Matthew is in the guest seat today! Why? Because in 2019—just months before the pandemic and this podcast kicked off—he published a book titled Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. It focused on survivor stories of assault and abuse within the cultic mechanisms of Pattabhi Jois' Ashtanga Yoga community. The book also proposed a path into co-creating safer yoga communities via enhanced critical thinking, self-and-other-care, student empowerment, and community resilience.
In many ways, this book holds the keys to how one-third of the team has tackled the conspirituality era. Derek and Julian interview their colleague about it all on the occasion of the release of a second edition, now titled: Surviving Modern Yoga: Cult Dynamics, Charismatic Leaders, and What Survivors Can Teach Us (North Atlantic Books).
Show Notes
Surviving Modern Yoga by Matthew Remski | PenguinRandomHouse.com
Yoga’s Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories | The Walrus
Survivors of an International Buddhist Cult Share Their Stories | The Walrus
How a #MeToo Facebook Post Toppled a Yoga Icon | by Matthew Remski | GEN
Shielded for Decades, A Yoga Leader's Alleged Sexual Abuse Finally Comes Under Fire
How to Respond to Sexual Abuse Within a Yoga or Spiritual Community—Jubilee Cooke, Karen Rain
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So for Iyengar, if the body is sculpted into hyper geometrical perfection, and then the posture is held for an interminably long time, it will become like a lightning rod for spiritual enlightenment.
But with Joyce, it's more like, you know, if the body can be stretched and torqued until you feel virtually boneless, you're like on fire, you're soaked in sweat, God will flow through you.
There's no resistance to God.
So there's the pain of the postures, But then in both cases, the teacher is also often physically manhandling the student into the postures, and the students are reporting these floods of pain-induced ecstasy.
And both of these guys, I think, were aware of the sadomasochistic paradox.
I think both of them explicitly pushed it, sometimes even seeming to take pleasure
in the suffering of their students.
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Hey, everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections
of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes via Patreon.
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As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspirituality 206, Surviving Modern Yoga with Matthew Remsky.
In 2019, our colleague Matthew Remsky published a book titled Practice and All is Coming, Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond.
Per the publisher's description, it focuses on survivor stories of assault and abuse within the cultic mechanisms of Patabi Joyce's Ashtanga Yoga community.
The book also proposes a path into co-creating safer yoga communities via enhanced critical thinking, self and other care, student empowerment, and community resilience.
We're talking about this today because a second edition of the book, now bearing the title Surviving Modern Yoga, published by North Atlantic Books and updated by Matthew's work here on Conspirituality, is being released today, while we're recording this on May 14th.
For the three of us, and many of you, our listeners, The roots of this podcast lie in the explosion of yoga's popularity in North America through the 1990s and the early aughts.
As yoga studios popped up in all the hip neighborhoods, the branding that established prestige and authority hinged at that time on being anointed into a lineage.
Western boomer yogis at the top of that food chain routinely traveled to India to practice at the feet of one of two masters.
Now, Iyengar and Joyce were born around World War I, and both of them had been students of the central figure in what historians call the Mysore Yoga Revival, founded by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.
Iyengar's institute in Pune emphasized static postures held with rigorous attention to geometric alignment.
His book, Light on Yoga, was revered as an authoritative text on the supposed medical benefits of each pose, as demonstrated in those pages by the proud and severe-looking guru himself.
But it was the Ashtanga Yoga of Pattabhi Joyce which linked postures into flowing sequences that would inspire the coming generations of athletic and gymnastic Western yogis, spawning the Vinyasa flow yoga style now taught all over the world, as well as the awe-inspiring acrobatics as spiritual performance that would one day be perfect for Instagram.
Together with Krishnamacharya, Joyce had created Ashtanga Yoga by blending traditional Hatha yoga practice with European fitness and Scandinavian gymnastics influences.
Early promotional images of their school at the Mysore Palace showed groups of young men and boys engaged in demonstrations of impressive contortions, sometimes even with Krishnamacharya or Pattabhi Jois standing on top of their bodies.
Okay, so that's our little historical context.
It's here that I want to start, Matthew.
What is your sense of the inherited attitudes that Pattabhi Jois carried Well, it's a great introduction, Julian.
Thank you guys both for having me on as a guest.
And I think it's a great place to start because of all of the influences that yoga has had on the globalizing world.
We talk about them ad nauseum.
There's the spreading of Orientalist ideals of oneness.
There's the notion that achieving personal equilibrium will elevate a person above politics and change reality itself.
I think it's that attitudes towards what it means to be virtuous in the body and the alleged sacrifices that that entails.
That's right up there at the top.
And I think that's how we actually found each other, the three of us.
Purification and body virtue and somehow transcending politics are all at the root of conspirituality.
So I think, you know, we were soaking in these attitudes and then we watched them curdle and explode during the pandemic.
But for the top post-war Indian exporters of postural yoga like Iyengar and Joyce, you know, those attitudes were rooted in a couple of ideas that you're already pinging.
So for Iyengar, If the body is sculpted into hyper geometrical perfection, and then the posture is held for an interminably long time, it will become like a lightning rod for spiritual enlightenment.
But with Joyce, it's more like, you know, if the body can be stretched and torqued until you feel virtually boneless, you're like on fire, you're soaked in sweat, God will flow through you.
There's no resistance to God.
So there's the pain of the postures, But then in both cases, the teacher is also often physically manhandling the student into the postures, and the students are reporting these floods of pain-induced ecstasy.
