{"id":5867,"date":"2016-08-10T09:27:25","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T14:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=5867"},"modified":"2016-08-10T09:27:25","modified_gmt":"2016-08-10T14:27:25","slug":"guru-or-guide-whats-the-scope-of-practice-a-second-response-to-christopher-wallis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/guru-or-guide-whats-the-scope-of-practice-a-second-response-to-christopher-wallis\/","title":{"rendered":"Guru or Guide: What\u2019s the Scope of Practice? A Second Response to Christopher Wallis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Wallis responded to my response to his article on guru-abuse prevention \u2013 check his comment here<\/a>. We’re having\u00a0a cordial exchange about an important topic — how strange for\u00a0Yogaland! — and a lot of folks have seemed to appreciate the themes explored so far, so I\u2019ll respond again. Wallis was kind enough to direct message with me to clarify certain points, so I’ll refer to\u00a0those as well.<\/p>\n

In my previous post, I offered a positional statement:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing here as a non-Indian yoga practitioner who has interacted with echoes of the Indian guru-shishya system that have been borrowed, adapted, appropriated, or manipulated during the globalization phase of yoga.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ll expand that to say:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not qualified to comment on the content of Wallis\u2019 religio-philosophy, so I\u2019ll confine my focus to what he says about its pedagogy. My content ignorance may blinder me to some subtle mechanism of integrity that\u2019s second nature to him. Or it may be a strength, insofar as spiritual content so often obscures the structure\u00a0of material relations. I don\u2019t know. Also: I\u2019m writing as a two-time college-dropout who cycled through two cultic environments and spent the better part of the last decade healing from it in part by\u00a0informally researching what cults\u00a0are and how they work, and the last few years formally researching the shadows of yoga pedagogy for a book that started out as being about injuries but every day is becoming more about the embodied effects of patriarchy in modern yoga and how people reach out of them. I\u2019ll let Wallis share as much about his own background relationships beyond his formal bio<\/a> as he wants, but for now it suffices to say that we come at the guru problem from very<\/em> different angles, which makes friendly dialogue all the more useful.<\/p>\n

First, I appreciated Wallis\u2019 transparency in his comments, not only with regard to the incompatibility of Indian guru paradigms with non-Indian external and internal power structures, but with regard to his own liminal status as a scholar, devotee, and spiritual guide. Through some yoga of fate and choice, he\u2019s in an odd position, trying to stay objective about something he not only dearly loves but wants to share with others. He likely braves considerable side-eye at the academic conferences. His\u00a0position offers a progressive opportunity in a old-timey guise \u2013 the potential to reform a power dynamic by imagining its\u00a0idealization from a time in which there was little daylight between scholar and saint.<\/p>\n

Wallis\u2019 response\u00a0is rich and long, so I\u2019ll limit my focus to four highlights that I hope raise helpful questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The small print about \u201cinformed consent\u201d as applied to spiritual\/transformational relationships (it means nothing without a defined scope of practice),<\/li>\n
  2. his reframing of \u201cguru\u201d as \u201cguide\u201d,<\/li>\n
  3. his dismissal of psychoanalytic discourse,<\/li>\n
  4. and the unexamined\u00a0social power hiding in the narrative of \u201cawakening\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Informed Consent Demands a Scope of Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

    An important detail I neglected in my first response is that the informed consent of the modern therapeutic relationship is always bounded by scope of practice<\/em>. Wallis and other commenters erroneously compare an idealized spiritual mentorship dyad with professor\/student and doctor\/patient models. The error is that both the prof and the doctor are mandated to know when they are beyond scope.<\/p>\n

    When we\u2019re talking about something as indefinable as “waking up”, using a practice that accommodates all manner of techniques and purports to speak to all areas of life, what exactly is the scope? Were there aspects of Wallis\u2019 life and internality that were off-limits to his guru, Gurumayi, whose bio note<\/a> claims that her\u00a0“identification with the supreme Self is uninterrupted”?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Even in the most sophisticated discourses of yoga therapeutics \u2013 the literature produced by the IAYT \u2013 theorists struggle<\/a> to establish the scope of practice. It’s ridiculously\u00a0hard\u00a0to define what yoga therapy is doing \u2013 not in the easy way of listing all of the possibilities it loves to explore, but in the difficult ways of establishing\u00a0what those possibilities actually do, and knowing when you\u2019re under water and have to refer outwards.<\/p>\n

