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April 20, 2024 - Conspirituality
40:39
Brief: Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide (w/Theo Wildcroft & Harriet McAtee)

Matthew is joined by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, co-editors of The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide: Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power (Singing Dragon Publications), a volume of essays from 16 yoga world contributors. Three yoga culture critic nerds get into the weeds of how wellness workers and yoga teachers survive and navigate a post-pandemic world that exists at the crossroads of: capitalism and spirituality medicine and religion modern therapeutics and precolonial philosophy and caregiving gigwork and care work Theo is a yoga scholar. Harriet has been training yoga teachers for seven years in a little school in Oxford, UK. Show Notes The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide | Singing Dragon - US  Theo Wildcroft  Harriet McAtee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, we can add to that tagline how the yoga world can be both a Petri dish for all of this stuff, but also a test tube for new medicines of social and cultural repair.
I'm Matthew Rimsky, and in a bit, I'll be joined by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, co-editors of The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide, Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power, a volume of essays from 16 Yoga World contributors, out just this week from Singing Dragon Publications in the UK.
Now before I run my conversation with them, I'm going to open with a 101 on the book.
Starting with, full disclosure, I was invited to write the foreword and so I'll build around two main points that I made there.
The first is about who are the 16 workers who have charted their paths here.
If you have been in or adjacent to the yoga and wellness industries, you might be familiar with some of these histories.
So I wrote this.
Gathered here are folks who survived the yoga cults of the 1980s.
They weathered the growth bubble of the 1990s and the aughts, and they saw that their new industry was complicit in the cruelty of gentrification as yoga studios played their role in real estate upgrading.
They were sexually harassed and underpaid but offered Lululemon ambassadorships for their troubles.
They suffered repetitive stress injuries due to a complete lack of biomechanics education.
They've watched essential oil MLMs cannibalize entire communities because the side hustle of yoga often needs a side hustle to work.
And they've watched an old but new heteronormative orthodoxy emerge through the marketing of divine feminine and divine masculine workshops.
They knew that many of their colleagues were just one more juice fast away from going all in on body fascism and soft eugenics.
Now the second point generalizes the wisdom that they bring.
I wrote, The writers in this volume know very well that globalization, commodification, and technologization over the past century have transformed mainstream yoga into the religion of the neoliberal order, while promising women empowerment, gig workers freedom, and funneling money to the top.
They know that the AI tech bro who plans to create enormous online yoga studios staffed by literally no one isn't that different from the boomer yoga tycoon who is always more about sales than substance, who plagiarized and recycled their content to feed their lucrative downlines.
They know that the yoga discourse that will always pay the highest will lean into magical thinking, spiritual bypassing, and various flavors of Orientalism.
They know that a neoliberal religion is meant to consecrate the status quo, to bless the endless social reproduction of ideal bodies, purity fetishes, and productivity hacks.
They have seen how easy it was for capitalism to sell yoga as a method for reinforcing rather than breaking our conditioning.
Okay, so that's a rundown of what I believe this book is surviving from as the post-pandemic yoga world looks to the future.
But the real writing in it tells a much more hopeful story.
There are chapters piloted by contributors like the Sanskritist Barbara Sushkova on the possibility of transforming the yoga industry into a site of actual cultural and historical education with the help of real scholarship instead of popularized Orientalist takes.
They've got some biomechanics experts on board, like Jules Mitchell, who's built a career on debunking the spirituality of overstretching for the purposes of opening or cleansing, but with the unfortunate outcomes of joint and cartilage damage.
There's Amelia Wood, who's an emerging scholar of institutional abuse in yoga schools and what to do about it.
And then Laura Hancock adds an excellent chapter about how yoga teaching is service industry work.
And if there's sexual harassment in that world, the brutal economics are the root cause.
And so, like all service workers, unionization and collective bargaining is the smartest first step.
Now there's also a whole team of South Asian diaspora contributors, Simran Upal, Sheena Sood, and Aisha Nash, who write about the complexities of cultural appropriation and post-colonial discourse while drawing on Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh knowledge bases and lived experience.
