Holly Faurot tells more about her experience at Jivamukti; Sharon Gannon and David Life publicly respond to allegations of sexual assault and battery against senior Jivamukti teacher “Lady” Ruth Lauer-Manenti.

By Matthew Remski

4/24/16

On April 5th, Slate.com reported on the allegations of sexual assault and battery against yoga teacher “Lady” Ruth Lauer-Manenti, brought by Holly Faurot, her student at Jivamukti Yoga School in New York City.(1) The suit names Jivamukti founders Sharon Gannon and David Life, as well as studio director Carlos Menjivar, as co-defendants for covering up and condoning Lauer-Manenti’s alleged actions.(2)

Lauer-Manenti admitted to the relationship in a conversation secretly recorded by Faurot in 2014.(3) New York State has a one-party consent law, which means that Faurot was not legally obliged to tell Lauer-Manenti she was recording.(4)

In a step up from the earlier tabloid treatment of the story,(5) Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg interviewed Faurot and several off-record Jivamukti sources. But she framed the story through the views of renowned New York based yoga educator Leslie Kaminoff, who worked at Jivamukti in the 1990s. Kaminoff told Goldberg that Faurot’s story sounded like that of a jilted lover, and that she should now chant the mantra, “What the fuck was I thinking?

On April 8th, I interviewed Faurot by phone. I started by asking her what she thought of Kaminoff’s assessment of her suit.

“I found his comments ill-informed and unfortunate,” Faurot said. “He’s someone who’s been in the New York yoga community for a long time, and he instantly contributed to victim-blaming culture, which enables abuse, and silences those who would speak up.”

Thomas Shanahan, Faurot’s lawyer, was also on the call.

“From a legal perspective,” Shanahan said, “what’s stunning about Kaminoff’s comments is that with all of his years of experience in the yoga world, it’s clear he has absolutely no idea that under New York state law, Holly could never have consented to a sexual relationship with someone who controlled her employment.

“It’s shocking to me,” Shanahan said. “Maybe he figures that Eastern philosophy trumps Western law.”

“This is why this stuff happens over and over again,” said Faurot. “Victims speak out, and then people like him, who could be offering some guidance, make comments that are just wrong.

“Kaminoff doesn’t know me as a person. I’ve never met him.”

Nor have the thousands of social media commenters who seized on Kaminoff’s mic-drop moment to chuckle and cluck and share it around – faithful to a modern yoga tradition of minimizing and whitewashing patterns of abuse in teacher-student relations.

“People keep saying, ‘Don’t give your power away.’” Faurot says.

“But I didn’t know I had any power when I came to Jivamukti. My self-esteem was that unhealthy. I can see it now because I’ve done a lot of therapy.”

Only paragraphs after reporting that Faurot had entered Jivamukti from a history of child abuse and disordered eating, Goldberg quoted Kaminoff as saying “We’re not talking about people with diminished capacities”, and suggesting that it was Faurot’s fault for giving her power to Lauer-Manenti.

So I asked Faurot to paint a fuller picture of what she thinks made her vulnerable to Lauer-Manenti and the whole Jivamukti scene.

“I was in a freeze pattern”

“My apprenticeship with Ruth started out as highly formal, and I loved it,” said Faurot.

“The rule was that I couldn’t study with her until I could read and write in Sanskrit. She had high standards and expectations. In the beginning she showed herself to be a very firm, professional teacher who knew a lot and had a lot of experience. Once that trust was built, then the lines started getting crossed.

“Ruth would call me the daughter she never had,” said Faurot. “I was at her house for holidays. I visited her mother’s house. I was really entwined with her family. She would sometimes sign letters to me: ‘With a mother’s love’.

“She gave me so much attention. I really felt like I had a mother for the first time in my life.

“I know many people have suffered abuse in childhood, so I almost feel ridiculous saying it out loud. I had been alienated from my own family, and I was a very lonely person. I had a good job and close friends, but I had never experienced a sense of home.

“Getting things as an adult that I’d never received as a child was very powerful. I felt safe with Ruth. She made me feel very loved. I gained older sisters, who were her prior apprentices. I became part of this small privileged family within the larger context of the Jivamukti community.

“Acceptance into this family required unquestionable devotion to Ruth, and in return she agreed to be our teacher, our guru. It was assumed that all of us would work together to serve and take care of her.

“I learned quickly that to question her, to disagree, to see other points of view, or to even subtly to shift the focus away from her, was to bring on disapproval and the risk of rejection or being shunned.”

Because of her eating disorder, Faurot entered the Jivamukti community underweight, which amplified the power imbalance.

“It’s easy to project ‘little girl’ onto that body type,” Faurot said.

“That was the context of our relationship when Ruth asked to come over to my house. Why wouldn’t I invite my mom to my house? What’s wrong with my mother sleeping next to me in my bed?

“Then it’s really confusing when that ‘mother’ pulls you in to sexually spoon you.”

In the suit, Faurot alleges that after establishing both emotional trust and beginning to control her professional relationship to Jivamukti as a new teacher, Lauer-Manenti’s nonconsensual sexual advances escalated from spooning to groping to asking Faurot to pose for sexually charged photos.

Faurot alleges that when she attempted to confront Lauer-Manenti about their relationship in 2013, the senior teacher humiliated her by saying that she could see Faurot’s “little crotch” in her pants.(6)

“I was questioning her for the first time about her behavior,” Faurot explained. “Ruth dismissed all of my feelings, emotions and questions as ‘ridiculous.’ She instructed me to ‘focus on the love we have between us.’

“I felt she was saying, ‘All I can see of you, Holly, is your little crotch in your pants.’”

In our interview, Faurot suggested that Lauer-Manenti’s sexual assaults echoed throughout their public relationship, blended seamlessly into the studio’s culture of guru devotion, mimicked behaviours, and intimate physical adjustments.(7)

“Ruth would often look me up and down when I was in mountain pose,” Faurot said, describing their classroom dynamic.

“She’d gaze at me head to toe, in a way that if a man were doing it to a woman, it would be obviously wrong. I think that people get confused when it’s a woman doing it to a woman.

“When she helped me do dropbacks – backbends – she’d thrust her thigh into my crotch. She’d drop me back and then pull me back up on her thigh. Things were way more intimate then they would be with a stranger.”

Over time, Faurot’s practice and sense of her body underwent a disempowering shift.

“Ruth would spend the night with me on Sundays and I would always take her class Monday morning. Those classes were always very difficult. My body would feel off, heavy– like a wet noodle that could be bent into any shape. Looking back this was clearly my body’s response to the violations taking place.

“I was in a freeze pattern. I had a deeply ingrained habit of dissociation due to both my childhood and the eating disorder I developed as a young adult. Because of that, it was perhaps easier for Ruth, my ‘guru’ – the person I was taught to trust more than my own instincts – to gain control and possession over my person.”

Several Jivamukti teachers who asked to remain off-record said that the school’s teaching policies made adjustments a virtually mandatory part of their teaching responsibilities.

“The general message is that every student in the room should be touched,” one teacher told me. “They feel that no one should come and not be adjusted.

“But in any classroom, there are going to be people who have experienced emotional, physical or sexual trauma,” they said. “Some people love the intensity of the adjustments. For others, it’s triggering, and they don’t come back.

“There’s no trauma-sensitive training provided.”(8)

Faurot alleges that her relationship with Lauer-Manenti was also influenced by the dictates of the Jivamukti Teacher Apprenticeship Program, which encourages the pious service and emulation of mentors.(9)

“When Ruth taught, I was literally always within arm’s reach, ready to serve her and take care of any needs she had. My submission to Ruth was at the heart of my public life within the Jivamukti community.”

Lauer-Manenti was explicit about emulation as a spiritual necessity in a blog post from 2008.

“In olden times, and up to the present, when yogis wanted to reach enlightenment, they copied their teacher,” Lauer-Manenti writes.

“They emulated what the teacher ate, how much they slept, when they meditated, what the nature of their thoughts were, how they showed kindness toward others, what holy books they read, what holy songs they sung, how equanimous they were in the midst of ups and downs, how saddened they were by the suffering of others, and how happy they were in the presence of the Lord… Gradually the yogi and the great teacher would become one.”(10)

Overall, Faurot alleges, the encouragement to merge overwhelmed her sense of self.

“‘Holly’ was pushed further and further into the background,” she said, “and my identity in the community as ‘Lady Ruth’s devotee’ took over.

“It was a silent contract. I got to be close to Ruth if I never questioned her, if I did whatever she said, if I let her do whatever she wanted to do with me.

“I was an eager student, wanting to go on a spiritual journey, wanting to get rid of all the pain I’d been through in my life. This was a way for me to actually go there and achieve peace with myself, to feel self-confidence again. Slowly things changed. I became her object in her art projects, in her classroom, and also when she asked to sleep in my bed.

“It’s very disturbing to realize and digest what actually happened. The layers of manipulation are hard for me to parse or even to believe, now that I have gained distance from the relationship.”

Lauer-Manenti declined to comment for this article.

“Asserting victimhood”

I sent Kaminoff an early draft of this article to see whether reading Faurot’s account might prompt him to retract any of his comments, or to add nuance. His answer via email was mixed.

He first explained that his hour-long conversation with Goldberg had been reduced to a handful of controversial quotes.

“Our interview,” he wrote, “was about the cult-like atmosphere at Jivamukti –about which I had a lot to say that didn’t make it into the Slate article.”

Kaminoff then clarified his scope of practice. “I am not a legal expert so I was not speaking from a legal, employment-law perspective,” he wrote.

“In addition, I am not a psychologist or trauma specialist so I am not evaluating anyone’s psychology. I am a yoga educator with decades of experience seeing students and teachers alike use yoga to reinforce their preexisting psychic tendencies.”

But on the issues of power and consent, Kaminoff stayed his course.

“I’m the one standing up for the fact that Holly’s situation is the result of choices she made and continues to make.

“To assert otherwise is to strip her of any meaningful agency in the matter. Asserting victimhood may be the way to win an employment case in court, but it’s not a powerful way to go through life.”

Jivamukti’s Sharon Gannon and David Life: “A person sees what they want to see”

Up until this article, Sharon Gannon and David Life have made no public response to the allegations, beyond issuing a blanket denial of Faurot’s account on behalf of themselves, Lauer-Manenti, Menjivar, and the entire Jivamukti global community.(11)

When they agreed to my request for an interview, I sent them fifteen questions regarding Jivamukti business practices and beliefs pertinent to the suit. In their written answers, they ignored my mention of Lauer-Manenti’s admission to the relationship with Faurot, and repeated their collective denial of wrongdoing— “adamantly”. They evaded a question about whether their denial would contribute to the the well-known suppression of sexual abuse claims. They wrote that Faurot’s complaint was the first ever filed against them.

Gannon and Life also minimized the far-reaching effects of the Jivamukti apprenticeship system by denying that Lauer-Manenti was Faurot’s superior during the period of their relationship.

“During the time frame alleged,” they wrote, “Ruth was not Holly’s supervisor. She and Holly were both yoga teachers at the school.”

Their richest responses added metaphysical dimensions to the claim that Faurot was “asserting victimhood”.

“A person sees what they want to see,” Gannon and Life wrote — in response to a question about how their school educates students and teachers about power imbalances and psychological projections.

“What is inside one’s own mind will be mirrored in the world around them,” they wrote. “If a person is focused on money every thing they encounter is conditioned by that thought. If a person is thinking of sex they will see others around them in that light. If a person sees themselves as a victim they will see others around them as either victims or perpetrators.”

This thinly-veiled speculation on Faurot’s motivations is consistent with Jivamukti teachings that attribute a student’s negative experiences to their own actions and thoughts. In a dharma talk from New Year’s Eve, 2015, for instance, Gannon claims that critical speech causes the self-perception of victimhood.

“It’s all a state of mind, isn’t it?” Gannon asks the crowd of revelers through a puckish smile.

“Isn’t it? Is it?”

The room goes silent.

“There is a very popular trend,” she continues soberly, “to complain and find fault with other people, with the government, with your parents, boyfriend-girlfriend-husband-wife-children, the school system, the medical system. Complaining and blaming.”

“Please remember, every time we do that, we do something to ourselves. What we do is we paint ourselves as a victim. And that’s very toxic. It’s like poison….

“The power of your words come from your thoughts, and your thoughts are the most powerful, holy substance that exists. Your thoughts make your reality. Collectively, our thoughts make our collective reality.”(12)

According to Gannon and Life, the desired collective reality of Jivamukti precludes the possibility that Lauer-Manenti and Faurot were engaged in an injurious power dynamic.

“The teachings say that our souls are eternal and blissful,” they wrote, “and in truth no one is greater than anyone else—we are all one.

“If Ruth was teaching that gradually the yogi and the great teacher would become one, then she was teaching in accordance with an ancient respected tradition spanning thousands of years.”

I had asked how their school fostered independent critical thinking in conjunction with their emphasis on emulating mentors and guru devotion.

“The practices of yoga are intended to encourage critical thinking, to help one to let go of negative thoughts that isolate and encourage divisiveness and hostility.

“Yoga practice helps one to focus on cultivating redeeming virtues such as patience, compassion, kindness, and forgiveness, all of which promote clarity of mind.”

On the legal front, Gannon and Life’s clarity is being represented by their attorney, Siobhan Healy, who on March 11^th moved to have Faurot’s case dismissed on a series of legal technicalities.(13) Healy did not respond to several email and phone requests for comment.

Healy’s motion states that Faurot’s complaint to Jivamukti was made more than a year after Faurot ceased being an employee of the company, and is therefore uncovered by New York State or City Human Rights Laws. Likewise, Faurot’s “causes of action for assault and battery are barred” by a one-year statute of limitations.

