, and silencing present in these survivors' accounts as implicit in rape culture. The responsibility therefore extends beyond the "perpetrators", and falls on all of our shoulders as bystanders and participants in "yoga community". We need to face and discuss this history and that of any harm in order to move into the true promise of living out yogic teachings — harmlessness, integrity, generosity, non-attachment, and the wise use of sexual energies."
Jacoby Ballard
Yoga Teacher and Social Justice Educator
"Matthew Remski was one of the first teachers to speak out on social media about physical and emotional injury and trauma in yoga. In doing so, he created a safe space for people to connect with each other over shared experiences and ultimately heal their own trauma. Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond sheds light on the sexual and physical assault that has taken place in the yoga community, while providing a resource that helps teachers and students recognize when they may be in an unsafe situation and empowers them to protect themselves. This book should be required reading for every yoga teacher training."
Trina Altman, BA, E-RYT 500, PMA-CPT
Creator of Yoga Deconstructed© and Pilates Deconstructed©
Update: January 22. Practice And All Is Coming has a cover!
Here it is. Click here to preorder! First copies ship out 3.14.
Update: October 31st, 2018. Practice And All Is Coming Launches in March, 2019
Happy Hallowee’n, friends —
Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond is steaming towards a March 14th 2019 release date.
I’ll be launching the book at the Sedona Yoga Festival (March 14-17), and then at events in Copenhagen (March 29-31), Cambridge, UK (April 2), London (April 4), Berlin (April 6), at the First Annual Conference on Trauma and Embodiment (April 12), Boston (April 13), Calgary-Edmonton (May 10-12), Victoria-Vancouver (May 16-19), California venues in June, and Ottawa in July. As I look over this schedule, I’m both excited to meet old and new friends, and also already missing my family, plus overwhelmed with gratitude for my partner Alix who will be holding down the homefront with our boys, even as her psychotherapy practice scales up towards full time.
The big news from my current edit is that with the help of my publishing team, I’ve been able to pivot towards an unforeseen conclusion. PAAIC still goes into granular detail of the what and how of the Jois event as a case study for similar tragedies in yoga and dharma communities. It still rigorously employs several analytical frameworks I believe will be broadly useful. But the ending now arcs upward, offering a proactive study manual to help students, teachers, trainers, and administrators use the lessons of the book to evaluate the vulnerability of their communities to toxic group dynamics. Part 6, the concluding section, is titled “Better Practices and Safer Spaces: Conclusion and Workbook”. Here’s a screencap of its Table of Contents.

I’ve been crucially aided in this process by my editor at Embodied Wisdom Publications, Maitripushpa Bois. She’s a Buddhist scholar with a long history in many publishing sectors. She’s also a practicing Buddhist with a long-term connection to a community that has grappled with its own abuse history. Her familiarity with the territory, combined with her temperance, has helped me soften key edges, distinguish between analysis and editorializing, and find a pathway from criticism to empowerment.
Each summary section in the conclusion ends with 5-7 essay questions that can be used as points of reflection for individuals and communities. As the March release date approaches, we’ll also be building an online forum where these questions can be answered by readers anonymously, and, with consent, published in blog format to build a growing research base for how practitioners of all disciplines understand and navigate issues like consent, charisma, attachment patterns, loaded language, social contagion, and manipulation.
Once the book is released and the online forum is live, I’ll be adding a new YTT training module to my repertoire called “PRISM Training: A 30-hour yoga teacher training module in critical thinking and community health”. My hope is that this book, forum, and training become a robust and replicable resource for years to come.
— MR
Update: August 15, 2018
Happy August, everyone —
I hope this season is offering some peace and time with loved ones.
I have an important announcement to make today. Almost four years after beginning the WAWADIA project, I’ve signed a publishing contract with Embodied Wisdom Publishing of New Zealand for a first volume. The release date is set for March 2019. I’m currently discussing with the publisher whether the early and patient crowdfunders can receive their copies in a “pre-release wave”.
