Bonus Sample: Surviving Modern Yoga Panel (w/Ann Gleig & Michelle C. Johnson)
Matthew fields excellent questions about his new book from colleagues Ann Gleig and Michelle C. Johnson.
NAB Show Notes
This event includes discussions on sensitive topics related to abuse; sexual assault; high-demand tactics; racism; gender-based violence; and systems of dominance, patriarchy, and oppression. We know that these topics may be distressing or triggering to some attendees, and we invite you to take care when listening, and to tend to your needs if you feel activated, overwhelmed, or emotionally impacted. We're so grateful you're here, and we thank you for coming. We also want to thank survivors of sexual violence and abuse in yoga, wellness, Buddhist communities, and beyond, whose stories, voices, and feedback have been invaluable to the work each of us continues to do in service of healing our communities from the harm of sexual violence.
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Last spring, or this past spring, North Atlantic published the second edition of some investigative work that I did on the cultic dynamics of yoga culture.
So the first edition of the book was called Practice and All is Coming, and it came out in 2019 from Embodied Wisdom Press in New Zealand.
And practice and all is coming was the catchphrase of a man named Patabi Joyce, who was the founder of a modern yoga school called Ashtanga Yoga.
He was born in 1915.
He died in 2009.
He headed up a modest global empire of studios dedicated to his particular synthesis of contemporary postural practice and some reconstructed yogic ideas from the Middle Ages and before.
He was regarded by the tens of thousands of mainly American and Western European students who made pilgrimage to his feet in Mysore, South India as a physical healer, a tantric adept, a chaste yogin, and also a fatherly and grandfatherly guide on the path to liberation.
but unfortunately that picture obscured the fact that he was a serial criminal sex assaulter who abused his students on a daily basis in class, in public, for all to see, for decades.
And no one really was able to stop it on a community level.
And my investigation of how this slow burning tragedy unfolded was built around the testimony of 19 of his victims, who I was able to connect with and interview as they developed a kind of whisper network of mutual support between them. And my framework for approaching the story was really rooted in this paradoxical question that it raises for many people, like, you know,
How many times did this happen?
And how did no one see or care about it?
And how was this all sort of covered over by a veneer of spiritual activity?
And how did he get away with it for so long?
And I found actionable answers to most of those questions through the framework of cult analysis, which was a discipline that I was already familiar with, Because I myself am a survivor of high-demand groups.
So this book is a close reading of the facts of the case, plus an analysis of how disasters like this constellate around abusive, charismatic figures and their inner circles, their apologists, their enablers.
And it also has some self-analysis and community tools towards the end.
Now, 2019, for a lot of us, feels like a century ago, and I'm grateful that North Atlantic thought this book was worth reworking and boosting again, because it gave me the opportunity to add a lengthy preface to the front to track how the yoga abuse crisis, which really was boiling over at the time of publication, has since unfolded, especially in the shadow of the pandemic.
During the pandemic, there were a ton of developments.
The yoga world had to go almost completely online.
And its discourse, unfortunately, was eerily disrupted by the themes of QAnon and conspirituality, both of which posed real challenges to any survivor-centered justice movement.
So, what you'll get with the new edition of the book is a historicization, a new historicization of the topic within a conversation about new spirituality and religious engagement as it's been accelerated by a more immersive and confusing online life.
And also amidst the rise of frankly conspiracy theorizing yoga gurus who carried the Joyce Torch and the Kundalini Torch and so on across the line, the digital line into the culture wars.
That's complex.
We'll unpack some of that this evening.
And we have six questions that we're going to work with.
We hope to get to them all.
And just so you know, process-wise, we had a great series.
Well, we had one meeting, one async meeting, a lot of emails about preparing for this.
And we came up with these topics that I'm really looking forward to being challenged with because they both appeal to Anne and Michelle's expertise.
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