DON'T LET IT GET STOLEN

DON'T LET THEM TELL YOU WHAT IT IS

GO OUT AND NIGHT, CONSULT THE MOON AND THE STARS...

OH,AND IT'S NOT ASIAN INDIAN


ASK, WHAT IS THIS???????????????????????????????????????????

DO NOT SETTLE FOR SO LITTLE.

THE HEART OF YOGA IS LARGELY DEAD

In most systems--be it music, yoga, martial practice, religion--the eventual task is to step beyond the system TO RECOVER THE AUTHENTIC--THE HEART.  

One is never completely outside the systemic, but that is the task.  Every 20 years, or for sure, 30 years, what is right and real is a different reality.  Yes, there is still a thread of the enduring eternal, but  does it have anything to do with what you are doing as “yoga.”

In this blog, it is “yoga.”  It might have been “zen” or “aikido” or “Nashville sound.” 

You see, there is science applied to yoga in  terms of raw physiology and in terms of applied physiology in, for example, medicine.  All you 500 hour yogis, your not on top by going 500, you’ve fallen for a scam in you’re in a rut.  You’re down, not up.  And when you go upside down in our headstands, you are askin’ for trouble.  You’re askin for possible strokes in our 20’s.  Oh so noble, to be able to balance on your head in the center of the room--to be so inverted, so noble and graced and holy.  Or to  value hyper-flex as the holy grail, perhaps the sign of a problem.  And all of your pushing to limits--to “let the pain leave your body”--as likely just another facile form of work and social manipulation, for what?

“Yoga” is a wide-reaching term that references almost whatever you want.  If you go to a high-end yoga conference, let’s say in Sedona, go to the preliminary online materials to register and see the rock-star sort of descriptions of workshops.  That ought to be a bell-weather warning that you’re getting a fad here and another  there and another there.  That may be a sign of your neediness more than an answer; a manipulation of you and others, more than something authentic. 

so, I say, there no “yoga.”  India is now trying to claim it, but look at what they are trying to market, and, I say, market.  If there is anything good in this tradition, once you  become exclusive, you have lost it.

There is a lot of “yoga” in my town, Des Moines, mostly “young-uns” taking bey it and leading classes and a few long-timers. BUT I can’t find yoga here.  What I find is facile-- too easy--an exercise class or a suave alignment class where either stupidity OR beliefs rather than facts are operant.  I watched people coming to yoga for flex and calmness and most leaving after one introduction.  Those wanting an alternative to being on a treadmill tended to stay and enjoy whatever was gong on but it was not yoga. 

The heart of yoga is largely dead, co-opted, stolen, strayed.

"Work-Outy" Yoga

You know, the contemporary global orientation in "yoga" is a fairly rambunctious workout mentality. if you are going to pay regular, you tend to want to have a workout, in trade for choosing to do yoga instead of treadmill or boot camp or something rather physical and "work-outy."  If you have a yoga studio and you don't offer a workout in your prime pre- and post-work hours--rather intense and up through practices like power and hot yoga--you're likely to go under as a business.  My favorite teacher said you can't run a yoga business for long if it's not a workout. Oh, you might try beer yoga or goat yoga or laugh yoga or nude yoga, but they will come and go as fads, and you kinda know it.

What saw through my years is people coming to yoga primarily for flexibility, and getting stabilization instead.  And it was hard and painful to do vinyasa as it was done, almost in a hurry.  And the message was essentially, keep doing it until it is not uncomfortable. So for some many, one class and done, and all these beautiful souls lost from yoga, and thinking that they had tried yoga, when then a=had not.  But the teachers were very righteous and felt this was the way--some level 2 and even 3.

So if your yoga is a workout after your work or before work to get it in to your busy day, you are right in the popular flow of yoga. But until about 1900, for thousands of years, yoga had little to do with sequences of poses, vinyasa flow or workout.

