Most Yoga Teachers are Not Online Producers. They Have a Deeper Gift, and Now Is the Time to Trust It.

Actually, some yoga teachers are online producers. They have highly developed business models and an easy familiarity with outrageously expensive and complex technology. They have seamless integration between video production and distribution through nerdy tools like “affiliate networks” that allow them to “blitzscale”. Their in-person events and conferences are really advertising gigs for their online products. They pull off a near-mystical blend of personae: equal parts tech-bro, boss-babe, and yogalebrity.

Does this sound like you? Nah, I didn’t think so. 

Next questions: Does it sound like a landscape you want to compete in? Do you want to take up space there? Is there another option when you’re forced online?

This blog is an expansion on some thoughts I first discussed and developed privately with Theodora Wildcroft about ten days ago, and then publicly with Jivana Heyman in a webversation we did yesterday that I’ll embed below. I’ll also say that this is a very new idea but that I feel it’s worth initiating broader conversation about sooner rather than later, given how quickly things have changed. I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts, feedback, and objections.

So:

About twelve days ago my Facebook feed filled up with dozens of independent teachers and studio owners teaching yoga classes from their living rooms with anywhere from 2 to 8 viewers and lonely little Venmo links in the comments. I had a number of itchy, conflicting feelings:

This makes sense.

The dedication is moving.

Everyone wants to serve and connect, and survive.

I’m worried this isn’t sustainable.

I wonder if these folks are aware of what they’re competing against. 

I’m afraid it won’t work out well to try to occupy space with Omstars or Yogaglo or Alo Moves.

So here’s what Theo said to me (I paraphrase):

Streaming yoga classes have been available on the cheap since 2009. The world already has more demonstration videos than anyone can even use. Most of them are free or cost a pittance. We’ve got to figure out why people have still been coming to studios and classes at all, and offer that.

(2009 was the year Yogaglo was founded. And the platforms have only gotten slicker, and more competitive.)

So I sat down to think of the reasons that people have chosen to attend studios despite online instruction becoming ubiquitous and virtually free.

Here’s an incomplete list:

  1. They enjoy the scheduled trip out of the home or on the way to work dedicated to self-care.
  2. They enjoy the body-buzz of the room: they’re inspired by others moving beside and around them.
  3. They want hands-on help from the instructor.
  4. They enjoy the togetherness, and sometimes find common cause beyond the mat.
  5. They want direct communication with, feedback from, and attunement with the instructor.

Let’s call these the IRL values. What’s not on this list is the visual demonstration/ performance of postures. The streaming formats have that locked up.

Physical distancing means that among the IRL values listed, #1-4 are off the table, perhaps indefinitely.

Let me pause here, and articulate two caveats about what follows.

  1. There are IRL yoga businesses that have developed online content over the past decade that is not fairly characterized by the tech-bro / boss-babe / yogalebrity stereotype above. I know several studios that have produced excellent online work that has served to support rather than overshadow or replace their IRL values. They may be better set up to shift into virtual studio mode at the present moment, but I fear the economy will be cruel to them as well, especially if they expect the virtual to subsidize the shuttered real.
  2. IRL value #4 is off the table as far as the mainstream yoga economy goes. But I also know that there are communities of marginalized practitioners for whom gathering together is a survival need, and this need will likely outlast what is to come. For these populations, #4 is better stated as “They require togetherness“.

Okay, moving on:

If the UK’s Imperial College is correct about distancing likely needing to last for 18 months in most parts of the world, and if poor old Dr. Fauci is correct that COVID-19 will have cyclical surges until a vaccine is found, most of the brick-and-mortar spaces that provide IRL values may well be finished. I’ve owned two studios, organized festivals, and taught in YTT programmes for more than a decade. I know dozens of studio owners, and can think of only one who might have the resources — which come from outside the yoga industry — to ride out this stoppage.

Thus: I believe it’s naïve to think about this condition as temporary, and about the online space as a “holding tank” for a brick-and-mortar business that will just pick up where it left off.

Let’s say that those of use who have survived are all free and clear and vaccinated in 18 months. How long will it take for the public to resume feeling comfortable in embodiment spaces? How long will it take for former yoga consumers to have the same level of disposable income? And will they spend it on class passes? Will they spend it on cardio training to rehabilitate damaged lungs? Will they use it build up their community gardens or learn new survival skills? Will the yoga consumer of 2021 need more yoga classes, or have we given them enough since the 1980s? Let’s remember that we’re not just talking about an 18-month stoppage: we’re talking about 18 months of people getting super-interested in other things, by necessity.

If I’m right about the impacts of an 18-month stoppage, we may be looking at a near-total collapse in the private-sector industry — or at a paradigm shift away from its basic group-class model. Which brings me back to the list:

To my eye, the IRL values that can be sustainably approximated in online / streaming / webinar formats are expressed in #5. Communication, feedback, and attunement are NOT on offer from existing streaming services — and certainly not from celebrities. (Levels of attunement are likely inversely proportional to the celebrity of the teacher.)

But #5 is exactly what independent teachers and studio owners seeking to maintain connection with their long-term students and communities can actually provide. For a while it may seem as though a certain portion of your business is willing to play Simon Says on Zoom along with you, but stripped of the IRL values that Zoom in the long term cannot provide, I can’t see how this will last.

