Yoga's Terribly, Horribly, Awfully Negative Year

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Buy From Art.com

All I could think when I read this was "here we go again." Yet another man in a position of spiritual leadership turns out to have been abusing his power by exploiting women and just generally being a dick.

The guru behind a popular style of yoga currently facing allegations of rape and sexual assault inspired fear in his employees and runs his company "like a cult," a lawyer for a former employee told The Huffington Post Monday.

Carla Minnard, a civil rights attorney, says her client was one of the few to stand up to Bikram Choudhury, the man at the center of the Bikram yoga empire. In return, she says, the company threatened to have her client and her 8-year-old daughter deported.

“There’s a great desire to keep Bikram’s conduct in the dark,” Minnard said. “It shows an inability by anyone to restrain an individual who is a dangerous person.”

Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden, Minnard's client, is a former legal advisor at Bikram’s Yoga College of India, a Los Angeles-based yoga school. Jaffa-Bodden is the sole plaintiff named in an explosive but little-reported June 13 lawsuit against Choudhury, which accuses him of rape and sexual assault of employees and students. The suit additionally claims the yogi promoted a work environment inside his school that was rife with misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexual harassment and threats of violence.

Whether all the allegations prove true or not, much of Choudhury's behavior has been well-documented and he appears to be an equal opportunity hater. Gay people caused AIDS and "these blacks just don't get my yoga" are just some of the sentiments ascribed to the guru. The substance of the suit is worse. It alleges that when Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden got wind of his abuses she was threatened with deportation and worse.

The most recent charges come from Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden, Choudhury's former legal advisor. Jaffa-Bodden claims that she became aware of allegations of sexual assault and harassment during a multi-day training conference; when she approached Choudhury about them, she was told that it would be "best" to "not look into it any further." When she attempted to stand up to the yoga guru, his company threatened to have her and her 8-year-old daughter deported. In March 2013, Jaffa-Bodden says that she was forced to resign by Choudhury himself. He apparently made her sign a resignation letter by threatening her physically.

In addition to black people and gays, Choudhury has such a history of slurring entire groups of people that a former student listed and categorized the hate. Objects of his ire included the Chinese, the tattooed, Mormans, dog owners, sluts, and women of every body type and hair style: "Chubbies, too skinny, small-breasted, without make-up, with short hair, with long hair, but worn up."

Sydney Towne said she kept a list of Bikram's behavior when she trained with him full-time from April to June 2012 because "he dislikes so many types of people" that "a list seemed like the only way to keep track of it all." She loved Bikram Yoga, but hated the way Bikram himself "completely takes advantage of people and their desire for wellness."

"I think he preys on people and there's such a cult of personality around him that people don't question his clearly inappropriate behavior," she said. "I completely believe all accusations against him."

Choudhury seems to have something ghastly to say about just about everyone. He is fond of his own penis, though. Quite, quite fond.

Meanwhile, if you want to buy your yoga pants at Lululemon, be prepared for similar judgmentalism and cultishness. Much like Abercrombie & Fitch, Lululemon recently took a publicity hit for its tendency to sideline women over a size 8. Those clothes, if they're stocked at all, can be found in an unsorted heap in the back of the store... under a table.

Far from an accident, the exiling of larger clothing by Lululemon is a central piece of the company's strategy to market its brand as the look of choice for the stylishly fitness-conscious, according to former employees and consumer advocates. They say this treatment of larger clothes and customers reflects the culture that Lululemon represents -- one that falsely suggests skinniness is the paramount feature of health. Lululemon declined to comment.

The judgment and in-group, out-group dynamics reportedly permeate the company culture of Lululemon. Former employee Elizabeth Licorish describes a sorority girl type of hierarchy in which employees scrutinize and evaluate each other constantly and it takes little to be found deeply wanting.

I hoped to exercise my love of running, earn an employee discount, and take free fitness classes. But, soon after enduring Lululemon's intensive training program, I realized I'd been indoctrinated into a bottomless pit of groupthink I'd never be able to survive.

