Hot yoga tycoon and sex offender Bikram Choudhury was set to teach his sweaty pseudoscience in Vancouver starting on February 20th. But a team of yoga allies, led by a woman who has sued Choudhury for rape, said "Fuck off."
So that's that.
Or is it? We have many questions.
Why was this cursed event planned in the first place? Who on earth is continuing to support this clown, and trying to make money off of him? Who would cover themselves in sweaty shit in order to prop up this Simpsons-level caricature of a yoga megalomaniac? And how did Bikram Yoga become the de facto exercise method and spiritual practice of "Freedom Convoy" supporters?
Matthew takes a sweaty tour through a land of pseudoscience and rape culture, hot yogis and truckers, anti-vaxxers and frog-lickers to find out.
Big thank you to Colin Hall of Bodhi Tree Yoga for stopping by!
Show Notes
Canadian yoga competition stretches into Edmonton | CBC News
Controversial Bikram yoga founder's planned Vancouver workshops raising flags
Jill Lawler's 1st-person account
Petition · Stop Predator Bikram Choudhury from hosting Yoga Seminar in Vancouver · Change.org
Woman speaking out against Bikram Yoga event gets disturbing pushback from organizer
Bikram yoga event no longer planned for Vancouver hotel
Bikram Yoga Creator Loses It When Asked About Sexual Assault Allegations | HuffPost Women
Sponsor: https://www.gardomlakeyoga.ca/
WATCH: Justin Trudeau cross-examined by Convoy lawyer
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everybody, Matthew here with a Conspirituality Brief called Bikram Convoy Stopped by His Survivors.
Remember that you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, you can follow us on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can sign up at Patreon.com slash Conspirituality, where for $5 a month you can access hundreds of hours of extra content.
Also, you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
A warning before we start.
This story about Bikram Chowdhury's now thwarted attempt to come to Vancouver to teach his sweaty magic yoga choreography is going to involve descriptions of sexual assault, cultic dynamics, victim shaming, and non-stop evidence of traumatized narcissism.
Now if you've never heard of Bikram Chowdhury and all you want is a dirty thumbnail, that can be digested in the next three minutes and then you can turn this podcast off and get on with your day.
Or you can listen to the rest to hear a little background on how his influence tangles itself into the conspirituality world, up to and including serving as a spiritual support for the trucker convoy movement that occupied downtown Ottawa for several weeks exactly one year ago.
Chowdhury, now in his 70s, is the hot yoga tycoon who's on the lam from a U.S.
arrest warrant related to multiple allegations of sexual assault, as well as failure to pay damages to his former manager, who he fired when she tried to rein in his behaviors.
When confronted about the assault allegations in 2016 by journalist Andrea Kramer for Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, this is what we hear.
Jill Lawler, Maggie Gentner, they felt sexually violated by you.
Okay.
Lie, lie, and lie.
I don't need to do that.
Rape or sexually assault?
Sexually assault.
If I need women, I can make a line.
The most beautiful, famous, rich women in the world.
If I have to sleep with women, then I have to sleep, you know, 5,000 girls every day.
5,000 women a day want to sleep with you?
Yeah.
They commit suicide.
Four of them.
You're saying that four different women each killed themselves because you wouldn't have sex with them?
Why I have to harass women?
People pay $1 million for one drop of my sperm.
I can make million dollar a day, every drop.
You are that idiot or dumb to believe those trash.
The women are the trash?
Yeah.
I pick them from trash and give them life.
So that's the 101 on Bikram Chowdhury.
By rationalizing assaults and rape culture shit-talking with megalomaniac body magic claims, Bikram Chowdhury is the Andrew Tate of Deepak Chopra's.
So, you can leave this podcast here, or you can stick around for some background and context, which I'll start now.
In the 1970s, Chowdhury began building a stable of luxury cars, now all repossessed, and a personal fortune that reportedly topped out at $75 million.
He did it by attracting celebrities to his studio in Los Angeles, which he heated to 105 degrees.
Soon he franchised this model and he created teacher trainings that were very lucrative.
And at the heart of his shtick were miraculous claims about health and vitality.
He would tell students that if they did 30 minutes of yoga per day, quote, it is not necessary to spend a single cent on a doctor in your whole life, unquote.