The last technicality regards the interpretation of the relevance of Jivamukti’s Ethical Guidelines, which forbid sexual relationships between teachers and students. In her motion, Healy argues that the guidelines “did not create a binding agreement between Plaintiff and the Jivamukti Yoga Center.”

In effect, Healy’s argument verifies Faurot’s account of how the Jivamukti school trivializes its own guidelines. Faurot’s suit alleges that Jivamukti co-founder David Life joked about power and consent issues in training sessions. The suit says that Life “made light of the Jivamukti sexual harassment policy, telling teachers that although the unlawful behaviour was prohibited, [the policy] was not in practice otherwise.” Life allegedly quipped that if this guideline were followed, Jivamukti classes would be empty.(14)

I asked Gannon and Life if that account was accurate.

“The quote you refer to,” they wrote, “was obviously taken out of context to sensationalize what would otherwise be a non-story.”

Gannon and Life concluded the interview on a prophetic note.

“These are indeed dark days,” they wrote, “where material greed, profit and victimization are more appealing than Yoga—enlightenment, self-realization, kindness and eternal joy.

“Even so, we firmly believe that goodness will prevail, maybe not in the immediate future, but definitely when all is said and done.”

On April 12th, however, Healy withdrew her Motion to dismiss.(15)

“Spiritual rhetoric aside,” said Faurot’s lawyer Thomas Shanahan, “all they needed to do was enforce the school’s anti-discrimination and sexual harassment policy, and this case would never have been filed.

“A jury will decide if they are as spiritually sophisticated as they profess, or in denial.”

Leaving Jivamukti: Holly Faurot Moves On

Faurot is not asserting victimhood as an ongoing identity. She remains a plaintiff in a lawsuit she’s committed to seeing through, but she has also moved on. She now works for the Sonima Foundation, teaching yoga classes to students in the New York City public school system.(16) She’s also pursuing a Master’s Degree in Special Education at Hunter College.

“My new job has definitely been a part of my healing process,” she said. “It’s been very inspiring to introduce and instruct yoga and mindfulness practices to adolescents.

“If I had learned yoga at their age, perhaps it would have given me the tools to manage the anxiety I had and to build a healthy relationship with myself and my body. It’s hard to say for sure.”

Faurot was hired by Sonima director Eddie Stern, the former director of Ashtanga Yoga New York, which is now the Brooklyn Yoga Club, where Faurot now practices. Her connection with Stern dates back to the days in which she would “escape” Lauer-Manenti and Jivamukti on Tuesday mornings to practice in what she felt was a safe space.

“I remember saying to myself many times ‘I’m fixed’ or ‘I’m back’ after practicing at Eddie’s on Tuesdays. In essence, practicing there gave me my body back after Ruth had taken possession of it.

“Looking back on it now, I think an unconscious part of me was responding positively to an environment in which I was truly respected.”

[Follow up article by Matthew Remski: Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond]

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Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

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References:

(1) “A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?” Accessed 4.19.2016.

(2) “Holly Faurot – v. – Jivamukti Yoga Center, Inc. et al”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(3) “Exhibit A – Report of Sexual Harassment by Plaintiff”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(4) “New York Recording Law”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(5) “Manhattan yoga guru accused of sexually harassing apprentice teacher in $1M lawsuit”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(6)  “Exhibit A – Report of Sexual Harassment by Plaintiff”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(7) For examples, see this video of a class given by Sharon Gannon in 2014: “Jivamukti Master Class w Sharon Gannon (2014-10-Oct) (SRYBC)”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(8) For information on Trauma Sensitive Yoga, the work of David Emerson and co. is good place to start.

(9) Jivamukti Teacher Apprenticeship Program Manual, 2013, p.8.

(10) “Focus of the Month for JULY, 2008: How to become a Master”, accessed 4/14/2016. In a followup article, I’ll be showing how Lauer-Manenti’s ideology of guru devotion is psychosocially consistent with her lineage connection to the neo-Buddhist teacher Michael Roach, and somatically consistent with her account of studying with Pattabhi Jois.

(11) “To the Jivamukti Yoga Community”, accessed, 4.14.2016.

(12) “2015 New Years Reflections at Jivamukti Yoga NYC”, accessed 4.22.2016.

(13) “Affirmation in Support of Motion to Dismiss”, accessed 4/22/2016.

(14) “Verified Complaint”, p. 4, accessed 4.15.2016.

(15) “Stipulation”, accessed 4.23.2016.

(16) http://www.sonimafoundation.org/?s=Holly+Faurot, accessed 4.15.2016.

The post Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.

by Matthew Remski

6/2/2016

[Editors note: This is a followup to Matthew Remski’s previous article Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out, which explores in depth the recent sexual assault allegations against senior Jivamukti teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti.]

On a podcast released May 4^th, yoga teacher Matthew Lombardo echoed the sentiments of many of his co-workers at the Jivamukti Yoga School, arguing that the reporting on the recent sexual harassment lawsuit against his employer was “spurious, until it’s proven otherwise — legally.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have robust conversations, and even passionate ones,” said Lombardo, who started teaching at the school in 2005.

“But let’s talk about this after there’s a ruling. Let’s wait until there’s a judge that says ‘This person is wrong, this person is right.’ Then we’re like: ‘the law held up.’”

Lombardo suggested that until then, reporters “keep [their] critical thinking hat on,” and “stay out of other people’s business.”(1)

But on May 19^th, prospects for legal clarity were snuffed by the announcement of an out-of-court settlement, bound by a confidentiality agreement. Former plaintiff Holly Faurot is now committed to silence concerning her experience at the school. Former defendants Ruth Lauer-Manenti, Jivamukti founders Sharon Gannon and David Life, and studio manager Carlos Menjivar are likewise forbidden from answering questions about Faurot’s allegations and how they were handled.(2)

In the secretly recorded conversation that formed part of the suit, Lauer-Manenti didn’t deny sexually touching her supervisee. The mentor’s actions were a breach of both New York State sexual harassment law and Jivamukti’s Code of Ethics. The confidential settlement means that prospective Jivamukti students who ask why Lauer-Manenti is still working at the school and whether or not she has been disciplined in relation to the allegations will be met with “No comment.”(3)

Lauer-Manenti was allowed to continue facilitating a teacher training program in India after the lawsuit was filed. She recently led a Jivamukti retreat in upstate New York, and is about to embark on a European teaching tour.(4)(5)

On the day the settlement was filed, Jivamukti deleted the public denial of wrongdoing it had addressed to its community. The same statement vanished from its Facebook timeline, along with its contentious comment thread, where critics and devotees had battled for weeks over whether the company was covering up abuse.(6)(7)

Non-Disclosure Agreements and Self-Censoring

There can be many legitimate reasons for settling out of court. And for all anyone knows, the confidentiality terms might have demanded that Jivamukti remove their website denial. The deal might have awarded money to the plaintiff commensurate with her $1.6M claim.

Speculation aside, the confidentiality aspect of the settlement — forged to avoid court testimony and mute public comment — is consistent with a yoga studio culture in which teachers and practitioners feel afraid to speak truth to power. In her article for Slate.com, Michelle Goldberg notes that all six current and former Jivamukti teachers she interviewed requested anonymity. They “described an intense, all-consuming environment,” she wrote, “where the lines between workplace and ashram were blurred and where supervisors doubled as gurus.”(8)

I’ve interviewed seventeen Jivamukti teachers and employees (ex and current) about the Faurot allegations, as well as similar complaints. Like Goldberg’s sources, every one has declined to go on record. They’re concerned about professional vulnerability, losing friendships or status within the company, the danger of being ostracized, or the possibility of being discredited in the same way Faurot was by Gannon and Life’s public statements.

“I have to consider my own health right now,” one former Jivamukti employee wrote via email. “If I’m going to put myself back on this toxic radar it would really need to be worth it.”

A culture of silence also informs Jivamukti’s customer relations.

On April 26^th, an applicant to the June Jivamukti Teacher Training in Costa Rica posted my April 24^th article on the Faurot case to a private Facebook group created for the event. The producer and program director of international Jivamukti trainings quickly deleted the post and unilaterally issued a tuition refund, cancelling the applicant’s spot in the training.(9)

In a subsequent email thread, the producer chalked up the refund to a misunderstanding, and offered to reinstate the application. The applicant, who requested anonymity, was nonplussed.

“You cut me off from the other attendees,” she wrote, “and my ability to communicate about this issue. The attendees have a right to know about what’s happening. We have the right to discuss it. I never asked for a refund but in the end I’m glad my name won’t be associated with such absolute insanity any longer.”

The Jivamukti training producer did not respond to a request for comment.

Four former employees of Jivamukti who wished to remain anonymous said that other former employees and students have been prohibited from commenting on the school’s culture through non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) they have been invited to sign in exchange for cash payments or tuition refunds. These sources worked at the company between 2001 and 2016, which suggests that the agreements have been a common Jivamukti management practice. They said that NDAs are used to smooth over student grievances against teachers, or teacher’s grievances against management.

“It is very disappointing to realize that Jivamukti applies fear politics and silencing methods under the flag of spiritual anarchism, activism, and veganism,” one source wrote via email.

“NDAs create an oppressive environment in which there is no space for open discussion or critical thinking.”

Another source wrote that “there is a subtle, but very strong atmosphere of internal silencing from the management at Jivamukti.”

“It encourages self-censoring amongst its employees. Even in teachers’ meetings — a supposedly open forum to discuss problems — we didn’t bring up our concerns about power abuses. Things were discussed in a roundabout way, wrapped in spiritual platitudes.”

Gannon and Life did not respond to a request for comment.

An Open Secret

If there is pressure at Jivamukti to keep mum, it wouldn’t be unique in the world of yoga communities that orbit around charismatic leadership. In fact, the tactics described by sources who used to work at Jivamukti echo a silence surrounding one of Gannon and Life’s lineage masters, the late Pattabhi Jois, innovator of the Ashtanga Yoga method. Jois was also one of Lauer-Manenti’s root teachers.(10)

There is clear video documentation that Jois’ often-brutal physical adjustments elided with sexual harassment of his female students. The video has been scrubbed from YouTube twice between 2013 and 2015, but remains on Vimeo, posted anonymously.(11)

To my knowledge, no prominent Jois devotee has publicly addressed this open secret.

In December of 2010, ex-Ashtanga student Anneke Lucas, now director of Liberation Prison Yoga, published her account of Jois grabbing her vagina while she was in plow pose during a public class in Manhattan in 2000. She shared the post on Facebook, but it attracted almost no attention from her roster of Ashtanga world friends.(12)(13)

Lucas recently published an updated version of the account. Again, no prominent Ashtanga practitioners or teachers responded to the post, even though this time it was shared widely.(14)

I asked Lucas why she thought her story had met with silence. Her insights are informed by being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, along with decades of therapy and activism.

“Senior male Ashtanga teachers have told me that Jois was a father figure for them,” she said via Skype.

“In a dysfunctional family, if you’re not in, you’re out. In wealthy dysfunctional families, all the children are bought off. The silence is paid.

“I think it can be the same in the yoga world: there’s a legacy of power and that power governs people’s livelihoods.

“If the brother who sees the father inappropriately touching his daughter stands up to the father, he’s going to lose his inheritance.

“The guru is dead, but everyone is still silent. Nobody wants to taint the minds of the new people coming in.

“Whereas it’s really the opposite: everyone is tainted who is not informed.”

A Repeating Cycle

Ignoring or whitewashing abuse is a basic strategy of institutional defence. Some modern yoga schools, however, add in psychospiritual gaslighting, reframing a guru’s abuse as karmically appropriate for the victim, or signs of love from a misunderstood genius. This happened in Swami Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga, at Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville, and at Swami Satyananda’s Bihar School of Yoga, among others. (15)(16)(17)

Many of these schools have fizzled in terms of global relevance. But the pattern is also prominent in mainstream schools that have built popularity in part by avoiding accountability at watershed moments.

In 1991, investigative journalist Bob Frost reported on years of sexual abuse allegations against Manouso Manos, a senior teacher at the Iyengar Institute of San Francisco. In a written statement to Frost, Manos didn’t deny the misconduct, consisting of in-class groping and therapy room sex acts. In 1989 he was suspended from the Institute.

However, B.K.S. Iyengar himself intervened to ask the board members to forgive Manos. Frost reports that Manos’ subsequent reinstatement in 1990 prompted five Institute teachers to quit, and the resignation of Judith Lasater from the Institute’s board.

When Frost phoned Iyengar in India to ask him if he believed the charges against Manos — which Manos had not denied — Iyengar replied, “No. That is an old, old story. I doubt its truth. I do not believe past things when they are kept quiet for so long.”

But the asana master changed tack when Frost asked whether he believed that the women had seduced Manos. “Yes, naturally,” Iyengar told Frost. “Unless a woman shows willingness, the man will not act.”(18)

Six months before Frost’s report, Yoga Journal had published Katherine Webster’s investigation into decades of sexual harassment committed by the late Swami Rama against his female Himalayan Institute students. Webster showed that Rama’s apprentice and spiritual heir, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, staunchly defended his guru in part by ignoring and discrediting the accusers.(19)

“Before [these women] started saying these things,” Tigunait told Webster, “I also had a very good feeling that these people were wonderful people and they would never lie and they were trustworthy people.

“But after they started saying all these things, I never trusted them anymore.”

Years later, the story evolved to show that even a court decision rendering the type of clarity many were hoping for in the Jivamukti case can have little impact on a yoga school found to be negligent.

