I just had the pleasure of answering some interview questions posed by an old friend about the health care needs of ex-cult members.<\/p>\n
Such a great topic. I talked about digestive issues and depression and how reading Harry Potter to my five year-old has helped me recover from the abject disenchantment of spiritual abuse.<\/p>\n
It also made me remember a few other things, or see them slightly differently.<\/p>\n
I came to yoga after my cult years (1996-2003), and quickly began to professionalize into it. It made sense: I hadn\u2019t finished college, had travelled too much, didn\u2019t feel settled or productive, wanted and needed to connect with people and show value, etc. Part of what worked about that is that it offered an alternative\/unconventional pathway towards a job in which I wouldn\u2019t have to answer for the lost years.<\/p>\n
(As an aside: all this anxiety around yoga teacher\u2019s education and \u201cauthenticity\u201d is IMO heavily wrapped up not only in the fact that nobody\u2019s in charge, but in the biographical havoc and shame that high-demand groups wreck on people\u2019s lives. My gut says that most of those who accuse me and others of not having proper teachers \u2014 and therefore nothing worthwhile to say \u2014 are either covering up or spiritualizing their own cult abuse stories.)<\/em><\/p>\n The other part that worked was that both the practice and its professionalization seemed to grant a sense of agency and maybe even autonomy. Yoga culture wasn\u2019t a cult, or at least I hadn\u2019t run into specific yoga cults, yet. As a recovery zone, it seemed as wide-open as any new economy. Studios were opening with DIY pluck on the leading edge of gentrification, alongside art\/design shops and digital marketing startups. There was a sense that the world was wide open and everything was material to excavate, and that the basic premises of psychosomatic exploration would yield private but shareable wealth.<\/p>\n I now understand this was a late crest on the Human Potential Movement wave, which began to roll in 70s. And I suspect that the neoliberalism that these movements both fronted for and concealed managed to capitalize on whole swaths of people who felt the need to escape systems of control. Yoga really did become the religion of neoliberalism, not just because it was commodified as the sign of freedom and spiritualized flexibility in relation to the precariat, but because it really did embody freedom for people leaving abusive constellations. In many cases, it made only bodily demands upon devotees. It felt “grounded” that way.<\/p>\n In my specific case, the post-cult need for autonomy, playing out in the yoga zone, meant that I had no instinct nor education towards the protection of indigenous sources or modes of learning. The basics of cultural appropriation \u2014 detach, reframe, commodify \u2014 were built into the globalizing economy, but also intersected with a personal need to have something of my own following years of being manipulated.<\/p>\n I now see what I was using and why and am doing my best to realize my own sense of unreality did not give me permission to plant a flag over real things from real places. Travel there, yes. Dialogue with, yes. Live “your yoga” as though you were the center of the universe, detached from global injustice and inequality? No.<\/p>\n My education in and fascination with Ayurveda allowed me similar leeway. A premodern self-care regime based on intuitive poetry gave me a sense of autonomy over a body that cults had taught me was disgusting or unreal. But it also protected me from the scrutiny of diagnostic medicine, which I subconsciously feared would force me to ask hard questions about whether in fact I needed more professional help.<\/p>\n I survived depressive episodes without self-harming, but I\u2019m very concerned that the self-reliance expressed through these practices \u2014 itself a trauma-related response \u2014 can at times go too far, convincing people that the vata will eventually calm down with a little more sesame oil, or that everything will improve when Jupiter enters Aquarius, so long as you\u2019re attuned to it and have merited the blessings of the transit, etc. People can really jeopardize themselves through shaky mechanisms of self-reliance, which aren’t really self-reliant at all if they rely on mystification.<\/p>\n When the yoga world showed its cultic ass to me, I really didn\u2019t want to believe it. I really didn\u2019t want to see what I saw on that video of Jois, or hear what I heard from students of Iyengar or Choudhury. I went so far as to shut down my friend Diane\u2019s story of Jois\u2019s assaults. More on that in the upcoming book.<\/p>\n Yoga was a zone of freedom, I insisted, and if people didn\u2019t find it there, that was on them.<\/p>\n Oh yes, I really thought that, and not just from my layers of privilege, but from the perspective of not having digested the shame of having been in cults.<\/p>\n My response was out-of-phase. I was hearing cult abuse stories in my zone of cult recovery. I was angry about the contamination. But I got over it.<\/p>\n So now I\u2019m wondering how much of the blowback that yoga cult victims get is not just generated by the cults themselves, but by the more general belief and marketing that yoga was the zone so many of us went to for agency \u2014 and, in lock step with neoliberalism, we had to believe in it to feel functional or even survive.<\/p>\n As a specialized subgroup, we yoga people were indoctrinated to blame the victim. We were under the illusion that we had autonomy, and that our healing could come from within ourselves alone.<\/p>\n What a joy that it does not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just had the pleasure of answering some interview questions posed by an old friend about the health care needs of ex-cult members. 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