2019 Yoga/Buddhism Accountability Roundup | Like Waiting for Government Action on Climate Catastrophe

In 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:

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”.

 

Here’s the latest communication from the Sivananda administration:

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:

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.

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. 

 

 

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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”

I Learned Yoga/Buddhism Through an Abusive Group. Now I Teach It. What Do I Do?

Short answer: there’s a lot you can do if after all this you still love yoga and Buddhism the way you did in the beginning and you still want to share it with others. Scroll down if you don’t need the primer on the problem.

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In January of 2018, Shannon Roche, current CEO of Yoga Alliance said the following in a video announcement of YA’s updated sexual misconduct policy:

There’s a deeply troubling pattern of sexual misconduct within our community, a pattern that touches almost every tradition in modern yoga.

Every human being deserves to practice yoga free from abuse, harassment and manipulation.

In honour of those who have spoken up, and in honour of those who have been too hurt to speak, we have to start somewhere, and we have to start now.

“Almost every tradition.” Did she really say that? Yes she did. Is that accurate? Yes it is.

You can scroll to the very bottom for an incomplete List of abuse documentation. Roche is speaking for the yoga industry here, but her statement might equally apply to Buddhist organizations, so The List is in two parts.

Please note I’m not talking about “Yoga” and “Buddhism” in some general sense, and as you’ll see from the list below, I’m not referring to organizations that are strictly indigenous to India or South Asia. The focus here is on modern businesses conducted mostly in English and responsible for the global commodification of yoga and Buddhism as wellness and spirituality products.

When I present The List publicly to groups of teachers and teacher trainees, I can feel the air get sucked out of the room.

Why?

Because virtually everyone who has professionalized into yoga or Buddhism over the last thirty years has done so in relation to one or more of these groups. 

The List makes clear just how terrible the yoga and Buddhism industries have been at fostering the communities of competence, safety, dignity, and even love that their marketing has promised. The List lays bear the toxic outcomes of (mainly) male charismatic leadership over brands that vie for commercial legitimacy within an unregulated field. The List shows that the main thing that facilitates practice — a safe social space — is actually a very rare commodity. On the broadest scale, the sensitive observer will look at the list and wonder “What was this industry about, really?”

So what now? What do all of those trainings and certifications mean? What baggage do they carry with them? What do we do with this past?

I remember writing about Anusara Yoga in 2012. I was amazed at many things, but two stood out: how quickly the organization imploded, and then, how equally quickly so many people moved on. Some of the higher-ups simply switched gears and replicated abusive patterns in unregulated coaching or MLM schemes. But the lower-downs with more integrity tried to pivot to independent teaching status where they could still share what they really loved and valued. As they did so, many scrubbed their resumes, as if it had all been a bad trip they’d rather forget. I remember talking to many friends at the time. They now had a secret, and didn’t know what to do with it, and wondered how they would recover their sense of confidence.

There are fewer and fewer secrets now. That said, some of the articles listed below are from the early 1990s, so the secrets have been open for ages, and of course the survivors of these organizations have known the truth all along.

#metoo sweeping through the yoga and Buddhism worlds has turned the open secret into a do-not-pass-go reality test, and shown that abuse ignored is abuse perpetuated. One of the clearest recent examples has come from Dharma Ocean, where brave former students of Reggie Ray have disclosed a system of charismatic coercion that mimics the Trungpa/Shambhala community Ray famously broke away from. (Pro-tip: charismatic men splitting off from charismatic groups to form their own groups are waving red flags right in your face.)

The shame-scented grace period within which people have been able to quietly rebrand and move on is now over. We’re in a golden age of cult journalism. Skepticism is at an all-time high. And the yoga labour market is simply too saturated to skip town and just hang out another shingle. There’s no room left for blank slates. But there is room for honest growth and resilience.

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Four Groups of Stakeholders

What do we do with the knowledge that our education is compromised by the unaddressed abuse histories of our schools? Let’s first get clear on who wants to do something.

In my experience so far, people relate to their abusive groups in four modes of descending intensity. I’ll briefly describe them here to narrow down who my real audience is here (spoiler alert: it’s group 3), because that audience has the burden of being surrounded by people (groups 1+2) who used to be friends and associates, but have now revealed insupportable values.