I’m well into the second edit of what is now a 350 page manuscript. EWP has hired a splendid editor for this project, and expects to engage an award-winning US book designer very familiar with this genre.
This volume is an expansion of my feature article in The Walrus on abuse and recovery in Ashtanga Yoga. The number of victim testimonials from women who were assaulted by Pattabhi Jois has gone from nine to nineteen, and I’ve developed the themes that the feature could only hint at: enablement, deception, the mechanisms of high-demand groups, and how really listening to victims of institutional abuse is the pathway to reform.
The working title is Practice and All is Coming: Cult Dynamics, Abuse and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. My hope is that a nuanced presentation of the Jois tragedy, combined with reporting on progressive responses to it and aiding a robust discussion of harm prevention, will help strengthen the health of yoga and dharma communities everywhere.
I’m happy to say that so far this work is already having an institutional impact. The Yoga Service Council recently invited me to participate in the writing process of their “Best Practices” manual for bringing yoga to survivors of sexual violence. I’ll be honoured to meet with that committee at the Omega Institute in October. I’ll be there not as a specialist in sexual violence or trauma, but as a researcher and activist with ideas about how yoga service providers can avoid unintentionally passing along unresolved abuse histories.
Practice and All is Coming was not in my original plan. It is the product of journalistic urgency. For the second WAWADIA volume, I’m planning to return to the core themes of the project which I lay out in this podcast with my friend J. Brown. I argue that a central story in the last half-century of global yoga culture is the movement from somatic dominance towards trauma awareness.
I’m also developing a book proposal on the recent (though historically fated) implosion of the Shambhala International group. I’ve posted several articles on the crisis so far, and have been interviewing dozens of group members. I was never a member of Shambhala, but my recruitment into a similar high-demand neo-Tibetan Buddhist group in the late 1990s gives me solid background for this work.
If you started following this project in 2014, you tuned into a slightly different content stream from a fairly different content provider (me). For the record: I’m still proud to teach yoga philosophy, history, and culture in yoga training programmes around the world. I’m honoured to be consulting with Yoga Alliance on the Scope of Practice committee. I’m still proud to offer entry-level content in Ayurvedic self-inquiry and care.
Bottom line: I’m still very much “inside” the yoga and meditation worlds, despite my critical position in relation to both, and despite the fact that I take a lot of heat for it. The clearest way of describing this insidership — this continued dedication to practice — is to say that I’ve bumped my focus outward from yoga as self-regulation to yoga as social dharma.
I used to practice to get a firmer grip on my mental and physical health, and my self-perception. Parts of it worked. (So did beginning to raise a family with an amazing partner.) Because it worked for me, I taught it. That’s the pattern in this industry, which, for good or ill, commodifies personal revelations.
But somehow, it also worked for me in a way that allowed me to see how it wasn’t working for others. So far, I’ve focused on the stories of harm that disrupt the common marketing of yoga and dharma aspirations. But more broadly, I’m coming to feel that any self-focus that continues beyond a baseline of therapeutic functionality in life can easily become just another form of privileged consumerism, disguised in a spiritual glow. I’ve filled out this argument in a post called “Don’t Deepen Your Practice”, if it is of further interest to you.
The punchline is that there’s a point at which the commodified medicine of personal work can become a social toxin that further isolates its patients, and lowers expectations of the common good. I’m going to keep looking for that point, to see where we can turn back from it.
And I’m going to hang out more with folks who are doing the same. Like Jivana Heyman of Accessible Yoga, who invited me to give this closing keynote speech in June at their first Canadian conference in June. I was very happy to talk about happy things.
Thank you for sticking with me on this journey.
— MR
Update: April 25, 2018
Happy Spring everyone –
I’m long past due for an update. One reason is that I’ve had to keep today’s news under wraps. The Walrus has just published my feature article on the alleged sexual assaults of Pattabhi Jois. It is centred on the voices of nine women who pushed back against trauma, confusion, shame, and silencing to go on record. I thank them for their bravery. So will the entire yoga world, I believe, in time.