And complexity is really the key word here because they really expose how white liberals worrying about the ethics of saying namaste obscures the deeper issues of how material colonial injustices are still shaping geopolitics.
And even more troubling, that within India itself, a homogenized and corporatized yoga religion, which is not unlike the Christian nationalism on the rise in the United States, has become a locus of soft political power within Modi's neo-fascist regime.
Hindu nationalists love yoga because they believe it can cure homosexuality, that it can strengthen the national spirit against secularism and Islam, and because its purported health benefits are easier to distribute than functional health care.
Now this intervention is particularly timely as the book launches only a few months after the new Ram Mandir temple opened up in Ayodhya at a cost of over 200 million US dollars on the site of a medieval era mosque that was torn down by hand by Hindutva rioters in 1992 as part of a series of pogroms that threw the BJP into national prominence.
But the South Asian writers in this volume complicate this scene further by pointing out that it's not just Hindu nationalists who use yoga to Aumwash, as Sheena Sood points out.
Case in point, yoga is really popular in the IDF.
Perhaps some of you recall the drone footage of yoga practitioners doing sun salutations over portraits of hostages in Tel Aviv And then there was that speech by the Israeli Zen teacher about how meditation could help with battlefield terror.
Now, of course, the US has been teaching yogic breathing to snipers for years.
So, there's a lot of sobering stuff in this book and it will make any yoga student think deeply about the material implications and metaphysical uncertainties of their spiritual journey.
But isn't that the point for everyone who wants to contemplate their lives and their shared conditions with integrity?
As you'll hear in our wrap-up, it's that shared condition that offers the real relief, that this thing that from time out of mind has usually been a solitary and austere contemplation is made rich and worthwhile when it happens in communities of care, which is pretty much what this book is.
So, here's my conversation with Theo and Harriet.
Theo, you are an old friend of mine, a yoga scholar.
You were an early guest on this show discussing the uses and abuses of the concept of trauma in the yoga industry.
And Harriet, you've been training yoga teachers for, what, seven years in a little school in Oxford.
So pleased to have you both.
Welcome to you both.
Thank you for having us.
It's always good to chat.
I was going to say, we remember when you were a yoga teacher, Matthew.
Yeah, we do.
That's how long we've been around.
On the podcast, we have studied the yoga world through a critical and maybe sometimes paranoid lens because during the pandemic, a chunk of this demographic became a vector for skepticism towards public health, anti-vaccine rhetoric, COVID-minimizing ableism, even versions of QAnon.
And the impact was significant, given that there are hundreds of thousands of yoga teachers in the U.S.
alone, and that current estimates for the number of people worldwide who practice yoga hover around 300 million.
So we'll be touching on the reasons why this world became vulnerable to strange, sometimes harmful ideas.
But to start, Is it fair to say that you both watched this happen from the inside while the economics of the industry fell apart and while you were editing this book?
And is that why part of it is, well, is that part of why it's a survival guide?
The first thing to say is the title came last, which is really interesting and I think really reflects that journey.
But the book started from a place of wanting to share some wisdom from a circle of experts that we trusted, so that the people who tended to come to us with issues as yoga teachers and yoga teacher trainees, that these were the people that they could trust not to lie to them about some of the issues of yoga teaching already, right?
But in editing it, you're right, that issue of survival, that issue of how do we get through all of the things that we navigate as yoga teachers became more urgent and it became more existential for us and for many of our contributors.
And so it is a survival guide written by people who know the terrain, but it's also a survival guide written by people trying to figure out each successive wave of crap hitting the yoga teaching community, I think.
It was a really personal and professional challenge this period.
You know, both of us trying to find our way within this like, you know, neoliberal late stage capitalism economy, how that intersects with yoga, but also on a personal front as well, dealing with, you know, both of us like quite significant health issues, which is also a story that many yoga teachers will feel familiar with, I think.
What this project has also allowed us to do is kind of clear the path for like where we go next.
Now the three of us are yoga reform nerds who could have like an inside baseball chinwag all day about the subjects platformed in this book, but I want to orient the audience generally by starting with some basics on the complexity of the landscape.