    Wallis shares this struggle, as shown in the first comment exchange on this post<\/a>, in which the commenter asks for advice on getting to know his\u00a0true being and releasing the “story (about life) I’ve been telling myself”, after disclosing he’s\u00a0suffered from anxiety for eight years. He also\u00a0says he’s\u00a0resisted medication. Wallis doesn\u2019t state his scope with regard to mental health issues, nor does he recommend professional support. He suggests learning about “The Work” of New Age charismatic Byron Katie. (Katie’s<\/a>\u00a0not a mental health professional either.) He also pitches his book and course to the commenter, implying these are\u00a0sufficient therapies for long-term anxiety. (Wallis\u00a0clarified by direct message that he\u00a0has referred\u00a0other students on to therapists, psychiatrists, body workers, and shamans.)<\/p>\n

    Scope of practice in Yogaland is a vexing issue because premodern naturopathies like Ayurveda and Siddha medicine overlap with Tantrik paradigms of subtle body materialism, in which chakras are not just psychological or spiritual centers, but physiological sites. In this world, mantras can be prescribed to reinvigorate sluggish circulation, or you can wear gemstones to illicit the support of a particular planet for a specific tissue, or you can sponsor a puja to\u00a0help with your meditation, scripture study, or sex life.<\/p>\n

    This porousness between categories of experience and study is part of the modern attraction to these arts: their confident holism pushes back against the hedging fragmentation of tentative specialists. The modern patient\u00a0yearns for\u00a0their endocrinologist, rheumatologist, dietician, psychotherapist and religious minister to simply talk to each other. A Tantra-inspired yoga therapist or Ayurvedic practitioner offers the possibility that they could actually be the same person. We want round answers, complete answers, and the generalists\u00a0serve us well. But how do they know where their enthusiastic empathy ends and their grandiosity begins?<\/p>\n

    The professor and doctor are bound by other mechanisms that simply don\u2019t exist in the global spiritual marketplace: peer review and regulatory boards. These cumbersome and sloppy institutions oversee informed consent and scope of practice, so that the pressure to regulate the dyad is not solely on the individual interaction, which is so vulnerable to unconscious sadomasochism. In the absence of any of this support, Wallis finds himself\u00a0inviting me to poll his students to see how he\u2019s doing with power issues. No thanks. That\u2019s really his job, but how could\u00a0he do it with neutrality? His offer underscores the point: because the teaching part of his profession lacks the formal feedback mechanisms that other therapies mandate, it falls to zero-budget bloggers, journalists and cultural critics who love yoga to do the work. And who\u2019s peer-reviewing them\/me?<\/p>\n

    Other accountability options are emerging for spiritual teachers. My friend and co-author Michael Stone, for example, has instituted\u00a0this council<\/a> apparatus to handle student grievances. It seems the Buddhists are generally ten years ahead of yoga people in things like this.<\/p>\n

    Guru or Guide?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Wallis describes his progressive adaptation from the guru dynamic\u00a0to what he calls the \u201cdeshika\u201d structure. The word, he writes, translates as “guide”, and\u00a0“corrects for the \u2018basic power imbalance in the economy of spiritual transformation\u2019 that Remski is concerned about, since it seeks to educate and empower the student.\u201d He lists some of the elements at play: the teacher is not confused with the teachings, and that s\/he brokers practice instead of power. He explains that in his own teaching he tries to restrict himself from imposing normative values and commands.<\/p>\n

    By private message, Wallis confirmed that he\u2019s the first to be replacing the term \u201cguru\u201d with \u201cdeshika\u201d, but stopped short of saying that he\u2019s innovating the role, \u201cas I\u2019m sure others have described something similar.\u201d I appreciate the postmodern gesture of theorizing about who you are and what you\u2019re doing while you\u2019re doing it. But as a card-carrying postmodernist, I know from my own mistakes that that double task can be a powerful engine for self-justification. How can Wallis know that the theory with which he frames his project isn\u2019t rationalizing a more subtle transference process that attracts students to his transparency as a spiritual virtue? Can any\u00a0of his own teachers, like Adyashanti, help him sort that out? How can his students know that he isn\u2019t innovating a role discontinuous with the tradition that attracted them in the first place, while he uses\u00a0that tradition for validation?<\/p>\n

    Even if the deshika idea had sampradaya<\/em> or parampara<\/em> support, what would that mean in Wallis\u2019 case? The legitimacy of many global-era teachers of classical Tantra\u00a0has been torched by scandal. The field is a magnet for crazy-wisdom sex addicts. If Wallis wants to right the boat, Sanskrit accreditation from Oxford is definitely\u00a0a legitimating\u00a0move. But he\u2019ll face an additional transference and accountability challenge as the creator\u00a0of what basically amounts to a new lineage: an Anglophone version of Shaiva Tantra\u00a0that radically revisions its root principle of transmission, and demonstrates\u00a0this new role through the\u00a0unprecedented choices of an American interpreter.<\/p>\n