There is something there in the heart of yoga that can flip your nervous system, that is graced, that you might be tossing away, especially in an era when the Earth is being decimated while we frantically work and then workout to calm.  Really?  What's wrong with this picture, and we reward the folks doing it.  Look at Jois and astanga yoga as al most the pinnacle of what higher yoga is.  Folks had to wait to get into his Indian sangha each day due to the crowds. [See recent NY Times article to take a look a astanga, which is really at the heart of this workout intensity, and some solid Jois-ian sex abuse.  But sex abuse or no sex abuse (and there are criminal, exploitive others that are or have ben wildly popular), is this your yoga?

If you can't do a headstand or handstand are you any good?  Or is this your goal?  I see it a lot, of handstand time and headstand time especially in classes with 600 hour teachers, by body-types that are not gymnastic.  I would ask are you doing yoga at all.  But yoga is a term that contains nearly anything.  Hopefully you won't be the one who attains headstands or handstands without support and gets a stroke from a neck pinch in your 20's.  You know, in a headstand/handstand (which is worse and not yet measured), your intraocular press might be 60 instead of a normal 11--eating away perhaps at those optical nerve cells and birthing glaucoma either now or later.  Didn't you teacher mentions this?  Handstand kinda might = stupid.  But if you can't do it for Jois, you won't make his big astanga elite team, and you will have to do a lot more, and if cute enough a little sex on the side.

So maybe, in a few words, relax and calm and follow body, and outdo the so-called masters.

Yoga Reconsiders the Role of the Guru in the Age of #MeToo

Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” in 2019. 

Last week on Instagram, Sharath Jois, a grandson of Pattabhi Jois, the hugely influential founder of Ashtanga yoga, which has millions of followers worldwide, finally responded to several years’ worth of claims of sexual misconduct against his grandfather, who died in 2009, at the age of ninety-three. Since 2010, more than a dozen former students have come forward to accuse Guruji, as his followers called him, of sexually assaulting them in his yoga studio in Mysore, India, and during workshops while he was on tour in the United States. Their allegations include that he rubbed his genitals against their pelvises while they were in extreme backbends, lay on top of them while they were prostrate on the floor, and inserted his fingers into their vaginas—an action that fellow-students excused as an adjustment to their mula bandhas, the body’s lowest chakra, which lies between the genitals and the anus. After his grandfather’s death, Sharath became the director of the Shri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, and the paramguru (or “guru’s guru”) of Ashtanga. “It brings me immense pain that I also witness him giving improper adjustments,” Sharath wrote in the post. “I am sorry it caused pain for any of his students. After all these years I still feel pain from my grandfather’s actions.”

This is only the latest in a string of scandals involving powerful men within the yoga community that date back decades. In 1991, protesters accused Swami Satchidananda, the famous yogi who issued the invocation at Woodstock, of molesting his students, and carried signs outside a hotel where he was staying in Virginia that read “Stop the Abuse.” (Satchidananda denied all claims of misconduct.) In 1994, Amrit Desai, the founder of the Kripalu Centre for Yoga, a well-known yoga-retreat center, was accused of sleeping with his students while purporting to practice celibacy. (Desai eventually admitted to having sexual contact with three different women.) More recently, Bikram Choudhury, the founder of “hot,” or Bikram, yoga, has faced several civil lawsuits for sexual misconduct, including one filed in 2013 by his own lawyer, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who said that he not only harassed her but also forced her to cover up allegations of misconduct against other women. (Bikram has denied all allegations.) After Bikram failed to pay Jafa-Bodden a seven-million-dollar judgment issued against him by a California court, in 2017, the judge issued an arrest warrant, and Bikram reportedly fled the country. In 2012, John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga, admitted to sleeping with several students. He was also accused of running a Wiccan coven called Blazing Solar Flames, where members often went naked. (In a public statement, Friend denied any involvement in “a sex coven.”) Friend withdrew for a time from public life but has since launched another form of yoga, called Sridaiva. Not all of the recent scandals have been sexual; some have involved financial impropriety or the physical abuse of students. During his workshops, B. K. S. Iyengar, who died in Pune, India, in 2014, openly slapped and kicked his students while telling them, according to the Times of India, “It’s not you I’m angry with, not you I kick. It’s the knee, the back, the mind that is not listening.”