In 1994, Tigunait became a defendant in a $1.9M suit brought against Rama’s Himalayan Institute by Jasmine Patel, who charged that the Swami forced her to have sex with him thirty times when she was nineteen and he was in his late sixties. Swami Rama fled to India in 1995, and died there in 1996.

In summarizing the jury’s 1997 verdict against the Institute, Chief Judge Vanaskie of the U.S. Middle District Court of Pennsylvania found that Patel “became a victim because of the Himalayan Institute’s repeated cover-ups of Swami Rama’s prior sexual transgressions.” Vanaskie noted that Tigunait had fielded complaints about Rama’s conduct since the early 1980s.(20)

Tigunait offered Webster a personal rationale for his silence.

“Because that’s my whole life…. My relationship with [Swami Rama] is purely divine and spiritual – there cannot be impurity in it, and there is no room for such thoughts.

Tigunait remains the spiritual director of the Himalayan Institute, and maintains an active teaching and touring schedule.

“I might doubt my own perception, I might doubt my own eyes, but I cannot doubt that strength which has given me everything.

“Believing such stories,” he told Webster, “means disbelieving in myself.”

Moving Forward: A Pledge

I sent Tigunait’s quarter-century-old quotes to Anneke Lucas and then asked her via Skype what she thought it would take for the veil of silence over yoga institutions – including Jivamukti – to lift.

“The first thing that anyone has to do is look at themselves — why we put people up or why we look down on them,” she said.

“We have to look at our own internal power structures.”

But Lucas is clear that transparency and safety can’t come from self-reflection alone. She’s become a driving force behind From Darkness to Light, an activist organization committed to educating the yoga community on abuse issues, formed in the wake of the Jivamukti scandal. Its committee has hosted an inaugural event in Manhattan, and released a pledge for yoga teachers and studios they hope will become a basic qualification for integrity.(21)

“The challenge is to create a more civilized society,” Lucas said. “To not fall back on ‘Oh well — you’re humiliated. Tough luck.’

“People who have been abused have had their soul crushed, and may not have access to their courage to stand up for themselves. Does that mean that they deserve to go and do yoga to heal themselves and have the same thing happen again?

“They deserve a society that is more civilized than the one they were exposed to, free from power addicts.”

Signatories to the pledge commit to the creation of and adherence to sexual harassment policies, and investigating all complaints of misconduct “as serious violations of trust, security, yoga tenets/ethics, and local laws.” The pledge advocates for an end to silencing through and education: “Sexual harassment training is critical and must be incorporated into yoga teacher training curricula.”

“I would like to see that pledge posted in the lobby of every yoga studio,” said Lucas. “In plain view, so that everyone who enters can see it.

“Because if you’re vulnerable with a power addict, they’re going to smack you down and make you feel like shit.

“But if you’re in an environment where you know that your fear and vulnerability is not only real, but okay, you might find courage, and begin to heal.”

____

Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

____

NOTES:

1.“Matt Lombardo on Spiritual Bypassing, Cults, and Recent Scandals.”, accessed 5.30.2016.

2.“LETTER / CORRESPONDENCE TO JUDGE”, accessed 5.30.2016.

3.“EXHIBIT A”, accessed 5.30.2016.

4. “Jivamukti Teacher Training”, accessed 5.30.2016.

5. “2016 Jivamukti Yoga and Tai Chi Weekend Retreat”, accessed 5.30.2016.

6.“A Message to the Jivamukti Yoga Community” (Wayback Machine), accessed 5.30.2016.

7. “Message from Sharon Gannon and David Life April 29, 2016”, accessed 5.30.2016.

8.“A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?”, accessed 5.30.2016.

9. “Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out”, accessed 5.30.2016.

10. In the conversation recorded by Faurot, Lauer-Manenti justifies her intimate advances in part by saying that she used to cuddle with “Guruji”, and would sit on his lap and kiss him after every class she took with him. “I kissed him everyday that I had class,” Lauer-Manenti told Faurot.

11. “PATTABHI JOIS: Ashtanga Yoga Adjustments”, accessed 5.30.2016.

12. Wikipedia: Anneke Lucas, accessed 5.30.2016.

13. Anneke Lucas’ Facebook Timeline, 12/7/2010, accessed 5.30.2016.

14. “Why the Abused Don’t Speak Up”, accessed 5.30.2016.

15. “O GURU, GURU, GURU”, by Lis Harris, accessed 5.30.2016.

16. Stripping the Gurus, Chapter XII: “SEX, BLISS, AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL”, accessed 5.30.2016.

17. “Boycott Satyananda’s Literature and Methods Until Reparations are Made for Sexual Abuse”, accessed 5.30.2016.

18. “Old Temptations in the New Age”, accessed 5.30.2016. I’m hosting this PDF on my site, as it is strangely unavailable anywhere else.

19. “The Case Against Swami Rama of the Himalayas”, accessed 5.30.2016..

20.“JASMINE PATEL V. HIMALAYAN INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF YOGA SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE USA”, p. 33, 22. Accessed 5.30.2016.

21. From Darkness to Light website, accessed 5.30.2016. The International Yoga Alliance for Ethics is also an excellent resource. Accessed 6.1.2016.

The post Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.

by Matthew Remski

June 21st

[Editors note: This is a followup to Matthew Remski’s previous articles: Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out, and Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond, which explore in depth the recent sexual harassment lawsuit against the Jivamukti Yoga School.]

The sexual harassment case against the Jivamukti Yoga School has been settled and sealed. Ruth Lauer-Manenti has exited stage right for teaching gigs in Berlin and Switzerland. Sharon Gannon and David Life have exited stage left for retreats in Costa Rica, upstate New York, and then Moscow in the fall. Holly Faurot has left the show altogether to practice, heal and get on with her life by teaching yoga to at-risk youth in Brooklyn.(1)(2)

The local effects of the case continue to quietly ripple. Several off-record insiders told me that Jivamukti teacher training numbers are drastically down from previous years. One current teacher told me that they’re patching together an exit plan, disgusted with bosses they accuse of fouling the brand they spent tens of thousands of dollars and hours helping to build. Some former teachers are now wondering how to reference Jivamukti in their educational history.

Confidentiality deals, rebranding, and the unconscious of the deep web will eventually swallow these stories. But the larger effects of the case – hammered out in the discourse surrounding it – form the latest crest on a wave of challenges confronting the global culture of yoga teaching, business ethics, and even philosophy.

The lawsuit has provoked the formation of an activist group, the staging of one of several planned public panels on abuse in the yoga world, and a petition to the Yoga Alliance to add trauma-sensitive training to the 200-hour curriculum. It has led to a broken teaching contract in at least one studio. It has exposed the rationalizations by which guru culture becomes indistinguishable from rape culture. It has spotlighted fundamental questions about the scope of practice for yoga teachers, and what kinds of spaces studio owners are obliged to foster. These tangles lead to even deeper questions about the nature of the human beings the yoga industry presumes to serve.(3)(4)(5)

The most dramatic themes have emerged in pitched online battles. On one side are Jivamukti teachers, students, and affiliate studio owners who reject accusations that they are cultists and avow the effectiveness of their method and the bonds of their community. On the other are former students and teachers who point to the school as an example of everything that’s wrong with modern yoga: a quintessentially American pyramid scheme, topped by charismatic pretenders.

But beneath the storm, subtler disputes are unfolding, perhaps most clearly seen in the point-counterpoint between yoga veterans like Leslie Kaminoff and a new generation of educators about how to move forward in the shadow of perennial scandal.

Kaminoff is one a handful of prominent students of the lauded yoga therapy pioneer T.K.V. Desikachar. He’s an anatomy instructor and yoga historian, and he provided a central voice for Michelle Goldberg’s report on the Jivamukti scandal in Slate.com. Goldberg consulted him as a former Jivamukti teacher, and as a veteran of the Manhattan yoga scene.(6)

“He gave voice to what I suspected a lot of readers were thinking,” Goldberg wrote via email.

In the article and a follow-up video, Kaminoff described growing wary of the Jivamukti scene in the early 1990s, as Gannon and Life became increasingly clear about their intentions to “remystify” yoga. He described how they built their faculty and business through a culture of emotional surrender and free labour, noting that leaders in cult-like environments become incapable or unwilling to distinguish disagreement from disloyalty. He criticized their militant veganism, their penchant for showing animal slaughterhouse films during yoga classes, and their negative attitudes towards their students having children.

But Kaminoff parts ways with other critics of Jivamukti by saying that participation in the school requires multiple choices that ensure its students are clearly consenting to everything that happens to them.

“Given how much buy-in there has to be in order to become a special person within an atmosphere like that,” he explained in the video, referring to Faurot, “it’s not a powerful way to go through life, identifying as a victim, when there are so many choices along the way.”(7)

Faurot accused Lauer-Manenti of abusing her status as mentor and supervisor to sexually grope her over the course of a year and a half.

“Holly’s situation is the result of choices she made and continues to make,” wrote Kaminoff in an email interview for my first article in this series. “To assert otherwise is to strip her of any meaningful agency in the matter.”

In a portion of our interview I didn’t publish, he offered a further assessment of the dynamics at play.

“Whatever power Ruth seems to have as a guru is that which has been given to her by students who choose to suspend their critical thinking in order to gain acceptance, love, better class times, whatever. Ultimately, the students have the power to eventually wake up, heal, and move on.”

In a subsequent interview, Kaminoff clarified, “It goes without saying that teachers should not harass or abuse their students. But because students cannot control their teachers, or know with 100% certainty that every teacher will act with integrity, students need to watch out for themselves and make decisions in their own best interests.”

The emphasis on student empowerment is the lynchpin of a broader argument Kaminoff has made for more than a decade as the unofficial spokesman of an anti-regulatory movement in American yoga. Schools can be incompetent and gurus can be abusive, he concedes. But campaigning to control their curricula or policing their actions is both presumptuous and threatening to the relational structure he posits as the heart of yoga pedagogy. He argues that making behavioural ideals into rules not only needlessly provokes temptation, but obstructs the directness, immediacy, and power of the student-teacher relationship.

“I avoid engaging in any action that will lead to third-party interference in the student-teacher relationship,” he declared in a 2008 manifesto against both regulatory bodies and the desire of some yoga therapists to legitimize the profession to health insurance providers.(8)

A Trauma-Sensitive Paradigm Emerges

Those who disagree with Kaminoff’s approach  suggest that appeals to personal agency in student-teacher relationships are both insensitive and insufficient when a person’s power of choice is compromised.

Jess Glenny, a British yoga teacher and yoga therapist specializing in working with people who have experienced sexual, emotional and physical trauma, was one of many who begged to differ with Kaminoff’s statements on the Jivamukti case.

“This woman is an abuse survivor in process of recovery,” Glenny wrote in an online comment, referring to Faurot.

“This isn’t about her choices. It’s about the way her neurology has responded to abuse. It’s biologically determined by her experiences. If someone has lost a leg, we don’t chastise them for not being able to run when someone tries to mug them.”

“Some of my clients are very, very vulnerable to this kind of behaviour,” Glenny said, referring to Lauer-Manenti’s harassment of Faurot.

“They often don’t have an understanding of appropriate boundaries. They can be triggered into a reflexive passivity and a need to placate in order to survive when someone makes a sexual advance on them. People with these issues are in our yoga classes, and we all need to be aware of this.”

Kaminoff released his follow-up video on May 15th, in part to respond to comments like Glenny’s, as well as numerous commenters who accused him of victim-blaming. He referred to a question I asked him in our first interview: If he’d known about Faurot’s history of abuse, would that have changed his comments about her personal responsibility?

“I thought long and hard,” he said. “My first reaction was ‘Well, that really sucks, that someone with that history got involved in that situation.’

“But so many people have that history. So many people react so differently to that history.”

He went on to detail the age-old categories of things we do not choose: nature, and nurture. “There’s nature, or your genetic inheritance,” Kaminoff asserted, “and there’s nurture — or the environment you grew up in, and how people treated you.”

He raised the example of people with albinism — a genetic or “natural” condition they obviously didn’t choose. He wondered aloud whether they might “be the least likely to develop skin cancer, because they’ll be the ones who are most protecting themselves against UV radiation. They’re not going to walk into a tanning parlour.”

In the same way, he suggested, sexual abuse survivors, who have been subjected to conditions of nurture they didn’t choose, should take actions to keep themselves out of “situations where their vulnerabilities will be exploited.

“How you respond to being a victim of something determines the outcome,” he said. 

“So would I have said things differently,” he asked, “had I known this teacher had this history? I would say no.

“Because choices were made, knowing what the history is, and potential vulnerabilities…. This is how lessons get learned.”

Yoga Practice, Scope of Practice

Through the lens of Feminism 101, Glenny and those who echoed her are protesting a basic misunderstanding of consent flowing from the Jivamukti faithful in dozens of comment threads:

The accuser chose her circumstances. She only complained when she wasn’t getting the attention she wanted. To imply that she was victimized is to demean and infantilize her. She has free will and she should have exercised it to her advantage.

But applied to yoga culture generally, their pushback raises the question of who, if anyone, is qualified to make assumptions about the inner capacities of students, along with what kinds of training might be required to serve a growing cultural awareness of the impacts of power, abuse and trauma upon a student’s ability to develop and thrive.

Recently, many yoga educators have been inspired by the interdisciplinary work of Trauma Sensitive Yoga innovators like David Emerson. Yoga teacher and somatic psychologist Hala Khouri has been featured by Yoga Alliance in an interview on the trauma-informed yoga, and has recently released a trauma-sensitive yoga programme through Off the Mat, into the World. Trauma sensitivity, social services, and social justice also intersected at the annual meeting of the Yoga Service Council which opened with an exploration of “trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness methodologies.”(9)(10)(11)(12)

These trainings introduce teachers to the incidence rate of trauma in the general population, how trauma impacts physiological and psychological responses, or a student’s capacity to say no to physical adjustments or emotional suggestions, how instructional language can offer options instead of ideals, and how not to further marginalize people who may be carrying shameful burdens.