His yoga, he claimed, would cure arthritis and multiple sclerosis and help the elderly have multiple orgasms.
But it was ferociously hard, he would say.
A path of fire and pain, and some commentators have suggested that this took off amongst the Malibu elite because nobody else in their lives ordered them around and humiliated them.
So, what Chowdhury did in his speedo, pitching yoga as a perfect and ultimate cause of health to the Hollywood A-list, was to put like a porno mustache on a trend that was started by Indra Devi 40 years previously.
But it also drew on something even older, which is how the Indian Yoga revival of the 1920s and 1930s, which built on the popularity of European physical culture, viewed itself as a naturalistic and anti-modern health panacea that could out-compete new-fangled medical techniques.
In researching our upcoming book, we found a photocopy of a Bikram training manual from 1997.
Now, the manual mostly consists of the Bikram script, which gives precise instructions for the execution of 26 postures over 90 minutes.
Bikram Chowdhury once tried to copyright this sequence as intellectual property.
That's a whole other story involving his belief that he's a genius.
Memorizing that script is the main task of the nine-week teacher trainings Chowdhury hosted for years before he went on The Lamb.
Up to 600 hopefuls would gather in a white circus tent buttressed by industrial heating ducts to get stretched, dehydrated, and verbally abused after paying tuition and fees of over $10,000.
Now, across the top page of that manual, there's a handwritten note from whichever student donated it to archive.org.
Quote, 75 years ago, Guru said mental stress and strain is the cause of all the diseases, even the infectious ones.
Let's just put a pin in that.
Even the infectious ones.
Now, if this document was uploaded by a training participant taking notes on Chaudhary's sermons, the Guru in the note likely refers to the early modern Indian bodybuilder yogi Vishnugosha, who counted none other than Eugene Sandow as a primary influence.
Sandow was a Prussian who loved to dress up in Roman sandals and thongs and was really the world's first celebrity bodybuilder.
And he was also a very anxious racist who believed that pumping iron and swilling herbs would protect white people from the humiliation of having brown people outbreed them.
Now, when this attitude paradoxically got imported into India, it blended with medieval esoteric ideas about purity and pollution and about semen being intrinsic to a yogi's life force.
So, when Chowdhury starts talking about the value of a single drop of his sperm to a sports reporter, he's not just wackadoo.
He's historically wackadoo.
But, let's back out of that tangle and return to COVID-era Vancouver, where Bikram was set to arrive and start teaching on the 20th of February, which is next week.
The idea that Bikram Yoga can even cure infectious diseases was at the center of the first major news story of lockdown conspirituality in Canada.
Because in March of 2020, a Vancouver guy named Mac Parar did something that both sabotaged his tiny Vancouver strip mall business and gained him huge recognition as a protest leader in Canada's conspiracy theory community.
He sent out an email to the customers of his Bikram Yoga Studio with some dangerous misinformation.
He invited them to continue coming to class in violation of temporary lockdown ordinances.
Now this email has a strong Dwight Schrute vibe.
Fact.
This supposed virus cannot survive in the heat.
Fact.
Bikram yoga is the best way to keep your immune system healthy and or the best way to build and improve your immune system to fight flus, colds, bacteria, and viruses.
So that email and his refusal to close brought out the bylaw officers from the city and they yanked his business license.
Now this whole thing kind of foreshadowed his very depressing death 18 months later.
He'd been posting videos, coughing and rambling about an illness that he professed to be treating with ivermectin, which was the favored cure of COVID quacks who waffled on whether they believed in COVID or not.
But the coroner's report was just released last week, and while it showed that he was infected with COVID-19 when he died, he also had fentanyl in his system.
Now Parar was a super fringe and very tragic person.
He was a flat earther, he spent a lot of time mourning his divorce and losing parental custody, and he compulsively vaped his COVID symptoms away while posting and ranting on YouTube and basically boxing himself into a shrinking demographic of Q-pilled compatriots.
But his marginalization does not diminish the core fact of what more mainstream Bikram proponents and studio owners were faced with during the pandemic.
The most faithful devotees of Bikram Yoga absolutely believe that the sequence and the heat is the only medicine a person would ever need.
And many of them have self-reported miracle stories about recovering from cancer or diabetes through the hot 26 postures.