And both of these guys, I think, were aware of the sadomasochistic paradox.
I think both of them explicitly pushed it, sometimes even seeming to take pleasure in the suffering of their students.
And it was all out in the open.
Like there's this book I quote from by a French yoga woman named Noelle Christiane Perez who started taking private lessons with Iyengar in 1959 and they had this very interesting, I think probably slightly spicy relationship where they would practice together these super painful postures and then they would talk about God.
And she would write down his statements, which include things like,
when you begin yoga, the unrecognized pains come to the surface.
There should always be a certain amount of pain.
Then only will you see the light.
And what is pain if it enables you to see God?
And then most famously, he would say, pain is your guru.
Now, Joyce's English wasn't as good, so he wasn't as eloquent,
but he had the same attitude, and the attitudes then filtered down.
I think even into our own yoga experience, I know that you've spoken about this through your experience with Anna Forrest, Julian.
Another book that I quote from heavily is this book of interviews from Joyce's senior students and every interview is obsessed with pain.
Pain appears 118 times in 460 pages and pain is often sort of explained or the necessity of it is explained through these long philosophical answers about therapeutic and spiritual necessity.
And this sets up a new generation of readers to surge towards the edge of their capacity and being in pain.
But of course, as we'll get into, that welcoming of pain also welcomed or at least provided no resistance to outright physical and sexual abuse.
In fact, it became part of the culture to welcome it.
Yeah, it's a wild thing because I know that there's a way that the yoga community set itself apart in those days from the rest of fitness culture as being holier and more holistic.
You know, pain is just weakness leaving the body.
It's sort of like a fitness dictum, right?
Well, yeah, and I think a lot of non-Indian seekers saw themselves as doing a kind of penance for, you know, the looser, more profligate, hippie ways of wellness.
Like, it was no longer virtuous in their estimation to drop out into relaxation and psychedelics.
Like, some of them were actually drawn to these more familiar, you know, patriarchal safeties, I think.
Now within the culture that the three of us grew up in with yoga, there was this almost mystical sense that if you did the postures correctly, they would become this doorway into spiritual awakening.
And so dedication to that disciplined practice and to sustaining whatever discomfort it might include, along with a kind of energetic transmission from the teacher, or even one step removed from your teacher who had studied with the very special teacher, would eventually Deliver many things, freedom from suffering, healing of the mind and body, even perhaps revelation of the ultimate truth of the universe.
And for Ashtanga Yogis, my sense is that this mood was summed up in this ubiquitous quote from the beloved Guruji, Patsabhi Joyce, practice and all is coming.
Right.
What's your sense?
Was there anything actually religious or traditional about Ashtanga Yoga practice during this phase?
And did Westerners somehow come to see it as akin to a kind of spiritually transformative therapy?
Okay, so Karen Rayne, one of the central interview subjects of the book, was sexually assaulted daily by Joyce in class over years.
So we'll describe that probably a little bit later.
But at the end of it, She comes out and understandably says, there was nothing spiritual about this at all.
And she also just flatly asked Joyce's devotees to stop calling him Guruji, which implies he was some kind of spiritual master.
But I think what makes it tricky and also contributed to the silence around the abuse for so long was that his entire project was just haloed in this mist of spiritual assumptions and romantic bullshit.
And some of it came from a reasonable place, like India in general is profoundly religious.
By the 1970s, there's a whole century of history of white folks traveling there in the hope of recovering something they've lost in their own cultures.
And Joyce was a Brahmin.
He's wearing his thread.
Sometimes he has the three stripes of white chandan powder on his forehead marking him off as a devotee of Shiva.
And so when students are rolling up on their bikes to wait to get into his room at 4am, they might catch glimpses of him doing Aarti, or the ritual of lights with butter lamps at the family shrine.
And so when he travelled, he also followed his caste rules about food, because his wife had to pack rice and dal to take with them from the hometown.
And then he would get in trouble for doing really Brahmin things, like saying that he would never teach yoga to Muslims.
He had to take that back when people pointed out it was backwards.
But there's a similar story about Iyengar, actually.
He was also from a Brahmin family, and he refused to teach a lower caste boy who would hang out at the family temple, hoping for lessons.
So Joyce embodied this kind of visible Hinduism, and I think that was attractive because I don't think his white students were clear about the rigid, bigoted, misogynistic, superjudgmental aspects of Brahminical religiosity.
And if they had, They might have realized that they were actually entering into a more repressive environment than they'd ever been as Catholics or whatever they were back home.
So I think they were more attracted by their own assumptions of what lay underneath the surface of those rituals.
Because they also believed that he was an esoteric master of yoga philosophy and practice, and that, as you suggest, he had helped to reconstruct an ancient religious technology that was universal in nature.
But all of that relies on some very dodgy storytelling that dates all the way back to the person that you're mentioning earlier, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who was born in 1888.
So, this is a long answer, but can I say a little bit about him?
I mean, because you've pinged him.
All right.
So, we only know about Krishnamacharya's life from his own claims and from reports from his children and students.
But the best historical picture we have from the scholarship is of a really precocious and imperious 1920s-era charismatic Who was one of many up-and-coming yoga entrepreneurs who attracted crowds with strongman feats and reciting Sanskrit texts in ways that sounded impressive.