Jivamukti’s Gannon and Life say that issues of trauma-sensitivity are beyond their scope of practice. When I interviewed them for the first article in this series, I asked for a response to a quote from an ex-Jivamukti teacher who lamented that the school didn’t provide trauma-sensitivity training to its staffers, even as its method encourages constant hands-on adjustments.

“It is illegal for us, as yoga teachers, to diagnose or treat someone with a physical or emotional trauma,” they wrote, via email. “We are only allowed to teach yoga. When a teacher gives a student a hands-on assist it is to help the student do the asana correctly and safely. A student can injure themselves by practicing yoga with incorrect alignment.”

But off-record sources say that adjustments at the Jivamukti Yoga School also project power and foster intimacy between teachers and students. In one videoed class, Sharon Gannon delivers a sermon against finding fault in others while sitting on a student’s thighs. The student is immobilized in reclined hero pose.(13)

I asked Glenny via email what she felt about Jivamukti’s answer.

“Obviously, nobody’s asking yoga teachers to diagnose or treat anyone with or for anything,” she wrote. “Yoga teachers don’t get those tools from practice and general training.

“But we should respond appropriately to what our students bring into the room. If a student comes into a class with prolapsed discs or a repaired knee, it’s clear that we should have an awareness of this if we’re going to adjust them.

“Also, touching someone is never just about alignment and physical safety,” Glenny continued.

“Many subtle messages are conveyed through touch. If a person has experienced sexual trauma, especially as a child, what they receive from touch may not be the message intended.

“If the intention does cross boundaries, they will experience difficulty in decoding the inappropriateness and taking action to protect themselves.”

Impacts on the Workshop Circuit

Theodora Wildcroft is a trauma-sensitive yoga instructor who teaches asanas and breathwork to non-neurotypical youth. She’s also a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at The Open University, researching the intersection of British counter-culture and social activism with transnational yoga culture.

She argues that the kind of trauma-aware training that could help disarm the power imbalances at play in the Jivamukti case should become a minimum requirement for yoga schools.

“As a trauma survivor, I need to know what spaces are safe for me to enter as a student,” Wildcroft wrote in an online comment.

“The Jivamukti lawsuit said that the student was encouraged to consider the teacher a more enlightened being than they were. Then she was to share a bed with that teacher ‘platonically’. Then she wound up being sexually touched by that teacher.

“The management not only did nothing, they continued to support the teacher, while suggesting that their policies need no review. That is not a safe space for me, and not one I can encourage others to enter.”

As to Kaminoff’s emphasis on student responsibility, Wildcroft approved of his transparency on a Skype call from her home in Southern England.

“His statements do prospective students a service,” she said. “He understands what his views are regarding free will and the primacy of the individual, and he speaks them clearly and confidently.

“The real problem in yoga culture is with powerful teachers who either hide these views or don’t even know that they hold them – who don’t realize that they’re shaming vulnerable students for not possessing the qualities they actually came to yoga to develop.

“Then there are all the studios and schools and other institutions that fail to challenge this status quo within the culture.”

“So I’m grateful that he’s made it very clear that I can never attend his classes,” Wildcroft continued. “Not because I’m concerned he can’t teach anatomy or that he will injure me in some direct way, but because his comments make me unsure of his interest in what an abuse survivor has to say about how her past impacts her responses, or what she needs to feel safe and supported.”

An entire yoga community in Portland, Oregon, shares Wildcroft’s analysis. Todd Vogt and Annie Adamson, co-owners of Yoga Union, recently cancelled an upcoming weekend intensive with Kaminoff in which he was scheduled to teach on the anatomy of breathing in yoga postures. Their decision came in response to local, student and faculty concerns surrounding the Jivamukti conversation.

Their awkward process, played out publicly on social media, is a watershed moment in yoga business ethics, and a sign that trauma-awareness in yoga culture is going mainstream. It’s the first time I’m aware of that studio directors have allowed a programming and business decision that merges political and therapeutic concerns to be guided by community input an open forum.

(Full disclosure: I occasionally travel from my home in Toronto to present at Yoga Union, and have known Vogt, Adamson, and many faculty members for the past three years.)

The fracas began with Yoga Union sharing Kaminoff’s clarification video to its Facebook timeline. Yoga Union Teacher Ivy Katz commented, questioning whether Kaminoff’s attitudes to the victims of abuse indicate a flaw in his teaching approach.

“I’m disappointed that someone who is such an ‘expert’ on the anatomy of yoga seems to lack any understanding of neurobiology,” she wrote beneath the post.

A mental health worker specializing in developmental trauma, Katz had first expressed her concerns to Vogt weeks earlier.

On May 21^st, Yoga Union issued its first public comment on the brewing debate, attempting to both soothe concerns and preserve the business arrangement. They defaulted to a well-worn path in the history of yoga controversy – encouraging students to separate the teacher from the teachings.

“Hosting him doesn’t mean we endorse his views on psychology any more than they mean we endorse his political or religious views,” Vogt wrote.

“Hosting him means that we trust he is qualified to teach yoga and anatomy.”(14)

This careful answer fell flat. One Portlander decried it as “tone-deaf”, while another wrote: “As a yoga teacher of over 15 years, a former studio owner, and a PhD psychotherapist specializing in trauma I would say your convenient ‘compartmentalization’ of this situation is only further damaging to your studio’s reputation. Is this how you want your students and the public to see you, turning a blind eye?”

That evening, Yoga Union teacher Carly Budhram publicly distanced herself from the studio’s statement, writing: “As a woman, a yogi, and a yoga instructor at Yoga Union, I do not in any way endorse Yoga Union’s statements, or Leslie’s comments, or his presence at our studio.

“As much as Kaminoff’s understandings of the physical practice of yoga have greatly supported my own practice and teaching (among many, many others), I do not believe that can be separated from such an egregious perspective on personal agency and abuse – especially considering the field we’re in, and the deeply problematic lack of boundaries we are complicit in perpetuating when we do not speak up.”(15)

Vogt and Adamson took heed of Katz, Budhram, and many others, and the next day apologized to their faculty and student body. They noted the sensitive personal territory and confusing business situation they were in, and asked for continued feedback and guidance.(16)

On May 24^th, they discussed the issue with the teacher training cohort that made up the majority of the event’s registered audience. The trainees told the studio owners and management that they’d prefer a different instructor.

On May 30th, Yoga Union announced their decision to cancel with Kaminoff “on the basis that insensitively and inaccurately speaking outside his scope of practice has compromised his voice and lost his audience at Yoga Union.”

The studio has since devoted that weekend to a “Trauma Informed Yoga Community Event”, to be facilitated by local trauma sensitivity professionals, and featuring open community discussion.

“Our community is our greatest teacher,” wrote Vogt on the Yoga Union timeline. “We are looking to them for guidance.”(17)

Beyond a broken collegiality, the decision has also led to a financial dispute, with Yoga Union forfeiting their deposit, and Kaminoff’s talent agent sending the studio into collections to recover non-refundable travel costs.

“Free will is a powerful story, but not everyone can tell it.”

On the surface, Kaminoff’s approach resonates in at least one way with the new paradigm of trauma sensitivity — through his long-standing belief that yoga should serve the unique needs of the person.

“The ultimate context of yoga is the person who is doing it,” he wrote via email.

“To me, the purpose of yoga is to bring an individual to more of a state of balance, whatever that means for that person. What’s balance for me can be very different than what’s balance for you.

“I think that yoga is about understanding our own individual nature. As my teacher, T.K.V. Desikachar says, ‘The yoga must be adapted to the individual.'”

Kaminoff’s acknowledgement of individual needs, however, blends with overtones of individualism that presumes an inviolate personal agency.

“There’s stuff that happens that we didn’t choose,” he emphasized in his video elaboration.

“But then there’s how we respond – how we chose to respond to the things we didn’t choose.

“There’s nature and nurture versus free will and the choices we make.”

It’s unclear whether this seemingly common-sense philosophy will survive feminist analysis and trauma-sensitive practice, neither of which separate things that happen to a person from how a person is able to act in the world. Whether studying the propaganda of rape culture or the effects of abuse on sympathetic nervous response, both disciplines — which are changing global yoga discourse from the inside out — argue that the very capacity for personal agency is heavily if not completely socially and experientially conditioned.

Nonetheless, Kaminoff’s statements are neither unique nor fringe in the yoga world. They resonate with a core tenet of yoga faith in the new age: a belief in the personal power by which anybody, regardless of their history, can re-make themselves. The belief is rooted in ancient and medieval practice manuals – or at least contemporary readings of them – that encourage yoga practitioners to transcend their socialization and re-identify themselves with internal or transcendent sources of joy and calm.

The modern era appropriates and fertilizes this metaphysics with the gospel of American independence and the spiritualitized capitalism that has allowed yoga to globalize. Whether yoga teachers channel bygone sources to tell students to “Practice, and all is coming,” or corporate mantras of “Just do it,” the power of modern yoga marketing turns on its invitation to the individual to step out of internalized abuse and oppression into the triumph of self-sufficiency.

It’s a message that can make therapeutic sense. Practice often seems to begin where positive intuitions provoke decisive effort. Don’t we, after all, choose to practice, and by practicing, enrich our capacity for making new choices? Aren’t we choosing to undo the recurrent patterns of suffering targeted by the medicine of yoga? Isn’t there someone inside of us who remains fundamentally smart and sound, and who, despite everything, knows and wills the way?

As both scholar and survivor, Wildcroft doesn’t see the belief in American-style free will as an eternal tenet of yoga philosophy, nor that it refers to an essential attribute of the yoga student. For her, it’s more of a placebo – which means it’s also a resource, and perhaps the privilege of those who haven’t been affected by trauma.

“Free will is a powerful story, she said via Skype. I’d caught her after her evening classes. “It’s a story we may need. But not everyone can tell it.”

I asked her what she thought about Kaminoff’s statement that people fall prey to abusive persons or organizations because they “choose to suspend their critical thinking.”

“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” she said. “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege.

“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.

“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.

“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”

I wondered aloud how yoga has helped her, given that most of the culture isn’t dialed in.

“Yoga practice can radically change my ability to consent. But I have to be in one of those rare spaces where I can let go and be broken, and not be told what’s wrong with me by people who think they have the answers.

“Safe spaces are spaces in which survivors can learn to heal themselves.

“When Jivamukti pretends that trauma-sensitive training isn’t their concern, survivors are reminded that they’re only allowed to be in one of two states. Either you’re broken and you should get the fuck out of here and get fixed. Or you’re fixed – in which case you don’t have any problems, so sure – let’s do yoga together.”

“That Jivamukti response is saying: ‘Don’t come to us with your needs. They don’t fit our view of ourselves or the world. Go away and get them fixed.’”

“Trauma-sensitive yoga brings it back to the person,” she explained. “It puts them in charge. That’s what’s missing in yoga culture in general. We’re too invested in the idea that the teacher is the expert in the condition of the student. That hurts everyone on some level.”

Dusk gathered in Toronto; the night deepened in England. Wildcroft sat back in her chair. It was clear this would be an ongoing conversation.

“The trauma survivor is the canary in the yoga studio coal mine,” she said. “We’re going to react worse than anyone if you stigmatize us.”We’re asking for safer spaces, and honourable relationships, and the cultural and institutional support to help make that happen.

“We’re asking because what’s good for us will benefit everyone.”(18)

____

Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

____

NOTES AND RESOURCES:

1. Lauer-Manenti’s dates in Berlin, and in Switzerland, accessed 6.15.2016.

2. Gannon and Life’s 2016 tour schedule, accessed 6.15.2016.

3. From Darkness to Light website and studio pledge. Trauma-sensitivity also drives the work of FDTL co-founder Anneke Lucas, director of Liberation Prison Yoga. Accessed 6.15.2016.

4. Abuse of Power panel, sponsored by Yogacity NYC, 5/3/2016, accessed 6.15.2016.

5. Petition to Standardize Abuse Prevention Education for Yoga Teachers. The Yoga Alliance response can be found here. Accessed 6.15.2016.

6. “A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?”, accessed 6.15.2016.

7.  “Teachers and Students: Rule Making, Rule Breaking.” Accessed 6.15.2016.

8. “I’m Not a Yoga Therapist Anymore”, accessed 6.19.2016. See also Yoga Talks with Leslie Kaminoff on Regulation EXTENDED. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

9. Healing Trauma with Yoga with David Emerson. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

10. Talking Teacher Ethics with Hala Khouri. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

11. Off the Mat Into the World, Yoga for Self-Regulation and Trauma. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

12. Yoga Service Council 2016. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

13. Jivamukti Master Class w Sharon Gannon (2014-10-Oct). Time cue: 1:12:00. Accessed 6.15.2016.

14. “Dear Yoga Community…”.  Accessed 6.15.2016.

15. “I’ve been sitting a lot with my thoughts…”. Accessed 6.15.2016.

16. “Our community is our greatest teacher…”. Accessed 6.15.2016.

17. “Trauma Informed Yoga Community Event.” Accessed 6.15.2016.

18. Wildcroft’s blog on Trauma Sensitive yoga practice provides a solid introduction to her work in the field.

The post Jivamukti Fallout: A Trauma-Sensitive Tipping Point in Modern Yoga? appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.

Holly Faurot tells more about her experience at Jivamukti; Sharon Gannon and David Life publicly respond to allegations of sexual assault and battery against senior Jivamukti teacher “Lady” Ruth Lauer-Manenti.