So, when the WHO declares a pandemic, And then local officials ask that you shudder your sweaty shrine of healing.
It really feels to these folks that they're being deprived of their only health support during a time in which they may need it most, if this virus is really a thing.
Hot yoga is a whole, immersive group experience, and it's hard to replicate that at home over Zoom.
When studios shuttered in the spring of 2020, some of the loudest complaints came from Bikram Yoga people who were trying to turn their bathrooms into steamy saunas so that they could get their fix.
Not a great scene.
So let's turn now to who on earth organized this now-failed event?
Who on earth is continuing to support this clown and trying to make money off of him?
Who would cover themselves in sweaty shit in order to prop up this Simpsons-level caricature of a yoga gangster?
We can start with Adam Chypiak, the president of the Canada Yoga Sports Federation, which is an obscure but official sounding group that mainly exists to promote the idea of Olympic or competitive level yoga performance.
Adam uses doctor as an honorific on the internet and it appears that he has practiced dentistry in the past and that he was enrolled at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine here in Toronto.
But whatever kind of doctor he is, his Facebook page indicates it's the type of doctor who thinks that vaccines are poison.
The page is rounded out with pastel Q content.
Quotes from Orwell about fear and control.
Live your principles.
Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.
The quote from Alexander Hamilton.
And then the standard Matrix-illiterate meme of Neo in his sunglasses, captioned by Powerful, Invincible, Limitless Creator.
These are your true pronouns.
Winky face emoji.
Matrix illiterate given what the Wachowskis were actually up to.
Adam Chypiak did not return a request for comment.
It's important to note before I move on to the next board member that Adam has a very common Bikram Enthusiast origin story.
He says that the practice helped to put his Hodgkin's lymphoma into remission.
That next member of the Canada Yoga Sports Federation is Adam's sister, Ava, and they share a similar miracle story.
Ava Chipiuk says that Haunt Yoga helped her survive pancreatic cancer, but more importantly, it showed her what she believes is the disconnected negligence and impersonality of conventional medical treatment.
Because after having a portion of her pancreas removed, she says, her doctors offered her no dietary or holistic advice.
They sent her coldly on her way with a pat on the head and a hope we don't see you again, which is an unfortunate and not uncommon experience for many cancer patients.
Ava also connects her illness and her brother's illness with environmental toxins she believes they were both exposed to early in life.
This is another area of reasonable concern and the not-wrong complaint that governments aren't actually looking out for the health of citizens in all cases.
Now for both Adam and Eva, Bikram Yoga seems to provide a complete, robust, self-activated, self-regulated system for preventative and recuperative health.
And I'm just going to underline again how important this view is when considering contrarian responses to a pandemic lockdown.
Public health measures basically barred people like Ava and Adam from the churches that offered the ritual of hot pseudoscience that they believed had saved their lives.
But there's a twist that tangles Bikram Yoga up with the hard right anti-vax wing of Canadian street politics because Ava is also a lawyer and she used her training to find a leadership role in the Trucker Convoy movement which paralyzed downtown Ottawa for weeks in February of 2022 with an illegal blockade.
Ava attended the occupation, partied at it, posted from it, but also concocted a number of the pseudo-legal arguments the movement used to justify honking air horns all night long, pissing in the streets, harassing center-town residents, and preventing disabled people from accessing services.
All of this legal peacocking won Ava a once-in-a-lifetime platform during the recent Emergencies Act inquiry, which was triggered by law when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the Act to facilitate ending the occupation.
Now, just a note here about government transparency.
The very strong and imperious Emergencies Act is mitigated by a serious check that required Trudeau to take the stand for hours in the aftermath to justify his call.
So just imagine for a moment that a US president is required by law to be cross-examined every time he issues an executive order.
That's kind of what happened here, and it was Chypiuk who got to cross-examine the Prime Minister for 15 minutes to attempt to pick apart his use of the Emergencies Act.
It was an amazing opportunity, but she fumbled it, and really just used her time to read her do-your-own-research convoy talking points into the record.
It was pretty cringe to listen to.
A number of people have testified in this inquiry referencing your widely published comments and calling the unvaccinated racist and misogynist.