It certainly won’t last if independent teachers and studios post rates comparable to their pre-pandemic drop-in standard. I’ve seen folks ask for $10-15 for each class, which I feel in my bones isn’t going to fly long-term — again, given the dirt-cheap rates of the yoga video mills, plus the fact that the majority of the clientele are also seeing their income in free-fall.

Most of the major yoga media platforms have free trial periods. New or existing students could even skip the countless YouTube classes and be on commercial-free platforms for months, at no cost. And check out these screencaps from Googling “online yoga” just this morning:

 

QED: the tolerance for paying for online classes is already low. In a tanked economy, it will sink lower.

Don’t get me wrong — I think the impulse to ask for $10-15 is on point, because the premise is that the teacher is offering IRL values. But for that to be true, the focus has to be on #5.

So: what does #5 look like, in practical terms, for the non tech-bro, non boss-babe, non yogalebrity teacher now having anxiety rise as they try to learn Zoom?

I think it looks like a brief, conversation-based private lesson. Equal parts check-in, instruction, and homework assignment. The vibe is encouraging and empathetic. The limits are clear: it’s instructional, but it’s not therapy. The timing and finances are set by mutual agreement, just like any other private appointment.

The scope of practice issue here is crucial. I’ve spent a good amount of the past five years analyzing and theorizing and consulting on the issue of the yoga teacher’s scope of practice. My basic argument has been that the absence of a SOP in the profession is closely tied with rates of charismatic overreach, as well as physical, sexual, emotional and financial abuse. As I’ve done that work, people have often said: “But the vast majority of yoga teachers are kind and ethical people,” and my response has been “Okay, I’m not talking about that, but I agree with you, and also think we can improve things further.” But in this situation I feel it’s appropriate to be sensitive to the costs of gatekeeping, lean into the general-goodness theory, and have faith that on the whole, yoga teachers with whom this blog resonates will understand clearly how not to cross over into unqualified territory.

As I see it, here are two key advantages of the online private lesson:

  1. The timing is flexible. I’ve seen a lot of colleagues try to guess about when they should be running their new virtual classes. It seems to be an impossible calculus, because so many people are now at home with their children, and those schedules aren’t going to settle down for months. It’s a lot easier to block off a specific half-hour in a week than to pencil in a virtual class that you can bail on at any time.
  2. The finances can be individually negotiated. People are falling apart financially, but it’s unevenly distributed. I don’t believe that we can establish a stable market value for an online class at this point. However: the individual student who knows their daily and weekly needs and resources can definitely make a decision about how much a 30-minute meeting is worth vs. what they can afford. It might be $5, it might be $50. I’m betting that by the time we get to 6 months, most of us will accept the fact that beggars can’t be choosers. In a broader sense: negotiating the value of each exchange is a step, however small, towards anti-capitalism.

With regard to time vs. money: a participant in my webservation with Jivana asked, astutely:

“How many teachers have the time to give 20 individual classes right now rather than one class on Zoom for all 20??”

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I believe the time/money calculus will become clearer as people monitor their income from those Zoom classes over the next month. My prediction is that the numbers will inevitably decline, because a) the Zoom format will feel flatter and less communicative over time (visual media retention requires increasing visual complexity) and b) the money won’t be competitive. Also: it will be far harder for the virtual studio to attract new students. The question is: why not act upon the clear IRL value #5 sooner, while you have existing connections, rather than later, as they start to fray?

There’s a broader theme here, and some supportive history.

The rush to digitalize the brick-and-mortar studio is bringing up a lot of anxiety. I think it’s important to tune into that. Because beneath the tech issues and financial terrors, I’m betting that something else is coming into focus:

Yoga has always been degraded by visual media, and we can feel this in our bodies. I believe this tunes us in to something we’ve known all along: that the entire modern movement has constellated around a paradox:

Yoga is an internal, personal practice. Look! Here are some pictures and demonstrations of other people doing it for you to imitate.

Is cultural appropriation a problem? Yes. Commercialization? Yes. But at a more primal, embodied, cross-cultural level, the modern yoga movement — for a century now — has nurtured a schizoid split between presence and performance.

The most obvious example of this is reported on by BKS Iyengar himself — perhaps the most-photographed yoga person of the pre-Instagram era. The hundreds of plates in Light on Yoga were photographed in such a compressed period of time that he had to be hospitalized for weeks after. What that means is that the best-selling yoga photo-manual in the world, which is chock-full of claims of medical benefits, is actually the visual record of a man entering a health crisis. He’s literally sickened by his performance of wellness. He both established an artform and set the tone for its most unsettling outcomes.

There’s something fundamentally off about this very old problem. And the rush to go online may only rub salt in this wound.

It’s no-one’s fault. It is a collision of culture, technology, and globalization. But right now, in the space of a few weeks, our world has become very small and intimate. As we wash our hands, things become very tactile. We cannot be globalized in the same way. The age of spiritual junkets to Pune and Mysore might be over for good. We can’t afford to use technology uncritically, and this means we might be able to re-invest in a culture that values presence over performance.

We can let the tech bros, boss babes, and yogalebrities keep their share of the performance market. If we do, we might connect with something older in yoga history.

So far as we know, yoga instruction in the premodern period featured no group classes, no visual aids, no physical adjustments, and no physical demonstrations. As Jim Mallinson told me about learning hatha yoga from his late guru Balyogi Sri Ram Balak Das: the instruction was all oral. Jim was told, in conversation, about a series of postures, and encouraged to practice on his own. There was no need for “alignment”. There were no mirrors, no selfies. No need to make sure it looked right. There was only simple instruction, encouragement, and faith.

