Maybe It Wasn’t the “Shambhala Teachings” That Changed Your Life: A Brief Note on False Attribution

Maybe It Wasn't the "Shambhala Teachings" That Changed Your Life

“But the Shambhala TEACHINGS are precious. They changed our lives. We CAN’T let them go. We HAVE to separate them from the organization and its leadership.”

This is the active-ingredient argument you may be hearing from some of your fellow community members. It’s based on the premise that beneath all of the human imperfections and “conventional realities” of Shambhala International, there was something essentially good and true communicated by Trungpa and his followers, and that that essence was what changed lives.

A further premise is that that essence can and should be isolated and mobilized.

Those who talk about the “essence” of the teachings are those who are still in one way or another within the learning community or high-demand group. They might believe that the essential teachings were universally clear; they could test this belief by asking those who left the group what they believed the teachings were. 

They would be also be the ones who would be least likely to consider the placebo effect of the teaching content. Continue reading “Maybe It Wasn’t the “Shambhala Teachings” That Changed Your Life: A Brief Note on False Attribution”

Jonah, Matsyendra, Jivana Heyman, and Northrop Frye: Keynote Address to the Accessible Yoga Conference, Toronto, 2018

Jonah, Matsyendra, Jivana Heyman, and Northrop Frye: Keynote Address to the Accessible Yoga Conference, Toronto, 2018

Given in the Victoria College Chapel,

University of Toronto,

May 23, 2018

(edited lightly)

 

I want to thank Jivana for inviting me to make a few remarks here today, near the closing of this groundbreaking event.

Fun fact: I used to go to school here. I dropped out. There were a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I couldn’t at the time see what the point was, what kind of job or living could come from a literature degree.

I didn’t want to break a spell. I’d spent several years reading books in these rooms, immersed in a dreamlike experience that shone a light into some internal space. It was like the sweet spot in a yoga career. I didn’t want to wake up and be productive. I wasn’t so interested in achieving anything. I didn’t want to perform, or conform. Maybe these sentiments sound resonant to some of you after this weekend – especially if you took the training earlier this week.

Just downstairs, I would go to the lectures of Northrop Frye in the year before he died. Frye was a famous Canadian intellectual. You Americans and others we’re hosting here might be familiar with a more recent and even more famous, and much wealthier Canadian intellectual, also tenured at this University. I’ll just say that Frye was very different from the current celebrity: he didn’t become rich and famous by mocking the emotions of marginalized people or by dismissing their needs, which the dominant culture already makes invisible – such as the need that trans people have to be recognized as who they are.

Like our current celebrity, Frye was also a Christian, and he appreciated Jung. But you can be sure that if he was still alive he’d be marching down Church Street this weekend in the PRIDE Parade.

Frye was truly a thinker, and a generous one – a literary critic and theorist who articulated several revelatory ideas that forever changed the way a lot of people read books.

He was a United Church minister, but his ideas were pretty yogic. One was the notion, broadly stated, that there are no single books in the world. It’s like the covers that separate books on shelves are simply there to allow you to pick them up more easily. Each person’s work, Frye argued, fit into a “continuity of the word”, reiterating and expanding upon primal themes handed down through the mythic frameworks by which societies live and grow. It wasn’t the critic’s job to judge an individual book so much as was to give it voice within its proper context, to see how it fit into the whole landscape of human dreams, how it mobilized the forms of the past for new purposes. He didn’t see himself as a gatekeeper of what was correct or proper, but as a facilitator of imaginative experience. That has inspired me throughout my life.

I’m opening with this recollection here, because I believe Jivana and his colleagues are doing the same thing with this organization, this movement. They look at bodies and consciousness in the way Frye looked at literature – as one broad continuum of potential experience. They aren’t high-brow. They are not gatekeepers. They don’t believe in gates, unless they’re already open. Continue reading “Jonah, Matsyendra, Jivana Heyman, and Northrop Frye: Keynote Address to the Accessible Yoga Conference, Toronto, 2018”

Accountability Or Apologia? Reading Between the Lines When Yoga and Buddhism Leaders Issue Crisis Statements

Accountability Or Apologia? Tips for Reading Between the Lines

 

Many of today’s leaders in yoga and Buddhism built themselves through online marketing. This means that when abuse in their communities is revealed, they must be prepared to make online responses. It’s good to be able to see where the responses are continuous with the marketing: this may give clues as to how earnest, considered and educated those responses are.