  1. Doubled-down Devotees. Take a look (trigger warning) at this petition organized by Russian Ashtanga students. And this one, organized by a Bulgarian student of Manouso Manos. Here are folks who show the classic hard-cultic habits of absolute denial, DARVO, black-and-white thinking, and bounded choice. For these folks, revelations of abuse by Jois and Manos cannot be true, but must be evil, must be motivated by hate and jealousy for sincere practitioners like them who have found the truth. These folks are the life-support system for the high-demand group before it implodes fully, or runs out of recruitment possibilities. That these two petitions target non-English speakers shows that the most recalcitrant elements of a cult will always evade responsibility in their home lands and languages to go for broke abroad.
  2. Reformer-Apologists. These respectable bystanders are often able to admit that their guru was a flawed man. Oddly, this can automatically increase their own social capital, because they are said to be showing wisdom and forgiveness. “Jois was only human,” they say, never naming the behaviour as criminal. They are even less likely to acknowledge that the criminality was enabled by the organization. Their statements and actions consistently ignore or minimize survivor testimony, and seem guided primarily by the need to limit liability and preserve the idea that the practice of the organization itself (as continued on through their virtue) will be enough to solve all problems. They typically argue that the practice can be separated from the abuser at the centre of the organization, even when they themselves enabled the abuser, and owe him a chunk of their social status. Most of these folks have financial positions to defend in relation to the organization. I’ve talked with many survivors who say that these folks are far more harmful in their behaviours than those in group 1, because reformer apologists pretend to care, but then go about business as usual. In the worst cases, they go so far as to take on reformer roles within the organization, even while shutting down survivor voices.
  3. The Disillusioned-Sincere. This is the group of people who are worth talking to about how to move forward with integrity. These are folks who professionalized through an abusive school. They may or may not have known about the abuse at the time they were on the inside. If they didn’t, they may have felt something. If they did, they might have frozen in response to it and haven’t known what to do since. They generally finished their educations and then struck out on their own, but were always low enough on the totem pole that it would have been a risk to clearly differentiate from the group. They’ve had good learning experiences, and they value the shreds of community they have left, but they also question what unspoken things they picked up. They can feel lingering weirdnesses, silences, and secrets. Most of all, they want to reclaim whatever it was that drew them to practice in the beginning, and to extract that from the mud. They know it’s worth keeping and sharing with others.
  4. The Long-Time-Gone Independents. People like Angela Farmer, Donna Farhi, and Diane Bruni are far enough away from their abusive learning communities that they’ve had time to feel and model the empowerment of personal creativity. They’re in a good place in relation to the systems that booted them out or that they had to leave, but it wasn’t always easy.

The iron laws of cultic allegiance mean that for the most part, people in groups 1+2 will only ever be able to serve their own diminishing markets. They’re either too indoctrinated or conflicted to care about or have the ability to move beyond their groups to show the general public that they’ve learned something beyond what their leader taught and his enablers rationalized.

Folks in Group #2 might move at some point to #3, but only if they get pushed off the island by fellow Group #2ers. I think there’s too much at stake in terms of identity formation for them to go on their own.

But if you’re in Group #3, there are three categories of action I believe you can take to reparatively and positively move forward.

 

I. Personal Inventory and Therapy:

As a Disillusioned-Sincere person, it’s tough to realize that your educational affiliation is compromised, or worse — that it has value to the extent that the group’s leaders suppressed abuse histories. But here we are.