So in Mysore, in South India, the Maharaja at the time, who was like Downton Abbey level wealthy, literally rolling around his villages in a Bentley and writing in English, script about his trips to the country. He was impressed by
Krishnamacharya and tapped him to design a new fitness regime for his public schooling
initiative that would be indigenous and spiritualized, but also compete with the
European nationalist fitness programs that they admired from afar, designed by people like Eugene
Sandow. Now, there wasn't a substantial difference between the sequences that Krishnamacharya
developed and the Scandinavian gymnastics stuff that inspired it, so they really relied on this crucial
difference, which was this veneer of spirituality, and Krishnamacharya provided that in spades.
He wore his Brahman thread as well.
He told stories of his mystical visions at 16, and then subsequent journeys throughout Mother India to collect ancient knowledge.
And then he apparently also lived with a 200-year-old yoga master.
Scholarship, especially from David White, has tracked out this story, and pretty much he made it all up.
And he also presented this kind of mastery of the Vedic literature.
So he allowed himself to be built into this polymath, and a lot of that capital was invested in the story of his finding a mythical book called the Yoga Karunta, which he claimed combined Iron Age aesthetic philosophy with medieval body practices, but nobody ever saw it because it crumbled to dust once you read it, and he memorized it so only he knew what was in it, right?
So, for the Maharaja, Krishnamacharya was this perfect case study of everything old and Indian that he wanted to preserve as authentication for his phys-ed project.
And for Joyce's students a generation on, Krishnamacharya's stature as a saint reassured them all that the whole thing wasn't just made up.
So, there's a supposed religiosity, and it's attractive, it's inspiring to many, But there's two important drawbacks, which is that it really hides the nationalist and proto-fascist agendas of the culture, and then it also launders and rationalizes the terrible behavior of its priests.
I mean, the first time that Joyce took a yoga class with Krishnamacharya, he remembers incessant beating from the old man.
He was, like, only 12 years old.
Well, earlier, I gave this history of Joyce, a truncated history to be sure, becoming a hugely prominent and influential figure.
But the next chapter of the story is really the meat of the matter in terms of your book.
It has to do with how he systematically violated people in his community who revered him.
How did you first become aware of the Ashtanga community?
And some of the more cultic dynamics at play in it.
Yeah, one of Joyce's survivors, Jubilee Cook, estimated that over the course of his career, Joyce committed tens of thousands of sexual assaults.
This is on a daily basis, many per day.
And so I was very honored and humbled that I got to interview 19 of those women for the book.
And the assaults all happened under the guise of the adjustment, I'm using air quotes there, in which the teacher would manipulate the student manually into what they believed was a more perfect or spiritual form.
I think we should be clear that there is no history or tradition of this at all in any form of yoga practice prior to the 1930s.
But yogis in the pre-modern era were generally ascetics who learned one-on-one.
They practiced alone.
There was no group classes, no adjustments.
Nobody gave a shit what the posture looked like.
There were no fitness goals.
So adjusting in this line of people starts with these scenes that you're talking about, Julian.
So Krishnamacharya standing on 12-year-old boys in upward bow.
Like, if listeners had seen Russian ballet coaches stretching the shit out of small girls to get them into wildly flexible postures, it's pretty much like that.
And there's a lot of audible crunching.
Krishnamacharya's students would refer to that as bone setting, and they thought that that had therapeutic benefits like, you know, chiropractic adjustments.
So it was just implicitly accepted and known that Joyce would manhandle you into the posture, and you asked, like, you know, how did you first become aware of this?
Well, in every Ashtanga class that I went to as a younger person, like, that was just what happened.
You just got manhandled, and everybody seemed to You know, just accept it.
And I never knew what to make of it, really.
It seemed very odd, sometimes extremely, you know, nurturing, and then at other times very dangerous, but always confused.
But this aspect really became the draw to Joyce's shala.
students would have to be adjusted by him every day for months at a time as they were
on their sojourns there if they wanted to progress towards being authorized.
So here's where we get to the sexual assault part.
So there's a content warning, people might want to skip ahead the next two minutes.
What Joyce would do for whatever reason, because he could, because he got away with it, because
he was extremely troubled and he needed a lot of help, is that he would often apply
his full body weight to people in super vulnerable positions.
And if they were women, he would grope their breasts or buttocks or even openly hump them.
And there was this famous thing that he would do that people, you know, they used a euphemism for called the Mula Banda Adjustment.
And that involved Joyce, quote, checking to see if the perineum was engaged, you know, whatever that means.
And that involved him pressing his fingers through the tights into women's vaginas.
So really digital rape.
And all of this happened out in the open.
Many people saw it.
Most senior students ignored it or rationalized it.
And so I spoke to women who were told that they were making the assaults into something dirty through their imaginations if they brought it up as a problem within the group.
Or women who were told that even if they were telling the truth, that Joyce was such a tantric level spiritual teacher that the assault was actually a teaching.
That he was reorganizing their prana, That he was helping them with sexual trauma, like incredible rationalizations.
There are some students, senior students, who were privately aware of these crimes, but they felt very confused and powerless to intervene.
And that's where the cult dynamics come in.
And the thing is that because none of this was really exposed or repaired or integrated, Joyce's students carried with them the same attitudes, passing this adjustment-slash-assault culture down to the next generation.
So there are a few next-generation allegations of similar assaults against Joyce's students.
But as we know more generally, this ethos of, like, the teacher is a spiritual master who knows best, plus, you know, his touch is healing, plus pain is part of the purification process, which we were talking about before.