I also thank my partner Alix, who has provided constant support and feedback every step of the way.
To my generous and patient WAWADIA crowdfunding supporters: this article shows what I’ve been up to, why I am late on my projected finish date, and why my thesis has shifted.
As I describe in the update below, I started this project by speaking with practitioners, mainly women, who had been injured in yoga practice. I quickly came up with some interesting data and ideas on the intersection between repetitive stress, performance expectations, and the social psychologies at play in yoga studios and communities. But I also had this feeling that I was asking too many of my subjects the wrong questions. Everybody gets injured doing physical activities. Why was there so much emotion around injuries sustained in yoga?
In time I learned that writing about physical yoga injuries can be a way of avoiding looking directly at the moral and spiritual injuries people suffer within the culture. It began to make less and less sense to be talking with practitioners about the dangers of yoga postures while ignoring the themes of domination and control that heavily influence yoga relationships.
So: this major piece of the puzzle is done. Within the next few weeks I’ll be able to update you more clearly on my publishing path and schedule going forward.
I can say this much now: while this article has gone through five months of pre-publication preparations, the data driving it has grown into something that deserves its own book. This will be the first in a WAWADIA series. I’m exploring self-publish and hybrid options for this coming fall, because it’s been clear from the last 18 months of back-and-forth with my agent that this material is too niche for the mainstream trade market.
My intention is for this first book to serve as a case study for how abuse is enabled, covered up, disclosed, dealt with, and perhaps healed in yoga culture.
On that note, I’m happy to say that all of this heavy research seams to be bending towards justice. My next travel will be to the Yoga Service Conference from May 11-13th at the Omega Institute, where I’ll be presenting a brief outline of best practices for engaging with histories of harm in yoga communities.
I am also honoured to be working on Scope of Practice issues for the Yoga Alliance’s Standards Review Project. It’s my firm belief that the idealization and mystification that intersect with authoritarianism in toxic yoga communities can be sharply limited by clearly defining the limits and responsibilities of the yoga teacher.
Thank you for your patient support.
–MR
Update: January 24, 2017
Dear WAWADIA supporters –
At the end of November, I was signed by Hilary McMahon of Westwood Creative Artists Literary Agency here in Toronto. She’s going to be representing my book in upcoming meetings with U.S. publishers. She believes it has market potential beyond the yoga niche and has provided great (general) editorial guidance so far, to get me thinking large-scale. So: as I suspected, the self-publishing route is now closed for this book. All IGG supporters will, of course, get the copies they deserve, as well as undying thanks. I’m about 150 pages into a “final first” draft, with about 500 pages standing by for selection. Almost settled on a title, too. I’ll keep you updated.
–MR
Update: May 14, 2016
Dear WAWADIA supporters –
I’m writing on the cusp of a much-needed pause in book-brewing as my partner Alix and I await the arrival of our second child within the next week or two. I’ve finished up my teaching engagements until September, and have nothing on the docket but gardening and nesting (and one on-line course). I’ll be going completely offline for a while, soon.
The break marks a threshold, as I take stock of how this patchwork of research and storytelling fits together – even whether it will occupy one volume, or several. To date, I’ve compiled over 200 interviews, absorbed a lot of the relevant popular and academic literature, and produced hundreds of pages of manuscript.
Limiting my research is proving to be one of the toughest obstacles. Hardly a week goes by without my hearing from several practitioners who want to share their injury stories. The narratives are paradoxical and poignant, telling of therapeutic needs confounded by magical thinking, and spiritual aspirations hijacked by power imbalances and outright cruelty.
Of course, it’s been like this from the start of the project more than two years ago: a relentless and heartrending stream that could easily fuel a potboiler of disillusionment and outrage. For a while, that’s the path I beat with this book, crafting the voice of a crusader.
But crusaders need solutions, and solutions need data. That’s where I ran into quicksand.