The Lululemon culture consists, on the surface, of catchy manifestos. Lululemon wants you to know it's "elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness" and "creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives." But, dig deeper, and you'll learn about Landmark Forum, the ultra-secretive, eerily cultish educational series, which Lululemon employees are "strongly encouraged" to attend. Before you're in line for Landmark, you're bombarded with Brian Tracy motivational CDs and a book club that culminates with Atlas Shrugged. Successful Lululemon employees can recite Brian Tracy better than the Pledge of Allegiance. Mention Chip Wilson, Lululemon's founder and former CEO, and their eyes will light up and quickly glaze over. They'll tell you, quite seriously, that he saved their lives by elevating them to greatness.

All this sort of made walking into work feel like time traveling to Salem. Because, with the Lululemon creed and catechism comes a collective mentality that thrives on scapegoats and leaves you feeling worthless if you subsist on anything but spring water and kale. Once, another employee sneered at me from across the floor and said the soda I happened to be enjoying would "rot me from the inside out." Eventually we were all issued reusable acrylic cups and forbidden to drink anything but H2O. We'd be encouraged to give "feedback," a terrible, calculated misnomer for ruthless criticism that could veer from professional to personal in 60 seconds flat. If a customer dismissed your sales pitch because, let's say, he was in a bad mood, one of your fellow team members would pull you aside and say your conversational style lacked genuine authenticity. She'd insinuate that you lack authenticity. That you aren't equipped enough as a human being to sell yoga pants.

And, unsurprisingly, at the heart of this world of LGATs, motivational speakers, and measuring everyone's spiritual worth by their material success, is a corporate leadership that knows The Secret.

A cult following is the most coveted accessory in retail, and Lululemon's is even more lustworthy than its Velocity Gym Bag. It wasn't built on the work of some Jobs-ian swami, however, but on the sources of Lulu founder and chairman Chip Wilson's own spiritual awakening. Wilson has mixed a heady self-actualizing cocktail from equal parts Landmark Forum (seminars based on the philosophy of Werner Erhard), the books of motivational business guru Brian Tracy, and Oprah-endorsed best seller The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. He is now hard at work formalizing them in a Lululemon "internal constitution."

"It's the first time I've heard of anyone almost directly using the techniques of cults and applying them to their business," says Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands. Drawing on those techniques, and with virtually zero advertising, Lululemon has converted the most popular yoga teachers from Beverly Hills to Boston (and their students) into a devoted -- and self-propagating -- clientele. In a little more than 10 years, Lululemon has grown from a single storefront on the surf side of Vancouver, British Columbia, to a public company with more than 100 outlets and $340 million in annual revenue. "I have not been able to find any company that compares with what they do," says Suzanne Price, a retail analyst with ThinkEquity, who points to Lululemon stores ringing up $1,800 in sales per square foot, compared with only $600 for retailers such as J.Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Wilson claims he didn't start Lululemon merely to sell $90 leggings, but also to help his customers limber up for their journey to self-esteem and empowerment. As he writes in the "Chip's Musings" section of the company Web site, "The law of attraction" -- the central tenet of The Secret, that visualizing goals is the key to attaining them -- "is the fundamental law that Lululemon was built on from its 1998 inception." He goes on to explain the company's meta-mission: "Our vision is 'to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness,' and we are growing so we can train more people and spread the word of The Secret -- which to us at Lululemon is not so secret."

Lululemon talks a good game about authenticity but it quickly learned that being too authentically yogic was a bad business model. "Yogis" turned out to be "too slow" on the sales floor so they dumped them for runners who also like yoga. This brought them the driven, "type A" personalities needed to create a yoga themed business empire.

Other challenges to Lululemon's "authenticity" branding have included exposed hypocrisy and outright fraud: the use of child labor in China, the manufacture and sale of expensive seaweed bags bragging a litany of seaweed related health benefits that turned out not to contain a whit of seaweed, and a name that reportedly owes to the company founder's delight in mocking the Japanese. 