These are all features of the yoga world that we grew up in a generation later.
In the preface to the new edition, you talk about how, as you started to become aware of all of this information and all of these stories, You had resistance initially to covering the story yourself and writing the book.
What changed your mind?
Well, I had really wanted to believe that after being in two prior cults that the yoga world into which I had professionalized was somehow immune from this stuff.
Like, I wasn't coming to it objectively.
I knew that I would be engaging in a disillusionment process and that that would spell the end of my teaching career, which is most of what all I had and it did actually because it's going to be very hard to be the guy who writes that book and then also teaches classes.
Also, while I knew that the stories were likely true, I just didn't want to make them the center of my consciousness, because that's what you have to do with it.
But, you know, pretty soon I got into the crusading spirit of it, and that has its own problems, of course.
I mean, as you both know, I grew up Catholic, and so stories of covered up intergenerational sex abuse are pretty close to the bone.
I think part of my hesitation in going forward was being aware of how thick those stories get lairied in with confusion and repression and shame.
And how hard it would be to get satisfying answers and accountability.
Like, is pure exposure of a story like this enough of a goal?
Because when you do an investigation, you know, you have to be okay with opening up a lot of wounds and not necessarily knowing how to take care of them.
And I tried to mitigate some of that discomfort by providing what I believed to be, you know, useful cult analysis tools so that practitioners and readers would have something actionable to come away with.
And I did do my best to provide moral support for many of the interview subjects, but, you know, that was also difficult.
I think I did a pretty good job at it.
But the impossible desire is that you want to make it all okay, and, you know, you just can't.
But the two things that really sort of turned me towards, you know, investing in it were that, you know, my late friend, Diane Bruni, would just look at me.
She was an Ashnanga teacher here in Toronto, and she would give me this withering look when I said I was writing a book about injuries in yoga classes, but I didn't really want to, like, go into abuse stuff.
She wanted me to go there, you know, because for her it was an open secret that Bad adjustments and the injuries that came from them were really just an extension of, like, blatant assault in the Joyce School.
She was dying of cancer at that time.
She just had no fucks left to give.
So she just pushed me and pushed everyone around her to speak as loudly as we could.
And, you know, eventually I got up the courage.
I figured out the skills I needed to do it.
I'd written books before, but like never an investigation with interviews and analysis like that.
So there was resistance to the book, but a lot has changed since the time it was originally published.
So what do you think has changed in the years since in terms of how the general population of yogis treat renowned teachers as well as allegations of abuse?
I think it's a good question, and I think that we're gonna look back at the pandemic as a watershed moment, not only for the explosion of conspirituality, but also for the near-complete transition to what friend of the pod Theodora Wildcroft calls post-lineage yoga, which is a term that means a lot of things, but it's mainly about the process of decentralization from the famous yoga brands like Iyengar and Ashtanga.
So, the shine is just off the big brands, The guru's feet are made of clay, that's clear to almost everybody.
There are a lot more independent practitioner-teachers.
There's more eclectic and syncretic training.
And there's the relative independence, also the stress, of online teaching and marketing and remote training.
And there are a lot of people very interested in specific, empathetic, non-grandiose topics like trauma sensitivity, decolonization, social justice.
None of the old guard gurus, I think, could afford to be focused in on issues like that because, you know, their methods really had to solve every problem.
But now I think these specializations, they promote a kind of collegial humility while also allowing professionals to stand out.
Like if you're teaching anti-ableism, you're probably not also recommending cure-all orthorexia diets.
You're probably not also unconsciously promoting Hindu nationalism.
if you're worried about, I don't know, trauma sensitivity.
So, maybe what's happened is that, you know, modern yoga has finally entered
like a conscious postmodern stage.
Like, it was always syncretic and constructed and a big pastiche of things, but now I think there...
You know, you might have other thoughts about this, guys, but I think there are a lot of younger practitioners
and teachers who really feel that axiom from leotard.
Like, we have an incredulity towards metanarratives with like metanarrative referring to any big totalizing
idea from...
You know, the ideological like yoga is ancient or yoga is Hindu to the instrumental ideas like yoga will make you totally healthy or meditation will remove anxiety.
Like I don't think zoomers are buying into big promises anymore because like they see lies all around them.
And I think if you know that climate chaos is coming, for example, and you know how complex it is, you're probably much less likely to believe that a yoga guy has some sort of total answer to life.
And I also think that for the most part, the yoga enthusiast world is aware that the list of abusive leaders and groups is very long.
There might be some straggling idealization of people in Kundalini Yoga or Ashtanga or Sivananda Yoga.
And that will be produced by the group's successful marketing to new customers.
But it won't take long.
It doesn't take long for anybody who wants to become more invested in a group where there's a big ticket money ask delivered to them to simply open up their phone, do a little Googling and dig up the basics.
So it's all out there now.
And I don't think that the big company marketing stuff will ever be the same.
And so all of these leaders are dead and gone.
Most of the Iyengar and Joyce students are in their 70s.
The end of the brick and mortar ashram is also the end of the dominating guru.
I would say that I don't see as many people falling for big promises in the yoga
that we were brought up in.
But there was a article recently about nine and 10-year-old girls.
There's a booming market for young girls buying anti-aging skincare products.
So, I would say that the big promises have just gone to other industries.
Right.
Not that it has stopped with the younger generations because you don't have longevity protocols without the sort of promises that yoga proceeded with.
Right.
Yeah, I agree with that.