Now that’s a process that can easily migrate to Zoom, with no special equipment — or persona — required.

 

 

Balyogi Sri Ram Balak Das and Jim Mallinson

 

P.S.: Here’s my online plug. The last session of 6 Critical Problems in Modern Yoga and How to Work With Them runs this afternoon. The topic today is: “How and why to practice in the shadow of climate crisis, or during COVID-19 chaos…plus.  a Bhagavad Gita thought experiment”. You can join at any time. If you need tuition relief, we can work that out by email.

New series starts May 1. “Cult Dynamics in Yoga and Buddhism: Recognition, Recovery, Resilience“. Also negotiable tuition.

 

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“But Kundalini Yoga Works!” | Some Considerations

Here’s a slightly edited and updated collection of some recent Facebook posts on the “But Kundalini Yoga Works!” meme that’s floating around in the wake of the KY/3HO abuse crisis, prompted by the publication of Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan, by Pamela Dyson.

My aim is to address a recognizable tension: the cognitive dissonance of trying to process the fact of Bhajan as an abuser against the deeply felt experience that his techniques were healing, or even life-saving. In the cult literature, these seemingly irreconcilable facts are described as, in some cases, deeply intertwined.

 

Maybe Kundalini Yoga Techniques Are a Form of Social Control

 
The classic definition of the cult is as follows, from Langone and West.
 
“A group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethical manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it), designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”
— West, L. J., & Langone, M. D. (1986). “Cultism: A conference for scholars and policy makers.” Cultic Studies Journal, 3, 119-120.
 
With a small but jolting perspectival shift, it’s clear that the practices of any group can perform the functions in the parenthesized checklist, all of which act to enforce compliance to the leader or the group:
 
Clothing, naming, and dietary changes can isolate members from birth families and former social circles. Getting up at 4am to invoke trance states can debilitate the capacity to question and be enormously suggestive. It’s also clear that the public images of Vishnudevananda, Jois, Bhajan and others have been carefully information-managed.
 
Definitions, however, can promote black-and-white thinking, and sometimes that doesn’t help. The practices taught by high-demand groups aren’t inherently coercive (though I would speculate that the closer the member is to the leader, the more coercive they are). The trick is to find where the practices cross the threshold between “Wow! here’s a new thing that I love to do and which seems to help me with X condition” to “Um, here’s this thing I must do every day because, um, I forget, but I’m a little scared to stop.” Beyond that threshold, the practices may perform the function of psychosocial control.
 
As we browse through the checklist we can see whether each data point applies to the spectrum of practices we’ve taken on according to the question: “Did x practice truly empower me and give me agency, or did it make me less likely to question or individuate from the group that gave it to me?”

Maybe Kundalini Yoga Works through Trauma Responses

Alexandra Stein has pioneered the application of attachment theory to cult dynamics. Briefly put: she shows that the main task of the high-demand group is to re-wire the recruit’s attachment patterning to the disorganized end of the spectrum, where they are in an acute state of arousal amidst the contradiction of needing to devote themselves to the person who is abusing them.
 
One of the most personally resonant implications of this for me is Stein’s description of how surrendering to the tension of this conflict can seem to provide deep relief, even euphoria. I experienced this very strongly in both of the cults I was recruited into.
 
The second phase of a trauma response is dissociation: “detachment from an unbearable situation.” As previously described, in this state, both physiological states of hyperarousal and dissociation are activated: internal energy-consuming resources are simultaneously on full alert at the same time as the person is dissociating to try to shut down and conserve these resources. Imagine the toll on the body that this two-fold unresolvable process must take. Eventually, dissociation – freezing and giving up the failed effort to escape – comes to dominate. Along with giving up the struggle to fight against the group and the fear it has generated, the dissociated follower comes to accept the group as the safe haven and thus forms a trauma bond. This moment of submission, of giving up the struggle, can be experienced as a moment of great relief, and even happiness, or a spiritual awakening.
 
What little I know of KY/3H0 experience is that there is a strong emphasis upon altered and/or transcendent states. From my personal experience and research on other yoga groups, I know that the line between a “radiant fawning” response and a truly empowering experience can be hard to find. Worse, that line can be manipulated by the group or its leader, by suggesting to the member that their stress response is actually a sign of awakening. Groups in which spiritual practice is particularly intense, demanding, or life-pervading (Ashtanga Yoga, Sivananda Yoga, etc.), are hot spots for this conflation.
 
So as KY practitioners consider the conundrum of how effective the practices have been vs the picture that’s emerging of Bhajan and his lieutenants and enablers, I would encourage gentle reflection on the question of “Why were the practices efficient? Why did this work?” Because it’s possible that the euphoria and bliss, in some cases, was not only part of the abuse, but an essential mechanism for deepening trauma bonds within the group.
 
This is definitely not to say that the practices if they are still felt to be beneficial, should be abandoned. But I believe that everyone deserves to practice without the additional burden of cognitive dissonance. And who knows? Practicing euphoria from a place of real freedom may well be possible.

 

Maybe Kundalini Yoga Works Because It Carries the Domination Affect of Yogi Bhajan | a note on Gurmukh’s Abuse Crisis Statement

This thought began to form in response to reading Dyson’s book and some testimonies on the Premka page about how Bhajan dominated everyone’s lives through a grandiose ideology that required constant material attention: a thousand different tasks, rituals, protocols, attitudes, gestures.

