Bonus Sample: The Inventor of Yoga Teacher Training Was a Rapist Obsessed with UFOs
In 1969, Swami Vishnudevananda pioneered what has become a life transition ritual for the GenX and Millennial precariat: the Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) Programme. He was a cult leader rapist who thought yoga would help the world understand messages sent by UFOs. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.Not every YTT programme is bad—today's bonus host Matthew has worked in some good ones for over a decade. But on the whole, we're talking about an industry that has graduated up to 500K ppl over 50 years through a pseudo-educational process that has greased the epistemological pipeline towards conspirituality.YTTs are unregulated by any academic or professional consensus. They are driven by the anxious charisma of urban yoga studio entrepreneurs who need to sell big-ticket products to counter the rising overheads of the gentrification they're helping to drive. Their curricula offers a pastiche of uncited resources. They pad contact hours with sermons and meditation sessions. The typical YTT training manual is an unironic postmodern meat-grinder in which Iron Age philosophy and high school anatomy are blended with quotes from Carl Jung and Rumi. As an example, Matthew looks at a Jivamukti Yoga School manual from a 2007 training hosted at Omega Institute.Again: not all YTTs are bad, or lead to QAnon. But the ritual and charismatic pedagogy that most offer has a lot in common with the sacrament of redpilling—albeit more socially acceptable and aspirational. Conspirituality went viral in 2020. It's time to ask whether the YTT industry compromised a culture's immunity to it.
Show NotesHello, YogAnon! Selfish Care Rituals | by Matthew Remski | MediumHow a #MeToo Facebook Post Toppled a Yoga Icon | by Matthew Remski | GENShielded for Decades, a Leader of Sivananda Yoga Finally Comes Under Fire for Alleged Abuse | GENJohn of Fraud. How did slack journalism and New Age… | by Matthew Remski | Medium Practice and All Is Coming – Matthew RemskiJivamukti sexual harassment lawsuit says the yoga studio is a cult.Jivamukti, Dark and Light: Holly Faurot, Sharon Gannon, and David Life Speak Out - Decolonizing Yoga Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman Re
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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The inventor of yoga teacher training was a rapist obsessed with UFOs.
Well, that's a morbid Robert Evans-type headline, but there's no lie.
Hey everybody, it's Matthew here for another Stripped Down Bonus.
No music or poetry again this time, just one core idea fleshed out as clearly as I can.
As I mentioned last time around, we're neck deep in a big project we can't quite announce yet, and for me, this has limited the time I have for extras.
And also, Omicron is starting to crush our province, and this means we'll be homeschooling again in about a week's time.
And on that note, I can say from all of us that we hope you're bearing up okay during this next wave of grief and helplessness, and that you have the support you need, and that if it's not coming from your government, it's coming from family, friends, and community.
And speaking of support, thank you for your Patreon status.
It really helps us with this project.
It makes it possible, actually.
So thank you so much.
The idea today is some history and then an open-ended question.
Here's the top-line argument.
The institution known as the Yoga Teacher Training Program, which dates back to 1969, has churned out anywhere from 200,000 to a half-million graduates in the English-speaking world over the last 50-plus years.
Now that number could be a lot higher.
Numbers are hard to come by because schools don't publish their numbers.
My conservative estimate here is based on the 100,000 plus registered yoga teachers who are now presently listed.
on the Yoga Alliance website and of course that number represents you know a contingent that are rotating in and out of valid registration status so it's going to be more than that.
But then another Yoga Alliance number to look at is that there are currently 6,609 registered yoga schools.
Now most of these are in the U.S.
but Yoga Alliance is a global organization.
Some of those schools are quite large and they churn out hundreds of graduates per year, but the majority are small and independent schools associated with local studios and some might not be hosting programs every year.
So, given these caveats, if one imagines that each school is turning out 10 graduates per year, That makes 66,000 graduates per year, and this episode is going to ask, what have they been learning?
And more importantly, how have they been learning it?
Now, some of these yoga teacher training graduates went on to join the gig economy of yoga teaching, And others were just satisfied with the training as a kind of personal enrichment experience.
Now the former are going to yield more cultural and economic power than the latter when it comes to the yoga and wellness economy, but what I'm interested in for this bonus episode is the fact that all of them went through a kind of training process that leaves, I believe, an epistemological trace in the culture.
Now, by the aughts, the yoga teacher training system has become a kind of transitional ritual for the liberal, wellness-oriented Gen X and Millennial market.
So, are you going through life changes?
Are you getting divorced?
Have you been sick?
Is there a death in the family?
Is the economy shit?
Has that humanities degree lost its market value?
Have you crossed that five-year dry spell threshold in LA trying to make it as an actor?
Maybe it's time to look within.
To take care of yourself.
To think about a new career, gig work style, in spreading the message of yoga.
That's basically how the teacher training boom happened.
But what is the Teacher Training Program?
It's positioned as an educational experience, but that status is a little bit dubious.
Because it's not really comparable to any accredited learning process.
It's not regulated by any social or cultural consensus, let alone academic consensus.
Now, full disclosure here, I worked as a consultant on the recent Yoga Alliance Standards Review process, where they convened about a hundred senior yoga teachers and researchers to hammer out some basic definitions of practice, scope of practice, and pedagogical standards.
This process took years.
It was kind of like, you know, working in the Democratic Party.
All kinds of stakeholders with all kinds of compromises to be made.
And the resulting documents and policies, I think they do represent a step up in the professionalization process of the industry, but they fall far short of any evidence-based regulated discipline.
Especially given the fact that this is an industry that is fond of making health and wellness claims.
Another thing we can safely say about the yoga teacher training You know, structure is that it's driven primarily by the charismatic confidence of its entrepreneurs, who offer accordingly a charismatic pastiche of unsighted resources.
Also, we can say that the Yoga Teacher Training Program is usually undertaken by people who are going through a vulnerable time.
So, let me just make that point again.
These are educational or pseudo-educational experiences that are undertaken during a vulnerable time and inspired by the possibility of self-transformation.
Does any of that sound familiar?
Now, in developing arguments around why the yoga and wellness worlds have been so vulnerable to the explosion of conspirituality in 2020, Derek, Julian, and I have covered three basic themes.
First of all, there are ideological overlaps between conspiratorial thinking, 20th century fascism, and New Age thought, and we can file that under Nazis loved yoga.
Secondly, there are cultic networks that transitioned from yoga-centered content to conspiracy-centered content, and we can file that under Guru Jagat Platform's David Icke during the pandemic.
And then thirdly, this is not something we've spoken a lot about, but we're going to get more into it as we continue through 2022.
Decades of active depoliticization within the yoga and wellness consumer demographic.
Basically, this is the process by which a privatized religion will tend towards apathy in relation to the wider world.
Plus the fact that, you know, a top axiom or, you know, aphorism in the yoga world is that politics is divisive or polarizing and so it's the true duty of every yogi to pretend that they are above the battlefield of politics, that they are abiding in perfect equanimity or dissociation, depending upon how you're looking at it.
So here's my open-ended question, because it involves a possible fourth theme, and that theme reflects the epistemological, pedagogical, and ritual overlaps between conspiratorial thinking and yoga teacher training programming.
And I've come to this by looking anew at some of the yoga teacher training manuals I have collected over the years.
A little later I'll describe a 2007 manual that was put out by the Jivamukti Yoga School.
The short story for now is that to leaf through a typical yoga teacher training manual is to bear witness to an epistemological meat grinder.
You know, early in the pandemic, you might remember that meme put out for laughs that was this fake certificate that came from the University of YouTube that, you know, would be given out to, you know, the do your own research crowd.