There seems to be less cults of personality around people from the yoga world and it has transferred over to the tech world and billionaires.
That would seem to be more where I see a lot of the fascination from younger cultures moving towards, personally.
Now, back to the book, you relate first hearing of abuse charges with your own experiences, as you mentioned, growing up in very paternalistic Catholic schools that were led by these domineering authority figures.
And in these spaces, physical discipline was allowed.
My brief years in CCD, I never had that, but I have friends who went to Catholic high schools and I've heard about that.
And we'd like to believe that's behind us.
But there are many states where such discipline is still allowed in private schools.
In fact, there's a whole sort of cottage philosophy industry in the anti-woke discourse because adults are advocating for a return to physical punishment because they believe that's what kids really need.
So, how would you respond to such an idea today?
Very badly.
Three things that I'll say up front.
First, those who advocate for child assault, we should remember, it's very likely that they were subjected to it and are therefore driven to rationalize or even spiritualize it to make it all okay.
I would sincerely doubt there's a single adult in the world who does not inherit this reasoning from bodily experience.
I don't have data on this.
I've tried to look and I haven't been able to find anything, but I would be very surprised if a child raised in a non-assault home would ever grow up to think spanking was okay.
Second, violence against children creates very complicated bonds.
Trauma bonds, disorganized attachment bonds, the bonds we see in domestic abuse in which the victim truly believes they are being loved and cared for while they're walking through their lives in terror.
So this is what makes it so difficult to talk about.
It's very difficult to navigate the guilt and confusion and resentment of all of that.
But so altogether, I'd say that those advocating for child assault have likely inherited it and also have the most complicated and conflicted relationships to it, having convinced themselves that assault can convey love.
And the third thing is the language that I'm using.
Like, I've come to use the term child assault in place of corporal punishment or physical discipline because No child gives their consent to violent contact, and punishment and discipline make it sound like there's something to punish or discipline, or that either of these things work to guide children when they don't.
Those things can force compliance through dread, and most of the time, that's the opposite of learning.
What you asked, Derek, is that it is hard to reckon with states enshrining protections for child assault, but here we are.
I've got a bonus series running on Patreon called Conspiratuality and the Imaginary Children, and it turns out that I'm looking at this wild pamphlet called God's Word on Spanking.
It's by Ralph Drahlinger.
Does this name ring a bell for you guys?
Yes, he's the guy who does Bible studies with all of the people on Capitol Hill.
He has 42 All over the country, I'm just remembering this from somewhere deep in the archive of my brain, so the numbers may not be correct, but he basically organizes Bible studies for everyone in government.
Yeah, so Catherine Stewart has a whole chapter on him in Power Worshippers.
Yeah, so he led the White House prayer group during the Trump years.
He's walking the halls, he's holding prayer circles.
Anyway, I'm sending you guys a quote from this book.
Can you tag team on these paragraphs?
If children come into this world morally and ethically neutral, then all they really need is education, direction, not correction, a good environment.
Herein is the viewpoint of the humanist who believes that man is basically good and his greatest need is education.
He reasons, since all problems are remedied with learning, there is no need for corrective discipline.
In reality, however, this is a biblically naive philosophy.
There is sin, problem, and it needs to be addressed immediately.
To illustrate this, study a baby long before he talks.
He struggles against you, for example, during diaper changes, or when you instruct him not to touch something.
All babies possess a self-will that defies authority.
Left unchecked, this self-will will eventually bloom into teenage rebellion.
A child's problem is not a lack of education and instruction.
More accurately, his problem is that which is stated in Proverbs 22, 15.
Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.
I just want to say if Julian and I sounded weird reading it, it is because it is the weirdest form of English.
It's broken up.
There's like semicolons and colons in weird places.
I can't believe that an actual American wrote this?
Well, I think he's got like a biblical sort of syntax going on or grammar or something like that.
Anyway, nice quote, guys.
I think for most of us, I think my favorite part is he struggles during diaper changes.
Yeah.
So naughty.
So I think, yeah, this sounds insane as a rationale for assaulting children.
But I want to point out that there are many degrees of coercion possible in parent-child relationships.
All of them are justified in one way or another by a similar will to control, a similar assumption that by nature the child is unruly, a similar impatience with or even disgust with a basic messy uncertainty of a child.
And I'm going to go a bit farther here, actually, and, you know, this is an opinion that might piss some people off.
I think the impatience at the root of justifying this stuff is visible in family scenarios in which the children become wordlessly compliant with all kinds of demands they never had a say in.
And the demands of school will set the tone here.
So if you're in the middle class, among those aspiring to, like, and managing to comply with everything that capitalism demands, you'll be surrounded by kids who are absolutely overbooked with activities.
They have to work all the time.
If they're not in school, they're in sports, they're in music lessons, every day of the week, there are scheduled play dates.
And one question I've never seen asked in cult studies It's about the extent to which a childhood spent meeting totalizing expectations with no real discussion or self-guided choices really sets a person up to go with the flow of other arbitrary socially constructed demands.
But if we bring it back to yoga, which is where this starts because Iyengar and Joyce begin their yoga education in the sphere of childhood assault.
We associate this upright and symmetrical posture that Iyengar, you know, performs for the world with his focus on alignment.
But then when you read about the fact that he learned his postures in the context of constant beating as a teenager, you realize that there's a part of him standing up straight to avoid punishment.
And that's a weird thing to consider when we think about posture.