Jois was born in 1915, in the rural village of Kowshika, in South India, and spent the first thirty-two years of his life living under British colonial rule. One day at school, when he was twelve, he attended a lecture in which a yoga instructor named Sri Krishnamacharya demonstrated several asanas, or poses. Jois ran away from home at fourteen, reunited with Krishnamacharya a few years later, and proceeded to study with him for twenty-five years. He went on to create Ashtanga, a form of yoga that involves a series of rigorous athletic poses that students are encouraged to practice six times a week. Beginning in the seventies, students flocked to Mysore to study with Jois, and, as his following grew, so did his fame and influence. Some students stayed in Mysore for months or even years to perfect their poses. Others came to venerate the teacher, prostrating at his feet. Female students later complained that he sometimes kissed them on the mouth without their consent, and patted their buttocks when they hugged him or bowed before him. Jubilee Cooke, a fifty-three-year-old former student who says that she was groped by Jois during yoga sessions, didn’t realize that his behavior was something that she could report. “I didn’t know it was called sexual assault until I heard political pundits talking about what Trump had done on the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tapes,” she told me.

Alex Auder, the forty-eight-year-old founder of Magu Yoga, a studio in Philadelphia, has been one of Jois’s most vocal critics. During the late nineteen-nineties, Auder taught at Jivamukti, in New York City, one of the places where Ashtanga first grew popular in the United States. But, over the last decade, she has become increasingly skeptical of some aspects of the practice. Initially, her criticisms focussed on the poses themselves, which she believes Jois designed with little regard for how they would be enacted by women. “The physical practice is totally off-base—it’s patriarchal,” she told me. “For many women’s bodies, it simply doesn’t work.” (To illustrate this point, she recently posted a picture on Instagram of Sharath Jois assisting a pregnant woman to “drop back” from a standing position into a backbend, which struck Auder as ill-advised.) For the past five years, Auder has written about the increasing commodification of yoga, which she calls “neo-spiritualism”—an alliance between yoga and neoliberalism. Such criticism is not taken lightly in the Ashtanga community; according to Auder and others, those who speak out are often ostracized. “Sharath kicked anyone off the list of sanctioned teachers who ever criticized Pattabhi Jois or Ashtanga,” she told me. (Sharath did not respond to requests for comment on this article.)

For Karen Rain, a fifty-one-year-old former student who says that Jois repeatedly assaulted her between 1994 and 1998, at his studio in Mysore, the fear of being ostracized kept her from telling anyone about the abuse. “I knew it would bring me criticism and slander,” she told me. She was certain that her fellow-students would turn on her if she made her allegations public, and, in 2002, she left Ashtanga. “It destroyed my life as I knew it,” she said. “I loved the practice and was hoping to build my life and career around it.” In 2018, she told her story on Medium and included photographs showing Jois pressing his crotch to hers while she lifted her leg above her head. “Since the images are still photographs, you don’t really see that he’s humping me,” she told me.

Anneke Lucas, a fifty-six-year-old former student, who now works as an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse and is the founder of Liberation Prison Yoga, confronted Jois the moment he groped her crotch, during a class in Manhattan in 2001, and told him that he could go to prison for touching her like that. After she spoke out, she felt that her experience wasn’t taken seriously by other students and teachers, which she found more harmful than the assault. “I was far more hurt by the culture of silence and ignoring the victim and victim-blaming than the abuse itself,” she told me. “If there would’ve been support from the community, and it had been dealt with, it would have gone away.” Cooke has called out the magazine Yoga Journal for favorable articles that it published about Jois in the nineties. “Whether or not they did it consciously, it was grooming,” she said. “Encouraging people to go study with Pattabhi Jois and expect good things from him.”