For all its adherence to The Secret, Lululemon somehow law of attracted a grisly homicide as one sales girl brutally stabbed and bludgeoned another to death, purportedly over a stolen pair of yoga pants. CEO Linda Day made a grand public statement about how convicted murderer Brittany Norwood's actions were "the antithesis of the values of our company." Well, one would think that murder is contrary to the values of most companies. One would even think that it goes without saying which renders it an odd statement indeed. But it also conspicuously avoids addressing how it fits with their like attracts like philosophy. But then, we all know that among law of attraction adherents we're all responsible for everything we attract until it's so horrible that we're somehow not anymore.

None of this bears much resemblance to what I learned when I first started studying yoga. For my teachers, it wasn't about having a perfect, beach body, but about listening to your body's unique wisdom and moving in tune with it. It was about health and spiritual alignment -- not "fitness." I've long been aware that the growing popularity of yoga was a double-edge sword. A beautiful, traditional practice proliferated in the West but it also succumbed to faddishness, vanity, and pecuniary exploitation.

My first teacher was based largely in Kripalu yoga. I also spent time at Kripalu. Amrit Desai created a beautiful, patient yoga style that people of every age, condition, and body type could benefit from. He also turned out to be an inveterate womanizer, manipulator, and hypocrite. Oh well. The more things change...

Read More

Verdict: Yoga is Not a Religion

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Buy From Art.com

In a fairly unsurprising decision, Judge John Meyer has found that children in Encinitas, CA schools are not being religiously indoctrinated by a yoga program.

The ruling denied a request by a family in a San Diego suburb to ban the local school district from including yoga in physical education, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and separation of church and state.

"Yoga as it has developed in the last 20 years is rooted in American culture, not Indian culture," San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer said. "It is a distinctly American cultural phenomenon. A reasonable student would not objectively perceive that Encinitas school district yoga advances or promotes religion."

As discussed here, the parents who brought the case to stop yoga in their school district had their own very clear religious bias and were enthusiastic supporters of Christian programs in schools. This was not a case about not wanting religion in schools. This was a case about what religion should be taught in schools. If this was in any way unclear, their attorney Dean Broyles made it quite explicit in his post-trial comments.

"There is a consistent anti-Christian bias in these cases, and a pro-Eastern or strange religion bias."

I'm sorry. Who's biased?! A "strange religion" bias? Wow.

Read More

Christianist Group v. "Neopagan" Yoga in Encinitas

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Well. I knew it. As soon as I saw that a group was suing the Encinitas school district over its yoga program and claiming it violated the separation of church and state, I knew it was only a matter of time before I could draw a straight line to some Christianist group far more concerned with what religion these kids might be exposed to than with religion in schools per se. And I was right. Both the plaintiffs and the attorney are every bit as supportive of Christian-based school programs as they are derisive of the vaguely Hindu incursion represented by yoga.

One of the parents spearheading the lawsuit, a Mary Eady, works at Truthxchange, a Christian group dedicated to stopping the "rising tide of neopaganism." Attorney Dean Broyles works for the National Center for Law & Policy, or NCLP, whose slogan is Faith + Family + Freedom. It's an affiliate of the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a conservative Christian advocacy group.

In a broad sense, the plaintiffs could have a point. Yoga is born of religious tradition and has some spiritual overtones, even if, as practiced in the West, those overtones are, dare I say it, spiritual but not religious.

If anything I'm as ambivalent about the idea of yoga as a strictly secular exercise program as I am at the targeting of yoga as if it were equivalent to prayer in the schools. That spiritual lineage is now not only secularized, but trivialized. I'll never forget the sense of horror I felt when I first saw a yoga shirt with the printed slogan "Have a Namaste." Namaste is a mystical concept that roughly translates to "me bow you," and translates idiomatically as "The God in me bows to the God in you." There is something a little sickening about yoga as a commodity, completely devoid of all spiritual context or that subverts the spiritual precepts that underlie it.