And additionally, more broadly, I think it's a weird thing to think about when We, we consider the general regimes of self-improvement that we cover on this podcast.
So back to the book, you're researching and writing after you've sort of overcome the initial resistance that you had through Diane Bruni's withering looks.
And this is during the Me Too movement in 2017 and 2018.
What was that like in terms of that context?
It was really activating.
It was really complicated.
I think there was a lot of hope around sunlight and disinfectant.
And I mean, that's perennial.
But I think what I've learned is that exposure of wrongs is very easily co-opted into a new consumer fascination or into social media whirlwinds that really spin their wheels.
But the new consumer fascination in this case is what's happened with cult discourse.
So I had always been a writer in various genres.
I was learning how to be a journalist online.
So that's not a great way to start.
I knew where my sympathies were, but I wasn't exactly clear on my positionality or on the difference between observing and advocating.
So, was I exclusively myself a cult survivor and commentator, or was I able to use other frameworks?
Had I been complicit in these idealized forms of spirituality that functioned to hide abuse?
Was I a good ally?
Was I a good researcher?
Was there a tension between the two?
And then I think you can probably both remember that those years were kind of a high point for social media turf wars in the yoga world.
And I'm not on Facebook at all pretty much anymore, but I remember for a few years it was just all-consuming.
And the spell for me only really broke intellectually when I heard Matt Chrisman of Chapo Trap House.
He gave this ship-in-a-bottle talk on Jacobin, where he said, like, building a social movement is like building a ship.
Uh, and if you're doing it in real life, you have to, like, get people together who have actually skills, and, you know, they know what wood to use, and, you know, how to put everything together.
But online, you build a ship in a bottle, and then it sits on the desk of Mark Zuckerberg, and it goes nowhere.
and but you know you're still Tempest Tossed, right?
You also write about Manuso Manos, who was stripped of his Iengar certifications due
to allegations that he sexually assaulted students.
Yet to this day, he uses his training with Iyengar on his website.
And we also know Bikram is still leading certification courses now in Thailand.
These men might not have the same public adorations in yoga circles as they did before, but they're still out there teaching and they're making money from it.
Are they ever held accountable?
Well, I just have to say that Menuso Manos is about the most toxic human being I have ever met in my life.
And maybe we can link to a story I wrote about meeting him.
I went to interview him.
Anyway, incredible guy.
And he's never gonna stop, no.
And yes, the Iyengar Yoga National Association of the U.S.
found in an independent investigation that it was unlikely, or sorry, that it was likely that multiple allegations against him were true going back
decades.
He denied everything. He concentrated on markets abroad.
He does seem to be fine working in Thailand and I think Russia.
So, the business model gets dinged for guys like that.
Unless there's criminal prosecution, there's really no accountability per se.
Just a waiting game until they, you know, shrivel up, lose market, and die.
I think that one bright spot is that their continued visibility often really inspires reformers to work harder on things like consent and reporting safety.
I did an episode for the podcast a while back about how a bunch of Canadian yoga people raised hell over Bikram being invited to a teach-in in Vancouver.
Some of the people who were running the trucker's convoy had invited him to teach in Vancouver.
And so anyway, this posse contacted the police and immigration and so on, and the event got stopped, so that was pretty funny.
I get several emails a week from people who are or were in toxic yoga groups, and they make really serious allegations against leaders.
And I think the saddest part of these communications is that I have to run down this sort of checklist of elements that would be needed to report these stories out.
Is there documentation?
Is there corroboration?
Are the alleged behaviors illegal or simply toxic?
What's the cultural profile of this person?
Like, what editor would be interested in this story?
Because most of the stuff that happens in cults is not illegal.
You know, it's kind of like built on pseudo-consent.
And as I'm having these discussions with people that write to me, it's clear that what they usually want In addition to being heard is this sense of accountability.
And sometimes what I try to say is that being heard versus seeking accountability can be a real fork in the road.
You can spend a lot of frustrated years of thankless effort trying to extract accountability, but you know, the energy that we have is limited.
And that same energy can be put into like repair, self-care, therapy, building something else.
So it's not an easy choice, but if you're going to make that choice, I think it's better to be really clear on the costs of pursuing accountability, which we also have to do.
It's just, it's not an easy road.
After the initial publication of the book, a lot of Ashtanga yogis were very angry with you.
They were very critical.
I believe there was even a lawsuit.
Tell us about that phase of this process.
Yeah, I sued someone over a statement made at a crucial time that attacked in what I claimed was a defamatory way the integrity of the book.
But more importantly, by extension, I felt that the statement put into question the integrity of the stories the woman told about Joyce.
So I felt that if I didn't take action, the 19 people who gave their stories would be undermined.
And I really didn't want that to happen.
I also really didn't want to take legal action, but I really, I felt like I was in a corner, and a lot of my colleagues, including my publisher, supported me in going through with it.
So the case was settled, and so that's all I can say about it.
But I will say that I had never before, and hopefully will never again, engage in legal action like that.
It's not a clarifying process.
Because all the legal maneuvers are leveraged to manage power, not the truth of a situation.
And it really, it just sucks for everyone involved.
There was broader criticism.
There were diehards that like flamed me online for months about destroying their spiritual lineage, like really defending this holy person.
A lot of the senior students of Joyce were pretty angry at having their statements about Joyce over the years repeated.
These were idealizing statements.
And then there was one senior student who went way out of his way to try to personally discredit one of Joyce's assault victims.