I've sussed out four paradoxes I think the book explores, so I'm going to state them and maybe you can each give your best two-sentence reflection on each.
Okay, so this is like a flash round.
Okay, so number one, the yoga world exists at the crossroads of capitalism and spirituality, and its teachers have to negotiate making money by selling healing and freedom.
Go.
I think that that's right.
I think that it's not a new issue.
I think it's always been the case.
I think that exploitation has always been a part of yoga to some extent, and that part of our issue in the contemporary world is the myth of a purer past to go back to, right?
Where that's not true.
I think that's important.
But I also think that it's part of a bigger cultural reckoning that's going on around capitalism, spirituality, and all the other subjects that you touch on in the podcast.
Okay, so number two.
The yoga world exists at the crossroads of medicine and religion, and its teachers have to be clear about which one they're doing.
What we're really asking here is what do we mean by healing?
And that there are and always have been some really complex intentionalities and epistemologies around yoga more generally.
So yoga has always existed at this place where magic and medicine collide anyway.
But yes, it is so much of what we do is assisted if we can get really clear about our scope of practice.
Number three, the yoga world exists at the crossroads of modern therapy and pre-modern, pre-colonial philosophy and caregiving, and yoga teachers have to reckon with a lot of post-colonial confusions.
For me, when I'm working with yoga teachers, one of the key things here is helping them understand the concept of many yogas rather than this kind of like monolithic yoga.
And that so much of the confusion comes from this kind of homogenization of many varied histories and stories of practice.
And the other thing I would add here is that this is where having great allies really comes in.
So it's not about A single yoga teacher having to have sorted all of this out, but knowing where to go and who to ask the questions of to kind of start unpacking and untangling those confusions.
Okay, number four.
I think we're doing well.
The yoga world exists at the crossroads of gig work and care work, and yoga teachers need to get clear on what their labor actually is.
I agree with you.
I think the question that I find yoga teachers need more help with is actually, who are you working for?
Like, who is that labor for?
And who is profiting?
Because it's not yoga teachers, we know that.
It's really not even...
Yoga studios in many instances, and I mean here like grassroots yoga studios, even though yoga studios are often painted as the bad guys and there are lots of shitty things about how they operate and teach yoga teachers, for me it's Understanding that really, it's landlords and it's venture capital.
And you look at the big yoga businesses, you know, pre-pandemic, it would have been like Yoga Works in the US, now it might be Yoga Six.
And we have versions of that in the UK as well.
And really, at the end of the day, they're not selling yoga, they're, you know, selling real estate, renting real estate, and they're venture capital.
They're not, they're not yoga businesses.
So who's profiting?
Who are you working for?
The more lengthy answers, I think, can come with the following questions.
And I wanted to start with the opening chapter because it's made up of two essays that present a real fork in the road in terms of, you know, who as a yoga teacher is going to survive.
Karen Carlson can't see a pathway forward personally and is giving up on teaching yoga.
And she's very eloquent about the reasons why.
Donna Farai still sees hope.
She's a senior teacher.
There's some global renown there, and she gives her eloquent reasons why she will keep up with the good fight.
Now, listeners can catch those stories in full in the book, but zooming out, what would you say the decisive factors are in whether seasoned, experienced yoga workers are able to weather the pressures that we've outlined so far?
I mean, one of the biggest things is luck.
And it's really important to remember that a lot of it is about luck.
I think a lot of it is about privilege.
And, you know, that's a word that gets thrown around a lot, but essentially it's about resources of all kinds and how they relate to your levels of resilience.
And those need to be psychological, financial, you know, all sorts of different ways.
It also depends on whether you have other options.
Sometimes people are still teaching because that's what they have and that's what they know.
Not everyone can find something more lucrative or more stable to do anyway.
Speaking as someone who divides her time between training yoga teachers and working in academia, for example, I'm not really sure which one is the more stable or more financially rewarding.
Or the more exploitative.
Or the more exploitative.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
It also, I think it depends on what weathering looks like.