I'm not sure that what is being taught in Encinitas, can even fairly be called yoga.

"We're not teaching religion," [Superintendent Timothy B. Baird] said. "We teach a very mainstream physical fitness program that happens to incorporate yoga into it. It's part of our overall wellness program. The vast majority of students and parents support it."

At the same time, I can personally attest to the physical benefits of yoga. When taught properly it is a harmonious practice that encourages students to listen to and respect their bodies' needs and limitations. The movements are fluid and patient in a way that most physical fitness regimens cannot claim. All of that can certainly be gained without religious overtone. But without knowing the specifics of the yoga curriculum being offered in Encinitas, I can do little more than speculate as to either the benefits or the drawbacks, which it would seem, the school district is still evaluating.

To a large extent, it seems that Broyles is arguing a straw man by railing against the religiosity of yoga, writ large, rather than the specific program being taught. And it has brought about some rather comical hyperbole. He has deemed the Salutation to the Sun sequence as "sun worship" -- something that after years of doing yoga would never even occur to me.

But Eady was disturbed by what she heard when she observed one of the classes.

“They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth," she said, "and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercises."

Some of us would consider that an acknowledgment of a basic, scientific fact. Without the heat of the sun, there would be no life on Earth. My daughter learned the same thing in grade school science classes. Kind of a stretch to call that a religious observation, let alone a Hindu teaching. But for all I know, Eady may be anti-science, as well.

Equally risible is her contention that the character-building component is "very different from sports programs."

“It’s stated in the curriculum that it’s meant to shape the way that they view the world, it’s meant to shape the way that they make life decisions," she said. "It’s meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves.”

I have yet to encounter the sports program that doesn't claim to teach values and life skills: teamwork, leadership, confidence, loyalty, etc.

Said Broyles, "If you research yoga and Hinduism, most people would say Hinduism is yoga and yoga is Hinduism." I don't know who "most people" are but his own employer, the NCLP, said in a press release that yoga is "inherently and pervasively religious, having its roots firmly planted in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and western metaphysical religious beliefs and practices."

So which is it? Is it a Hindu practice or a multicultural practice, drawing from numerous Eastern and Western traditions? And how can anything be firmly planted when it derives from that many different influences?

As Superintendent Baird points out, here in the States, 90-95% of yoga practitioners are not Hindu. I don't know from whence he draws that statistic but I, for one, don't know a single practicing Hindu among the many, many yoga practitioners and teachers I count among my friends and acquaintances. I know they're out there and a number of yoga schools trace back to Hindu gurus, but that doesn't mean they require their students to convert to Hinduism. I can't say that's never happened but I've never encountered it. The yoga teachers I've known through the years have been Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and, of course, those who ascribe to no particular religion.

It would appear that the Jois Foundation, which is partially funding the Encinitas yoga program through a grant, is similarly multicultural. Director Eugene Ruffin points out that, “Our organization is made up primarily of people who are members of the Abrahamic faiths." But the Jois Foundation is connected to the K. P. Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute and Jois was a Hindu, even if his yoga practice was very much outside of his family's religious background. A quick scan of his life story illustrates how absurd is Broyles's contention that "Hinduism is yoga." Yoga, as we know it, came out of a narrowly defined sectarian practice and is not something practiced by all Hindus. Hatha grew out of Tantra, which as I recently pointed out is sometimes erroneously and reductively described as a "sex cult." Imagine what Broyles would do with that if he knew it, which he apparently does not. But Hatha and its many derivatives like Ashtanga, have wandered very far from those roots. As practiced, in yoga studios all over the Western world, the Hindu influence is vestigial, at most, and amounts to some Sanskrit words and very general concepts of union with spirit.

It would appear that the curriculum offered in Encinitas is also far removed from Ashtanga "Power" Yoga. Not only is the Jois Foundation legally separate from the K. P. Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute with a different mission, the curriculum is set by the school district, not the Jois Foundation. This is not a rapid sequence of asanas geared towards raising inner heat.