He did this in personal communications with me.
But then there were also some criticisms from Ashtanga people that gave me pause because I thought they had real merit.
So there was this Amazon review that came in from an Ashtanga teacher in San Francisco named Magnolia Zuniga.
And I had interviewed her back in the beginning of my research, but I didn't quote her in the book.
And she wrote this, I've always known this story needed to be told.
It's been a dark cloud hanging over the community.
After decades of silence, I am very happy these women's voices are finally being heard.
Maybe you can hear the butt coming.
Many Ashtanga practitioners will completely dismiss this book not only because denial runs deep, but also because of the intensity and fervor with which Remsky targeted some in the community over the past few years.
His research, in quotes, felt personal, predatory, and vengeful.
He seemed to relish getting into word wars with community members who were clearly confused and suffering.
Instead of building bridges in order to help facilitate healing, He created more and more divisions.
Okay, so my purpose in bringing this up is to talk about how she makes a really good point.
I do want to offer a bit of context though because like in June of 2018, this is a year before the book, I published a feature investigative article on what would become the book and that made this big splash and it drew a lot of fire.
And the whole year before publication was really rocky because of that.
So I think where she says that I'm targeting, I think that's really about the ongoing commentary that preceded and followed the article.
You know, during which time I would blog about how the Ashtanga World was responding, and then I would be on Facebook, and there'd be some, like, pushback, and I would push back.
At one point, there were some very angry, like, gangster-type Russian yoga guys who started leaving threatening comments.
So it was pretty normal for that time.
I would never do that again.
But I do think she captures something about the online environment that was inflammatory in a harmful way and that I definitely participated in as a defender of those telling stories of abuse.
I didn't, Bill Bridges.
She's right.
But that's also because one person can't do everything, and so I look forward to, you know, how she or someone with that type of insider experience writes about this one day.
But in that spirit, and I think because of that review, one of the things that I did in the preface for this edition was I interviewed two Ashtanga practitioners still in the community to ask for their views on how it all went down.
And I really enjoyed doing that.
Going forward, I don't think I would jeopardize my access to being able to do that in a similar project.
And you know, I am also thinking too that among the three of us, Our listeners will know that we all have different approaches to this premise of reaching across the aisle.
I'm more likely to pitch, I'm in Slack, I'm going to pitch interviewing Catholics or Mormons or Evangelicals on the positive aspects of their religions, and that's not going to be your instinct.
And there are sort of personality, temperament differences on display in that.
But also, to be honest, I also have this tendency that is informed partly by guilt because I really did a number on this yoga group and it doesn't feel good to like press that detonator down and so there is a small part of me trying to compensate for maybe having disillusioned too many people, maybe in ways that were difficult to take at the time.
Well, you also note that the Ashtanga world hasn't engaged in any organizational-level reflection about either Joyce's behavior or what those behaviors represent for their community.
But also, plenty of people benefit from Ashtanga.
I did it for a while, on and off.
I'm not someone who likes to do the same workout day after day.
I understand that sort of meditation works for people, but it's not my thing.
I like diversity of movement.
That said, if someone benefits from it, I think that's wonderful.
So how do you personally navigate this space of dubious origins, but that actually results in a beneficial product?
It's such an important question because I think it is, I mean, one of the primary responses that I would hear from people I think who are honestly hurt by hearing these stories is, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There's something of value here.
And for a while, my response was, no, well, whatever was valuable is what you particularly brought to it.
And so that's not going anywhere.
You should just be taking it somewhere else.
But I think I have a little bit more of a subtle view based upon how important community bonding is for some people, how I've seen that play out over the years.
And I think there will always be people who bump into practices and communities just by chance, and that they'll get benefit from both the practices and the communities.
And some of them will only stay superficially connected and not really even come close to the group history or the dynamics.
The problem now is that as soon as a person becomes more interested, more invested, which is what the group wants them to be, And that's especially if they have trainings and events on offer.
You know, the person will start looking things up and the first hits on Kundalini Yoga are, And they're going to have this flood of confusion, disgust, and that is bad for everyone because I think it adds to a sort of global cynicism and depression index.
Like, oh, this is bad too, right?
I thought I was getting something.
So I think there's an alternative, which is that Jubilee Cook and Karen Raine published a pretty amazing piece, we'll link to it, about how yoga and other groups can take care of survivors.
Now, this wasn't their point, but I also think it's a really good list for taking care of the community in general.
And one of the basics they pointed to was that, you know, you take signs of veneration towards an abusive leader, and you just take them away.
Take them down.
Like, get honest about what's going on.
And so when they published that, around the world there were lines drawn in Ashtanga communities between those who kept the photos of Joyce up at the front and those who took them down.
And that's a point of change.
That's like a threshold.
Then there were individual teachers Not so much in the first generation, more in the second, people who are under 45, who came out with statements saying things like, yeah, I learned to practice and teach yoga in an abusive group.
This is uncomfortable for me to admit, and this is how I'm reflecting on things now.
And now there's also a very strong contingent of people in the Ashtanga world who argue that seeking validation and certification from Sharath Joyce, also known as Rangaswami, this is Joyce's grandson, isn't really meaningful.
Now, Sharath knew that his grandfather was assaulting women and, you know, sometimes he would try to intervene, but he was never really able to stand up to the old man.
And when I reached out to him in many different ways for a statement, he didn't answer.
And a lot of people were disappointed by that.