So not everyone has to teach full time, right?
You know, sometimes in a lot of ways, it's about the kind of the yoga teacher's version of quiet quitting, which is like maybe avoiding stepping back from the hustle and teaching a couple of times a week or teaching just here and there, you know, when you want to.
I did a little informal survey on kind of like Ex-yoga teachers a little while ago, and I asked them kind of like, you know, what are your reasons?
What are you doing now?
And so on and so forth.
And one of the questions that I asked them is, do you think you'd teach?
And almost again, and almost all of them said that they weren't ruling out going back to it someday.
Right?
Like even if you've walked away from the idea of professional identity of being a yoga teacher, that doesn't mean to say the teaching stops.
It doesn't mean to say the yoga stops.
It kind of looks different, right?
So there's a kind of semi-retirement option basically where you just teach what you want and you don't hustle for students and In order to make that work, it needs to be sustainable for you.
So your cost needs to be low.
They need to be non-existent.
And for some people, that's a viable side hustle.
For some people, that's a viable income.
And for others, it's just not, right?
So all of those factors, none of this has anything to do with the yoga, which is interesting, right?
I agree with everything Theo said.
I have two things to add.
One is cynical and one is not cynical.
The cynical one is that I think the relationship between seasoned yoga teachers and charisma is really interesting.
So for better or worse, and it's usually worse, yoga teaching is still really a profession which relies heavily on charisma and personality, hence why it can slide so easily into abuse, exploitation, conspirituality.
And some of the worst examples in our industry are the most charismatic.
And some of the best examples have learnt, I think, to manage their charisma and develop a responsible relationship to it in their teaching.
So they're kind of using it for good instead of evil, for very reductive language there.
And my non-cynical answer is, I think what is a big factor in weathering as well is community and relationships.
I know I certainly wouldn't have lasted as long as I have in this industry if it wasn't for the relationships that have unfolded as a result of my teaching, whether that's professional relationships, friendships, kind of like kinship that develops.
And if you're looking to weather the industry, so to speak, we're much better like the image in my mind here is we're much better as like all of the penguins huddled together in the storm than like trying to trying to deal with the storm out on our own.
And that's also a really difficult thing when yoga teaching as a whole is such an isolating profession and we really have to work hard as yoga teachers to Cultivate that peer network because I don't think it comes organically.
It takes work and I think it takes the penguins a certain amount of time to learn that you only spend a little amount of time on the outside.
You have to be able to be let in so that your back isn't against the cold.
So that there has to be turnover.
I really like what you say, appreciate what you say about the management of charisma.
It reminds me of just the basic psychological concept of healthy narcissism that understands its own boundaries, that doesn't burn itself out, that doesn't need too much.
Now, turning to yoga education itself, throughout your editorial notes, you're pretty salty, both of you, at the low quality out there.
So, you went out and you found some proper academics to straighten some of the history out and to encourage the use of proper scholarship.
So, you're really modeling something, I think, for the yoga teachers who will pick this book up.
But I wonder...
About this, to what extent are people attracted to yoga through mystification and Orientalism to begin with?
And will intellectual honesty shake out to robust workshop sales or, you know, do we really care about that anymore?
In many situations, Modern yoga displays the all-too-common wellness trap that we see of selling both the problem and the solution.
Mysticism and Orientalism is definitely a part of that.
And there's this really tricky liminal space where, just to pick a random example, someone might come to a yoga class because they want to feel better in their body in a non-specific way, right?
The teacher tells them that they have tight hamstrings and that more yoga is the solution.
We also see this outside of yoga but in related contemplative practices like Vipassana.
And I see similar strategies scaled up when selling teacher training programs.
And I think part of the issue, and absolutely when it comes to the mystification and, you know, exotifying of yoga, is that there is so much gatekeeping that happens with knowledge in yoga spaces.
And what I see is so many people end up on a teacher training because there's no other space to learn the things about yoga that they want to explore.
So intellectual honesty and rigor is part of how we manage this, yes.