Last year, Auder became Facebook friends with Rain, Lucas, and Cooke, and the four began discussing what they saw as Ashtanga’s toxic sexual culture. At first, Auder wasn’t sure how to process the severity of the women’s claims. “I’m a product of the seventies,” she told me, “and I don’t mind a pat on the ass.” But as the number of accusers grew over the last year she came to see that what others called “inappropriate adjustment” was really a pattern of sexual abuse, and that the powerful following that had grown up around Jois had helped to keep his accusers silent. After that, on Instagram, she called for an official response from Ashtanga leaders.

Instead of putting the controversy to rest, the statement that Sharath issued last week has kicked off a flurry of angry responses from people who argue that it comes too late, and that it reads like an attempt to end the controversy rather than a genuine effort to set things right. Critics accused Sharath of shirking blame for himself or his family and instead accusing other students of failing to protect their fellow-practitioners. “Why did they not act in support of their fellow students, peers, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, friends and speak against this?” he asks. He followed this up with another statement, in which he grew more defensive. “You can criticize me what ever you want,” he wrote on Instagram, punctuating his post with crying-face emojis. “I have always respected & supported women my students know it & god knows it.” The post has since been deleted.

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But the scandal has prompted other leaders, including Eddie Stern, a fifty-one-year-old yoga instructor who, for twenty-five years, was the head of one of the most influential Ashtanga schools in the United States, to speak out about Jois’s abuses. Stern studied under Jois for eighteen years and has since authored three books about Ashtanga. After the allegations were made public, he received letters from current students asking him to respond. “People have considered me to be part of this problem because I haven’t spoken publicly,” he told me. Although Stern has been talking in private to concerned students and fellow-teachers, now that Sharath has issued a statement, Stern has decided to speak to me for this article.

Jois’s abuses remained hidden for so long in part because of his overwhelming authority as a guru, which may reflect a larger problem within the culture of yoga. In traditional yogic practice, a guru is a mediator—a translator of sorts—through whom a set of teachings is passed down. Devotion to the guru is meant to symbolize devotion to the teachings, not to the man. But in the Western context gurus become rock stars, and students compete to curry favor with them. This gives gurus significant influence over their students, which is sometimes misused. “I had this idea in me that the guru was supposed to be this all-encompassing everything,” Stern said. “I, along with other people, superimposed these mythologies on top of a human being . . It was a misunderstanding of what the relationship was supposed to be.

For Rain, apologies from Ashtanga teachers have come too late. She is less interested in public statements and more interested in specific measures that schools can take to change their cultures. Some yoga communities have begun instituting official checks on how teachers are allowed to touch their students, including issuing “consent cards,” which students fill out to indicate whether they are willing to be touched and place at the edge of their mats. Rain wants Ashtanga teachers to pledge to offer free copies of articles about the accusations against Jois at their studios and to post unedited accounts of the allegations on their Web sites. She told me, “I’m offering them a way to make amends by giving the narrative to us.”

Never Stop Moving--A Refreshed Scientific/Spiritual Yoga

Hilma Af Klint

Holding Poses = Contracting muscles/ligaments---NO, No, no...anti-refreshing

Releasing: swaying, reaching, squatting-rocking in poses: “following-the-pose”

Moving is dynamic and blends body areas.

Slow, slow flowing: also allows for listening to what is stretching, and how that which is stretching shifts.  This improves balance as parts of the body that are not attended to ARE attended to.

Flowing is essentially releasing and releasing optimizes flexibility, and flowing regularly over time strengthens groups of muscles throughout the body and relates or integrates seemingly disparate areas together.vs. isolates specific muscles.

Deeper body-MIND: slowing, flowing, listening, relaxing stretching

Not lengthening muscles and ligaments, but rather releasing nerve spindles in muscles and ligaments

Yoga Metta: kindness yoga: can do for hours were one wanting to do this.