But coming to think about it from the perspective of Magnolia Zuniga's comment, he may have been forewarned about talking to me because my position on the history was clear from what I had written already.
And it might even be worse than that because, you know, this writing of the article and then the book sort of in public might have dissuaded him from making a statement that he wanted to make because, like, he would have known that I would have scrutinized it for errors, right?
So I think here's an example of a type of journalism that might have actually delayed or ultimately dissuaded a kind of institutional repair.
But in any case, people feeling that they no longer have to go to Mysore, the ground zero of Ashtanga practice, to be adjusted by this family, it's a huge change.
It's really people breaking the link between the guru and the content.
So if you're an Ashtanga teacher, You love the practice and community.
You've helped to form and support.
You take Joyce's picture down.
You stop going to Mysore and filling the pockets of this family.
You publish some kind of statement about how you recognize what happened and how you feel about it.
Then Derek, I think, yes, like all of the benefits of the postures, you know, maybe with along with some trauma sensitivity training and, you know, maybe volunteering somewhere, You have the ingredients there for a practice that can really liberate itself, but also repair, like, a lot of its own history.
So, like you, I mean, this is not something that's for me or my body, but people really love it.
They feel ecstatic in those sequences, and I think that can only be a good thing, you know, as long as they, like, avoid ripping the crap out of their hips and their shoulders.
You know, you're already, I feel like, over these last five or ten minutes, Trying to tease a lot of this stuff apart and sort of reflecting on the role that you've played and some of the regrets that you have or some of the uncertainty about how you handled things or what to do in the midst of this very complex and highly charged, messy material.
As someone in recovery from being in two different cults, just on a personal level as you step back now, did you find yourself caught up in your own Yeah, 100%.
So the joke is some guys will write a whole damn book about a yoga cult instead of going to therapy, right?
I mean, I did go to therapy, but you can't do journalism as therapy.
You certainly can't do it as revenge.
And you can't think that knowing cult theory makes you an expert in every group, which is part of why, like, you and I just did that episode on Steve Hassan.
And I think he's a good end case example of highly motivated reasoning stemming from, like, a deep personal wound that just won't stop bleeding.
Like, he's been riding that Unification Church experience and storytelling about it for 40 years with no discernible change in direction or thinking.
And I think that's a clue around some real limitations.
Along with, like, the broader considerations around whether anti-cult discourse is helpful, stigmatizing, or polarizing, whether it pathologizes group behaviors that are simply odd, whether anti-cult discourse winds up giving capitalism a pass because isn't everyone living under undue influence?
What if the whole culture is obsessed with cults because it allows us to externalize and talk obsessively about this pervasive coercion we struggle to name and process?
But that's another discussion.
Wait, that would be the idea that we're sort of displacing... Yeah.
Yeah, onto cult stuff that actually is more about the broader issue of life under capitalism.
Yeah, absolutely.
It gives an external focus for something that we feel elements of, maybe in much less intensity all the time, but the logic is similar.
I don't really think there's a lot of difference between… You know, sort of impact difference between how Jeff Bezos runs his company and how Keith Raniere runs NXIVM, right?
Like, there's a there's a there's a pyramidal structure.
There's, you know, just all of this technology of exploitation.
And yeah, like, how do we square that?
We don't make, like, true crime dramas about corporate... Well, we do, I guess.
But I think those things should come closer together.
True crime documentaries about cults and corporations are pretty much the same documentary to me.
But the other thing that I think has happened is that I've stopped using the self-ID of Cult Survivor, like when I'm describing myself now or in bios, because I realized something that was doing and I was unconsciously expecting it to do this.
I realized that it was giving me like a free credibility pass as a commentator.
And if you look out into the anti-cult world, there's a lot of influencers making a name based on personal experience alone.
A lot of podcasts running on that engine.
And at some point I realized that everyone was just taking me at my word about my experiences.
Like no one was fact-checking even the basics of what I was saying about my earlier life.
People would nod and say, oh very interesting.
Very interesting.
It was very gratifying, of course.
So saying that you're a cult survivor has a lot of emotional punch, but it tells people very little about the particulars that matter.
And I think the particulars are crucial because they help us sort out the basics.
Like, was that really the worst thing that could have happened to me?
Was the group I was in actually a step up from my shitty childhood?
Or the church I was born into?
And so the paradox is, like, You know, who else just totally gets believed about their stories is cult leaders.
So I started to draw- Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.
We gotta back up a little bit here because you're saying something very specific there, right?
You're saying that there's a way in which people find themselves in positions of credibility and influence because of a backstory.
Yeah.
And that that is sort of something that translates across multiple different
types of influence and types of individual, right?
I think it's very ironic that the structure by which you authenticate yourself
as a cult leader and the structure by which you can authenticate yourself
as an anti-cult activist is pretty similar.
Yeah.
And I think that's a problem.
I think it's a problem.
I'm not talking about the people who do, like, you know, actual research and who, you know, get into the sociology for real and the people who actually become trained therapists.
You know, I'm talking about the sort of the influencer level.
So, yeah, I started I've started to draw back from that.
And it wasn't because I was making shit up about my life that I just wanted people to believe, but it was because it was interfering with the clarity that I needed for journalism.
So.
Now, I just feel like on a personal or parasocial level, people can love me because they feel identified with me as a cult survivor, or they can hate me because I wrote that their guru was a criminal.
But I've really just got to keep all of that separate from the actual quality of the work itself.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you here on the main feed next week or over on Patreon.