    Psychoanalysis, Or: What\u2019s Driving You?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Wallis and other commenters poked fun at my seeming reduction of yoga pedagogy to recursive familial dynamics. Fair enough: although I have written about the limits of the psychoanalytic literature I use here<\/a>. Where it is useful is approaching the unconscious drives behind our relationships and how we manage and manipulate self-perception. Consider this graf from Wallis\u2019 response:<\/p>\n

    As far as I\u2019m aware, virtually no one in Remski\u2019s circles has pointed out that the traditional model is effective in one important regard: when a student has enormous respect for his teacher, and venerates her as a conduit for lineage-transmission, it has the benefit of making him receive the practices she offers with much more gratitude and reverence, and of therefore committing to them more fully. Such was my case exactly: I\u2019m exceedingly lucky that my guru didn\u2019t abuse her authority, and the veneration I had for her inspired me to actually do the practices she gave me, when constitutionally I am far too lazy to have committed to them otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Effective for what? Reifying certain attachment patterns? Let\u2019s leave aside Wallis\u2019 attribution of his safety to \u201cluck\u201d. (Is that all we can offer ourselves and the culture?). Let’s bypass the generalization that Gurumayi \u201cdidn\u2019t abuse her authority\u201d. Wallis clarified by private message that she “didn’t abuse her authority in relation to me — but now that you mention it, I didn’t see her do so with anyone else in the three years I lived with her.” (Those who want to know more about Siddha Yoga complexities will find Liz Harris’ 1994 New Yorker article<\/a> of interest.)<\/p>\n

    Psychoanalytic\u00a0sensitivity can help us take a look at how Wallis’\u00a0narrative introduces what it fails to examine: What internal structures prime\u00a0the devotee to fall in love with the guru? Why do they need the guru? What were they looking for when they found him\/her? What\u2019s the difference between the seeker who plunges in to venerate and the religious tourist who says \u201cOh \u2013 she\u2019s interesting and weird\u201d? What\u2019s going on when the seeker publicly diminishes himself in relation to the guru?\u00a0I argue\u00a0that if these questions aren\u2019t front and centre it will be hard to understand why you fell in love with your guru or guide, and what the heck you\u2019re doing when you listen to them.<\/p>\n

    Psychoanalysis can be unscientific, crude, bourgeois, and self-absorbed — just like yoga! But it also forces you to ask a foundational question:\u00a0\u201cWhy do you need and love what you need and love?\u201d<\/p>\n

    In a comment thread, Wallis says that I\u2019m \u201cseduced by the religion of psychoanalysis.\u201d I disagree. I just read it as an amateur, take it seriously, study its internal conflicts, and meditate on it. Also, this quip is a little rich coming from someone who\u2019s been immersed in a religious community since the age of seven. Psychoanalysts might\u00a0call this a projection.<\/p>\n

    Layers of Power in \u201cAwakening\u201d: a Sketch\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Referring to a prior comment on his posting of my piece that wondered about my position on \u201cawakening\u201d, Wallis writes:<\/p>\n

    I do suspect that Matthew doesn’t really believe that spiritual awakening exists, at least the strong form of it. And why would *any* rational materialist who hasn’t experienced that radical spontaneous rewiring of the brain believe it is possible?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    It\u2019s just a Facebook comment, but let\u2019s pretend for a moment it\u2019s important, because it highlights a subtle mechanism of power in spiritual discourse. It\u2019s a classic argument from authority, wrapped with an armchair evaluation of my internal life. The authority of what? Having had an experience that the speaker or his followers describe as \u201cawakening\u201d. Here, Wallis gives me\u00a0a label (“rational materialist”) I can\u2019t remember ever applying to myself in more than a passing way, and then uses that label to attribute poverty to my inner life, and\u00a0litmus test my capacity to dialogue. For the record: I\u2019m pretty agnostic about every faith claim and knowledge discipline.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m not insulted: assessing my internal state is a sport for some. One guy began a slasher review of one of my books by admitting he hadn\u2019t read it. Then he said he didn\u2019t have to because he knew what kind of meditation experiences I have and haven\u2019t had. Of course I\u2019d never met him. I have met Wallis, and he isn\u2019t at all crass like that, and he\u2019s been terribly generous with his time and knowledge with me. But \u2013 and he can correct me if I\u2019m wrong \u2013 he seems to share with my reviewer a fetish object: a notion called \u201cawakening\u201d that categorizes people into in-crowds and out.<\/p>\n