"We are probably using some of the poses found in Ashtanga yoga," Baird told ABC News. "But we have modified this extensively to be done by students of this particular age. And all body types can be successful [with] what we are doing in our classes."

While the program is popular with most of the school district, a number of parents, like Eady, opted their kids out of the classes. According to Broyles, these kids are being unfairly ridiculed and bullied by their peers. If true, that's unfortunate, but it's got nothing to do with yoga.

Kids will bully other kids for being different. Period. That's in no way specific to kids whose parents pull them out of yoga classes. It's also hardly an argument against kids being different, or parents making choices they deem necessary for whatever reason. The problem is the bully behavior which is better targeted by anti-bullying programs. But the ADF opposes anti-bullying programs because they interfere with their Christian right to teach their kids to hate gay people.

The ADF and its allies also invest considerable efforts in seeking to overturn some anti-bullying school guidelines on the grounds that such policies persecute the “Christian perspective” on LGBT rights and that demanding tolerance is a front for promoting  “homosexual values.”

The ADF advocates for a roster of faith-based programs such as abstinence only programs and "character development" programs that are little more than teasers for evangelical events. They are quick to accuse civil libertarians who try to stop them -- like the ACLU -- of a "war on Christianity." I'm betting we won't be hearing from the Jois Foundation that this lawsuit constitutes a "war on Hindu."

Finally, let’s consider fundamentalist Good News Clubs, which are presently in well over 3,000 public elementary schools around the country. Good News Clubs, which are sponsored by an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship, are ostensibly after-school “Bible study” programs that require parental permission to join. But that description is misleading. Good News Clubs are not about “study,” they are about religious indoctrination. Further, the clubs produce the false but unavoidable impression in very young children that they are part of the school; they set up shop in public school classrooms immediately after the bell rings, so as to appear a seamless part of the school day. And finally, Good News Clubs instructors tell kids attending the clubs to recruit their peers at school.

It turns out that Encinitas public elementary schools that sparked the national outcry over yoga stretching are rife with Good News Clubs: all nine public elementary schools in the district have a club, reported Assistant Superintendent Miyashiro. And their presence has been made possible by the legal firepower of the ADF and lawyers like Dean Broyles. When it comes to unhealthy entanglement between church and school, a classroom of first-graders stretching their hands to the sky seems to be, for now, a matter of far less concern than the well-organized conservative Christian proselytism that is already making deep inroads into public education.

Read More

Pigs in Zen

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've been so immersed in events erupting from the the scandal-plagued, power-abusing Vatican all week, I missed the news about scandal-plagued, power-abusing Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki. Funnily enough, the latter story broke wide with an article in the paper of record the same day Pope Benedict's resignation was announced. Of course, rumors had dogged the aging leader since the 1970s, but it was in January of this year that an announcement from senior teachers was posted on the Sasaki community website.

In early January, the senior teachers of Sasaki's community admitted in an on-line statement that the community "has struggled with our teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi's sexual misconduct for a significant portion of his career in the United States."

In truth, to call them rumors is generous. It seems the living legend's inappropriateness was known about and actively enabled for decades. Then, in November of last year,  Zen priest Eshu Martin, who had studied under Sasaki for over ten years, threw down the gauntlet with a post on the Sweeping Zen website. The title, "Everybody Knows – Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi and Rinzai-ji," is an obvious allusion to one of Sasaki's more famous students, Leonard Cohen. This reference does more than point to the fact that Sasaki's behavior was common knowledge. Cohen's masterpiece speaks to the ubiquity of deceit and injustice in this game of life we are all participating in.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the founder and Abbot of Rinzai-ji is now 105 years old, and he has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. Many individuals that have confronted Sasaki and Rinzai-ji about this behaviour have been alienated and eventually excommunicated, or have resigned in frustration when nothing changed; or worst of all, have simply fallen silent and capitulated. For decades, Joshu Roshi’s behaviour has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