My sense is that personal reckoning in most cases has to come first in order to get over the guilt and shame responses that impede being able to truly listen to and centre survivor voices, and let them carry reform forward, or conceptualize a new way of doing things altogether. So here are some thoughts I hope are helpful:

  1. It’s an unregulated profession in which male charisma — not competence, not kindness — has been the primary currency of value. It’s not surprising that the power dynamics are bad. You didn’t make the system up, and you wouldn’t have chosen it if offered a choice. But you can take responsibility for your part.
  2. If the group you were part of was indeed cultic, there is no shame in having been recruited. You know you didn’t sign up for abuse. The group hid that part from you.
  3. Educating yourself on how high-demand groups work can be really liberating. Here’s a great reading list from Janja Lalich.
  4. Don’t get caught up in the meaningless shame spiral of thinking that, for instance, the victims of Jois judge you harshly because you love Ashtanga. They don’t care what you love to do with your body, as long as you’re not hurting anybody else. That shame is a black-and-white defence against moving forward.
  5. You may have been a bystander to harm. Or you may have perpetuated harm. You can go to therapy to explore how that might have happened, and how you feel about it. But keep in mind that the group may have taught you to do exactly that, and that there were strong mechanisms in place to egg you on and shut you up.
  6. You don’t have to totally forgive yourself for having been there in order to do a good job with the next two categories, and the main point is not to make yourself feel better. But if you are gentle with yourself you’ll have less of your own stuff in the way moving forward.

 

II. Repair:

The baseline, ground-zero instructions for how to listen to and support those your organization abused are in this white paper by Karen Rain and Jubilee Cooke: “How to Respond to Sexual Abuse Within a Yoga or Spiritual Community With Competency and Accountability.” Please read it, digest it, and share it with everyone you can. Follow up, to the best of your ability, on its distinct suggestions (I’ve added some terms in brackets to broaden the scope):

  1. Seek education from experts outside of the community [on all aspects of equality and justice, for no yoga or Buddhist organizations have this as a focus].
  2. Learn about sexual [physical, emotional] violence.
  3. Talk in a way that supports survivors and does not cause further trauma or perpetuate rape culture.
  4. Be accountable.
  5. Understand and address the shortcomings of the organization.
  6. Design policies and practices that help prevent further sexual [physical, emotional, financial] abuse.
  7. Utilize resources.

Here’s yet another tool that Karen Rain has offered for Jois-identified teachers who want to do the right thing. They can take this pledge,which commits to stepping back from any leadership in reform.

If you know that you have some bystanderism or enabling in your past, it might make sense to personally apologize to those you impacted. However, it’s anyone’s guess whether they want to hear from you, and there’s no telling how it will go if you do reach out.

In considering repair, let’s think about money as well. As an example, check out this still from this famous video released in 1991:

Jois stands in the centre. From the right we see Maty Ezraty, Eddie Stern, Chuck Miller, Tim Miller, Richard Freeman, and Karen Haberman (now Rain). Jois died a wealthy man, and five of these students went on to have very lucrative careers. There are reports that Ezraty’s net worth at the time of her recent death was 15M USD. Karen Rain, by contrast, had to leave the Ashtanga world, and her career, because she was able to discern that Jois was assaulting her and other students. Most of her colleagues on that stage alongside her knew what Jois was doing to women. Rain had to leave what she loved behind and start over.

Maybe at some point someone will be able to collect data on the amounts of money that survivors of abuse in yoga and Buddhist communities have had to spend on therapy and lost wages. In some cases, groups of survivors might find themselves in class action territory.

Until then, do what you can to support and platform survivors of your organization. And you can go farther than that by refusing to participate in yoga financial structures that suck profits up to the top. As with any vertical system, wealth accumulates because it gets stolen from others. You can re-orient yourself in relation to this by moving towards yoga service in public health spaces. See the Yoga Service Council for more details.

 

III. Moving towards Protection, Mitigation, and Freedom

Protection

This is where I pitch my book, because the last section is called “Better Practices and Safer Spaces: Conclusion and Workbook”, and it goes into detail about how to recognize cultic dynamics and how to think critically about group-based spiritual practice. It contains several frameworks meant to foster protection and safety. One such framework is the PRISM method, which I use in consulting. Another calls for a “Scope of Practice for the Yoga Humanities”, in which I argue that it’s not enough for yoga teachers to adhere to a physical SOP that would govern things like touch and unlicensed dietary advice, but for teachers to abide by standards of humility and self-restraint in the areas where they can most easily manipulate the emotions and intellects of students.

At this point I also believe that the staunchly anti-regulatory attitude of the (especially American-dominated) yoga industry has to be called out for enabling abuse. This is a very contentious topic, but I’ll just give one example to prove my point:

It was not only internally reported, but publicly reported, in 1991, that Manouso Manos was committing sexual assault and misconduct on a regular basis. Had yoga teaching in California at that time been a licensed profession, he would have been barred for life. It wasn’t and he wasn’t, so he was free to go about his business after being “forgiven” by Iyengar.

I don’t know how licensing could or should work, but I do know that a blanket rejection of the very idea regulatory oversight is an ongoing slap in the face to abuse victims in the industry. What that attitude basically says is “The consequences of everyone being unaccountable to a college or licensing board are not as important as my freedom.” That’s immoral.

Mitigation

One of the most powerful assertions and recommendations that Rain and Cooke make in their article is this:

Accreditation through an organization lacking transparency, accountability, or reparations for abuse is inadequate for establishing safety. Upgrade accreditation through an uncompromised yoga organization or other educational avenue.

Let that sink in for a moment. What it’s saying is that those certificates from Pune and Mysore that people have been waving around for years are now liabilities. They thought they were showing their competency, but now they show corruption.

What Rain and Cooke are saying here is that a flawed certification can and must be upgraded. You have be able to show yourself, your community, and the public what you have done to mitigate your prior education. This is obviously the best thing to do. In a world of workshops, why not pursue the knowledge that will show real leaning? Even without the need to mitigate your resume, taking a trauma-sensitive certification would be an excellent thing to do.

 

Freedom

Eddie Stern is a central figure in the Jois tragedy. He knew that Jois was assaulting women at least as early as 2001, when his student Anneke Lucas disclosed to him that Jois assaulted her (PAAIC p. 319-20). Yet, he went on to host Jois on many tours, and in 2012 released the book Guruji, in which close to 40 devotees of Jois give their hagiographical accounts of his mystic power, and no-one breathes a word of his criminality. Stern’s co-editor Guy Donahaye has disclaimed the book and promoted an accountability gesture for Ashtanga teachers to sign. Here’s Donahaye’s statement on the book:

Since his death, KPJ has been elevated to a position of sainthood. Part of this promotion has been due to the book of interviews I collected and published with Eddie Stern as “Guruji: A Portrait of Sri K Pattabhi Jois” which paints a positive picture of his life and avoids exploring the issues of injury and sexual assault. In emphasizing only positive stories it has done more to cement the idea that he was a perfect yogi, which he clearly was not.

By burnishing his image, we make it unassailable – it makes us doubt the testimony of those he abused. This causes further harm to those whose testimony we deny and to ourselves.

I would like to offer my sincere apologies to all victims who were harmed by KPJ or by his teachings as passed through his students for my part in cultivating this image of perfection that denies the suffering and healing of many. I would also like to apologize for taking so long to write this – it was not easy to do.

Aside from a poorly-presented series of quotes in the New Yorker, Stern has remained publicly silent on the issue of institutional abuse in Ashtanga. And his new bio note scrubs all reference to Jois.

Here’s a thought experiment: without his connections to Jois, would Stern have been able to build the networking power that enables him to now release a book with a forward by Deepak Chopra, or be the fly-in asana guy for the Walton family’s upcoming conference? (This brings us back to money, see above.) What does it mean that Jois has now vanished from his history?

Whenever someone asks me what they should do about their prior affiliation with the Jois family, Manos, Satyananda, or Choudhury, I can basically say: “Don’t do what Stern does.”

Here’s what transparency, which I believe leads to freedom, looks like:

  • Fully own your educational past, and your relationships.
  • Show how you’ve updated your education.
  • If you feel that you were in a high-demand group, this is not a point of shame if you can show what you’ve learned from it. If you have to make amends to anyone before spilling it, do it: it’s the right thing to do anyway.
  • Within the bounds of legal risk, be frank about both what you learned to do and what you learned not to do. If you can refer to mainstream articles to make your point about your former school, that should be safe. I am not giving legal advice here, but I can say in general that the test for defamation is that what you say about your past needs to be untrue for you to be in legal jeopardy. That said, people with money can sue over anything.
  • If it’s not your style or it wouldn’t be appropriate or would be legally dangerous to share about your past in a confrontational way, you could instead write a manifesto of values that clearly names dynamics that you have suffered and will continue to work against and reverse.