“Dominated” is the key word here. “Dominated” in the sense that no one else had time or space to have their own life, their own reality, their own feelings. One of the hardest parts of Dyson’s book for me to read was where she quotes Bhajan repeatedly saying things like: “You must be like me,” followed by pages on pages of Dyson discovering that her own identity had been suppressed, supplanted, negated, and that she had to find it again.

Domination was the root of the religion. Daniel Shaw details the granular level of how this might work in his masterful work Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. His erudite psychoanalytic appraisal of the Bhajan-like figure — in his case Gurumayi of SYDA — shows a person who is terrified of anyone around them asserting their own agency, for then the world and and others in it would no longer be theirs to control. It would feel like a mortal threat.

Dominate in order to control, and do it completely, passionately, sleeplessly — or else you will die. I’m familiar with these themes from studying cult leaders.

But the possibility that they are baked into the very content and method of Kundalini yoga itself was made much more clear by Gurmukh’s post yesterday. Many have noted this quote in particular:

“Between the flu and the allegations, from the center of my being I choose Joy. This is sincerely all that I can do. I stand for Joy. My platform is Joy. Joy is the opposite of fear. Fear breeds more fear. Joy breeds more Joy. In my choice I choose to teach Kundalini Yoga throughout the world, God willing, until my last breath.”

Look past the white saviourism of the journey, the conflation of a virus for institutional abuse, the bypassing. The hidden-in-plain-sight message here is domination, albeit disguised in an emotive language of emotion that is coded maternal, receptive, and surrendering.

Come what may, this faithful practitioner will exert their will to Joy over all reality. No other emotion or perspective has the right to exist. With Joy she will cancel Bhajan’s critics. No one else — and obviously not survivors — will be referenced. Everything emanates from the centre of their being… and what emanates is Kundalini yoga (as taught by Yogi Bhajan), and she will colonize the world with it. This virus-infested, allegation-ridden world, teeming with orphans who will be Joyful when they are visited by the bearer of Joy.

So when I see people talk about how much Kundalini did for them — especially in totalistic terms: “It transformed my life” — I wonder about how much domination is wrapped up in that: domination of intuition, of one’s past, of trauma, of appropriately negative responses, of questions and doubts, of reasonable desires to wear jeans or drink wine. I wonder how much success in practice is generated by dominating the unwanted or disowned parts of oneself. And on the professional level: how much domination does it take to suppress bad news, to enforce cognitive dissonance, to make sure one’s buzz doesn’t dim and one’s brand isn’t tarnished, to be able to stare questions down from the mountaintop.

I don’t doubt that it helped many people. Pressure and encouragement can do that for a while. The question would be when and how helpfulness crosses that threshold into domination.

 

However Kundalini Yoga Works, It is Aided by “Bounded Choice” | Looking at Snatam Kaur’s Crisis Statement

Janja Lalich is a cult researcher whose work has been very important to my own healing. One of her most illuminating concepts is “bounded choice”, and it helps to explain just how difficult it is for a high-demand group or cult member to see their way clear of the insular ideology that has functioned to narrow their world.

Briefly put: “bounded choice” is the condition of having been trained to believe that everything that happens in the group, or that the leader does, or that is taught or produced by the group, is for some ultimate good. This means that everything becomes grist for the salvation mill. If the practitioner falls ill because of dietary restrictions, they’re being taught to detach from the body. If they are left impoverished, they are being taught about the maya of worldly wealth. If they are forbidden to marry, they are being taught the virtue of renunciation. If they are forced to have an abortion, they are being taught to give up on the wheel of life.

Bounded choice allows the leader and the group to continually move the goalposts so that the member is never able to convincingly say: “This is wrong. This doesn’t work.” It also does the crucial work of never allowing the group to be challenged by any external information.

The interpersonal examples above are fairly easy to spot when you get the hang of the idea. What harder is the subtler aspect of bounded choice, which is what is at play in Snatam Kaur’s invocation that all KY members should recommit themselves to chanting the mantras as they try to make sense of revelations of abuse in their group.

In Kaur’s view, the mantras are held up as all-good, all-saving, primordial, and sacred. It’s unthinkable that they were ever used to deceive, to baffle, to love-bomb, to dissociate, to hijack critical thinking in favour of bursts of serotonin. It’s inconceivable that they’ve ever been used to enforce a premature repair or forgiveness following abuse. And yet the cult research is filled with examples of techniques of hypnotic trance, contact high, pleasure/pain disruption, and nervous overwhelm that function to break down resistance and increase compliance.

Kaur’s statement can also be considered through Jennifer Freyd’s lens of institutional betrayal. One part of her theory says that when abuse victims are asked to appeal to the institution that enabled the abuse for relief, or to its content or methods, retraumatization can occur. A basic lesson is: don’t expect healing from the institution that traumatized you.

Here are some thought experiments that might help show that for some group members Kaur may be offering yet more bounded choice, even if she believes she’s offering relief. These are examples of bounded choice compounded by institutional betrayal. They also express a conflict of interest: the group continuing to promote itself as the solution to the problem it contains.

1. A man has just disclosed that a Catholic priest abused him when he was a child. The news shocks the parish. A well-meaning member suggests that everyone — including the man — bond and heal by going to church and reciting the rosary.

2. A woman has just disclosed that Harvey Weinstein raped her. The news shocks Hollywood. A well-meaning member suggests that community gather for a ceremonial showing of Shakespeare in Love.

3. A woman has just disclosed that Ashtanga yoga founder Pattabhi Jois regularly sexually assaulted her while in class. The news shocks the community. A well-meaning member suggests that everyone bond and heal by practicing the Primary Series.

4. A woman has just disclosed that Bikram Choudhury raped her. The news shocks the community. A well-meaning member suggests that everyone bond and heal by continuing to practice Choudhury’s 26 postures in 104 degree heat

5. A man has just disclosed a lifetime of institutional abuse within the Shambhala Buddhist community. The news is shocking. A well-meaning member suggests that everyone bond and heal by reaffirming their dedication to the Tantric kingdom of Shambhala.

 

 

 

Eddie Stern’s Statements About the Crimes of Pattabhi Jois (Post and Podcast)

Eddie Stern’s Statements About the Crimes of Pattabhi Jois (Post and Podcast)

Last week, I released the following video of the late Maty Ezraty puts Eddie Stern at a meeting of senior students in Mysore in the early 1990s, at which Jois’s abuses were openly discussed and acknowledged.

 

Ezraty recalls that she and Chuck Miller decided at that time to actively distance themselves from Jois. Stern went on to help Jois publish a book, to host Jois at U.S. events, and co-edit Guruji, a collection of interviews that glorify Jois.

Yesterday, Eddie Stern released a statement about the criminality of Pattabhi Jois. The statement is co-signed by his partner Jocelyne and can be found here on his site.

Through present-tense phrases like “The stories that are being reported on the actions of Pattabhi Jois…”, the Sterns imply that they have only become aware of Jois’s abuses recently, or since survivors like Anneke Lucas and Karen Rain have spoken up.

The Sterns’ statement was simultaneously published with this podcast excerpt with Eddie Stern, hosted by Leanne Woehlke.


In the podcast, Stern says:

I’ve read the reports of these women. I didn’t know what he was doing. And after reading the book, I could confidently know that — the Matthew Remski book — I could really confidently say I didn’t know about those things.

However, this same book recounts how Anneke Lucas went to Stern in 2001 after Jois assaulted her in New York. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

Anneke said that after Jois had returned to India, she went to Eddie Stern to report the groping incident. He was Jois’s host, after all.

According to Anneke, Stern’s wife – another senior Jois student – was also at the meeting.

“Eddie referred to ‘Guruji’s unfortunate problem’,” Anneke said, “apologized and told me I had done the right thing. His wife also offered words of sympathy.

“At the time,” Anneke said, “I was satisfied with the acknowledgment alone. But Eddie carries his share of responsibility by failing to warn me and others, and by persisting in spreading an image of Pattabhi Jois as though he was an enlightened guru.”

Nine years later, Anneke showed Stern a draft of the article she was about to publish.

“Eddie’s first question was ‘Why do you want to humiliate him like that?’ to which I answered: ‘He humiliated himself.’ Eddie agreed with me.   (PAAIC, p. 319)

Additionally, Stern told me via email in July of 2016 that he had flagged the infamous Jois adjustment video as inappropriate content. The video was subsequently deleted from Vimeo, but is now reposted here (trigger warning).

“I am very happy that they pulled it down,” he wrote, “and I hope that you will reconsider the need to continue using that video to prove/make some kind of a point.”

In his open letter to John Scott, Guy Donahaye says that Stern was a source for confirming Jois’s assaults:

Eddie Stern acknowledged the abuse and supported my action although he has as yet been unable to make a proper public statement. He is also the person I turned to for confirmation about KPJ’s actions after Matthew Remski had contacted me.

The structure of the podcast focuses on Stern’s own pain and concerns that he has been “targeted” for enabling Jois over the years. He describes being in therapy, and how he’s learning to listen.

Woehlke expresses sympathy over Stern being held responsible for Jois’s actions. She worries aloud that the discourse over Jois’s criminality will “undermine the good of a practice that can help so many people and especially someone like yourself who has been one of the primary teachers of this form of the Ashtanga tradition.”

Stern told Woelke that the movement to remove images of Pattabhi Jois from shalas — initiated by Jois survivors like Karen Rain and Jubilee Cooke — constitutes a form of denialism:

I don’t think it should be brushed under the rug, which is what I believe people want to do when they want to take Pattabhi Jois’s photo off the wall and stop using the opening prayer.

Like, okay, you can’t just sweep the guru under the carpet and then like, everything’s going to get better.

When Woehlke and Stern begin to discuss solutions to the crisis, he has this to say about the consent movement in modern yoga:

I don’t know if consent cards are like the answer. Um, you know, I see people selling consent carbs like all over the place now and I’m like, what are you turning sexual abuse into another industry? And it’s just really weird to me. That cuts off an important line of communication to where, you know, I don’t have to, you know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to sound, say the wrong way, but by using a card and just putting it on your mat, all of a sudden now you’re not communicating with the person who’s supposed to be your teacher. You just start putting out a stop sign there. One of the reasons I think that we have so many problems in our societies because of difficulty communicating. Like we don’t know how to communicate. Um, in a lot of ways.

And sometimes there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of whatever. So I just question and I wonder: would working on communication be a better way to surmount these problems rather than something like consent cards? If people really like consent cards cause they, they’re truly not able to verbalize it, I don’t want to remove that from them. Um, I, I just am going to make that observation that people are turning sexual abuse into another industry by selling things like consent cards.

What Happens in the Next Generation On From a High-Demand Group?

What Happens in the Next Generation On From a High-Demand Group?

Those who leave or escape from high-demand yoga groups seem to reorganize through two successive demographic splits.

The first split separates out those who must ghost out of the industry altogether to heal themselves and start over. Their drive to escape might be driven by the fact that they were abused too severely by the group to recover. There can be other factors as well, such as whether they have a pathway towards a different social circle and life, or whether they retained interests and skills outside of the group.

The second split occurs between those who stay within the industry, often because they need to.

I’ll use the Anusara example here, but you could substitute in many different organizations. I’ll call the splinter groups Category 1 & 2.

Category 1 is made up of those who figured out that John Friend created something toxic from top to bottom. They emerged with the drive to completely reorient themselves in relationship to their practice and self-understanding. It was a lot of hard work, and very lonely, because the rule book had been torn up. They might go through associations with other groups, and successive disillusionments as they detect similar patterns emerging. It takes them a long time to realize that the wisdom of disappointment has made them into leaders. I’ve seen many Category 1 people also start and follow through with training in a licensed therapeutic skill.

Category 2 consists of those who believed that Friend created something really awesome and it was just a damn shame that he let it get to his head or his ego or something and made “mistakes”.

Category 2 goes on to basically replicate the dynamics they learned in the high-demand group, but with enough savvy to remain just above social reproof. They might apply these strategies to leading a new yoga group, owning a studio, or they’ll skip sideways into an MLM (which gives you a sense of how they were thinking about yoga training to begin with).

The mechanisms are the same: puff yourself up in the name of inspiring others, whether you can follow through or not. For Category 2 people, charisma is not something to interrogate but to domesticate. Weber called it “routinization”. If they remove the rough edges it’ll all work out.

To switch examples for a moment, Category 2 people in the Ashtanga world seem to believe that they can keep all of the elements of Jois’s scheme — the implied consent, the absence of informed consent, the performative stress, the mystifications around the value of the postures and their relationships to spiritual development — and somehow it will all be cleaned up if they manage to not assault anyone. They may even honestly believe they’ve never injured anyone through cranking adjustments. The more savvy ones add stuff like brand-new concerns over cultural appropriation. Or they contort themselves into oblivion pretending that going to Mysore every year is coherent with feminism.

In the worst cases, Category 2 people form their own high-demand groups. The best recent example is Reggie Ray and his alleged coercive control over Dharma Ocean. Ray broke away from Shambhala.

It’s way better to work with (and especially for, if you’re junior) Category 1 people. They tend to be hyper-aware of issues of power and fairness, and if they have blindspots they’re happy to see and acknowledge them, and then take steps to mitigate. You’ll also find that they’re doing a wide range of supportive work within the industry, often for little to no pay. They’re writing, researching, mentoring, creating content that has no concrete market value.

Category 2 people, by contrast, fold all of their labour back into brand-building.

One thing that makes Category 2 people crappy to work with or for is that they view themselves as the ethical exiles of the first group — those who were doing Anusara “right”, those who weren’t so stupid as to have sex with their downline and have weed trafficked in over state lines. They were the ones who were able to see the value in the method and not screw it up with their selfish desires.

This particular grandiosity can make Category 2 people impervious to critique. I’ve noticed their politics can become even more neoliberal and responsibilist, because after all, they were individually able to steer clear of John’s train wreck, and they did that through their own grit and gumption, right?

This also means that many many maintain a long-term subtle contempt for Category 1 people who didn’t “get over it”, or who foster a “victim mentality”. Accordingly, they’ll be more resistant than Category 1 folks to new information about their student’s needs. If they jump on the trauma-sensitive train or start using woke-talk it will be because it’s a good biz plan.

In the cult literature, it’s widely accepted that there are no predictors for who gets recruited and who doesn’t. Similarly, I doubt there would be any predictors around who branches off into Category 1 and Category 2.

But if I were to speculate, I’d imagine that, while there might be psychological factors at play, Category 2 people were protected and supported by types of social privilege that insulated them from full disillusionment when the high-demand group fell apart. They had capital to move on with, for instance. Or perhaps they were always socially separated from those lower down in the group, and so they never had to learn from them about how terribly unequal things were.

Another factor might be that Category 2 people were more active as enablers in the original group (whereas Category 1 people might have done more bystanding), and so are better defended against self-examination. It’s a lot harder to cop to the fact that you enabled than to the fact that you were a bystander.

Bystanding in itself is an “off” feeling, through which it’s easier to access shame and perhaps even guilt. Those feelings are gold for disillusionment.

Somehow, the Category 1 person permitted themselves to be fully and wholly disillusioned, to such an extent that they would never be able again to rebuild in the same way.

Maybe disillusionment is not just something that happens. Maybe it’s also a skill that can be developed.

 

 

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Psst: here’s a plug for my online seminar, coming up in February!

That Time Manouso Manos Started a Yoga Class with a Verbal Attack And Showed How Trauma Bonding Works

Special thanks to Cassie Jackson, who was there that day and helped confirm many details. Her testimony of Manos assaulting her is included in the IYNAUS investigative report on pages 15-17. 