And we have heard testimony in this inquiry about how some of your officials wanted to label protesters as terrorists.
Would you agree with me that one of the most important roles of a prime minister is to unite Canadians and not divide them by engaging in name calling?
I did not.
Call people who are unvaccinated names.
I highlighted there is a difference between people who are hesitant to get vaccinated for any range of reasons And people who deliberately spread misinformation that puts at risk the life and health of their fellow Canadians.
And my focus, every step of the way, and the primary responsibility of a Prime Minister, is to keep Canadians safe and alive.
Right.
So, in terms of safety, when you met with... I'll reframe.
I'm playing that because Trudeau's distinction here between protesters in general and particular racist elements within the movement carries a hidden punch, given that Chypiuk is the lawyer for Tamara Lich, who rose to prominence with the help of a network of extremely white, ethno-nationalist activists from Alberta.
After that exchange, Chipiuk asked the Prime Minister to verify that the Emergency Act was a measure of last resort.
His answer?
Yes.
Was he aware that the police had prepared a plan that did not require the Act?
The answer was yes, but the plan was insufficient.
And then came her parting shot, which is really telling because it was a lot more like a Facebook retort than a legal challenge.
My last question, Mr. Prime Minister, when did you and your government start to become so afraid of your own citizens?
That's a very... I am not, and we are not.
Those are my questions.
Okay, I've digressed a little here because watching how a Bikram-pilled lawyer gets to interact directly with the head of state is really interesting.
And what we get with Ava Chypiak versus Justin Trudeau is the feeling of a fugue state meeting the mundane reality of how things actually work.
It was like watching the high school valedictorian give a speech at a political convention.
But beyond that mismatch, the showdown also revealed a very yoga-world habit of believing that stating a belief, be it about the healing properties of a sweaty room or the general principle that the convoy participants had good patriotic intentions, is equivalent to making an argument.
We can see here the real impotence of speaking your truth when you're in a place that is not a hot yoga studio or a green smoothie podcast or a Facebook thread.
When you're in a place where telling the truth actually means something because people will hold you to it.
Ava Chypiak did not return a request for comment.
Other Bikram convoy organizers included Brad Colwell, who owns the Bee Fire yoga business, and told the Vancouver Sun that Chowdhury's return to teaching in the city represents a rebirth for the man accused of multiple rapes.
Quote, The classes Bikram will be teaching here are the first he'll have taught since the pandemic.
Enough time has passed since the accusations were made that it's water under the bridge now.
Colwell did not return my request for comment.
Next we should look at the gold sponsor for the event.
This was Gardam Lake Yoga, a hot yoga studio 500 kilometers northeast and inland from Vancouver in Enderby, close to Kamloops.
The place is run by Allison Henry and it layers other magical treatment protocols on top of the benefits of Bikram's method by offering DMT sessions and Kambo treatments.
Now Derek has covered Kambo on the podcast a couple of times.
But the Gardum Lake Yoga description can refresh the basics.
Quote, Cambo is a sacred and non-psychedelic frog venom from the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog.
Now, by the way, the sticky venom has to be scraped from the backs of terrified frogs, and some wildlife preservationists consider this animal cruelty, so that's a whole article on its own.
It is known as Warrior's Medicine, discovered over 2,000 years ago in the Amazon jungle.
It is famously known for intuitively clearing autoimmune disorders, PTSD, trauma, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and many other chronic dis-eases.
Now, what other diseases, you might ask?
Well, Gardum Lake provides a list, and the list might have been copy-pasted over from that list of benefits provided by Bikram Yoga.
HIV, diabetes, severe addictions, long-term pain relief, herpes, Lyme's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and more in all caps.
Cambo, Gardam Lake writes, is the vaccine of the rainforest.
And I'd just like to note here, dear listeners, in future episodes we'll be covering yoga people who promote the insulin of the desert and the Prozac of the prairies, so stay tuned.
Henry did not return a request for comment on the Gardam Lake sponsorship of the Bikram event or the medical claims made about frog venom on the website.
Finally, a yoga guy named Christian Betancourt-Leon deserves a special mention here.
He's not on the board of the Canada Yoga Sports Federation.
He runs Commercial Drive Yoga in downtown Vancouver.