Owning your past, flaws and all, can give a new sense of creative and educational opportunity. Erasing trauma and history does not lead to freedom, but working with both may.

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The List:

Note: The organizations on this incomplete list are all different. What they share is social power that has survived unresolved abuse histories of different varieties. Often this involves the lieutenants of abusive leaders assuming routinized leadership positions by burying the truth about the organization’s origins and how they have benefited from the silence of the organization’s victims.

Yoga orgs:

 
Ashtanga Yoga:
 
Bikram Yoga
 
Jivamukti Yoga
 
Anusara Yoga
 
Kundalini Yoga
 
KYHF Chennai
‘Legal Closure | September 2014’. http://kausthub.com/legalclosure.
 
Satyananda Yoga
J Pankhania and J Hargreaves. ‘Culture of Silence: Satyananda Yoga’. 12/22/2017. https://www.theluminescent.org/2017/12/a-culture-of-silence-satyananda-yoga.html
 
SYDA Yoga (Muktananda/Gurumayi)
 
Rajneesh/OSHO
 
Himalayan Institute
Amma

Buddhist orgs:

Rigpa
 
Shambhala
Dharma Ocean
Against the Stream (Noah Levine)
Triratna (FWBO)

“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”

Update: IYNAUS Apologizes to Manos Victims; Abhijata Iyengar Acknowledges Abuse at Convention

In an email sent out to members last night, the IYNAUS Executive Council for the first time apologized directly to the women who gave their testimonies to the independent investigation into Manouso Manos. The email also details commitments to reform. Its content resonates with several of the guidelines laid out by Karen Rain and Jubilee Cooke in their recent article “How to Respond to Sexual Abuse Within a Yoga or Spiritual Community With Competency and Accountability.”

The apology coincided with a speech given by Abhijata Iyengar at the current convention in Dallas, which continues through Wednesday. By email, IYNAUS President David Carpenter reported that Iyengar

devoted 30 minutes or so to discussing her own experience being molested, stating unequivocally that sexual touch is unacceptable, telling individuals not to fear coming forward with complaints, expressing empathy for victims, and reemphasizing the centrality of physical adjustments in Iyengar Yoga and their benefits.

A transcript of Iyengar’s remarks is forthcoming. Continue reading “Update: IYNAUS Apologizes to Manos Victims; Abhijata Iyengar Acknowledges Abuse at Convention”

After Manouso: Questions for Iyengar Yoga Teachers and Leaders

If you haven’t heard: the professional independent and investigation (trigger warning) into decades of allegations of sexual assault by Manouso Manos under the guise of “yoga adjustments” has found enough credible evidence and corroboration to paint a picture of serial criminality, enabled by the propaganda of his genius and the silencing of his survivors.

The report has forced IYNAUS to oust him, and the Iyengar family to withdraw permission to use their trademark. Neither IYNAUS or the Iyengars have offered any public words of apology, support, or restorative justice to the women who gave their testimony. Neither organization has used the appropriate terminology to describe what the investigation substantiated, relying on euphemisms like “inappropriate sexual touching” instead of assault or digital rape.

Perhaps the careful language is meant to shield both organizations against civil suits. But along with the absent apology, the overall impact is the suggestion that Iyengar Yoga and the legacy of BKS Iyengar are the true victims of Manouso Manos — not women like Ann West, whose 2018 assault complaint against Manos was initially dismissed by the IYNAUS Ethics Committee. Continue reading “After Manouso: Questions for Iyengar Yoga Teachers and Leaders”

Facing Investigation into Allegations of Sexual Assault, Manouso Manos Goes Full DARVO. IYNAUS Is Having None of It.

On March 8th, Manouso Manos posted a letter on his website, announcing his resignation from the Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States. In its claims and defensive-aggressive tone, the letter positions Manos as the target of an unfair independent investigation into allegations of sexual assault potentially dating back to 1992. It also pits him against IYNAUS as the legitimate representative of the Iyengar family’s wishes, wisdom, and legacy.