Data on yoga injuries is hard to collect. Shame and cognitive dissonance confound the self-reporting process – not to mention marketing pressures and the absence of accountability structures in the modern studio model. And while many of my senior teacher informants predict an epidemic of repetitive stress injuries cresting as enthusiasts practicing since the 1990s slam into middle age, it seems that the official incidence rate remains low. What’s a crusade without solid numbers?
Then there’s the fact that mining any given injury story for a causal link to asana can be almost impossible. Those disillusioned with practice may attribute injuries to specific movements or adjustments, but devotees rarely do. The orthopedic surgeons who actually repair rotator cuffs and labral tears refuse to assert causes. They know too much about pre-existing conditions. They’re too well-versed in the variations of tissue damage and patients’ response to it to indulge in speculation.
Even when good data linking specific practices to potentially adverse effects emerge – as in recent studies on loading the cervical spine in headstand and core temperature elevation in hot yoga – devotees are often unmoved. Scientific discourse is not their idea of kirtan. It’s understandable: so many of us have taken refuge in the mat to find the world beyond the mind. And for some, repetitive stress is a fair price to pay for a ritual that brings the stability of faith.
So: the data on yoga injuries is scant, unclear, and can be unconvincing to those who view practice more through the lens of personal transformation than that of public health. Plus, digging for data pushes the conversation into the politics of industry regulation. This can be a valuable discussion, but it carries the cost of framing injury in yoga practice as a technical problem of percentages to be completely fixed through better biomechanics training or better business practices.
It’s not. It’s something much more. Injury in asana provides a window onto the paradoxes of spiritual desire. It spotlights perpetually conflicted views of the body caught between transcendence and acceptance. It reveals the primal ways in which intimacy and violence can blend in relationships between teachers and students.
Crusading against yoga injuries feels noble and wins clicks. But it can also set the crusader up to wield a different type of power imbalance. It can fetishize the anxious stalemate of “Now what do we do?”, while deepening the divide between the disillusioned and the devoted, who often share more than they recognize.
What they share is becoming more and more of my focus, sharpened with the benefit of valuable feedback from readers and workshop participants over the past year. I’ve toned down the crusade in order to plumb the narrative richness of the dynamics of injury, not with the illusion that it can be eliminated, but to better understand the shifting meanings we give to pain. In this way my research is increasingly focused on the following concerns:
First: our practice is an enthralling mixture of tradition and innovation, vitalized and complicated by the confusion of goals from entirely different eras. Modern global yoga constitutes an attempt to reconcile, within the body, premodern transcendent drives with modern therapeutic drives. The famous “edge” that we are invited to contemplate on the mat is where these two aspirations clash. Any discussion of injury in asana practice has to acknowledge that asana invites us to both nurture ourselves and to pull ourselves apart.
Secondly: the easy-to-identify contributing factors to injury on the mat– postural idealization and intrusive adjustments, to name but two – are not degenerations of the globalizing era, but integral to the very roots of modern asana instruction. Most early 20th century asana evangelists were educated in high-pressure environments demanding constant demonstration policed by corporal punishment. The somatic tensions of these shalas echo still, both in studio environments that foster unhealthy power differentials, but more subtly in the laws of visual performance through which practice is marketed and practitioners’ bodies are both evaluated and objectified. I argue that we won’t even approach understanding adverse effects in asana practice until we really grapple with this difficult history.
Thirdly: recent evolutions of asana practice have occurred most dramatically through a series of responses to the performance-based patriarchal structures of the last century. Beneath the official account of heroes and their methods lies an alternative history of conscious or unconscious rejections of what has come before. This has become crystal clear for me in through many interviews, including those with Erich Schiffmann and Donna Farhi about how they left the Iyengar world.
Lastly: “What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?” needs to account for how the “we” changes through time. I can’t count the number of interview subjects who have found a practice to be medicinal at first, but poisonous over the long term. This brings up all kinds of subtleties in the field of change management, highlights the tensions between disciplined and spontaneous learning, and shows devotion and disillusionment to be two sides of the same developmental coin.