Everybody knows that you love me baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful Ah give or take a night or two Everybody knows you've been discreet But there were so many people you just had to meet Without your clothes And everybody knows ~ Leonard Cohen

As is so painfully typical in these situations, abused women who complained were shamed and shunned, while the abusive leader was venerated. From the New York Times story:

Many women whom Mr. Sasaki touched were resident monks at his centers. One woman who confronted Mr. Sasaki in the 1980s found herself an outcast afterward. The woman, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, said that afterward “hardly anyone in the sangha, whom I had grown up with for 20 years, would have anything to do with us.”

. . .

Several women said that Zen can foster an atmosphere of overt sexism. Jessica Kramer, a doula in Los Angeles, was Mr. Sasaki’s personal attendant in 2002. She said that he would reach into her robe and that she always resisted his advances. Surrounded almost entirely by men, she said she got very little sympathy. “I’d talk about it with people who’d say, ‘Why not just let him touch your breasts if he wants to touch your breasts?’ ”

Almost more appalling is the blatant subversion of Buddhist teachings Sasaki used to manipulate women and justify his sexual acting out.

In the council’s report on Jan. 11, the three members wrote of “Sasaki asking women to show him their breasts, as part of ‘answering’ a koan” — a Zen riddle — “or to demonstrate ‘non-attachment.’ ”

. . .

“He would say something like, ‘True love is giving yourself to everything,’ ” she explained. At Mount Baldy, the isolation could hamper one’s judgment. “It can sound trite, but you’re in this extreme state of consciousness,” she said — living at a monastery in the mountains, sitting in silence for many hours a day — “where boundaries fall away.”

Not the first time I've heard a spiritual leader reinterpret the surrender to spirit as a surrender to himself. If you don't surrender to his ego, you're just too much in your ego. Get it? But most appalling was this gem:

One monk, whom Ms. Stubbs said she told about the touching, was unsympathetic. “He believed in Roshi’s style, that sexualizing was teaching for particular women,” Ms. Stubbs said. The monk’s theory, common in Mr. Sasaki’s circle, was that such physicality could check a woman’s overly strong ego. [all emphases mine]

Uppity bitches. Someone had to knock 'em down a peg or two. The irony here is the implicit admission that sexual abuse is not about sex. It's about power and dominance.

Grace Schireson, who was on the "witnessing council" that issued a report on the problem in January, cites the Westernization of a Japanese practice. Interviewed by the Times, she claimed that the Japanese view their teachers with a healthy dose of skepticism and are less inclined to put them on a pedestal. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Japanese are less deferential to authority than Westerners. I think that basic problem is more a facet of human nature than culture (See Milgram). I put the question to my husband who has spent years studying martial arts, and is fairly well acquainted with Japanese teachers and customs. Leave say, he did not find that to be so. If anything, he found that Japanese teachers are more expectant of deference and that his own teachers were surprised by the "many questions" American students ask.

I have little knowledge of Japanese culture, but I do know that it is notoriously male dominated and incredibly sexist. Groping women on trains is so common in Japan that women-only cars had to be established. Such violations are fetishized, pornogrophized, and popularized in manga.

That said, the report offers a very insightful take on the dynamics that allowed this problem to go on for decades.

When ongoing questions of misuse of sexuality or power unfold in a spiritual community, it is rarely a matter of one person’s actions. Reading through the painful and heartfelt accounts documenting Joshu Sasaki’s sexual relationships with students at Rinzaiji down through the years, we see how, knowingly and unknowingly, the community was drawn into an open secret, and people’s ability to practice the dharma suffered. Despite individual and collective attempts to address boundaries, repentance, and rectification, these behaviors appear to have continued over more than four decades. We have reports that those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished.