He isn't listed by name on any of the marketing for the Bikram trip, but several sources pointed out that Choudhury's Vancouver visit was set to coincide with Betancourt-Leon's Vancouver Hot Yoga training.
The Choudhury event was to fall in the last week of the seven-week program.
Now, it's not unusual in the yoga world for the traveling celebrity guru to show up at the culmination Ha ha ha.
You don't know me.
Obviously I don't trust fake news and bullshit media.
No comment.
and it can really lock in the graduates while also recruiting the next crop of students.
I reached out to Christian to ask him about his studio's involvement with the visit,
and he actually responded, but this is what he said.
Ha ha ha. You don't know me. Obviously I don't trust fake news and bullshit media. No comment. Beat it.
By far the most serious and troubling response to the growing backlash against Chowdhury's visit
reportedly came from Adam Chypiuk himself.
The response targeted Jill Lawler, who lives in Vancouver.
You might remember her name from Andrea Kramer's reporting at the top of the show.
In 2015, Lawler filed a suit against Bikram Chowdhury that alleged he raped her repeatedly over more than three years as she participated in various Bikram trainings between 2010 and 2013.
We will link to her first-person survivor account in the show notes.
When Lawler became aware of Chowdhury's planned visit, she began organizing fellow yoga practitioners to protest.
According to reporting by Megan Devlin in the Daily Hive, she launched an online petition against the visit, which now has well over 4,000 signatures.
According to the Daily Hive, Adam Chipiak appears to have attempted to blackmail Lawler into standing down by sending her a photograph of a letter she had written to Chowdhury years ago.
This is from the Daily Hive.
Quote, She'd given the letter to a trusted friend at the time to deliver to Chowdhury and has no idea how the Vancouver organizer got a hold of it.
Lawler says that she wrote the letter after an attempt to leave Bikram Yoga.
In it, she expressed affectionate sentiments towards Chaudhuri while feeling ostracized by her beloved yoga community.
She said it was a clear sign of a trauma bond where the person being abused seeks validation from their abuser.
Lawlor didn't know whether Chowdhury ever received the letter, and said the photo from Chipiuk was the first time it's been brought up since she wrote it.
In messages seen by Daily Hive, Chipiuk implies he might release the letter and, quote, let the world decide when they see both sides of the coin, unquote.
So if it's not totally clear, what Chibiak is implying is that if he releases her Freeze and Fawn letter, everyone in the world will realize that Bikram Chowdhury really is everyone's heartthrob, that Jill was just one of those million women lining up for a drop of... I can't say it.
And it's on days like these that I'm really glad that I don't work for the CBC because they wouldn't let me close out this section on Chipyuk's stunt by saying, what a piece of shit thing to do.
Now in addition to Lawler's bravery, another bright bit of this story comes to us through the masses of yoga enthusiasts across Canada and throughout the world who raised the alarm on social and more.
One of the leaders here was friend of the podcast Colin Hall, co-owner of Bodhi Tree Yoga in Regina, Saskatchewan.
I spoke to him the day before the event was cancelled.
I'm thinking of this as sort of a three pronged approach.
The first one is essentially kind of trying to follow the money and see if there's sponsorship, see if there's any money coming in from like Sport Canada or something like that.
So far, no luck that way.
One of those angles, though, was making sure the host hotel was aware of who they were hosting.
I don't think the organizers of the event were honest with them.
So I don't think that they knew who was actually coming in for that event.
So yeah, just making sure the hotel was informed about what was going to be happening there.
Sort of follow the money approach was sort of the first prong.
The second one is sort of the, I would say, more legal or political approach.
And so to that end, we've been contacting Canadian Border Services, wanting to know if he has a work visa.
My suspicion is that he doesn't.
And wanting them just to be aware of who he is, the fact that he has a warrant out for his arrest, that he will be arriving in Vancouver around these sort of time frames.
We've contacted the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship in Canada, the Mayor of Vancouver, as well as getting yoga teachers in the United States to contact the Department of Justice in the United States to see if they are interested in pursuing that arrest warrant.
And with the hopes that Potentially, extradition is an option, and that him coming to Canada actually results in his ass going to jail, which would be the big, big win, obviously.
