On Saturday, LA yoga teacher and Bollywood dance instructor Hemalayaa Behl posted a blog\u00a0about how people who practice yoga should really manifest better moods through dancing and naps so that they can get off all those\u00a0inauthentic anti-depressant medications.<\/p>\n
She confessed that hearing about fellow yoga teachers who use “happy pills” triggered disappointed memories of her own mother, who didn’t have the strength to pull herself up out of her mental health challenges by her yoga\u00a0bootstraps.<\/p>\n
The post was an ugly, patronizing, reductionary, ignorant erasure of the experience of vast numbers of people who already\u00a0battle widespread\u00a0stigmatization of medications they need, in the worst cases, to keep them alive. To her great good credit, Behl has admitted as much through a heartfelt apology<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unfortunately,\u00a0the tsunami of negative response — and\u00a0Behl’s contrition — has now prompted her to remove her original post. This means that the thousands of fruitful and polarizing comments it has generated through links so far, not to mention the hours of intense work that writers like Charlotte Bell<\/a>, Alyssa Royse<\/a>, and Camicia Bennet<\/a> put in to passionately and thoughtfully responding to Behl are now pointing at an empty space. Taking the post down steals time, energy, and insight from all of those people, and insight from those who would learn from the full exchange. Fortunately, the web cache gives it all back<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In addition to her apology, it’s too bad that her PR sense (or people) didn’t encourage her to make even better lemonade: keep the post up, headed by an apology, disclaimer, links to the responses, and the resources she’s asking better-informed people to provide. It all could have gotten a lot better.<\/p>\n Though it can be dangerous (in the original post, Behl offers to help people get off medication with her workshops), I’m positive that the majority of people in modern yoga culture can forgive the exuberance and\u00a0na\u00efvet\u00e9\u00a0that can mask insecurity and empathy failure. Many of us have been there, because projecting one’s personal revelations into universal prescriptions seems to be a yogic reflex.<\/p>\n (I’m wondering if a medication should be developed for just this. Yogic self-projection inhibitors: YSPIs.)<\/p>\n Realizing that you’ve overreached and being able to talk about it with transparency and gravitas — and allowing others to talk about it by not hiding — has got to be found somewhere there in the eight limbs: probably between satya<\/em>, aparigraha<\/em>, and good old Isvara-P<\/em>.<\/p>\n And\u00a0honestly, none of this Behl’s fault. Nobody’s alone in this. Her view isn’t some monstrous anomaly. Stigmatization is the bitcoin of self-help. Yoga culture as a whole overreaches and self-aggrandizes, and anyone who excels in it is probably at risk for\u00a0getting really good at these two skills. Yoga culture as a whole has a hard time distinguishing existential inquiry from neoliberal “I am my own master”- ness. Yoga culture holds itself accountable to precious little except its own psychological hazing. Combine this with a large practitioner population traumatized into belligerence by a lack of universal health care, scientific illiteracy, and the ministrations of opportunists, and Behl’s blog\u00a0is really nothing out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n I think we also have to understand that the blogging and social media worlds are both real and ephemeral. We should now expect online responses to come with as much speed and fury as nervous responses. And like nervous responses, they can trigger people for years, and are best framed accordingly if we leave them lying around. Blogs don’t live\u00a0in your attic or garage, after all. Unlike nervous responses, they leave highly visible traces which can continue to be discussed when calmer moods prevail. Those traces can link us together in undiscovered ways — all the more so if we can manage to not dissociate from them and shut them down.<\/p>\n What will we find in the links? Knee-jerk reactions to our discomfort with biomedicine?\u00a0An inability to hold space for experiences we can’t understand? Or a woman who was\u00a0just trying to say “I really hope that what happened to my mom doesn’t happen to me”?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ____<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One thing I’m sure we will find if we keep looking is the\u00a0intense confusion of epistemologies that plagues modern yoga culture. Epistemology is brainiac for\u00a0how do we know what we know, how does knowledge change, who do we trust, how do we trust ourselves, and how far. MPY never seems to know whether it wants intuition or evidence,\u00a0fails to investigate where either of these come from, how they’re different or what each might be good for.<\/p>\n