But for me, it's also really grounding people in things like citation practice, reducing gatekeeping as a whole, building critical thinking skills.
Because until people have the tools to kind of unpack their own relationships to like Orientalism, colonialism, we're not going to address that issue.
Does this mean robust sales?
I'm not sure.
But I can, you know, because it's not shiny, it's not charismatic, it's not mystical, but I can say that after seven years of really dedicating my training work to being in this space, I'm able to carve out a modest income.
But I think most importantly for me, I can also sleep at night.
What we're really trying to do is two things.
First of all, in the book, we're trying not just to give the reality, but to give people the tools to It's not just about us saying, here, we can tell you the truth of yoga.
That would be something that's very much outside of what we want to do.
We're much more into, can we give you the tools to bring to information and to bring to expertise so that you can integrate these truths?
But also, can you keep the magic of the practice in the face of that historical truth?
Because it is not an uncommon thing to fall in love with a particular cultural system and over-romanticize it and then find out the gritty reality, right?
There's that syndrome of tourists that arrive on the streets of Paris and have nervous breakdowns and have to go home.
You've come across this.
Right?
And we are in yoga in some ways ahead of the curve to even begun to do this work, right?
When I talk to Pilates teachers, when I talk to martial arts teachers, when I talk to these other modalities, they're not asking themselves the same questions yet about consent to touch and colonialism and charisma and so on and so forth.
So we are trying to do something really difficult and we are in that sense ahead of the curve.
I think yoga will survive.
Will the yoga industry continue?
That is the question.
But yoga has always been part of this process of relentless evolution, right?
And relentless, I would say, disillusionment.
Yeah.
And I want to really sort of highlight that transition point that you're talking about.
Like, will the person who got very, very attracted to the apparent You know, elegance of Iyengar yoga practice, for example, will that survive their interrogation of where those postures came from or what Mr. BKS Iyengar was actually like or how much of the adjustment culture in that milieu was based upon notions of corporal punishment and somatic forms of discipline that come from another era that you might not value at all.
I have spoken, I've found people who learn all of that and yet they say there's something about the genius or the brilliance of the teachers in that milieu that communicated something anyway.
There was something sort of magical that remained after all of the education, after all of the disillusionment and that can happen too.
Well, I mean, that's, but that's the important bit, right?
That is the magic, right?
The magic happens almost in spite of that.
I mean, I think when you're looking, I mean, let's look at something like Kundalini Yoga, right?
Where we know so much of that stuff was just incredibly exploitatively made up, right?
And yet people find, have found incredible healing and meaning within that practice, regardless of being taught by, in many cases, absolute charlatans.
Monsters, monsters.
Monsters, yeah.
So you can look at that in two ways, right?
You can approach that and say, this is terrible, and I would agree with you.
But there's another question, there's a hidden question there, which is about the human ability to find incredible healing, even in situations like that.
So how can we, how can we understand that meaning making and how it happens?
And that's really where I want kind of, it's partly where I want my research to go next.
It's like, how do we make meaning even in the most insane of circumstances?
It's a really important direction, I think, because it happens and because to foreclose on the possibility of people recovering from terrible things is itself a terrible thing.
If I can give just a personal example and then let Harriet speak, is that I've been having, as Harriet knows, I've been having some real serious issues with perimenopausal stuff.
And because of other conditions I have, I can't, at the moment, there's no way I can take HRT or anything like that.
And I was looking at various different kind of modalities and things that I could do to help myself.
And then I ended up talking to a dear friend of mine and he and I were just like, we should just try magic.
Like, let's just try magic.
Like, let's figure it, like, because there is nothing else, right?
So that's literally what I've been doing, is trying magic.
From my perspective as, like, somebody who has facilitated teacher training journeys for a long time, I think, and done so, I hope, in a way that is like, Living up to the, to the values that are important to me.
There has to be a rupture in order for there to be a repair, right?
Like to use some really like, you know, nice Instagram psychology, but there you, you have to break these things for people gently and then ensure that they come on the repair journey with you.
Having been through that, myself and recovered and continued with the practice and like and kept going and found new meaning with it.
It's about helping them understand that the magic wasn't about the postures or the teacher or the you know the incense or the mysticism the magic was about the way that they were practicing hopefully practicing choice and agency and the way that they were practicing living in their bodies and relating to other people and how that filters out into the rest of their lives outside of the four corners of their map right so there's kind of this like
breaking repairing but then also like naming process that has to happen and that's really difficult because like yoga for all of the fact that it's a very physical very like visual discipline these days it also is felt and abstract and experiential and people aren't given the tools Frequently to communicate and think about those experiences.
And I'm really lucky that I trained as an art historian originally.
So my whole, you know, training at university was about looking at things and describing what you're seeing, describing how you feel, how other people feel, and asking questions about that.
So Yeah, like, I kind of have a cheat card, right?
Like, yoga didn't give me these skills.
I went to university for, like, too long to have them.
I think that's also what's really important in this process.
So that, yeah, people can keep the magic, but they can also, like, keep their head on so their brain doesn't fall out.
The theory of post-coloniality is a really strong theme in the volume.
I want to isolate a term coined by Sheena Sood.
She uses the term ohm washing, and I think it's a fascinating term, and I think that it takes the cultural appropriation argument into some pretty complicated territory.
Am I right?
First, it's really important to point out, because this is an audio format, that both Harriet and I are white women, right?
That's really important.
Therefore, it was really important for us to defer this question to diasporic allies.
It's one of the reasons why we wanted a circle of experts to answer these questions, because it's not our voices that need to be platformed.
But what I can say, and I know Harriet will have things to add, that number one, the cultural appropriation argument is just in many ways too simple to do justice to the complexity of what's going on in racial relationships and yoga in so many ways.
You know, there's so many other things going on in terms of casteism, in terms of different kind of religious groups, in terms of Hindu nationalism, so on and so forth.
The other thing that's really important for me is that colonial violence in various kind of forms is still very much a live issue, and it's still going on.
And I think those issues of colonial violence are much more important than whether a yoga teacher in Kansas says Namaste or not, right?
That's the stuff we really need to be talking about.
If we think of like the first heartbreak of the the contemporary yoga practitioner is realizing that you know the modern forebears of yoga were almost exclusively like horrible abusive people.
Then the second heartbreak for the contemporary yoga teacher who is You know, interested in social justice and interested in inclusion is the recognition that yoga is being used to support, perpetrate and reinforce violence and harm in a very real way.
today.
Sheena's term, own washing, I think is absolutely vital to helping us understand what's going on in these situations.
So if the first heartbreak is sort of realizing the the historic abuse and the historical violence that comes with the history of yoga, the second heartbreak is is really looking at the ways in which it's still being It's still being used to do that and I think we have to be able to reckon with the understanding that yoga in itself is not inherently good.
And yoga is like anything.
As I like to say on my chair yoga training, I'm like, fascists can do chair yoga too.
Doing chair yoga doesn't make you an inherently good person.
And this also absolutely extends to the way that, for example, yoga is being used by Modi and by the BJP in India.
We have to reckon with that heartache and then decide what we're going to do about it as a yoga community, I think.
Finishing up, the macrocosm theme of the volume is reflected in the title, like how yoga teachers survive in the industry they came up in, how they might seize agency and assert their values.
I imagine that that vision emerges from the microcosm of the two of you both being survivors of long-term interpersonal abuse.
Now, you tell some of these stories and how they've shaped you in a chapter in the book.
My general question for you both on this I think will resonate with many of our listeners who share that history and who are also on a long journey to find spiritual and caregiving communities that they can trust.
So the question is, what makes a community worth fighting for hard enough to edit a book about it?
So it's about It's about chosen family.
It's about communities of practice.
It's about the people that you trust and it's about sharing much more than just the practice.
So does that practice allow you to form connections with people that you can share some of the most kind of profound, the hardest, the most joyous, the most life affirming and sometimes the worst experiences of your life with, right?
And if the practice does not allow you to do that and does not enable you to do that, what is the point?
There's no point.