The speed at which it all happens is both terrible and revealing. Terrible insofar as it suppresses sober second thought. Revealing because it lays bare microdynamics of cultic control that in the pre-digital age were invisible outside of the group. Today we can watch cults get penetrated by reporting and instantly try to circle the wagons. It’s easy to see the crude damage control of the attempt to discredit victims or reporters. What’s harder to see is how the reporting can be deflected by selective acknowledgement or yes-but statements. Whatever the responses are, they play out in the open field, like some kind of cult-exit obstacle course reality show.

We have to learn the difference between structural change and rebranding. Especially as people are getting better at co-opting and monetizing discourses around trauma-awareness and justice. There’s a lot of leaders in the Shambhala org right now who will be ramping up the trauma awareness language and dusting off their Naropa psychology chops. But if they don’t simultaneously call for the Sakyong to be removed and the org to be investigated independently, they are abusing that language and those tools. This may not at all be their fault. They may be under the illusion that those values actually came from the Trungpa legacy, instead of having been co-opted by it. Continue reading “Accountability Or Apologia? Reading Between the Lines When Yoga and Buddhism Leaders Issue Crisis Statements”

“From Somatic Dominance to Trauma Awareness” – Interview with J. Brown (Transcript)

"From Somatic Dominance to Trauma Awareness" - Interview with J. Brown (Transcript)

Image: myself and Diane Bruni at the #WAWADIA event on May 29, 2014. I refer to this event in the interview. The write-up and (unfortunately) butchered video is here. I love how Diane is looking at me here, trying to figure out how full of shit I am.

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Thank you to J. Brown for having me on his podcast, as part of his series about current news in the Ashtanga world. You can also tune in to his talks with Kino MacGregor, Scott Johnson, and Sarai Harvey-Smith.

Here’s our talk. Resources and transcript (trimmed of intro/outro) below.

 

Karen Rain’s writings on her experience with Pattabhi Jois and Ashtanga Yoga can be found here. I interview her at length here.

I’ve updated my WAWADIA project plans here. My article on Pattabhi Jois and sexual assault, featuring Karen’s voice and the voices of eight other women, can be found here.

Here’s where I’ve quoted Theodora Wildcroft on the fear of contagion elicited by the voice of the victim.

Here’s my conversation with Colin Hall and Sarah Garden.

I’ve posted the classic “Deception, Dependence, and Dread” summary from cult researcher Michael Langone here.

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Transcript

Matthew Remski:

Hi.

Jason Brown:

Hi, how are you?

Matthew Remski:

I’m good, I’m good. I just listened to your intro to Scott Johnson. I didn’t listen to what Scott had to say, but I really appreciated the intro, it was good.

Jason Brown:

Well, thanks. There was still some debate about it, I guess. I just default to transparency and not everybody always thinks that’s a good idea. But for me, it’s where I feel most comfortable. So, thanks. But what else, what’s been going on, how’s your day going? It’s the middle of the day for you too, right?

Matthew Remski:

It is. And I just got up from a nap with alongside the almost two-year-old, Owen. And that was really good because I was up until about 1:30 in the morning after doing another interview with my friends Colin Hall and Sarah Garden at Bodhi Tree in Regina. It took me a while to come down off of that. But the sun is shining, we got some backyard cleaning done over the weekend, we emptied out the basement. Things are heading in an upward arc it feels in many ways.

Jason Brown:

Yeah. You know what, you mentioned two and a half years for your son and-

Matthew Remski:

Almost two, he’s going to be two on May 17th.

Jason Brown:

Well, we last spoke, the last time you were on the podcast was May 2016.

Matthew Remski:

Oh, my goodness. Was he born or not?

Jason Brown:

I guess he wouldn’t have been born because it’s exactly two years ago. But we spoke about that book that you wrote with Michael Stone about becoming fathers and stuff. I remember that. I can’t believe it’s been two years.

Matthew Remski:

Yeah, it’s been a long time. We’ve been in touch since. The difference between the podcast and being on the phone is a little bit thin.

Jason Brown:

That’s true actually. That’s a good point because sometimes, I had Peter Blackaby on and I had not had other conversations with him other than the two that you hear on the podcast, but you and I had had many conversations. There is a three line there. And gosh, so much has happened. When we last spoke, we were talking about WAWADIA still. And right at the end of that, we were saying, “Oh, it’s going in different directions.” And people were sort of, I think upset back then and maybe still that it was started out as what poses hurt you, what poses don’t hurt you. People wanted to sort of have some how to practice safe in clear, simple answers. And you were like, “I looked at it and I don’t know that pose exists. And you were saying that it was going in this direction of the interpersonal dynamics that were going on.