By Matthew Remski

4/24/16

On April 5th, Slate.com reported on the allegations of sexual assault and battery against yoga teacher “Lady” Ruth Lauer-Manenti, brought by Holly Faurot, her student at Jivamukti Yoga School in New York City.(1) The suit names Jivamukti founders Sharon Gannon and David Life, as well as studio director Carlos Menjivar, as co-defendants for covering up and condoning Lauer-Manenti’s alleged actions.(2)

Lauer-Manenti admitted to the relationship in a conversation secretly recorded by Faurot in 2014.(3) New York State has a one-party consent law, which means that Faurot was not legally obliged to tell Lauer-Manenti she was recording.(4)

In a step up from the earlier tabloid treatment of the story,(5) Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg interviewed Faurot and several off-record Jivamukti sources. But she framed the story through the views of renowned New York based yoga educator Leslie Kaminoff, who worked at Jivamukti in the 1990s. Kaminoff told Goldberg that Faurot’s story sounded like that of a jilted lover, and that she should now chant the mantra, “What the fuck was I thinking?

On April 8th, I interviewed Faurot by phone. I started by asking her what she thought of Kaminoff’s assessment of her suit.

“I found his comments ill-informed and unfortunate,” Faurot said. “He’s someone who’s been in the New York yoga community for a long time, and he instantly contributed to victim-blaming culture, which enables abuse, and silences those who would speak up.”

Thomas Shanahan, Faurot’s lawyer, was also on the call.

“From a legal perspective,” Shanahan said, “what’s stunning about Kaminoff’s comments is that with all of his years of experience in the yoga world, it’s clear he has absolutely no idea that under New York state law, Holly could never have consented to a sexual relationship with someone who controlled her employment.

“It’s shocking to me,” Shanahan said. “Maybe he figures that Eastern philosophy trumps Western law.”

“This is why this stuff happens over and over again,” said Faurot. “Victims speak out, and then people like him, who could be offering some guidance, make comments that are just wrong.

“Kaminoff doesn’t know me as a person. I’ve never met him.”

Nor have the thousands of social media commenters who seized on Kaminoff’s mic-drop moment to chuckle and cluck and share it around – faithful to a modern yoga tradition of minimizing and whitewashing patterns of abuse in teacher-student relations.

“People keep saying, ‘Don’t give your power away.’” Faurot says.

“But I didn’t know I had any power when I came to Jivamukti. My self-esteem was that unhealthy. I can see it now because I’ve done a lot of therapy.”

Only paragraphs after reporting that Faurot had entered Jivamukti from a history of child abuse and disordered eating, Goldberg quoted Kaminoff as saying “We’re not talking about people with diminished capacities”, and suggesting that it was Faurot’s fault for giving her power to Lauer-Manenti.

So I asked Faurot to paint a fuller picture of what she thinks made her vulnerable to Lauer-Manenti and the whole Jivamukti scene.

“I was in a freeze pattern”

“My apprenticeship with Ruth started out as highly formal, and I loved it,” said Faurot.

“The rule was that I couldn’t study with her until I could read and write in Sanskrit. She had high standards and expectations. In the beginning she showed herself to be a very firm, professional teacher who knew a lot and had a lot of experience. Once that trust was built, then the lines started getting crossed.

“Ruth would call me the daughter she never had,” said Faurot. “I was at her house for holidays. I visited her mother’s house. I was really entwined with her family. She would sometimes sign letters to me: ‘With a mother’s love’.

“She gave me so much attention. I really felt like I had a mother for the first time in my life.

“I know many people have suffered abuse in childhood, so I almost feel ridiculous saying it out loud. I had been alienated from my own family, and I was a very lonely person. I had a good job and close friends, but I had never experienced a sense of home.

“Getting things as an adult that I’d never received as a child was very powerful. I felt safe with Ruth. She made me feel very loved. I gained older sisters, who were her prior apprentices. I became part of this small privileged family within the larger context of the Jivamukti community.

“Acceptance into this family required unquestionable devotion to Ruth, and in return she agreed to be our teacher, our guru. It was assumed that all of us would work together to serve and take care of her.

“I learned quickly that to question her, to disagree, to see other points of view, or to even subtly to shift the focus away from her, was to bring on disapproval and the risk of rejection or being shunned.”

Because of her eating disorder, Faurot entered the Jivamukti community underweight, which amplified the power imbalance.

“It’s easy to project ‘little girl’ onto that body type,” Faurot said.

“That was the context of our relationship when Ruth asked to come over to my house. Why wouldn’t I invite my mom to my house? What’s wrong with my mother sleeping next to me in my bed?

“Then it’s really confusing when that ‘mother’ pulls you in to sexually spoon you.”

In the suit, Faurot alleges that after establishing both emotional trust and beginning to control her professional relationship to Jivamukti as a new teacher, Lauer-Manenti’s nonconsensual sexual advances escalated from spooning to groping to asking Faurot to pose for sexually charged photos.

Faurot alleges that when she attempted to confront Lauer-Manenti about their relationship in 2013, the senior teacher humiliated her by saying that she could see Faurot’s “little crotch” in her pants.(6)

“I was questioning her for the first time about her behavior,” Faurot explained. “Ruth dismissed all of my feelings, emotions and questions as ‘ridiculous.’ She instructed me to ‘focus on the love we have between us.’

“I felt she was saying, ‘All I can see of you, Holly, is your little crotch in your pants.’”

In our interview, Faurot suggested that Lauer-Manenti’s sexual assaults echoed throughout their public relationship, blended seamlessly into the studio’s culture of guru devotion, mimicked behaviours, and intimate physical adjustments.(7)

“Ruth would often look me up and down when I was in mountain pose,” Faurot said, describing their classroom dynamic.

“She’d gaze at me head to toe, in a way that if a man were doing it to a woman, it would be obviously wrong. I think that people get confused when it’s a woman doing it to a woman.

“When she helped me do dropbacks – backbends – she’d thrust her thigh into my crotch. She’d drop me back and then pull me back up on her thigh. Things were way more intimate then they would be with a stranger.”

Over time, Faurot’s practice and sense of her body underwent a disempowering shift.

“Ruth would spend the night with me on Sundays and I would always take her class Monday morning. Those classes were always very difficult. My body would feel off, heavy– like a wet noodle that could be bent into any shape. Looking back this was clearly my body’s response to the violations taking place.

“I was in a freeze pattern. I had a deeply ingrained habit of dissociation due to both my childhood and the eating disorder I developed as a young adult. Because of that, it was perhaps easier for Ruth, my ‘guru’ – the person I was taught to trust more than my own instincts – to gain control and possession over my person.”

Several Jivamukti teachers who asked to remain off-record said that the school’s teaching policies made adjustments a virtually mandatory part of their teaching responsibilities.

“The general message is that every student in the room should be touched,” one teacher told me. “They feel that no one should come and not be adjusted.

“But in any classroom, there are going to be people who have experienced emotional, physical or sexual trauma,” they said. “Some people love the intensity of the adjustments. For others, it’s triggering, and they don’t come back.

“There’s no trauma-sensitive training provided.”(8)

Faurot alleges that her relationship with Lauer-Manenti was also influenced by the dictates of the Jivamukti Teacher Apprenticeship Program, which encourages the pious service and emulation of mentors.(9)

“When Ruth taught, I was literally always within arm’s reach, ready to serve her and take care of any needs she had. My submission to Ruth was at the heart of my public life within the Jivamukti community.”

Lauer-Manenti was explicit about emulation as a spiritual necessity in a blog post from 2008.

“In olden times, and up to the present, when yogis wanted to reach enlightenment, they copied their teacher,” Lauer-Manenti writes.

“They emulated what the teacher ate, how much they slept, when they meditated, what the nature of their thoughts were, how they showed kindness toward others, what holy books they read, what holy songs they sung, how equanimous they were in the midst of ups and downs, how saddened they were by the suffering of others, and how happy they were in the presence of the Lord… Gradually the yogi and the great teacher would become one.”(10)

Overall, Faurot alleges, the encouragement to merge overwhelmed her sense of self.

“‘Holly’ was pushed further and further into the background,” she said, “and my identity in the community as ‘Lady Ruth’s devotee’ took over.

“It was a silent contract. I got to be close to Ruth if I never questioned her, if I did whatever she said, if I let her do whatever she wanted to do with me.

“I was an eager student, wanting to go on a spiritual journey, wanting to get rid of all the pain I’d been through in my life. This was a way for me to actually go there and achieve peace with myself, to feel self-confidence again. Slowly things changed. I became her object in her art projects, in her classroom, and also when she asked to sleep in my bed.

“It’s very disturbing to realize and digest what actually happened. The layers of manipulation are hard for me to parse or even to believe, now that I have gained distance from the relationship.”

Lauer-Manenti declined to comment for this article.

“Asserting victimhood”

I sent Kaminoff an early draft of this article to see whether reading Faurot’s account might prompt him to retract any of his comments, or to add nuance. His answer via email was mixed.

He first explained that his hour-long conversation with Goldberg had been reduced to a handful of controversial quotes.

“Our interview,” he wrote, “was about the cult-like atmosphere at Jivamukti –about which I had a lot to say that didn’t make it into the Slate article.”

Kaminoff then clarified his scope of practice. “I am not a legal expert so I was not speaking from a legal, employment-law perspective,” he wrote.

“In addition, I am not a psychologist or trauma specialist so I am not evaluating anyone’s psychology. I am a yoga educator with decades of experience seeing students and teachers alike use yoga to reinforce their preexisting psychic tendencies.”

But on the issues of power and consent, Kaminoff stayed his course.

“I’m the one standing up for the fact that Holly’s situation is the result of choices she made and continues to make.

“To assert otherwise is to strip her of any meaningful agency in the matter. Asserting victimhood may be the way to win an employment case in court, but it’s not a powerful way to go through life.”

Jivamukti’s Sharon Gannon and David Life: “A person sees what they want to see”

Up until this article, Sharon Gannon and David Life have made no public response to the allegations, beyond issuing a blanket denial of Faurot’s account on behalf of themselves, Lauer-Manenti, Menjivar, and the entire Jivamukti global community.(11)

When they agreed to my request for an interview, I sent them fifteen questions regarding Jivamukti business practices and beliefs pertinent to the suit. In their written answers, they ignored my mention of Lauer-Manenti’s admission to the relationship with Faurot, and repeated their collective denial of wrongdoing— “adamantly”. They evaded a question about whether their denial would contribute to the the well-known suppression of sexual abuse claims. They wrote that Faurot’s complaint was the first ever filed against them.

Gannon and Life also minimized the far-reaching effects of the Jivamukti apprenticeship system by denying that Lauer-Manenti was Faurot’s superior during the period of their relationship.

“During the time frame alleged,” they wrote, “Ruth was not Holly’s supervisor. She and Holly were both yoga teachers at the school.”

Their richest responses added metaphysical dimensions to the claim that Faurot was “asserting victimhood”.

“A person sees what they want to see,” Gannon and Life wrote — in response to a question about how their school educates students and teachers about power imbalances and psychological projections.

“What is inside one’s own mind will be mirrored in the world around them,” they wrote. “If a person is focused on money every thing they encounter is conditioned by that thought. If a person is thinking of sex they will see others around them in that light. If a person sees themselves as a victim they will see others around them as either victims or perpetrators.”

This thinly-veiled speculation on Faurot’s motivations is consistent with Jivamukti teachings that attribute a student’s negative experiences to their own actions and thoughts. In a dharma talk from New Year’s Eve, 2015, for instance, Gannon claims that critical speech causes the self-perception of victimhood.

“It’s all a state of mind, isn’t it?” Gannon asks the crowd of revelers through a puckish smile.

“Isn’t it? Is it?”

The room goes silent.

“There is a very popular trend,” she continues soberly, “to complain and find fault with other people, with the government, with your parents, boyfriend-girlfriend-husband-wife-children, the school system, the medical system. Complaining and blaming.”

“Please remember, every time we do that, we do something to ourselves. What we do is we paint ourselves as a victim. And that’s very toxic. It’s like poison….

“The power of your words come from your thoughts, and your thoughts are the most powerful, holy substance that exists. Your thoughts make your reality. Collectively, our thoughts make our collective reality.”(12)

According to Gannon and Life, the desired collective reality of Jivamukti precludes the possibility that Lauer-Manenti and Faurot were engaged in an injurious power dynamic.

“The teachings say that our souls are eternal and blissful,” they wrote, “and in truth no one is greater than anyone else—we are all one.

“If Ruth was teaching that gradually the yogi and the great teacher would become one, then she was teaching in accordance with an ancient respected tradition spanning thousands of years.”

I had asked how their school fostered independent critical thinking in conjunction with their emphasis on emulating mentors and guru devotion.

“The practices of yoga are intended to encourage critical thinking, to help one to let go of negative thoughts that isolate and encourage divisiveness and hostility.

“Yoga practice helps one to focus on cultivating redeeming virtues such as patience, compassion, kindness, and forgiveness, all of which promote clarity of mind.”

On the legal front, Gannon and Life’s clarity is being represented by their attorney, Siobhan Healy, who on March 11^th moved to have Faurot’s case dismissed on a series of legal technicalities.(13) Healy did not respond to several email and phone requests for comment.

Healy’s motion states that Faurot’s complaint to Jivamukti was made more than a year after Faurot ceased being an employee of the company, and is therefore uncovered by New York State or City Human Rights Laws. Likewise, Faurot’s “causes of action for assault and battery are barred” by a one-year statute of limitations.

The last technicality regards the interpretation of the relevance of Jivamukti’s Ethical Guidelines, which forbid sexual relationships between teachers and students. In her motion, Healy argues that the guidelines “did not create a binding agreement between Plaintiff and the Jivamukti Yoga Center.”

In effect, Healy’s argument verifies Faurot’s account of how the Jivamukti school trivializes its own guidelines. Faurot’s suit alleges that Jivamukti co-founder David Life joked about power and consent issues in training sessions. The suit says that Life “made light of the Jivamukti sexual harassment policy, telling teachers that although the unlawful behaviour was prohibited, [the policy] was not in practice otherwise.” Life allegedly quipped that if this guideline were followed, Jivamukti classes would be empty.(14)

I asked Gannon and Life if that account was accurate.

“The quote you refer to,” they wrote, “was obviously taken out of context to sensationalize what would otherwise be a non-story.”

Gannon and Life concluded the interview on a prophetic note.

“These are indeed dark days,” they wrote, “where material greed, profit and victimization are more appealing than Yoga—enlightenment, self-realization, kindness and eternal joy.

“Even so, we firmly believe that goodness will prevail, maybe not in the immediate future, but definitely when all is said and done.”

On April 12th, however, Healy withdrew her Motion to dismiss.(15)

“Spiritual rhetoric aside,” said Faurot’s lawyer Thomas Shanahan, “all they needed to do was enforce the school’s anti-discrimination and sexual harassment policy, and this case would never have been filed.

“A jury will decide if they are as spiritually sophisticated as they profess, or in denial.”

Leaving Jivamukti: Holly Faurot Moves On

Faurot is not asserting victimhood as an ongoing identity. She remains a plaintiff in a lawsuit she’s committed to seeing through, but she has also moved on. She now works for the Sonima Foundation, teaching yoga classes to students in the New York City public school system.(16) She’s also pursuing a Master’s Degree in Special Education at Hunter College.

“My new job has definitely been a part of my healing process,” she said. “It’s been very inspiring to introduce and instruct yoga and mindfulness practices to adolescents.

“If I had learned yoga at their age, perhaps it would have given me the tools to manage the anxiety I had and to build a healthy relationship with myself and my body. It’s hard to say for sure.”

Faurot was hired by Sonima director Eddie Stern, the former director of Ashtanga Yoga New York, which is now the Brooklyn Yoga Club, where Faurot now practices. Her connection with Stern dates back to the days in which she would “escape” Lauer-Manenti and Jivamukti on Tuesday mornings to practice in what she felt was a safe space.

“I remember saying to myself many times ‘I’m fixed’ or ‘I’m back’ after practicing at Eddie’s on Tuesdays. In essence, practicing there gave me my body back after Ruth had taken possession of it.

“Looking back on it now, I think an unconscious part of me was responding positively to an environment in which I was truly respected.”

[Follow up article by Matthew Remski: Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond]

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Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

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References:

(1) “A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?” Accessed 4.19.2016.

(2) “Holly Faurot – v. – Jivamukti Yoga Center, Inc. et al”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(3) “Exhibit A – Report of Sexual Harassment by Plaintiff”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(4) “New York Recording Law”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(5) “Manhattan yoga guru accused of sexually harassing apprentice teacher in $1M lawsuit”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(6)  “Exhibit A – Report of Sexual Harassment by Plaintiff”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(7) For examples, see this video of a class given by Sharon Gannon in 2014: “Jivamukti Master Class w Sharon Gannon (2014-10-Oct) (SRYBC)”, accessed 4.14.2016.

(8) For information on Trauma Sensitive Yoga, the work of David Emerson and co. is good place to start.

(9) Jivamukti Teacher Apprenticeship Program Manual, 2013, p.8.

(10) “Focus of the Month for JULY, 2008: How to become a Master”, accessed 4/14/2016. In a followup article, I’ll be showing how Lauer-Manenti’s ideology of guru devotion is psychosocially consistent with her lineage connection to the neo-Buddhist teacher Michael Roach, and somatically consistent with her account of studying with Pattabhi Jois.

(11) “To the Jivamukti Yoga Community”, accessed, 4.14.2016.

(12) “2015 New Years Reflections at Jivamukti Yoga NYC”, accessed 4.22.2016.

(13) “Affirmation in Support of Motion to Dismiss”, accessed 4/22/2016.

(14) “Verified Complaint”, p. 4, accessed 4.15.2016.

(15) “Stipulation”, accessed 4.23.2016.

(16) http://www.sonimafoundation.org/?s=Holly+Faurot, accessed 4.15.2016.

The post Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.

by Matthew Remski

6/2/2016

[Editors note: This is a followup to Matthew Remski’s previous article Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out, which explores in depth the recent sexual assault allegations against senior Jivamukti teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti.]

On a podcast released May 4^th, yoga teacher Matthew Lombardo echoed the sentiments of many of his co-workers at the Jivamukti Yoga School, arguing that the reporting on the recent sexual harassment lawsuit against his employer was “spurious, until it’s proven otherwise — legally.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have robust conversations, and even passionate ones,” said Lombardo, who started teaching at the school in 2005.

“But let’s talk about this after there’s a ruling. Let’s wait until there’s a judge that says ‘This person is wrong, this person is right.’ Then we’re like: ‘the law held up.’”

Lombardo suggested that until then, reporters “keep [their] critical thinking hat on,” and “stay out of other people’s business.”(1)

But on May 19^th, prospects for legal clarity were snuffed by the announcement of an out-of-court settlement, bound by a confidentiality agreement. Former plaintiff Holly Faurot is now committed to silence concerning her experience at the school. Former defendants Ruth Lauer-Manenti, Jivamukti founders Sharon Gannon and David Life, and studio manager Carlos Menjivar are likewise forbidden from answering questions about Faurot’s allegations and how they were handled.(2)

In the secretly recorded conversation that formed part of the suit, Lauer-Manenti didn’t deny sexually touching her supervisee. The mentor’s actions were a breach of both New York State sexual harassment law and Jivamukti’s Code of Ethics. The confidential settlement means that prospective Jivamukti students who ask why Lauer-Manenti is still working at the school and whether or not she has been disciplined in relation to the allegations will be met with “No comment.”(3)

Lauer-Manenti was allowed to continue facilitating a teacher training program in India after the lawsuit was filed. She recently led a Jivamukti retreat in upstate New York, and is about to embark on a European teaching tour.(4)(5)

On the day the settlement was filed, Jivamukti deleted the public denial of wrongdoing it had addressed to its community. The same statement vanished from its Facebook timeline, along with its contentious comment thread, where critics and devotees had battled for weeks over whether the company was covering up abuse.(6)(7)

Non-Disclosure Agreements and Self-Censoring

There can be many legitimate reasons for settling out of court. And for all anyone knows, the confidentiality terms might have demanded that Jivamukti remove their website denial. The deal might have awarded money to the plaintiff commensurate with her $1.6M claim.

Speculation aside, the confidentiality aspect of the settlement — forged to avoid court testimony and mute public comment — is consistent with a yoga studio culture in which teachers and practitioners feel afraid to speak truth to power. In her article for Slate.com, Michelle Goldberg notes that all six current and former Jivamukti teachers she interviewed requested anonymity. They “described an intense, all-consuming environment,” she wrote, “where the lines between workplace and ashram were blurred and where supervisors doubled as gurus.”(8)

I’ve interviewed seventeen Jivamukti teachers and employees (ex and current) about the Faurot allegations, as well as similar complaints. Like Goldberg’s sources, every one has declined to go on record. They’re concerned about professional vulnerability, losing friendships or status within the company, the danger of being ostracized, or the possibility of being discredited in the same way Faurot was by Gannon and Life’s public statements.

“I have to consider my own health right now,” one former Jivamukti employee wrote via email. “If I’m going to put myself back on this toxic radar it would really need to be worth it.”

A culture of silence also informs Jivamukti’s customer relations.

On April 26^th, an applicant to the June Jivamukti Teacher Training in Costa Rica posted my April 24^th article on the Faurot case to a private Facebook group created for the event. The producer and program director of international Jivamukti trainings quickly deleted the post and unilaterally issued a tuition refund, cancelling the applicant’s spot in the training.(9)

In a subsequent email thread, the producer chalked up the refund to a misunderstanding, and offered to reinstate the application. The applicant, who requested anonymity, was nonplussed.

“You cut me off from the other attendees,” she wrote, “and my ability to communicate about this issue. The attendees have a right to know about what’s happening. We have the right to discuss it. I never asked for a refund but in the end I’m glad my name won’t be associated with such absolute insanity any longer.”

The Jivamukti training producer did not respond to a request for comment.

Four former employees of Jivamukti who wished to remain anonymous said that other former employees and students have been prohibited from commenting on the school’s culture through non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) they have been invited to sign in exchange for cash payments or tuition refunds. These sources worked at the company between 2001 and 2016, which suggests that the agreements have been a common Jivamukti management practice. They said that NDAs are used to smooth over student grievances against teachers, or teacher’s grievances against management.

“It is very disappointing to realize that Jivamukti applies fear politics and silencing methods under the flag of spiritual anarchism, activism, and veganism,” one source wrote via email.

“NDAs create an oppressive environment in which there is no space for open discussion or critical thinking.”

Another source wrote that “there is a subtle, but very strong atmosphere of internal silencing from the management at Jivamukti.”

“It encourages self-censoring amongst its employees. Even in teachers’ meetings — a supposedly open forum to discuss problems — we didn’t bring up our concerns about power abuses. Things were discussed in a roundabout way, wrapped in spiritual platitudes.”

Gannon and Life did not respond to a request for comment.

An Open Secret

If there is pressure at Jivamukti to keep mum, it wouldn’t be unique in the world of yoga communities that orbit around charismatic leadership. In fact, the tactics described by sources who used to work at Jivamukti echo a silence surrounding one of Gannon and Life’s lineage masters, the late Pattabhi Jois, innovator of the Ashtanga Yoga method. Jois was also one of Lauer-Manenti’s root teachers.(10)

There is clear video documentation that Jois’ often-brutal physical adjustments elided with sexual harassment of his female students. The video has been scrubbed from YouTube twice between 2013 and 2015, but remains on Vimeo, posted anonymously.(11)

To my knowledge, no prominent Jois devotee has publicly addressed this open secret.

In December of 2010, ex-Ashtanga student Anneke Lucas, now director of Liberation Prison Yoga, published her account of Jois grabbing her vagina while she was in plow pose during a public class in Manhattan in 2000. She shared the post on Facebook, but it attracted almost no attention from her roster of Ashtanga world friends.(12)(13)

Lucas recently published an updated version of the account. Again, no prominent Ashtanga practitioners or teachers responded to the post, even though this time it was shared widely.(14)

I asked Lucas why she thought her story had met with silence. Her insights are informed by being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, along with decades of therapy and activism.

“Senior male Ashtanga teachers have told me that Jois was a father figure for them,” she said via Skype.

“In a dysfunctional family, if you’re not in, you’re out. In wealthy dysfunctional families, all the children are bought off. The silence is paid.

“I think it can be the same in the yoga world: there’s a legacy of power and that power governs people’s livelihoods.

“If the brother who sees the father inappropriately touching his daughter stands up to the father, he’s going to lose his inheritance.

“The guru is dead, but everyone is still silent. Nobody wants to taint the minds of the new people coming in.

“Whereas it’s really the opposite: everyone is tainted who is not informed.”

A Repeating Cycle

Ignoring or whitewashing abuse is a basic strategy of institutional defence. Some modern yoga schools, however, add in psychospiritual gaslighting, reframing a guru’s abuse as karmically appropriate for the victim, or signs of love from a misunderstood genius. This happened in Swami Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga, at Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville, and at Swami Satyananda’s Bihar School of Yoga, among others. (15)(16)(17)

Many of these schools have fizzled in terms of global relevance. But the pattern is also prominent in mainstream schools that have built popularity in part by avoiding accountability at watershed moments.

In 1991, investigative journalist Bob Frost reported on years of sexual abuse allegations against Manouso Manos, a senior teacher at the Iyengar Institute of San Francisco. In a written statement to Frost, Manos didn’t deny the misconduct, consisting of in-class groping and therapy room sex acts. In 1989 he was suspended from the Institute.

However, B.K.S. Iyengar himself intervened to ask the board members to forgive Manos. Frost reports that Manos’ subsequent reinstatement in 1990 prompted five Institute teachers to quit, and the resignation of Judith Lasater from the Institute’s board.

When Frost phoned Iyengar in India to ask him if he believed the charges against Manos — which Manos had not denied — Iyengar replied, “No. That is an old, old story. I doubt its truth. I do not believe past things when they are kept quiet for so long.”

But the asana master changed tack when Frost asked whether he believed that the women had seduced Manos. “Yes, naturally,” Iyengar told Frost. “Unless a woman shows willingness, the man will not act.”(18)

Six months before Frost’s report, Yoga Journal had published Katherine Webster’s investigation into decades of sexual harassment committed by the late Swami Rama against his female Himalayan Institute students. Webster showed that Rama’s apprentice and spiritual heir, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, staunchly defended his guru in part by ignoring and discrediting the accusers.(19)

“Before [these women] started saying these things,” Tigunait told Webster, “I also had a very good feeling that these people were wonderful people and they would never lie and they were trustworthy people.

“But after they started saying all these things, I never trusted them anymore.”

Years later, the story evolved to show that even a court decision rendering the type of clarity many were hoping for in the Jivamukti case can have little impact on a yoga school found to be negligent.

In 1994, Tigunait became a defendant in a $1.9M suit brought against Rama’s Himalayan Institute by Jasmine Patel, who charged that the Swami forced her to have sex with him thirty times when she was nineteen and he was in his late sixties. Swami Rama fled to India in 1995, and died there in 1996.

In summarizing the jury’s 1997 verdict against the Institute, Chief Judge Vanaskie of the U.S. Middle District Court of Pennsylvania found that Patel “became a victim because of the Himalayan Institute’s repeated cover-ups of Swami Rama’s prior sexual transgressions.” Vanaskie noted that Tigunait had fielded complaints about Rama’s conduct since the early 1980s.(20)

Tigunait offered Webster a personal rationale for his silence.

“Because that’s my whole life…. My relationship with [Swami Rama] is purely divine and spiritual – there cannot be impurity in it, and there is no room for such thoughts.

Tigunait remains the spiritual director of the Himalayan Institute, and maintains an active teaching and touring schedule.

“I might doubt my own perception, I might doubt my own eyes, but I cannot doubt that strength which has given me everything.

“Believing such stories,” he told Webster, “means disbelieving in myself.”

Moving Forward: A Pledge

I sent Tigunait’s quarter-century-old quotes to Anneke Lucas and then asked her via Skype what she thought it would take for the veil of silence over yoga institutions – including Jivamukti – to lift.

“The first thing that anyone has to do is look at themselves — why we put people up or why we look down on them,” she said.

“We have to look at our own internal power structures.”

But Lucas is clear that transparency and safety can’t come from self-reflection alone. She’s become a driving force behind From Darkness to Light, an activist organization committed to educating the yoga community on abuse issues, formed in the wake of the Jivamukti scandal. Its committee has hosted an inaugural event in Manhattan, and released a pledge for yoga teachers and studios they hope will become a basic qualification for integrity.(21)

“The challenge is to create a more civilized society,” Lucas said. “To not fall back on ‘Oh well — you’re humiliated. Tough luck.’

“People who have been abused have had their soul crushed, and may not have access to their courage to stand up for themselves. Does that mean that they deserve to go and do yoga to heal themselves and have the same thing happen again?

“They deserve a society that is more civilized than the one they were exposed to, free from power addicts.”

Signatories to the pledge commit to the creation of and adherence to sexual harassment policies, and investigating all complaints of misconduct “as serious violations of trust, security, yoga tenets/ethics, and local laws.” The pledge advocates for an end to silencing through and education: “Sexual harassment training is critical and must be incorporated into yoga teacher training curricula.”

“I would like to see that pledge posted in the lobby of every yoga studio,” said Lucas. “In plain view, so that everyone who enters can see it.

“Because if you’re vulnerable with a power addict, they’re going to smack you down and make you feel like shit.

“But if you’re in an environment where you know that your fear and vulnerability is not only real, but okay, you might find courage, and begin to heal.”

____

Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

____

NOTES:

1.“Matt Lombardo on Spiritual Bypassing, Cults, and Recent Scandals.”, accessed 5.30.2016.

2.“LETTER / CORRESPONDENCE TO JUDGE”, accessed 5.30.2016.

3.“EXHIBIT A”, accessed 5.30.2016.

4. “Jivamukti Teacher Training”, accessed 5.30.2016.

5. “2016 Jivamukti Yoga and Tai Chi Weekend Retreat”, accessed 5.30.2016.

6.“A Message to the Jivamukti Yoga Community” (Wayback Machine), accessed 5.30.2016.

7. “Message from Sharon Gannon and David Life April 29, 2016”, accessed 5.30.2016.

8.“A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?”, accessed 5.30.2016.

9. “Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out”, accessed 5.30.2016.

10. In the conversation recorded by Faurot, Lauer-Manenti justifies her intimate advances in part by saying that she used to cuddle with “Guruji”, and would sit on his lap and kiss him after every class she took with him. “I kissed him everyday that I had class,” Lauer-Manenti told Faurot.

11. “PATTABHI JOIS: Ashtanga Yoga Adjustments”, accessed 5.30.2016.

12. Wikipedia: Anneke Lucas, accessed 5.30.2016.

13. Anneke Lucas’ Facebook Timeline, 12/7/2010, accessed 5.30.2016.

14. “Why the Abused Don’t Speak Up”, accessed 5.30.2016.

15. “O GURU, GURU, GURU”, by Lis Harris, accessed 5.30.2016.

16. Stripping the Gurus, Chapter XII: “SEX, BLISS, AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL”, accessed 5.30.2016.

17. “Boycott Satyananda’s Literature and Methods Until Reparations are Made for Sexual Abuse”, accessed 5.30.2016.

18. “Old Temptations in the New Age”, accessed 5.30.2016. I’m hosting this PDF on my site, as it is strangely unavailable anywhere else.

19. “The Case Against Swami Rama of the Himalayas”, accessed 5.30.2016..

20.“JASMINE PATEL V. HIMALAYAN INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF YOGA SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE USA”, p. 33, 22. Accessed 5.30.2016.

21. From Darkness to Light website, accessed 5.30.2016. The International Yoga Alliance for Ethics is also an excellent resource. Accessed 6.1.2016.

The post Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.

by Matthew Remski

June 21st

[Editors note: This is a followup to Matthew Remski’s previous articles: Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out, and Silence and Silencing at Jivamukti Yoga and Beyond, which explore in depth the recent sexual harassment lawsuit against the Jivamukti Yoga School.]

The sexual harassment case against the Jivamukti Yoga School has been settled and sealed. Ruth Lauer-Manenti has exited stage right for teaching gigs in Berlin and Switzerland. Sharon Gannon and David Life have exited stage left for retreats in Costa Rica, upstate New York, and then Moscow in the fall. Holly Faurot has left the show altogether to practice, heal and get on with her life by teaching yoga to at-risk youth in Brooklyn.(1)(2)

The local effects of the case continue to quietly ripple. Several off-record insiders told me that Jivamukti teacher training numbers are drastically down from previous years. One current teacher told me that they’re patching together an exit plan, disgusted with bosses they accuse of fouling the brand they spent tens of thousands of dollars and hours helping to build. Some former teachers are now wondering how to reference Jivamukti in their educational history.

Confidentiality deals, rebranding, and the unconscious of the deep web will eventually swallow these stories. But the larger effects of the case – hammered out in the discourse surrounding it – form the latest crest on a wave of challenges confronting the global culture of yoga teaching, business ethics, and even philosophy.

The lawsuit has provoked the formation of an activist group, the staging of one of several planned public panels on abuse in the yoga world, and a petition to the Yoga Alliance to add trauma-sensitive training to the 200-hour curriculum. It has led to a broken teaching contract in at least one studio. It has exposed the rationalizations by which guru culture becomes indistinguishable from rape culture. It has spotlighted fundamental questions about the scope of practice for yoga teachers, and what kinds of spaces studio owners are obliged to foster. These tangles lead to even deeper questions about the nature of the human beings the yoga industry presumes to serve.(3)(4)(5)

The most dramatic themes have emerged in pitched online battles. On one side are Jivamukti teachers, students, and affiliate studio owners who reject accusations that they are cultists and avow the effectiveness of their method and the bonds of their community. On the other are former students and teachers who point to the school as an example of everything that’s wrong with modern yoga: a quintessentially American pyramid scheme, topped by charismatic pretenders.

But beneath the storm, subtler disputes are unfolding, perhaps most clearly seen in the point-counterpoint between yoga veterans like Leslie Kaminoff and a new generation of educators about how to move forward in the shadow of perennial scandal.

Kaminoff is one a handful of prominent students of the lauded yoga therapy pioneer T.K.V. Desikachar. He’s an anatomy instructor and yoga historian, and he provided a central voice for Michelle Goldberg’s report on the Jivamukti scandal in Slate.com. Goldberg consulted him as a former Jivamukti teacher, and as a veteran of the Manhattan yoga scene.(6)

“He gave voice to what I suspected a lot of readers were thinking,” Goldberg wrote via email.

In the article and a follow-up video, Kaminoff described growing wary of the Jivamukti scene in the early 1990s, as Gannon and Life became increasingly clear about their intentions to “remystify” yoga. He described how they built their faculty and business through a culture of emotional surrender and free labour, noting that leaders in cult-like environments become incapable or unwilling to distinguish disagreement from disloyalty. He criticized their militant veganism, their penchant for showing animal slaughterhouse films during yoga classes, and their negative attitudes towards their students having children.

But Kaminoff parts ways with other critics of Jivamukti by saying that participation in the school requires multiple choices that ensure its students are clearly consenting to everything that happens to them.

“Given how much buy-in there has to be in order to become a special person within an atmosphere like that,” he explained in the video, referring to Faurot, “it’s not a powerful way to go through life, identifying as a victim, when there are so many choices along the way.”(7)

Faurot accused Lauer-Manenti of abusing her status as mentor and supervisor to sexually grope her over the course of a year and a half.

“Holly’s situation is the result of choices she made and continues to make,” wrote Kaminoff in an email interview for my first article in this series. “To assert otherwise is to strip her of any meaningful agency in the matter.”

In a portion of our interview I didn’t publish, he offered a further assessment of the dynamics at play.

“Whatever power Ruth seems to have as a guru is that which has been given to her by students who choose to suspend their critical thinking in order to gain acceptance, love, better class times, whatever. Ultimately, the students have the power to eventually wake up, heal, and move on.”

In a subsequent interview, Kaminoff clarified, “It goes without saying that teachers should not harass or abuse their students. But because students cannot control their teachers, or know with 100% certainty that every teacher will act with integrity, students need to watch out for themselves and make decisions in their own best interests.”

The emphasis on student empowerment is the lynchpin of a broader argument Kaminoff has made for more than a decade as the unofficial spokesman of an anti-regulatory movement in American yoga. Schools can be incompetent and gurus can be abusive, he concedes. But campaigning to control their curricula or policing their actions is both presumptuous and threatening to the relational structure he posits as the heart of yoga pedagogy. He argues that making behavioural ideals into rules not only needlessly provokes temptation, but obstructs the directness, immediacy, and power of the student-teacher relationship.

“I avoid engaging in any action that will lead to third-party interference in the student-teacher relationship,” he declared in a 2008 manifesto against both regulatory bodies and the desire of some yoga therapists to legitimize the profession to health insurance providers.(8)

A Trauma-Sensitive Paradigm Emerges

Those who disagree with Kaminoff’s approach  suggest that appeals to personal agency in student-teacher relationships are both insensitive and insufficient when a person’s power of choice is compromised.

Jess Glenny, a British yoga teacher and yoga therapist specializing in working with people who have experienced sexual, emotional and physical trauma, was one of many who begged to differ with Kaminoff’s statements on the Jivamukti case.

“This woman is an abuse survivor in process of recovery,” Glenny wrote in an online comment, referring to Faurot.

“This isn’t about her choices. It’s about the way her neurology has responded to abuse. It’s biologically determined by her experiences. If someone has lost a leg, we don’t chastise them for not being able to run when someone tries to mug them.”

“Some of my clients are very, very vulnerable to this kind of behaviour,” Glenny said, referring to Lauer-Manenti’s harassment of Faurot.

“They often don’t have an understanding of appropriate boundaries. They can be triggered into a reflexive passivity and a need to placate in order to survive when someone makes a sexual advance on them. People with these issues are in our yoga classes, and we all need to be aware of this.”

Kaminoff released his follow-up video on May 15th, in part to respond to comments like Glenny’s, as well as numerous commenters who accused him of victim-blaming. He referred to a question I asked him in our first interview: If he’d known about Faurot’s history of abuse, would that have changed his comments about her personal responsibility?

“I thought long and hard,” he said. “My first reaction was ‘Well, that really sucks, that someone with that history got involved in that situation.’

“But so many people have that history. So many people react so differently to that history.”

He went on to detail the age-old categories of things we do not choose: nature, and nurture. “There’s nature, or your genetic inheritance,” Kaminoff asserted, “and there’s nurture — or the environment you grew up in, and how people treated you.”

He raised the example of people with albinism — a genetic or “natural” condition they obviously didn’t choose. He wondered aloud whether they might “be the least likely to develop skin cancer, because they’ll be the ones who are most protecting themselves against UV radiation. They’re not going to walk into a tanning parlour.”

In the same way, he suggested, sexual abuse survivors, who have been subjected to conditions of nurture they didn’t choose, should take actions to keep themselves out of “situations where their vulnerabilities will be exploited.

“How you respond to being a victim of something determines the outcome,” he said. 

“So would I have said things differently,” he asked, “had I known this teacher had this history? I would say no.

“Because choices were made, knowing what the history is, and potential vulnerabilities…. This is how lessons get learned.”

Yoga Practice, Scope of Practice

Through the lens of Feminism 101, Glenny and those who echoed her are protesting a basic misunderstanding of consent flowing from the Jivamukti faithful in dozens of comment threads:

The accuser chose her circumstances. She only complained when she wasn’t getting the attention she wanted. To imply that she was victimized is to demean and infantilize her. She has free will and she should have exercised it to her advantage.

But applied to yoga culture generally, their pushback raises the question of who, if anyone, is qualified to make assumptions about the inner capacities of students, along with what kinds of training might be required to serve a growing cultural awareness of the impacts of power, abuse and trauma upon a student’s ability to develop and thrive.

Recently, many yoga educators have been inspired by the interdisciplinary work of Trauma Sensitive Yoga innovators like David Emerson. Yoga teacher and somatic psychologist Hala Khouri has been featured by Yoga Alliance in an interview on the trauma-informed yoga, and has recently released a trauma-sensitive yoga programme through Off the Mat, into the World. Trauma sensitivity, social services, and social justice also intersected at the annual meeting of the Yoga Service Council which opened with an exploration of “trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness methodologies.”(9)(10)(11)(12)

These trainings introduce teachers to the incidence rate of trauma in the general population, how trauma impacts physiological and psychological responses, or a student’s capacity to say no to physical adjustments or emotional suggestions, how instructional language can offer options instead of ideals, and how not to further marginalize people who may be carrying shameful burdens.