    Wallis doesn\u2019t say explicitly that he\u2019s awake, but his comments about what \u201creally awake\u201d people know puts him in the in-crowd. I\u2019d like to know how this does anything in discourse beyond establishing power that out-crowd people then desire access to.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019ve had bizarre, terrifying, and illuminating experiences in meditation or while doing postures or other things. I also have a history of seizures, which has made me very interested in the intersections between mystic and neurological events. All of these experiences have rewired me in the sense that any experience can rewire a person. But I don\u2019t know what they are<\/em>. They have been mostly positive to the extent that I\u2019ve been able to mostly digest them, but I cannot track specific changes in myself to specific peak experiences. I understand why people use the language of \u201cawakening\u201d to refer to them, because they can present explosions of lucidity. But so do certain trauma responses. Peak experiences\u00a0can make you feel for a while like everything has changed. But so can seizures or good bowel movements.<\/p>\n

    \u201cNo wait!\u201d the advocates of \u2018awakening\u2019 will say. \u201cAwakening is different! It\u2019s so much bigger! Let\u2019s count the ways.\u201d Wallis makes the distinction this way:<\/p>\n

    I know, you’ve had powerful experiences in which you tasted your divine essence; but this is really not the same as properly waking up out of the belief that your thoughts, memories, and story have anything to do with who you really are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    How we narrativize peak experiences is up to us. But we shouldn\u2019t forget that assigning the property of \u201cawakened\u201d to ourselves or others is based entirely upon self-reporting influenced by scriptural suggestion and complicated\u00a0by the social capital wrapped up in being called awake. My point is that you can be awake or not — I don’t know — but telling somebody you are, or that somebody else is, creates power.<\/p>\n

    I can\u2019t think of a way of validating the claim of awakeness that steers clear of transference and countertransference: what people need to think about others, and what people need others to think about them. Bottom line: nobody can really say what \u201cawakeness\u201d is or who has it, because it\u2019s an internal state. So we should really look at who we want to have it, and why<\/em>. We also have to look at how it functions as a content-free currency of social capital in spiritual discourse.<\/p>\n

    Why content-free? Consider the Wallis post I originally responded to. I hope he will forgive me for paraphrasing one of its key arguments like this:<\/p>\n

    You can be awake and still be a jerk, or you can be awake and be integrated.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Question: what does the word \u201cawake\u201d add to the sentence above? Let\u2019s try removing it:<\/p>\n

    You can be a jerk, or you can be integrated.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Isn\u2019t it much more direct\u00a0without the in-crowd dogwhistle? Aren\u2019t we really only ever concerned\u00a0about whether people are jerks or integrated? What does a poorly-defined allusion to self-reported threshold experiences add, beyond mystification?<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s what I\u2019ve noticed over years of being in or around groups where some people believed they were awake or that they had had awakening experiences, or attributed them to others, while others hadn\u2019t. 1) Being awake is talked about with the same mystified, secretive charge as teenage sex was in my Catholic boys school of the 1980s: Did you do it? How far did you get?<\/em> 2) Men are more interested in it than women.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s my thought, which I’ll have to develop further at some point: the discourse of awakeness is what Derrida called phallogocentric<\/em>. It privileges masculine constructions of meaning and power expressed through transcendental terms that resist analysis. Derrida\u00a0used it to critique the entirety of Western intellectual history. But there’s an obvious overlap with\u00a0Yogaland in light of\u00a0the regressive sexual politics of a global Tantra administered almost exclusively by men, where even the most\u00a0thoughtful communities are still earnestly debating whether teachers should be allowed to sleep with students as part of a transmission process. In those discussions, notions of\u00a0“awakeness” — as either what guru has or what a student wants — easily complicates the analysis of behaviour.<\/p>\n

    Wallis is right about this: I don\u2019t know what \u201cawake\u201d means, and I don’t know how anybody else does. But I do know that the word itself is typically\u00a0used by men to register\u00a0status or to rationalize their actions and self-perceptions and means-to-ends, or those\u00a0of other men. I\u2019m not saying that this is how Wallis is using the term. I’m suggesting that it\u2019s an unexamined mechanism of social power at the heart of his narrative about spiritual life. “Awake”\u00a0is a transcendent signifier, impossible to evidence,\u00a0yet a defining aspect of a devotee’s or teacher’s social identity.\u00a0Mingled\u00a0with\u00a0the legacy of guru abuses Wallis\u00a0has inherited, it makes his democratizing, therapeutic task admirably ambitious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Christopher Wallis responded to my response to his article on guru-abuse prevention \u2013 check his comment here. We’re having a cordial exchange about an important topic — how strange for Yogaland! — and a lot of folks have seemed to appreciate the themes explored so far, so I\u2019ll respond again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,464,19,28],"tags":[479,477,55,478,480,481],"class_list":["post-5867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-blog","category-meditation","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy","tag-charisma","tag-consent-culture","tag-cult-abuse","tag-gurus","tag-kashmiri-shaivism","tag-siddha-yoga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}