And then the third prong is essentially what I'm doing just right now, which is connecting with media and journalists and trying to spread this message around, because my suspicion is that a lot of people actually are not familiar with the backstory.
Yoga people tend to live in a bit of a bubble.
And so, you say, Bikram, people know who you're talking about, but a lot of people, I suspect, do not know who he is and what he's done.
So, as fate would have it, Hall and his colleagues won the day.
On February 9th, as Hall mentioned, the Vancouver Sun reported that the J.W.
Marriott Park Luxury Hotel, slated as the event venue, no longer had the event on its schedule.
Now, reliable sources told me that for a while, the organizers considered relocating the event to Christian Bellencourt-Leon's Commercial Drive studio, but that would have been a steep downgrade in terms of capacity and revenue.
And then came Adam Chypiak's cancellation statement, posted on socials and also to the homepage of the Canada Yoga Sports Federation.
He wrote that the Chowdhury visit was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.
And then he wrote, quote, As for those who have sought to harass, shame and defame the Board of Directors on Canada Yoga Sports Federation, be advised that your names and statements have been noted and Canada Yoga is assessing legal action.
The allegations suggesting that directors of Canada Yoga are complicit or condoning of criminal behavior are demeaning and defamatory.
Criminal matters ought to be left with police authorities and courts, not second-rate journalists, Netflix, and social media.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where people believe social media is the judge, jury, and executioner.
This is wrong and adds to misinformation, harassment, and bullying.
So here, Cypia gives a standard rape culture conspiracy theorist response.
It must be second-rate journalists and Netflix, and not six women who have openly told their stories, several on camera, they don't count.
It's not that their allies are standing up for their dignity and safety, no, that couldn't be it.
But the statement is also incredibly ironic, coming from an organization that stacked with supporters of the Ottawa occupation, which, before it clogged the streets of the capital, gained traction as an online shitposting movement, and then burst onto the streets as a full-on harassment campaign.
Heading into the homestretch here, I want to ask, why so much senseless cruelty from yoga teachers who say they want to help people heal?
Does it make any kind of sense that the Chipeaks, Brad Colwell, and Christian Belancour-Leon, and everyone else who played a role in planning this thing, are as oblivious to rape culture as they are to public health through their support of the convoy?
It's understandable that all of the costs they've sunken into Bikram's business pyramid might inevitably set them up as apologists with culty vibes, but is there something about the hot yoga itself that sets the inner asshole on fire?
I want to be careful and not generalize, because there are plenty of former Bikram devotees who left the heat for good when the abuse crisis broke, and some of those folks have helped me for this report on background.
But I think that somehow, they were able to find a moral compass and a capacity for self-reflection that Bikram himself has never had, and perhaps never had the chance to form, given where he came from.
There's a great book that touches on these issues.
It's called Hell-Bent, Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga.
It's by journalist Benjamin Lohr and it's the memoir of his time spent in the upper ranks of the Bikram world.
In one crucial passage, Lore links Chaudhuri's melted megalomania to his childhood in Calcutta, spent under the thumb of the yoga taskmaster, Vishnu Ghosh.
Lore writes, Ghosh demanded total obedience from his disciples.
Refusing to train those who didn't follow his dictates exactly and subjecting those who did to screaming fits and brahmanical tantrums until their hair was blown back and their cheeks covered with spittle.
The easily distracted Bikram was a frequent target of his discipline.
When Bikram lost focus, Ghosh burned the preteen with incense.
Now, this tracks with the general pattern of intergenerational abuse that flows through the culture of modern yoga.
And while it's severe, it's also mundane for the time and place.
The important thing is that the Guru's abuse must be characterized as care.
Because if it wasn't, the entire ecosystem would collapse.
This is why, when Jill Lawler speaks out about Chaudhry's abuse, he and his acolytes must immediately flip it.
They will threaten to release an old letter, written by her traumatized earlier self, that suggests she actually wanted it, because that is what they must say about themselves.
That they wanted all of this.
That they wanted to hitch their wagon to an evil star.
So, there's sadism in the basic mechanics, but also masochism.
How do the rape apologists themselves tolerate the abuse?
How do they dispel the moral injury of hearing about their guru assaulting their fellow students?
Well, everyone's different, but there are some connecting themes.