Manos’s statements were elaborated in a 23-page support statement from his lawyers. Together, the documents present an object lesson in what psychologist Jennifer Freyd has defined as DARVO: a strategy used by those accused of crimes to turn back scrutiny and accountability. Continue reading “Facing Investigation into Allegations of Sexual Assault, Manouso Manos Goes Full DARVO. IYNAUS Is Having None of It.”

Manos Disciple Re: Manos Complainant — “She’s the only one who’s going to be hurt.”

Manos Disciple Re Manos Complainant — “She's the only one who's going to be hurt.”

On October 30th, IYNAUS announced the opening of an independent investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct made against Manouso Manos. “The independent investigation will not be limited to Ann West’s complaint. It will include other allegations covering the time period from January 1, 1992 to the present.” West’s complaint was dismissed in September, but many members felt the investigation was compromised by conflicts of interest.

IYNAUS has not suspended Manos pending the outcome of the investigation of multiple allegations, nor for making what was most likely a deceptive statement to the Ethics Committee that initially cleared him. He continues to teach.

One staunch supporter — a seemingly popular middle-aged male yoga teacher  — went to a Manos event over the past weekend, and then took to Facebook to harass and smear the complainants: Continue reading “Manos Disciple Re: Manos Complainant — “She’s the only one who’s going to be hurt.””

Why Manouso Manos Was Suspended: Meeting Notes and Internal Yoga Journal Communications from 1989/90

Why Manouso Manos Was Suspended: Meeting Notes and a Letter from 1989/90

Recently recovered notes from a 1989 faculty meeting of the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco show that Manouso Manos publicly admitted to sexual misconduct and that fellow faculty members recommended he be suspended. Further minutes from a subsequent meeting show that the recommendation was accepted. And a letter written by Donna Farhi in 1990, addressed to Yoga Journal on behalf of the California Yoga Teacher’s Association, corroborates a 1991 article by Bob Frost in the San Jose Mercury News “West” Magazine. The letter describes more extreme misconduct previously reported.

These three documents contradict recent statements made by Manos’s spokesman to KQED:

A spokesman for Manos said the [San Jose Mercury News] West article was inaccurate, saying Manos wasn’t suspended but voluntarily left (he said he didn’t know the reason for his departure) and didn’t seek reinstatement but was invited to return. He also said Manos denied past and current allegations of sexual misconduct. He didn’t know why Manos hadn’t sought a correction to Frost’s article if he believed there were inaccuracies.

The faculty meeting notes show that a motion was tabled to suspend Manos indefinitely from all teaching responsibilities at the Institute. It passed. It was also recommended that Manos be removed from “Assessments”, “India selection”, and from his advisory role to the 1990 San Diego convention. Manos attended the first part of the faculty meeting and admitted to having a sexual relationship with a student over four and a half years. The notes record that Manos said he was seeking psychiatric help. Continue reading “Why Manouso Manos Was Suspended: Meeting Notes and Internal Yoga Journal Communications from 1989/90”

Notes From the Iyengar Ethics Committee Ruling Dismissing A Recent Allegation Against Manouso Manos

How The Iyengar Ethics Committee Handled the Manos Allegation: Meeting Notes

On September 10th, the all-volunteer IYNAUS Ethics Committee met to consider an allegation of in-class sexual assault brought by Iyengar teacher Ann West against Advanced Senior Iyengar teacher Manouso Manos. They ruled to dismiss the allegation for lack of evidence.

Manos currently holds a seat on the Senior Council of IYNAUS. At least one of the Ethics Committee members is a long term student of Manos, enrolled in his three year Iyengar Yoga Therapeutics course.

The ruling, along with notes from that meeting, show that the committee glossed over past allegations against Manos. They questioned West’s perceptions of the incident, but found Manos’s explanation of his intentions plausible. One member suggested the committee punt the file to the Iyengar family in Pune. Continue reading “Notes From the Iyengar Ethics Committee Ruling Dismissing A Recent Allegation Against Manouso Manos”