Nobody cares.
Nobody's going to care a hundred years from now whether you can stand on one leg, right?
Nobody cares about that.
And this list, the contributors that we brought together to write this book is not our full circle of allies.
It's not everyone that we trust and love within yoga, but it is a selection of the people that we fight alongside And four.
We chose them and we handpicked every single one of them.
We went to them and we said, we want you to write for us.
Not only that, we told them what they were going to write on, which was really funny when we told Juvena he was going to write about money, because that's not what he was expecting, for example.
This is Jeevan Aheyman, who is the founder of Accessible Yoga.
He was a guest on our show just for listeners way back at the beginning.
He came on to speak about the ableism of inaccessible yoga practices, especially through the lens of his first work, which was to provide yoga as a hospice service to AIDS patients back in San Francisco in the 90s.
So for us, that wider circle of allies that includes, you know, the people in the book is like, there's literally no one better to have been through a global pandemic and the imminent collapse of capitalism with, which is kind of what we're doing, what we have done.
They're the people that we've chosen to do that with.
And when it comes to the practice itself, like it's, what do you keep coming back to?
Right.
And they, I've always found myself to be a reluctant yogi, like needing it, missing it.
When this question came through, we were talking and at the moment I don't have a practice that really works for me that is yoga in that sense.
I have other practices that I do and I miss it and I'm trying to find my way back to it because it is the thing that helps make my life make sense.
And I know it's going to be a hard journey, particularly as a survivor, particularly because I know too much about yoga to just rock up at a random yoga class now.
So that journey is difficult, but it's worth it, right?
This question is really important to me and it's worth fighting for.
If I think about my personal history with The practice and teaching.
It's because with very few exceptions elsewhere in my personal life, it was in my yoga communities and the relationships that came from them where me, I really felt seen and heard in my experiences as a survivor for the first time.
And being held and seen in those spaces enabled me to be more open and trusting in my relationships outside of yoga.
It was literally like these people were just like, oh yeah, like we see you, like this experience that you've had is valid.
And also without any need to kind of like explain the way that I was.
And I'm sure this is an experience shared by many.
I should also add like, I've done a fuck ton of therapy and been supported by plenty of mental health professionals along the way.
Like yoga is not the only thing and those relationships are not the only thing.
And on my inner left arm, I'm holding it up to show Matthew, but you know, listeners of the podcast won't see, I have a tattoo of three moons, each representing the phase of the moon when three meaningful people in my life were born.
And like, listeners can roll their eyes here because yes, I'm still a yoga teacher, I still like looking at the moon.
But these three people have been some of the most integral and important to me In holding me when I was broken, standing with me when I was like sifting through the fragments, figuring it all out.
Two of those people are yoga teachers.
Both of them are in the book.
One of them is Theo.
And the only non-yoga teacher there is my best friend who's in Australia.
So people might kind of glibly be like, oh, yoga saved my life.
And I kind of like get a bit nauseous whenever I see that on Instagram.
And I wouldn't wish to be so melodramatic.
And also, you know, there's so many caveats here, but not to minimize the very real impact of my experiences.
And for example, I'm currently at time of recording 28 weeks pregnant and had a quite a major PTSD relapse during my pregnancy, for example.
I'm really honestly amazed that I don't have a significant addiction issue or some other catastrophic consequence as a result of my life experience and there are many factors which have helped me along the way with that, you know, therapy, relationships.
Privilege.
So many things.
But one of the most significant has been the relationships that I've built from my yoga practice and my teaching.
That to me is worth fighting for.
If the way that Theo and I can kind of envision the future of yoga, you know, if that's the work that we're doing, Every day, and I hope it is, then that to me is worth fighting for, even if that just means that one other survivor feels seen and heard and can also be held in safety because of that.
There we have it, the origin story for The Yoga Teacher's Survival Guide, Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power.
Theo and Harriet, thank you so much for joining us, and good luck with the book.
I hope that it winds up in every teacher training in the English-speaking world and that it gets translated.
Great to see you.
Thank you.
Thanks so much, Matthew.
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