 

 

_____

 

In January of 2017 I emailed Manouso Manos to request an interview. At that time, my research for the book that eventually focused on Jois and Ashtanga Yoga was casting a wider net. The working title back then was Shadow Pose: Trauma and Healing in the Cult of Modern Yoga.

I was upfront and honest about the project. I told him I was investigating intergenerational trauma in the yoga world, and would be citing the 1991 report on allegations of sexual assault against him. I wrote that I wanted to ask him if or how he had changed over the years, and how he understood his teaching within the legacy of BKS Iyengar.

This was about ten months before I heard about the sexual assault claim Ann Tapsell West was preparing to file against Manos, which was first dismissed by the IYNAUS Ethics Committee, and then substantiated by an independent investigator.

When I wrote to Manos I did not know that there were or would be contemporary allegations against him. I also didn’t consider or research sexual offender recidivism. In this light, my initial query was naive.

Manos’s curt responses included a threat to take me to court for writing about him from the public record. Then, paradoxically, he invited me me to come to one of his classes for free.

So I made plan to go. I didn’t expect a warm welcome. But I didn’t expect to be ambushed. Continue reading “That Time Manouso Manos Started a Yoga Class with a Verbal Attack And Showed How Trauma Bonding Works”

About That Johnny Kest Scene in the NYT documentary

For the minority of yoga teachers (and smaller minority of yoga consumers) who have woken up to the fact that somatic dominance is a primary currency in commodified yoga, the Johnny Kest scene in the recent NYT/FX/Hulu doc was outrageous, but also recognizable and predictable.

There’s been a lot of great commentary on it already — most of it nailing down how the embodied entitlement of implied-consent “adjustments” merges with Kest’s patronizing shutdowns of the very straightforward feedback given by the women who were able to speak in the moment.

Theodora Wildcroft remarked that this is the kind of thing that exposes the mainstream industry as unworthy of public service — a blow to everyone moving in that direction. There will be much more to say on that point.

I’d like to highlight a few other things.
 
Reporter Katie Rosman opens the documentary by describing how in ten years of yoga practice she had never heard of the Jois abuse stories. There’s a good reason for her to have been in the dark, as revealed when Maty Ezraty describes an intentional decision taken by some of Jois’s students to not report his crimes. It’s so well hidden, in fact, that Kest is able to freely advertise and monetize his authority as a student of Jois, which likely factored into the marketability of his training system to a corporate chain.
 

This is important to repeat: it’s bad enough that Jois’s crimes were hidden, now we see clearly that the invisibility of Jois’s crimes has enabled brand profitability for teachers of Ashtanga and beyond. In the meantime, Jois survivors have left careers, suffered health problems, and racked up therapy bills.It was clear to me years ago that this wicked calculus would put Jois’s survivors in class action territory if it were not for the fact that those who have profited on Jois’s name aren’t represented by any suable organization.

The documentary does not answer the question of whether Kest has committed assault. But it does show how easily he could.

How?

Kest is operating in a somatic environment normalized by Jois, and which neither the industry around him nor its trade associations have challenged in any accountable way. The environment has changed in that adjustments have been standardized and domesticated within training systems, and the somatic dominance has crossed a gender line. But the basic premises remain. Here’s an incomplete List:

 
  1. The teacher assumes dominant and definitive knowledge over the student’s body.
  2. That knowledge is established by the objectifying male gaze* that diagnoses flaws that must be manipulated back into order. This means that the adjustment starts and can be felt before the touch. (*can come out of men’s or women’s eyes).
  3. The interventions are endowed with transformative mystery and so there can be no informed consent. (I.e.: The student’s body is to be enlightened to something it did not yet know. This can cannot be pre-explained.)
  4. Thinking or talking about what’s happening in the power dynamic encounter constitutes an interruption of esoteric communication. Asking questions means you’re not tuning in to the silent sweaty wisdom of God.
  5. The unregulated environment of implied consent, heavily gendered power dynamics and the value of silence provokes a spectrum of responses. Enthusiastic responses are instantly recruited to support the marketing narrative of the space, regardless of whether they are healthy or fawning (trauma-related).
This List begins to explain why what is so bizarre and outrageous to the awake yoga teacher/consumer seems perfectly natural to Kest. It’s not just entitlement and male privilege on display. It is decades of a very specific matrix of embodied power relations that have become invisible to those ensnared in them.
 
This List also tells us why it’s so hard for Kest’s clients in that room to speak up. They’ve been told in dozens of implicit ways before they even enter the room that he’s in charge and his authority threads back to a spiritual master. Plus: surely a national fitness chain wouldn’t be endorsing and hiring someone unsafe. Add to that the sunken costs of getting to that conference and the cognitive dissonance of wanting to have a good time and not harsh anyone’s mellow, and the path of least resistance beckons. In the most vulnerable cases it’s not about the easy way out at all, but about having frozen.
 
The doc shows in clinical detail the spectrum of responses to a rigged game, from seeming acceptance, to awkward silence, to patient offers to help Kest see that consent cards might be a good idea, to a firm challenge on the necessity of consent, to someone who’s able to say that the “diaper change” might trigger PTSD from past sexual assaults. Up until this point, this very spectrum has been used to justify and victim-blame, which is Kest’s fallback position when he tells the story about how the same touch on two different people provokes different responses. The subtext is: what’s he supposed to do with these crazy women? It’s not his problem, is it?
 
The mainstream upshot of the Rosman report is that, without a doubt, yes it is his problem. But it’s not a problem that he will have the resources to solve. And it’s not a problem that whistleblowing on abuse can really change either, given that the Jois, Manos, and other stories are well-exposed now, and very little has happened on a systemic level. Think about all of the platformers and gatekeepers who let this stuff happen because the money flows? Rosman asked tough questions of Kest’s corporate bosses, but how about the yoga conference organizers? How about his retreat hosts?
If you’re a yoga administrator and you’ve watched all this reporting pour out in 2018-present and you don’t immediately institute consent policies for your events, you’re asleep at the wheel, IMO.
 
Trade/educational influence is also not enough, given that Kest has been certified by YA for how many years and sounds surprised to even hear of the notion of consent, even as YA has poured big money into trying to get the most basic best practices out there and part of the conversation.
 
At the end of the doc, Rosman asks the simplest question of all: How come barbers, manicurists, and massage therapists all need licenses to touch other people’s bodies, and Johnny Kest doesn’t? Some of us have been asking that for years, and I haven’t heard a single answer to this question that doesn’t appeal to a sense of grandiosity or narcissism that claims the yoga teacher is somehow doing something too special to understand.

Cyndi Lee Interviews Matthew Remski about Working Through the Abuse Crisis in Modern Yoga and Buddhism (+ transcript)

Notice: This interview is part of the Yoga of Healing and Awakening Summit, a free online event featuring essential depth teachings and daily practices for your body, mind and soul. This recording is a copyright of The Shift Network. All rights reserved.

Transcript:

Announcer: 00:00

Welcome to the yoga of healing and awakening summit, a free online event where you’ll discover essential depth teachings and daily practices for your mind, body, and soul. Share these visionary masters and esteemed practitioners with your friends and family and join us on Facebook at The Shift Network. And now your host, Cyndi Lee.

Cyndi Lee: 00:24

Welcome everyone. We’re so glad that you’re joining us and today I’m really pleased to introduce my special guest and friend, Matthew Remski. Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher, industry consultant and author of nine previous books including Threads of Yoga, a remix of patanjali’s yoga sutras with commentary and reverie, and the survivor of two cults. His work has been pivotal in illuminating the shadows of globalized Yoga and Buddhism and showing that disillusionment and critical inquiry can be gateways to mature spirituality. Matthew, thanks so much for being with us today. Welcome.

Matthew Remski: 01:08

Thank you so much, Cindy. Thanks for the welcome. Thanks for inviting me to do this. It’s a pleasure to meet you finally. Continue reading “Cyndi Lee Interviews Matthew Remski about Working Through the Abuse Crisis in Modern Yoga and Buddhism (+ transcript)”

Intention vs. Impact, Trickle-down Violence, and Doing the Systemic Work: Francesca Cervero and Matthew Remski Discuss Practice and All is Coming

It was a real pleasure to discuss the book with DC-area yoga teacher and trainer Francesca Cervero for her podcast, the Mentor Sessions. Such great questions. Transcript is below.

 

 

Transcript:

Francesca Cervero: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Mentor Sessions. I’m your host Francesca Cervero. The Mentor Sessions is a meeting place for Yoga teachers who want to be supported and thinking critically about their teaching. While you’re here, expect to have your ideas about right and wrong challenged and your deepest need for nurturing and support met by a fellow sister on the pad. Today we have a really special guest talking about his newest book. I have Matthew Remski joining me on the podcast today and we’re talking about his new book Practice and All is Coming, Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing and Yoga and Beyond.

If you don’t know Matthew, let me just tell you a little bit about him before we get started. Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher, industry consultant and author of nine previous books including Threads of Yoga, a Remix of Patanjali’s Sutras with Commentary and Reverie. As a survivor of two cults, his work has been pivotal in illuminating the shadows of globalized Yoga and Buddhism and showing that disillusionment and critical inquiry can be gateways to mature spirituality. He facilitates modules in philosophy, history, culture and community health in yoga teacher training programs internationally. He lives in Toronto with his partner and their two children. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Matthew Remski: 00:01:30

Thanks so much Francesca, it’s really great to hear your voice again and thanks for the opportunity to speak about the book. Continue reading “Intention vs. Impact, Trickle-down Violence, and Doing the Systemic Work: Francesca Cervero and Matthew Remski Discuss Practice and All is Coming”

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

How Good Book Stores Become Unwitting Retailers for Yoga and Buddhism Cults

(With great love and care for independent booksellers everywhere.)

 

As part of my tour to promote Practice and All is Coming, I was invited by a well-beloved bookstore in a major North American city to give a presentation and sign copies as part of their author’s series.

This gorgeous bookstore is proudly independent, and has supported spiritual seekers, social progressives, and environmental activists for decades. The staff were kind and professional and encouraging.

I arrived early for the AV check and looked around. Behind the little stage area where I was supposed to stand stood the entire yoga section.

And there they all were.

It was strange and tense and activating to see piles of yoga books written by or associated with abusive leaders and institutional betrayal. I was there to present an argument against the messages and the media of exactly these books.

At the risk of wearing out my welcome, I made use of the paradox in my presentation. When I offered the following slide of The List of yoga organizations that have unresolved abuse histories, I was able to tie almost every one with a book from the shelf. I was worried about making the staffers uncomfortable, but they were really grateful and supportive. Who wants to sell compromised goods, after all? Continue reading “How Good Book Stores Become Unwitting Retailers for Yoga and Buddhism Cults”