Montréal and L’Oratoire: End of November
December 12, 2019Quotes from Ram Dass That Fit the Pattern of Spiritualizing Sexual Abuse in Yoga
January 8, 2020In the aftermath of Julie Salter’s viral testimony that Swami Vishnudevananda (b. Kuttan Nair 1927, d. 1993) sexually used and abused her for three years while she was his personal assistant, the Sivananda Yoga administration has released a number of statements, one of which asks other complainants to email a Montreal PR firm.
Here’s Salter’s testimony:
https://www.facebook.com/julie.salter.777/posts/10159225076324358
The International Sivananda Yoga and Vedanta Centres homepages now feature a pop-up statement, dated December 16th, committing to “honesty and transparency” and promising the appointment of an independent investigator within “a few days”. This hasn’t happened yet.
On December 25th, 3H0 recording artist Snatam Kaur gave a concert of devotional music at the Sivananda Yoga Bahamas ashram with senior Sivananda dignitaries in attendance. She sat in front of a larger-than-life portrait of Nair, and opened by quoting her guru Yogi Bhajan, also accused of sexually abusing his secretaries who worked for years for little or no pay. In a 2017 interview, Kaur lauded Bhajan as “very devout Sikh”.
https://www.facebook.com/SivanandaAshramYogaRetreat/videos/588804358566378/?__xts__[0]=68.ARCqhdc9YyoHzl5v_cwrkFjoXODyyVjsImgBFyhwc9e1EvD7shLeQSZ3lfjss-9IMHVxifCY2-lIU2I9uotPvwOVR57f-HufGbj6WWs-CuAEuZDdu0RcEF1_t8LOO-2LKKjv87UFkEGwdJx0J9p6L2SQpQKtj7sUoxSiaFQIKSYWFC972lvO7T6zY-p67RYPjlqBGhLPbuEiY8jizZxArRnS5Uj4aCmVLg6i4Nzocd_p8uver-qwnUvKQi9jn7N5BUgp-Msx75u1AxuXPi9W0JFLyhuub2oNisA-Uuj0RQN4vKf64EkADCL6Y1ZfUd0LgY_F3UILjJ-a&__tn__=-R
Here’s the latest communication from the Sivananda administration:
https://www.facebook.com/SivanandaYogaCamp/photos/a.10153422664889940/10158074634369940/?type=1&theater
Sivananda students around the world — including the reported 45K graduates from the organization’s signature Teacher Training Course — who are wondering how the accountability process may unfold might benefit from a brief review of institutional abuse crises in the yoga and Buddhism worlds from this past year alone, and how the organizations have responded.
Ashtanga Yoga
The publication of my book this past March brought together the testimonies of sixteen women who describe Ashtanga Yoga founder Pattabhi Jois sexually assaulting them under the guise of “yoga adjustments” between 1982 and 2002. Prior to the book, Jois survivors Anneke Lucas, Karen Rain, and Jubilee Cooke had all published their testimonies independently. Rain and Cooke went on to publish what is now the white paper on how yoga institutions should respond to abuse.
The story was covered in a Yoga Journal personal essay, and then mainstream outlets like the New York Daily News. The New York Times touched on the story as part of a longer feature in November.
While some individual Ashtanga leaders have published statements of accountability and allyship with the Jois survivors, no official statement has been made to date by the Jois family or by any entity that would represent Ashtanga Yoga worldwide. Sharath Rangaswamy, Jois’s grandson and inheritor of the family business, issued a rambling personal statement on Instagram that’s now deleted. (Reprinted here. More commentary here.)
No-one in the Ashtanga world has taken steps to commission an independent investigation, or to raise reparations funds for survivors. Meanwhile, senior Ashtanga figures like Eddie Stern continue to obfuscate what they knew and when.
Iyengar Yoga
IYNAUS and RIMYI (two influential arms of the Iyengar Yoga global body) gather together considerably more administrative power than anything found in the Ashtanga world. After their botched attempt to internally investigate testimony against Manouso Manos was exposed, they hired an independent investigator who found the testimony credible.
IYNAUS and RIMYI delisted Manos, and barred him from using the name “Iyengar” in association with his continued teaching. He’s doing it anyway in Russia. Recently, he gave a workshop at a secret location in Los Angeles, attended mainly by other Iyengar teachers:
https://www.facebook.com/matthew.remski/posts/10162762748405602
No concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Shambhala International
Ten months after an independent investigation found that Shambhala leader Mipham Mukpo had committed sexual misconduct (even though many people refused to participate in the investigation), the Shambhala Interim Board has announced that it supports the return of Mukpo from “retreat” in Nepal to bestow Tantric initiations on devotees this coming summer. The initiated practices involve participants visualizing Mukpo as a divine being.
The announcement also comes after a group of Mukpo’s former aides released a scathing description of his assaultive behaviour over the years.
In Mukpo’s own statement of intentions regarding the upcoming retreat, he makes no mention of the testimony against him, nor of any steps he has taken to mitigate further harm. Survivors and disillusioned members mocked Mukpo’s statement on reddit.
While Shambhala entities continue to fundraise for various projects, no concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Bikram Choudhury…
…is making money on the lam in Mexico, even after the airing of the Netflix doc, which added visuals to the far better-researched 30-by-30 podcast of the previous year.
There’s a warrant out for Choudhury for failure to pay the first of what will likely be many judgments against him.
No concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Rigpa International
Sogyal Lakar died in exile in August. The year before, an independent investigation found that Lakar had sexually, physically, and psychologically abused many students over decades. The report came one year after eight former devotees described their experiences.
No concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Takeaway
Even when organizations do a seemingly good job at investigating and confirming abuse testimony, we’re not seeing mitigation and reparations. For members of the Shambhala, Iyengar, and Rigpa communities, this might feel especially demoralizing — that the organizations to which many have committed the best years of their lives have mounted transparency campaigns that ultimately allow for the return to business-as-usual.
Opinion: It’s really like waiting for world leaders in the Global North to take decisive action on the climate crisis. They have the science, yet they are powerless, feckless, or nihilistic in response to the momentum of the culture. Whatever initiatives are taken are ineffectual or performative.
I don’t have answers here, but the stalemate does make me think of two things: how cultic organizations are designed to self-perpetuate in part by restricting outside input and avoiding outside scrutiny. Secondly, it makes me think of the distinction that activists like Aric McBay make between those who believe that corrupt systems can change, and those who don’t. I’ll end therefore with two grafs from McBay’s Full Spectrum Resistance.
Many of our [organizing] obstacles have been part of the culture(s) of the left. So I should clarify some of the terms I’ve been using, especially liberal and radical. Some people use radical as a synonym for “extreme,” but that’s misleading. The word radical originates in Latin, where it means “of the roots”—as in, from the grassroots, or root problems. Radicals see the dominant culture as having deep-seated problems that require fundamental changes to fix. They want to uproot entrenched power structures like apartheid, or patriarchy, or capitalism. As such, they tend to advocate (or at least support) political action that falls outside of what the political establishment considers acceptable. (Phil Berrigan’s argument that “if voting changed anything it would be illegal” is something radicals understand well.)
Liberals, in contrast, see the problems in society as comparatively superficial. They accept most of the established power structures of society—say, corporations or the parliamentary state—and they seek to work within those structures to make change. Liberals try to use “representative” systems of political power, either by electing someone sympathetic to them or by persuading someone already in power to grant concessions. Radicals may do this, at times, but radicals also like to build up their own community power and create movements that can exert political force more directly.
— Loc. 803.
So: here’s to a radical 2020 for our spiritual communities, and life on earth.