It won’t surprise you, I hope, when I say that the September release date I projected during the campaign is now overly ambitious. Stretching the timeline will help me produce the best book I can, but it will also allow me to absorb two other crucial works due out soon. Elliot Goldberg’s The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice is forthcoming in August. And the Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indian Traditions is forthcoming from Jim Mallinson and Mark Singleton in January. I’ll be reviewing them for my blog. I expect both to be culture-changers.
I hope my sporadic updates reveal a book coming together like yoga itself works: rarely in straightforward fashion.
Regards,
Matthew Remski
Reports and meditations on desire, pain, injury, and healing (the story so far…)
Here’s a little personal background for this book project.
I’ve been teaching asana since 2002. I’ve owned two studios in radically different places: rural Wisconsin, and downtown Toronto. From 2006 to 2010, I served as co-founder of Yoga Festival Toronto, which brought me into touch with hundreds of yoga teachers and dozens of yoga studio owners. I’ve been an Ayurvedic practitioner since 2005, and have worked with over a thousand clients. I’m pretty familiar with a broad range of the “yoga demographic.”
Throughout all of this time, I’d heard many colleagues and clients recount stories of injuries – both physical and emotional – sustained in asana classes. In fact, I can’t remember anyone describing an injury-free experience in asana. (In the course of the present research, I have met one. She’s exceptional, and I’ll be describing her experience in detail in the eventual book.) The obvious benefits of asana have always been well-reported throughout my social circle, as they are in yoga media. Injuries, however, have been spoken of in whispers.
For years, I was concerned, but not concerned enough. For the most part I believed that injuries were the result of poor instruction on the part of the teacher, or overwork on the part of the student. I used this half-baked rationale to simply divide the yoga world into people who “got it”, and people who didn’t. It took me a long while to realize that even well-instructed poses, executed mindfully, could also be injurious. It also took me years to give up on the default belief that the claim “yoga is for everybody” meant that the basic syllabus of Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) is essentially therapeutic. It’s actually not. It vastly overemphasizes mobility over stability, to take just one example. This has serious consequences not only for people’s bodies, but for how they relate to the world in general.
I have come to see this as having political implications. As one of my interview subjects, the filmmaker Mike Hoolboom said:
Slavoj Žižek noted recently that the New Economy requires flexible workers. He was referring of course to multiple employers, migrating job sites, the abolition of weekends. But couldn’t this also be read as a call for more yoga? I can see the boardroom heads already nodding yes. “And let’s put in a meditation room for the overachievers while we’re at it!” Žižek’s riff made me wonder if there wasn’t a fit between yoga’s newfound popularity and the rise of globalized capitalism.
So a number of realizations accumulated over the years. Firstly, I started paying much closer attention to stories students told about being injured by invasive adjustments. A few of my clients painted scenes of such negligence and even cruelty that a few times I felt compelled to suggest they consider legal action. I wasn’t happy about that suggestion, because it drove home the point that we really have no feedback mechanisms within yoga community at large. Teachers can injure students directly, not realize it, be protected from feedback by their own charisma, and believe for years that not only is everything fine, but that they’re doing good public service.
Secondly, I started getting clear on my own lack of knowledge. I’d accumulated thousands of hours of practice and training, and had been certified in Yoga Therapy (before the recent spate of IAYT upgrades), but quickly found that this didn’t come close to equipping me with the real biomechanics data that I needed to assess and help clients avoid and manage injuries. I did my best to remain clear about my scope of practice, which was definitely shrinking. Meanwhile, I saw other asana teachers continue to over-reach their training, offering advice that was medical in nature — or, in the psychological sphere, interventions that really required formal training. This, combined with reports from the Wild West of adjustments, gave me strong reservations about the whole project.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing I started to notice about the injury stories was that the vast majority of folks seemed to blame themselves for their pain. They didn’t blame their teachers, nor the instruction they’d received, nor the social environments that might have contributed to their overwork and repetitive stress. “I was acting out of ego” was and is the most standard reason a yogi gives for having been injured. Philosophically and psychologically, this is actually too vague to have much meaning at all, beyond “It’s my fault alone.” Somehow, yoga culture has either indoctrinated this default response, or capitalized upon it, to effectively avoid collective scrutiny.