Matthew Remski:

Yeah. That’s a good summary actually. It took about two years to figure out that I was barking up kind of a dissociative tree, that when the hard data is really laid out as I think you yourself suggested those years ago and perhaps before that as well, we don’t really see that yoga is any more damaging physically to anybody than any other physical activity. In fact, it’s probably safer. When that was clear, for a moment I held on to this notion that the problem with yoga injuries is the problem of expectation, that people get involved in this practice for therapy and spiritual healing. And why it seems very bizarre that they would hurt themselves, that they would develop repetitive stress or chronic pain.

I held on to that for a while. But trying to hang a research narrative on that premise became a lot less important than realizing the kinds of stories I was overlooking or I was papering over in the midst of all of the interviews that I was doing with people who had injured themselves or who had been injured by teachers. And a couple of key things happened that kind of spun me around. And one of them was that Diane Bruni was an early supporter of the work and she was one of my first interviews. And she told me about the correlation between overuse, repetitive stress and her hip injury coming out of the Ashtanga world.

And I interviewed her, it was a really compelling interview. She loved the project, she was a big supporter and she wanted to host this event at her home studio in Parkdale here in Toronto. We advertised it, it was going to be under the banner / branding of WAWADIA or my project. And 60 people showed up, and she was going to speak on her injury experience. I was going to give my initial research that was related to psychosocial dynamics of injury. And then we had also a sports medicine doctor who was going to come, and he was going to do a little bit of statistical analysis on who got hurt when and where and how. And Diane was going first, and she just did not follow the plan. That’s not really her jam.

It wasn’t unexpected, but at the same time, what she began talking about was really outside of what I felt the scope of my project should be. She started talking about the whisper network that she had encountered in the late 1990s that informed her that Pattabhi Jois was allegedly assaulting female students. And she described how that led her into a kind of crisis of faith and professional choices like how was she going to associate herself with a system where this was true? And the information that she had was credible. She told the story, and I was sitting there gripping my meditation cushion listening to her say it and thinking, “This wasn’t in the program, this wasn’t part of the deal.”

Continue reading ““From Somatic Dominance to Trauma Awareness” – Interview with J. Brown (Transcript)”

Talking about The Walrus Article on Jois with Colin Hall and Sarah Garden on Bodhi Talks Live

Talking about The Walrus Article on Jois with Colin Hall and Sarah Garden on Bodhi Talks Live

Resources:

Eleven-Year-Old Boys, Touching Women on the Subway

11 Year-Old Boys, Touching Women on the Subway

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault.

 

 

 

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I’ll bet many cisgendered heterosexual men have a story like this. After telling it, I’ll describe how I understand its origins, and the ways in which I’ve felt guilt and shame shut down its lessons.

1982. My friend showed me how to do it on the way to school. When the subway car was packed, boys our size could easily maneuver into position behind women, with our palms facing out.

The women were going to work. Form-fitting skirts were the uniform. The general mood was claustrophobic. It was easy to pretend you had no choice but to be stuck with your hand wedged in there, just like so, cupping.

If a woman felt something suspicious, we could plead innocence, break out the baby face. It was like we knew how to find that first entitled space between “boys are not men” and “boys will be boys”. How did we know? Continue reading “Eleven-Year-Old Boys, Touching Women on the Subway”

On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex

Minimization As a Patriarchal Reflex

Image: A chinstrap for children, designed by Moritz Schreber. Illustration from: D.G.M. Schreber: Calligraphy. Leipzig, 1858

 

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On Facebook, I posted a brief note about starting to learn what is painfully obvious to women: patriarchy inflicts the stress of constant bodily vigilance at best and acute terror at worse.

The post took off and the comments were stunning. So many stood out, like those that reported on strategies for increasing safety in taxis. One commenter wrote that she always video-chats with a friend while she’s alone in an Uber, dropping details that signal to the driver that someone knows where they are. If men don’t know about this kind of defensive labour, they’ve got to learn.

One genre of comments sent me down a real rabbit hole. The commenter would start with congratulations about my sensitivity to this kind of thing, because the commenter commonly interacts with men who simply think they’re irrational, neurotic, angry or bitter.

But I could feel instantly that such a compliment was undeserved, because I know in my bones what minimizing the other feels like. Continue reading “On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex”