High-demand groups hurt members and their families directly in physical, emotional, and financial ways.<\/p>\n
That harm is contagious.<\/p>\n
In this post I’ll look at two instances in which the primary tactic of the high-demand group \u2014 deception<\/a> \u2014 radiates harm outward, wasting the time, resources, and emotional labour of well-meaning people who come into contact with the group and wind up promoting it, even as it belies their values. One comes from academia, and the other comes from the mental health world.<\/p>\n The 2016 article \u201cYoga As Embodied Feminist Praxis: Trauma, Healing, and Community Based Responses to Violence\u201d (1) by Beth Catlett and Mary Bunn is built on meticulous fieldwork that assesses the efficacy of yoga programming in communities living with and recovering from violence. Bunn\u2019s contribution comes from her work with Project Air, a non-profit bringing services including yoga instruction to HIV-infected survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Catlett\u2019s focus is on the Urban Yogis programme for marginalized youth in Queens, New York.<\/p>\n Urban Yogis, as Catlett and Bunn report, is co-directed by an anti-violence activist named Erica Ford, and Eddie Stern of Ashtanga New York. Interviews with Stern and time spent in his service classes impressed the scholars with his humility and altruism, and dispelled their reservations about whether the patriarchal structure of Ashtanga Yoga could really serve a pro-social mission.<\/p>\n \u201cOur engagement with the Urban Yogis program,\u201d they conclude,<\/p>\n \u201chas inspired a confidence that a feminist-informed social justice orientation to community engagement emphasizing ethics of care, commitment, shared power, and mutual political vision is indeed possible.\u201d(2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Had Catlett, Bunn, and their editors known about the active and unresolved abuse history in Ashtanga yoga when they began their research? If they had known, would they have chosen to highlight an Ashtanga yoga community in a book about feminist-oriented social values?<\/p>\n By email, the scholars vigorously confirmed they hadn\u2019t<\/em> known.<\/p>\n \u201cOur starting point,\u201d they wrote,<\/p>\n is always to listen to, and take seriously, the voices\/experiences of those who have experienced violence and abuse \u2014 this is the way that we can learn about the ways that power operates in institutions, and these voices are important to inform our work to dismantle unjust systems of power, privilege, and oppression within such institutions.<\/p>\n We knew nothing of these experiences of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment at the writing of our chapter, and therefore, this new information about the abuse of power within the ashtanga community is something with which we will have to grapple as our work moves forward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But why<\/em> didn\u2019t they know? Was the research na\u00efve, overcredulous? Perhaps. But it\u2019s also true that certain high-demand nodes of the Ashtanga yoga world hid crucial facts.<\/p>\n Stern himself plays a role in that story through his editorship of the propagandistic book Guruji: A Portrait of Sri K Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students<\/em>, The volume’s co-editor, Guy Donahaye, recently distanced himself from the book,\u00a0writing<\/a>:<\/p>\n Since his death, Guruji 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\u2026 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.<\/p>\n By burnishing his image, we make it unassailable \u2014 it makes us doubt the testimony of those he abused. This causes further harm to those whose testimony we deny and to ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How then, does Stern become cited as a facilitator of “feminist-informed social justice” in the yoga world? How does he come to occupy that space to the exclusion of one of the hundreds of people, mostly women, that have been teaching consent-based trauma-sensitive yoga to at-risk populations for years?<\/p>\n Consider the enthusiastic undergrad and Master\u2019s students who will read Catlett and Bunn\u2019s essay and come away with a partial view of the method and community under discussion. Will there be a correction issued? Who will see it?<\/p>\n And how will Jois\u2019s victims feel about reading feminist academic accolades to their former male colleague who has yet to publicly acknowledge the abuse? Months of fieldwork by two feminist scholars are now of questionable value, not because they don\u2019t have productive observations to contribute about yoga service in general, but because their good will was confounded<\/em>.<\/p>\n Another example:<\/p>\n Trauma and addictions recovery specialist Gabor Mat\u00e9 works closely with a Canadian organization called Beyond Addiction<\/a>, which offers a yoga-based training programme \u201cfor individuals seeking to develop healthy habits and overcome addictive behaviour, for health professionals and yoga teachers who work with addiction.\u201d<\/p>\n The yoga community providing content for the program is 3HO: the \u201cHappy, Healthy, and Holy\u201d organization founded by Yogi Bhajan in 1969. Recent scholarship has shown<\/a> that Bhajan\u2019s postmodern \u201cKundalini\u201d blend of Tantric Yoga and Sikhism has few historical roots in any stream of Indian wisdom tradition, despite the community\u2019s lofty claims.<\/p>\n More importantly, anyone who Googles \u201c3HO abuse\u201d will find that the organization settled two lawsuits against Bhajan, including one case of rape and confinement<\/a> brought by a woman who entered his harem of \u201csecretaries\u201d at age eleven.<\/p>\n Did Mat\u00e9 do a basic background check on the organization he\u2019s promoting to his platform of 100K Facebook followers? Should he be concerned that a person with a trauma load might come to one of his 3HO-related trainings, do that Google search halfway through it, see that the Kundalini instructors he\u2019s collaborating with still quote Yogi Bhajan without reservation? Should he be concerned if that person feels both triggered and betrayed?<\/p>\n \u201cDr. Mat\u00e9 is well aware of the possibility and actuality of abuse in any spiritual or medical culture,\u201d wrote his assistant in response to an emailed request for comment.<\/p>\n That\u2019s just not good enough.<\/p>\n Bottom line: if you’re going to platform a yoga community, method, or personality \u2014 especially with the altruistic intention of using those resources to help vulnerable people \u2014 do your research. Prepare to find out that that community, method, or personality has likely failed its vulnerable members and followers \u2014 and in the worst cases, traumatized them.<\/p>\n Then: work out how you’re going to relate to that community, method, or personality with transparency, integrity, and justice, in such a way that the patterns of harm, enabling, or bypassing stops with you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n (1) In\u00a0Berila, Beth, et al.\u00a0<\/span>Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change: an Intersectional Feminist Analysis<\/span><\/i>. Lexington Books, 2016.\u00a0259-275.<\/span><\/p>\n (2) Ibid. 267.<\/p>\n