{"id":8146,"date":"2019-02-02T07:59:45","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T12:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=8146"},"modified":"2019-02-02T07:59:45","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T12:59:45","slug":"yoga-trolling-and-yoga-cults-a-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/yoga-trolling-and-yoga-cults-a-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"Yoga Trolling and Yoga Cults: A Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are several friends and colleagues I’d like to thank for helping me crack this part of the code. Ironically, naming them here would make them targets of further harassment. They know who they are.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary:<\/strong> Several prominent and combative figures on yoga social media are or have been embedded within yoga cults. This post speculates that by not disclosing these connections, and by blending or obscuring their religious agendas with anti-racist and social justice oriented concerns, these figures free themselves to harass or troll targets with impunity, in ways that preserve familiar cultic behaviours, while avoiding responsibility for their complicity in abusive organizations. Their attacks consistently express paranoia regarding the traditionality of yoga practice, in which authenticity is measured by all-or-nothing, black-and-white litmus tests for religious and ethnic purity. This paranoia combines the absolutisms of religious purity and performative wokeness, but conceals the absolutism of cultic control. It helps explain why these figures rarely if ever criticize the rising tide of Hindu nationalism and its implications for global yoga culture, and why they consistently fail to criticize malignant power structures in yoga groups. Their attacks on the \u201cinauthenticity\u201d of others may also be a way in which they project and act out a displaced shame over the abuses and charlatanry of their own communities, none of which are \u201ctraditional\u201d in this globalized era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

_____<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who\nAre All These Nasty Yoga People?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

For about the last five years, the questions\nhave been gnawing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who\nare all these nasty yoga people? What motivates them to harass others online? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways they present diverse and even competing interests. But their basic behaviour and go-to themes glue them together. So does, I believe, a shared demographic trait: many are current or former yoga cult people, continuing their culty behaviours under the cover of spiritual integrity, and, more recently, social justice.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the face of it, these are folks who claim special authority over the history and spirituality of Yoga (note the capital Y) which they define in terms that are equal parts simplistic, mystifying, and exclusionary. Their voices gather in comment threads, often calling each other in with long strings of tags. They gang-roll through Facebook groups, mocking and abusing seemingly anybody for a range of sins against Yoga: insufficient piety, a fixation on the body or the material world, blind participation in commodification, being too American, too millennial, too “postmodern”, failing to recognize a particular philosophical position as forever correct, or harbouring an egotistical refusal to surrender to a \u201cqualified\u201d teacher or some vaguely-described Absolute Truth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They would predictably challenge their targets on their training, always implying it is inadequate. They\u2019re really, really<\/em> fixated on this point: \u201cWho\u2019s your teacher? Who\u2019s your teacher?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When this was thrown at me \u2014 \u201cLook, look! He doesn\u2019t have a teacher!\u201d \u2014 it put me back on my heels. The truth was that my core experiences with teachers had been distorted by cult dynamics. I had both learned in and been abused by cultic organizations. I was ashamed of that tangled history, and I didn\u2019t know how to talk about it. Until I came out as a cult survivor, and fully reflected that in my full bio, I didn\u2019t know how to respond to an accusation that was accurate in one sense, but victim-blaming in another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being on the defensive distracted me from something crucial. While harassing me for my lack of education, the troll would usually speak as though they were a Faithful Student of Somebody. But they would never name that Somebody.<\/em> This was a red flag, and I missed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As time wore on and I started to numb out to the personal sting of these exchanges, it became apparent that this wasn’t just random nastiness. I could begin to predict who would be ganged up on. Favourite targets included yoga scholars studying the innovations and globalization of “Modern Postural Yoga”, non-Indian professional Sanskritists who do not translate yoga texts as an act of religious devotion but as a service to history, women asana teachers who became critical of the anatomical na\u00efvet\u00e9 of early 20th century asana teachers and developed smarter ways of moving \u2014 and goals<\/em> for movement, like functionality and strength. If those women also criticized the abusive pedagogy of some of those early Indian teachers, they were doubly hounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What all targets share in common is not their beliefs, content, or commitments, but their methods and sources of validation, <\/em>which are networked, peer-reviewed, and interdisciplinary. Of course, if you happened to be the scholar who stood back and collated immense amounts of data in order to describe this mode of horizontalized authority as “Post-Lineage”, well, you were also in big trouble. Because you would be rightly seen as legitimizing all this creativity and free-thinking as a real social phenomenon worthy of study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, extra vitriol was spewed all over those who worked for, appreciated, or were merely ambivalent towards Yoga Alliance. This went way beyond all of the reasonable criticisms \u2014 that the organization has been ineffective, sloppy, marred by mediocre leadership, etc. The trolls turned the Yoga Alliance employee or sympathizer into Public Yoga Enemy #1. I now suspect that this too was about vertical vs. horizontal authority. Here was non-profit actually taking steps to crowd-source<\/em> ways of making yoga safer and yoga schools more accountable. Yoga Alliance is attempting to democratize<\/em> an industry so far built upon charismatic pyramid schemes. It’s calling for greater oversight and higher educational standards. What kind of a person, belonging to what kind of group, doesn’t want that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trolling\nfrom the Left<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