Such as, one of the things that many Bikram Yoga students do, day in and day out, in their rigorous practice, is to revel in pain.
Here's Benjamin Lohr describing the sensations he's going through in an advanced Bikram backbending workshop.
Although my ribs are solidly in place, my spinal column feels like someone is driving a knife into it, like it's wrapped in barbed wire.
There are precise points that feel black and blue, other places that feel disembodied and almost silly.
My fingers are numb, but I find myself backbending easily anyway.
Buoyed by my incongruous elation, I find that if I focus on the pain, I can interface with it.
It doesn't mean that it stops hurting.
It means that the pain shifts and begins to feel like a medium I am moving through.
It feels like a melting.
When I have melted through, there is another side where I can just breathe.
Now a few pages later, a senior student tells a trembling and sweating lore, quote, It's just your body opening up.
Be patient.
That pain is almost like a rite of passage.
Almost every serious yogi goes through it.
So, this sort of thing goes on and on in the world of dedicated yoga people.
It's not just Bikram Hot Yoga students.
BKS Iyengar would say that pain is your guru.
And the students around Pattabhi Joyce, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, viewed his physical and sexual assaults as spiritual gifts.
And so, what will they do when someone turns around and says, no, that was a crime.
My celebrity teacher is an abuser.
The group will banish that person instead of reckoning with the fact that they too might be survivors.
All of which is to say that with varying degrees of self-awareness, Adam, Ava, Brad, Allison, and many other long-haul Bikram supporters may have to contort their way through a series of sweaty contradictions.
Respect for an authoritarian leader as a pathway to personal liberation, and an acceptance of pain as necessary to personal healing.
These are heavy strains of cognitive dissonance.
And my take, from everything I know about cultic dynamics and from hundreds of interviews, is that if you live with such a burden, it becomes very difficult to develop an interconnected view of the world.
Because reconciling these paradoxes is very costly, and it doesn't leave you a lot of gas left over to think about others.
It's not surprising that people become selfish and resentful even as they evangelize for freedom and health.
It's not surprising that when the authoritarianism of your leader is challenged by the directions of state officials during a pandemic, it's not simply a matter of who's right, but of who has the right to tell you what to do.
With Bikram Yoga, like with every intensive self-project, Participants can enter deeper and deeper into an intensely individualistic world in which obsessive self-concern is ritualized through practice and diet and supplements and overwhelms every other responsibility, whether it's social or civic.
This narrowing of participation mirrors the isolation of the leader.
And in Bikram's case, that isolation is demonstrated primarily by a complete refusal to be accountable for his behavior and its impact on others.
And that's the same position that convoy backers found themselves in, first in relation to COVID and then in relation to the residents of Ottawa, throwing fits of blind rage to be told that their bodies and actions impact others.
Now up top, I said that this episode would involve descriptions of sexual assault and other things, but also non-stop evidence of traumatized narcissism.
So to end, I want to further define that concept, which comes from cult expert and psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw, whose research began with his recovery from the cult of Siddha Yoga.
The Traumatized Narcissist is his template for how figures like Bikram Chowdhury operate.
Now if you've read about Keith Raniere, or if you've listened to our episode about Larry Ray, you might find this resonant.
Shaw writes, Cunning manipulators of others, grandiose, envious, aggressive, exploiting, and controlling.
These narcissists are users who can be charismatic, seductive, and intensely attentive.
Yet they ultimately prove to be concerned only with their own needs, feelings, and desires.
If their significant others—spouses, siblings, children, we can include followers here—attempt to assert their needs, this sort of narcissist is skilled at making such efforts out to be shameful, hurtful, and selfish.
In other words, exactly how Bickram and his followers responded to people like Jill Lawler.
This narcissist in real life, Shaw continues, a myth in his own mind, is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him that he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior being in need of nothing he cannot provide for himself.
To remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate.
The spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be for fear of being banished from his exalted presence.
He is compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation.
To the extent that he succeeds in keeping inadequacy and dependency external, he can
sustain in his internal world his delusions of shame-free, self-sufficient superiority.
So Mr. Chowdhury, a bunch of people have your number, it appears.
And a hint for you.
Those in Canada who blocked your junket to Vancouver are now reaching out to your hosts in Mexico, Spain, and Thailand.