Understanding that our practice is to bear what is unbearable and not to turn away from reality, how could this be so? We suggest it has something to do with a view of spiritual authority and “enlightenment” that we in the West have created in the name of Zen. To be fair, this is not just a problem of Zen. It arises in various Buddhist communities, and more widely in other religious congregations. We are unfortunately susceptible to enthrallment, which is hardly "seeing things as they really are." There are certain problems that may arise when one sees a teacher as comprehensively enlightened and fails to deal with the certainty that he or she, like oneself, has a shadow or deluded aspect. We imagine that “enlightenment” is separate from or outside of ourselves. The community may attempt to protect the teacher, the seeming embodiment of enlightenment. If we hold such a model, it is often impossible to recognize or admit that there has been an abuse of power. We fear the loss of our enlightened teacher and thus the opportunity to become enlightened ourselves.

It is not about a single individual, but about a very toxic synergy of power dynamics that can arise in any hierarchical structure. Even a deeply pathological leader cannot maintain a grip on a community unless he is enabled by followers. And even leaders who start out with the best of intentions can be seduced and subverted by the adulation of their followers. (See Zimbardo.) The search for enlightenment is subject to any number of pitfalls if we aren't keeping track of the shadow. (See Jung.)

This scandal put me in mind of a similar one at the Kripalu Institute many years ago -- not because these things are uncommon. They aren't. But because I was a fly on the wall for some of the aftermath of the Kripalu scandal. I spent a week at the Massuchusetts ashram shortly after the whole thing went down. I was just there for some yoga, rest, and relaxation, but it ended up being quite a lesson in the dynamics of disillusionment.

I did a little googling to refresh my memory on some of the details and I came across some interesting perspectives. But first, for those unfamiliar with the particulars:

In 1994, [Amrit] Desai resigned after admitting to having sex with followers.^[2][5][7][8] Kripalu paid $2.5 million to settle a purported class action lawsuit brought by more than 100 former residents who had served as unpaid staff. Kripalu financed the payment partly by selling its adjacent Foxhollow property, which it had acquired to provide housing for its most senior members.^[5][9]

One New York Times article pointed to yet another, more recent yoga scandal. The author manages to completely miss the point.

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The characterization of Tantra as a "sex cult" is extremely reductive, but that's not the dumbest part of the article. The author goes on to explain that Hatha increases circulation in the pelvic area and heightens the passions, which is true. Of course the same could be said many forms of physical exercise.

Where the article really enters the realm of the absurd is in the suggestion that sex scandals like the one at Kripalu were simply the result heightened sexual appetites. The idea that this was just a bunch of sexually adventurous people doing what comes naturally is absurd. Heightened and spiritualized sexuality could just as easily enhance committed relationships and increase closeness and intimacy between partners, as is, indeed, often the case.

The problem is one of dynamics and abuse of power, not human sexuality. In the case of Kripalu and similar scandals, many women claim to have been intimidated and coerced. Victims who complain are ostracized. Many lies are told and secrets kept. This is not about consensual sexual activity, openly engaged in by willing participants.

More to the point, as the subject of this post illustrates, these scandals are hardly unique to the world of yoga.

Finally, I read some excerpts from a book that addresses the Kripalu crisis. Steven Cope's Yoga and the Quest for the True Self speaks brilliantly to the group dynamics and larger lessons learned when people are ready to take their power back.

It was not the scandal that forced the death of the old forms of yoga at Kripalu. Quite the opposite. It was the impending death of the old paradigm that required the scandal. It is clear that the fact of Amrit Desai's affairs had been in the unconscious of the community all along. It was not new information. Quite a few individuals held the secret. It was simply information that could not be brought to the light of consciousness until the community was more or less ready for it.

In 1994 when the scandal erupted, Gurudev had not suddenly changed. In fact, the sexual misconduct was by that time many years old. Amirt was who he had always been -- ambitious, brilliant, sometimes a sincere yogi, sometimes just a smooth performer, too often a teacher who was too charming for his own good. It was the community's own capacity to see and bear the truth that had changed.

The bonfire was just as much a sign of success as of failure.

Read More