Jivamukti’s Gannon and Life say that issues of trauma-sensitivity are beyond their scope of practice. When I interviewed them for the first article in this series, I asked for a response to a quote from an ex-Jivamukti teacher who lamented that the school didn’t provide trauma-sensitivity training to its staffers, even as its method encourages constant hands-on adjustments.

“It is illegal for us, as yoga teachers, to diagnose or treat someone with a physical or emotional trauma,” they wrote, via email. “We are only allowed to teach yoga. When a teacher gives a student a hands-on assist it is to help the student do the asana correctly and safely. A student can injure themselves by practicing yoga with incorrect alignment.”

But off-record sources say that adjustments at the Jivamukti Yoga School also project power and foster intimacy between teachers and students. In one videoed class, Sharon Gannon delivers a sermon against finding fault in others while sitting on a student’s thighs. The student is immobilized in reclined hero pose.(13)

I asked Glenny via email what she felt about Jivamukti’s answer.

“Obviously, nobody’s asking yoga teachers to diagnose or treat anyone with or for anything,” she wrote. “Yoga teachers don’t get those tools from practice and general training.

“But we should respond appropriately to what our students bring into the room. If a student comes into a class with prolapsed discs or a repaired knee, it’s clear that we should have an awareness of this if we’re going to adjust them.

“Also, touching someone is never just about alignment and physical safety,” Glenny continued.

“Many subtle messages are conveyed through touch. If a person has experienced sexual trauma, especially as a child, what they receive from touch may not be the message intended.

“If the intention does cross boundaries, they will experience difficulty in decoding the inappropriateness and taking action to protect themselves.”

Impacts on the Workshop Circuit

Theodora Wildcroft is a trauma-sensitive yoga instructor who teaches asanas and breathwork to non-neurotypical youth. She’s also a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at The Open University, researching the intersection of British counter-culture and social activism with transnational yoga culture.

She argues that the kind of trauma-aware training that could help disarm the power imbalances at play in the Jivamukti case should become a minimum requirement for yoga schools.

“As a trauma survivor, I need to know what spaces are safe for me to enter as a student,” Wildcroft wrote in an online comment.

“The Jivamukti lawsuit said that the student was encouraged to consider the teacher a more enlightened being than they were. Then she was to share a bed with that teacher ‘platonically’. Then she wound up being sexually touched by that teacher.

“The management not only did nothing, they continued to support the teacher, while suggesting that their policies need no review. That is not a safe space for me, and not one I can encourage others to enter.”

As to Kaminoff’s emphasis on student responsibility, Wildcroft approved of his transparency on a Skype call from her home in Southern England.

“His statements do prospective students a service,” she said. “He understands what his views are regarding free will and the primacy of the individual, and he speaks them clearly and confidently.

“The real problem in yoga culture is with powerful teachers who either hide these views or don’t even know that they hold them – who don’t realize that they’re shaming vulnerable students for not possessing the qualities they actually came to yoga to develop.

“Then there are all the studios and schools and other institutions that fail to challenge this status quo within the culture.”

“So I’m grateful that he’s made it very clear that I can never attend his classes,” Wildcroft continued. “Not because I’m concerned he can’t teach anatomy or that he will injure me in some direct way, but because his comments make me unsure of his interest in what an abuse survivor has to say about how her past impacts her responses, or what she needs to feel safe and supported.”

An entire yoga community in Portland, Oregon, shares Wildcroft’s analysis. Todd Vogt and Annie Adamson, co-owners of Yoga Union, recently cancelled an upcoming weekend intensive with Kaminoff in which he was scheduled to teach on the anatomy of breathing in yoga postures. Their decision came in response to local, student and faculty concerns surrounding the Jivamukti conversation.

Their awkward process, played out publicly on social media, is a watershed moment in yoga business ethics, and a sign that trauma-awareness in yoga culture is going mainstream. It’s the first time I’m aware of that studio directors have allowed a programming and business decision that merges political and therapeutic concerns to be guided by community input an open forum.

(Full disclosure: I occasionally travel from my home in Toronto to present at Yoga Union, and have known Vogt, Adamson, and many faculty members for the past three years.)

The fracas began with Yoga Union sharing Kaminoff’s clarification video to its Facebook timeline. Yoga Union Teacher Ivy Katz commented, questioning whether Kaminoff’s attitudes to the victims of abuse indicate a flaw in his teaching approach.

“I’m disappointed that someone who is such an ‘expert’ on the anatomy of yoga seems to lack any understanding of neurobiology,” she wrote beneath the post.

A mental health worker specializing in developmental trauma, Katz had first expressed her concerns to Vogt weeks earlier.

On May 21^st, Yoga Union issued its first public comment on the brewing debate, attempting to both soothe concerns and preserve the business arrangement. They defaulted to a well-worn path in the history of yoga controversy – encouraging students to separate the teacher from the teachings.

“Hosting him doesn’t mean we endorse his views on psychology any more than they mean we endorse his political or religious views,” Vogt wrote.

“Hosting him means that we trust he is qualified to teach yoga and anatomy.”(14)

This careful answer fell flat. One Portlander decried it as “tone-deaf”, while another wrote: “As a yoga teacher of over 15 years, a former studio owner, and a PhD psychotherapist specializing in trauma I would say your convenient ‘compartmentalization’ of this situation is only further damaging to your studio’s reputation. Is this how you want your students and the public to see you, turning a blind eye?”

That evening, Yoga Union teacher Carly Budhram publicly distanced herself from the studio’s statement, writing: “As a woman, a yogi, and a yoga instructor at Yoga Union, I do not in any way endorse Yoga Union’s statements, or Leslie’s comments, or his presence at our studio.

“As much as Kaminoff’s understandings of the physical practice of yoga have greatly supported my own practice and teaching (among many, many others), I do not believe that can be separated from such an egregious perspective on personal agency and abuse – especially considering the field we’re in, and the deeply problematic lack of boundaries we are complicit in perpetuating when we do not speak up.”(15)

Vogt and Adamson took heed of Katz, Budhram, and many others, and the next day apologized to their faculty and student body. They noted the sensitive personal territory and confusing business situation they were in, and asked for continued feedback and guidance.(16)

On May 24^th, they discussed the issue with the teacher training cohort that made up the majority of the event’s registered audience. The trainees told the studio owners and management that they’d prefer a different instructor.

On May 30th, Yoga Union announced their decision to cancel with Kaminoff “on the basis that insensitively and inaccurately speaking outside his scope of practice has compromised his voice and lost his audience at Yoga Union.”

The studio has since devoted that weekend to a “Trauma Informed Yoga Community Event”, to be facilitated by local trauma sensitivity professionals, and featuring open community discussion.

“Our community is our greatest teacher,” wrote Vogt on the Yoga Union timeline. “We are looking to them for guidance.”(17)

Beyond a broken collegiality, the decision has also led to a financial dispute, with Yoga Union forfeiting their deposit, and Kaminoff’s talent agent sending the studio into collections to recover non-refundable travel costs.

“Free will is a powerful story, but not everyone can tell it.”

On the surface, Kaminoff’s approach resonates in at least one way with the new paradigm of trauma sensitivity — through his long-standing belief that yoga should serve the unique needs of the person.

“The ultimate context of yoga is the person who is doing it,” he wrote via email.

“To me, the purpose of yoga is to bring an individual to more of a state of balance, whatever that means for that person. What’s balance for me can be very different than what’s balance for you.

“I think that yoga is about understanding our own individual nature. As my teacher, T.K.V. Desikachar says, ‘The yoga must be adapted to the individual.'”

Kaminoff’s acknowledgement of individual needs, however, blends with overtones of individualism that presumes an inviolate personal agency.

“There’s stuff that happens that we didn’t choose,” he emphasized in his video elaboration.

“But then there’s how we respond – how we chose to respond to the things we didn’t choose.

“There’s nature and nurture versus free will and the choices we make.”

It’s unclear whether this seemingly common-sense philosophy will survive feminist analysis and trauma-sensitive practice, neither of which separate things that happen to a person from how a person is able to act in the world. Whether studying the propaganda of rape culture or the effects of abuse on sympathetic nervous response, both disciplines — which are changing global yoga discourse from the inside out — argue that the very capacity for personal agency is heavily if not completely socially and experientially conditioned.

Nonetheless, Kaminoff’s statements are neither unique nor fringe in the yoga world. They resonate with a core tenet of yoga faith in the new age: a belief in the personal power by which anybody, regardless of their history, can re-make themselves. The belief is rooted in ancient and medieval practice manuals – or at least contemporary readings of them – that encourage yoga practitioners to transcend their socialization and re-identify themselves with internal or transcendent sources of joy and calm.

The modern era appropriates and fertilizes this metaphysics with the gospel of American independence and the spiritualitized capitalism that has allowed yoga to globalize. Whether yoga teachers channel bygone sources to tell students to “Practice, and all is coming,” or corporate mantras of “Just do it,” the power of modern yoga marketing turns on its invitation to the individual to step out of internalized abuse and oppression into the triumph of self-sufficiency.

It’s a message that can make therapeutic sense. Practice often seems to begin where positive intuitions provoke decisive effort. Don’t we, after all, choose to practice, and by practicing, enrich our capacity for making new choices? Aren’t we choosing to undo the recurrent patterns of suffering targeted by the medicine of yoga? Isn’t there someone inside of us who remains fundamentally smart and sound, and who, despite everything, knows and wills the way?

As both scholar and survivor, Wildcroft doesn’t see the belief in American-style free will as an eternal tenet of yoga philosophy, nor that it refers to an essential attribute of the yoga student. For her, it’s more of a placebo – which means it’s also a resource, and perhaps the privilege of those who haven’t been affected by trauma.

“Free will is a powerful story, she said via Skype. I’d caught her after her evening classes. “It’s a story we may need. But not everyone can tell it.”

I asked her what she thought about Kaminoff’s statement that people fall prey to abusive persons or organizations because they “choose to suspend their critical thinking.”

“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” she said. “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege.

“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.

“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.

“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”

I wondered aloud how yoga has helped her, given that most of the culture isn’t dialed in.

“Yoga practice can radically change my ability to consent. But I have to be in one of those rare spaces where I can let go and be broken, and not be told what’s wrong with me by people who think they have the answers.

“Safe spaces are spaces in which survivors can learn to heal themselves.

“When Jivamukti pretends that trauma-sensitive training isn’t their concern, survivors are reminded that they’re only allowed to be in one of two states. Either you’re broken and you should get the fuck out of here and get fixed. Or you’re fixed – in which case you don’t have any problems, so sure – let’s do yoga together.”

“That Jivamukti response is saying: ‘Don’t come to us with your needs. They don’t fit our view of ourselves or the world. Go away and get them fixed.’”

“Trauma-sensitive yoga brings it back to the person,” she explained. “It puts them in charge. That’s what’s missing in yoga culture in general. We’re too invested in the idea that the teacher is the expert in the condition of the student. That hurts everyone on some level.”

Dusk gathered in Toronto; the night deepened in England. Wildcroft sat back in her chair. It was clear this would be an ongoing conversation.

“The trauma survivor is the canary in the yoga studio coal mine,” she said. “We’re going to react worse than anyone if you stigmatize us.”We’re asking for safer spaces, and honourable relationships, and the cultural and institutional support to help make that happen.

“We’re asking because what’s good for us will benefit everyone.”(18)

____

Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher and author living in Toronto. He’s currently writing a book on the shadows of modern yoga culture. You can follow him on Facebook, and his site is here.

____

NOTES AND RESOURCES:

1. Lauer-Manenti’s dates in Berlin, and in Switzerland, accessed 6.15.2016.

2. Gannon and Life’s 2016 tour schedule, accessed 6.15.2016.

3. From Darkness to Light website and studio pledge. Trauma-sensitivity also drives the work of FDTL co-founder Anneke Lucas, director of Liberation Prison Yoga. Accessed 6.15.2016.

4. Abuse of Power panel, sponsored by Yogacity NYC, 5/3/2016, accessed 6.15.2016.

5. Petition to Standardize Abuse Prevention Education for Yoga Teachers. The Yoga Alliance response can be found here. Accessed 6.15.2016.

6. “A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?”, accessed 6.15.2016.

7.  “Teachers and Students: Rule Making, Rule Breaking.” Accessed 6.15.2016.

8. “I’m Not a Yoga Therapist Anymore”, accessed 6.19.2016. See also Yoga Talks with Leslie Kaminoff on Regulation EXTENDED. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

9. Healing Trauma with Yoga with David Emerson. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

10. Talking Teacher Ethics with Hala Khouri. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

11. Off the Mat Into the World, Yoga for Self-Regulation and Trauma. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

12. Yoga Service Council 2016. Accessed 6.20. 2016.

13. Jivamukti Master Class w Sharon Gannon (2014-10-Oct). Time cue: 1:12:00. Accessed 6.15.2016.

14. “Dear Yoga Community…”.  Accessed 6.15.2016.

15. “I’ve been sitting a lot with my thoughts…”. Accessed 6.15.2016.

16. “Our community is our greatest teacher…”. Accessed 6.15.2016.

17. “Trauma Informed Yoga Community Event.” Accessed 6.15.2016.

18. Wildcroft’s blog on Trauma Sensitive yoga practice provides a solid introduction to her work in the field.

The post Jivamukti Fallout: A Trauma-Sensitive Tipping Point in Modern Yoga? appeared first on Decolonizing Yoga.