By 2009, I began to withdraw from asana instruction bit by bit to concentrate on writing and teaching Ayurveda and philosophy. At the same time, it seemed that a whole new wave of biomechanics-in-yoga specialists were hitting the scene: Paul Grilley, Leslie Kaminoff, Suzi Hately, Jill Miller, and the many others that followed them. They each brought unique and novel skills into the yoga sphere. Listening to just a few lectures made me realize that the tools I’d received throughout my training weren’t enough for me anymore. Or rather: they relied on a different, older paradigm – I’ll call it the “pranic model” of wellness – which didn’t focus upon functional, pleasurable, sustainable movement that would facilitate contemplation and lowered reactivity in everyday life, but rather abstract ideals of “alignment” that were meant to purify, re-organize, or even redesign the body by allowing prana to flow freely. The pranic model was a valuable guide for me, in some ways, as it has been for others throughout the ages. But it has limitations, the primary one being its reliance on intuition.
What Are We Actually Doing in Asana? really took off through the coalescence of four events. First came the endlessly rich conversations I had with my wife Alix, also a yoga teacher, at our kitchen table while she was pregnant with our son. She’d reduced her class load in her third trimester, and was able to step back a bit and examine some of her own injury experiences from a new perspective. It was a time in which we were both somewhat divested from teaching, and it allowed us both to consider the broader picture of what asana meant to us and our immediate culture, without worrying primarily about how this would impact our livelihoods.
Secondly, I was speaking with my friend and co-author Scott Petrie. He’s completing his training to become a psychotherapist. We were talking about why people persist in asana, even when they strongly suspect or even know that it is injuring them. (Repetitive stress is a main cause of yoga injury.) He said: “Well, if you wanted to hurt yourself, yoga would be a socially acceptable way to go about it.” This opened my eyes to something I’d long suspected but never articulated: because pain has different meanings for everyone, we really don’t know how other people relate to it. Some people may have a need for it, whether it’s to punish themselves, or to allow themselves to pierce a kind of numbness, or to even recreate a trauma in what they believe is a safer environment that allows for a different resolution.
Thirdly, I was speaking to an elite asana practitioner/teacher at a festival. I said to him: “You do some pretty extreme postures. Do they ever hurt?” He said: “Sometimes I think so. But often I’m not sure if my body is telling me the truth.” This further deepened my wonderment about the subjectivity of pain, and it severely problematized that old nugget of yoga safety: “Listen to your body.” Some people are listening to their bodies through trust issues or agendas that have little to do with safe, sustainable growth.
Lastly, for about two years after my public asana teaching wound down, I realized I had been trying to heal a very painful hamstring attachment tear by actually stretching it. How is this possible? After all of my training and exposure, how did I not know how to handle this very basic injury? No teacher had ever told me to simply rest. The solution to yoga injury was always more yoga. I had so sheltered myself from the “unyogic” world of secular movement/fitness practice that I’d never even heard of the principle of cross-training. And I just wasn’t inclined to look outside of the pranic model of injury for a diagnosis or help.
More strangely, at a certain point I realized that I wanted to feel that pain for some reason. Part of me enjoyed it. It had become a neurotic focus. I psychologized it. It became a symbol of the “knot of me”. I felt that if I could resolve this painful material contraction, it would unpack something primal and foundational in myself. Resolving it meant working at it, working on it. Always working to improve – as in everything else in the rest of my somewhat anxious life.