If you have experience with spotting religious fundamentalism, such attacks might be easy to counter with something direct, like: \u201cWow, it looks like you brought your hereditary authoritarianism to the mat with you. Didn\u2019t we all come here to get away from that stuff?\u201d For yoga people committed to liberal democracy and education, it\u2019s easy to brush off evangelical trolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what happens when the trolling comes from the left, and weaponizes the language of wokeness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what started to happen a year or two into all of this. Suddenly, it seemed, the theological arguments about the One True Path You Are Obviously Not On So Too Bad Loser began to merge with the language of anti-racism, decolonization, and social justice. The posturing and aggression was eerily familiar, but the content had changed in such a way that seemed at first to be legitimate, and even irrefutable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who would argue, after all, that cultural\nappropriation was not<\/em> a thing? That\nglobal yoga does not<\/em> emerge from and\ncarry with it the trauma and inequalities of post-colonial economies? That\nIndian culture has not<\/em> been\nobjectified and commodified for export to allow the Global North to feel\nspiritual about conspicuous consumption? That Desi folks in the global diaspora\ndon\u2019t<\/em> often feel excluded from yoga\nspaces? That everyone who benefits from yoga, especially according to their\nprivilege, is responsible for engaging these issues? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shift in focus was complicated by its diversity of sources. There are many South Asian writers who present the necessity for decolonization in a compelling and solution-based manner. (I\u2019ve linked them elsewhere but will not here, because they will be harassed if I do. Yes, that\u2019s<\/em> already starting.) Their arguments are tight and their activism empathetic. So when trolls started link-dumping these excellent think-pieces into harassment threads, they gained new social and intellectual power. In a sense, they appropriated the discourse of cultural appropriation to bolster an already-held posture of moral and spiritual superiority. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bizarrely, this new tactic began to attract other followers, whose main commitments were<\/em> in fact oriented towards social justice and anti-colonialism. This strange romance between theological purity and political progressivism led to some very strange bedfellows. Like self-identified feminist\/woke yoga scholars aiding and abetting Hindu nationalists, for example. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, sorting out the real from the manipulative \u2014 and the manipulated \u2014 in the cultural appropriation debate has pivoted on a single puzzle: who are all these white<\/em> people who have taken up the issue like a crusade? Given the often-apolitical zeitgeist of the modern yoga movement, could they truly be allies? Did they have sudden conversions to political wokeness, or are they just doing white guilt sun salutations? Why do so many have Sanskritized names? Where are they coming from? Why are they so rarely self-reflective in relation to their own privilege? Do they have any actual history and training in anti-oppression movements, or has their Yoga made them an expert in everything?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s going to take someone years of quiet,\nincognito fieldwork to answer these questions. The absence of hard data leaves a\ngut feeling that all is not as it seems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s well-established that the oxygen of all cultic mechanisms is deception<\/a>. An abuser, dominator, or high-demand group deceives the public and its members about its purpose and methods. The falsehood might look progressive, virtuous, on the right side of history, and spiritually liberating. Both leaders and members can truly believe it. The falsehood can appeal to their deepest values and motivate their unique passions and skills. That\u2019s what the falsehood wants: to co-opt and redirect passion and skill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online\nCultism vs. IRL Cults<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Before I get too far down this road, I want to be clear: a group of online yoga trolls do not constitute a cult in any clinical sense. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a group, they can indeed present many cultic behaviours: black-and-white thinking, circular logic, a fetish for jargon, leader\/follower pathologies, and disorganized attachments that oscillate between attacking and fawning. They can definitely cause material harm to their targets. In my case, my heath was negatively impacted and I lost at least one YTT job because my employer was trolled for planning to host me. That’s nothing, of course. In more extreme online environments, like in the gaming world, women are doxxed and sent death threats for merely pointing out misogyny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the online yoga troll landscape has far less cohesion than the IRL yoga cult. Allegiances are fleeting and made fragile through competition, because the trolls are also using these spaces to advertise their brands. There\u2019s huge and fast turnover of eyeballs, coming out of a seemingly limitless supply of social media users. Online trolling groups may control language, thought, and information, but crucially, there are no strong group behavioural controls<\/em>, such as are deployable in ashrams. When push comes to shove, the bonds between online yoga trolls are easily frayed. Participants can disappear at any time, and no-one asks after them. With the exception of one malignant dyad, I\u2019ve often wondered whether there are any IRL relationships between them that have become stable. Most of them haven\u2019t met each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we are talking about a herd phenomenon that wouldn\u2019t happen outside of social media. But the herd is rag-tag, and the environment and technology are profoundly isolating. We know from the crash of Bentinho<\/a> Massaro<\/a> that web-based cults are fragile, whereas Narcis Tarcau can survive being outed as a rapist<\/a> in the international media and be back at work in a few months, because he has IRL capital assets maintained by IRL people, sequestered in Thailand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Examples,\nAnonymized<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This brings me back to considering the\nindividuals involved. Like the ones I referenced above who talk about having\nsacred teachers, but never name them. Who are they, as individuals? Where do\nthey come from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019ll propose here is speculative,\nbecause I don\u2019t know any of these people personally. I\u2019m offering a reflection\non some prominent clues that are beginning to form a pattern. I\u2019m writing here\nout of my experiential understanding of cult mechanisms. Some say that this is\na narrow and obsessive lens for me. I own that, and want to be clear that what\nI\u2019m proposing is by no means complete, and only one lens of many. I hope as\nwell that by speaking from personal experience I can encourage empathy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the thing: off the top of my head I can think of at least ten highly active yoga enforcers who are or have been connected with or committed to high-demand yoga groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not going to name names, because my point isn\u2019t to shame but to inform. By not naming names, however, I do risk the perception of a form of McCarthyism, creating the impression that cult people are all around us. To this I\u2019d answer: Chill out, everyone<\/em>. If you’re in the yoga world, cult people are<\/em> all around you. It\u2019s no great aberration, but rather the natural outcome of an industry that in the absence of regulation has built itself up through networks of charisma. There\u2019s no shame in it: it\u2019s just something we have to understand better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whoever you imagine is being profiled in\nthe following list shares traits with many others. The particular details don\u2019t\nmatter. What matters is whether a person harasses or bullies you, whether\nthey\u2019re telling you the truth about their commitments and values, whether they\nare manipulating your sense of justice in order to exercise their control\nissues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n