So here the backstory in short form: over many years, I collected numerous contexts for yoga injury. I noted an element of poor biomechanical training. I noted magical thinking. I noted trends of socialization towards pushing and attaining that play on widespread fears of inadequacy. I noted teachers who project their needs and anxieties and rage onto the bodies of their students. And I noted the mystery of our own ambivalent relationships to pain.
In January of 2014, I posted a request to the yogis of Facebook to contact me with their stories of injuries sustained through yoga. I was instantly flooded with responses. I received so many long, very personal emails telling incredible stories of pain, injury, confusion, and long journeys of healing.
Many of my correspondents told stories about receiving injurious adjustments from teachers. I quickly realized the legal implications of collecting and reporting these accounts. I made the decision at the time to anonymize the data they gave me, redacting from it names, places, studio names, and yoga events. I’m not an investigative journalist, and I hadn’t gotten into this to establish court-ready narratives about who did what to whom. And it was not my intention to expose individual instances of poorly informed teaching, invasive adjustments, or teacherly grandiosity. In my view, these are epidemic within the culture, and there’s little use in pointing fingers and potentially ruining individual careers through hearsay. It is much better in my view to create a relatively neutral public record that today’s practitioners can simply bear witness to, and use to create a smarter culture moving forward. (Of course it can’t be entirely neutral, because I am personally invested in these stories. I can only promise to do my best to be open about where my own investments lie.)
The difficult thing about citing anonymous sources is that it puts my credibility into question. After all – I could be making all of this up. My hope is that I include such a spectrum of voices in the presentation of the data that it would feel very unlikely that it was coming from a single source or agenda. I also hope that the stories I choose are resonant enough with the general reader that their authenticity will be obvious. But to protect myself against the possible accusation of fictionalizing, I’m keeping meticulous records of every interview (video-recorded and transcribed, or via email) that will prove the authenticity of the data – while preserving its anonymity – in any potential legal action. If I am accused of fictionalizing, I will not hesitate to sue to prove I am not. My interview subjects have given too much to this project to have their stories libeled as fantasies. I’m doing this work so that we can take them seriously.
Having said all of this, there may be instances in which outright naming of specific actions committed by truly public figures might be illuminating enough – and worth the work of corroborating – that I’ll end up going in that direction. There are many difficult considerations here, the main one being how many readers would be alienated by journalism they perceive as attacking their guru. I’ll be asking the advice of many colleagues on this point, and won’t decide lightly either way.
Some of my interviewing will not be presented anonymously, or redacted, because it’s less about personal experience, and more about the expertise of the subject. In researching yoga injuries, I’ve reached out to physiotherapists, osteopaths, sports medicine doctors, clinical psychologists, yoga scholars, and other practitioners for their valuable outsider’s input. I’m happy to name these specialists, and they’re happy to be on record.
Three more things of note: I do not consider myself an asana expert, but rather an earnest student and almost-former teacher whose hubris has been sharply deflated. I don’t come at this project with any commitment to any method. At this point I value safety, transparency, sustainability, and empathy in instruction. Personally, this project is about sniffing these qualities out — and the obstructions to them. Secondly, some have accused me of unfairly targeting or bashing particular methods or lineages. While it’s axiomatic that practices focusing on physical intensity will yield a higher injury rate and create more visible examples, it is not my intention to single anyone or anything out. I’m describing a broad cultural problem, and I pledge to be an equal-opportunity critic. Lastly: it is not my direct focus, but I aim to close the eventual book with the most positive stories I can find, from those teachers and students who I believe are elevating the quality of yoga education for a new era.
I’ve created this page as a resource centre for the articles that have emerged from this project so far, and for readers to be able to quickly capture the overall scope of the project. I invite you to read, and comment, and share with whoever you think might be interested in this project.
This page is also a nod to the public evolution of this book. We live in an amazing time, in which research and stories can be shared and commented upon by a wide range of stakeholders with unprecedented speed. I began this project in the painful silence of my own body and mind, but it’s only coming to life through conversation. I thank you for participating.
Please let me know if you have questions, concerns, or stories to share through the contact page of this website.