Re: The downside of yoga

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Have you read Hell-Bent yet? Do.

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Benjamin Lorr’s provocative but thoughtful book about both the seedy underbelly and the silver linings of the Bikram yoga world transfixed me from start to finish—twice. He blessed me with this interview, which I am so excited to share with you here on Recovering Yogi now.

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Joslyn Hamilton "...I’m curious how you had the guts to present such a straightforward account of your time in the Bikram underworld without worrying about getting whacked by the yoga mafia. I get the feeling you don’t worry all that much about what people think of you. Is that true, or do you have a coping mechanism you’d like to divulge?

Benjamin Lorr

Haha. On the contrary! I am a hopeless suck-up. And spent a huge amount of time, when I should have been writing, rubbing my knuckles raw and worrying about how all the very nice people—sincere beyond belief, and yet financially and emotionally enmeshed in the net that is Bikram Choudhury—would react to the book. An outsized number of reviews focus on how “compassionate” the book is—and I’ll take that feather in the cap—but I think a real part of that compassion was just not wanting to get it wrong, not wanting to sell anyone’s experience short, honoring all these lives I was interacting with… in short, caring a lot more about what people would think than it is ever cool to admit.

The one aside I’ll make to this is that writing did require having a firm moral compass. I was approached by an always-growing number of teachers and students who urged me to “focus on the positives” and/or to “write about the yoga and ignore the man.” Justifications for intolerable behavior were passed around with the cheery conviction of political slogans (my personal vote for most loathsome being “think about all the good he has done”). There is a lot of pressure to conform. There is no strategy here, except maybe smiling and nodding at these people, and then mentally throwing up a big middle finger in their face, feeling secure that 99% of morally sentient human beings will have your back when the facts come out.

I taught high school dropouts in Bushwick Brooklyn for six years before writing Hell-Bent. There are a lot of reasons why an inner-city student drops out, but abusive situations are shockingly high on the list. And so I went into this book having seen firsthand the interpersonal destruction sexual manipulation can cause. That added a lot of moral clarity. At the end of the day, I couldn’t have looked myself in the mirror if I participated in the type of cowardice that allows a guru to become a predator. Silence is enabling.

Joslyn Hamilton Here’s something you said in a Washington Independent Review of Books interview that struck me: “There is a part of me that is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is a very fear-based community in many respects, and I guess I am still waiting for that fear to bite me.” What do you mean by fear-based community?

Benjamin Lorr “Fear-based community” speaks to exactly this inclination toward silence and cowardice in morally complex situations. It refers to the defensive crouch the Bikram community maintained. It refers to isolating people who voice dissention, ratting out others to get closer to the top because you are worried about your own position, or even feeling the need to exaggerate legitimate benefits of the yoga because you are afraid people won’t see them as satisfactory compared to the hype.

I don’t think most people in the Bikram Community knew all the details of what was going on—and unless subsequent lawsuits are filed, they still don’t (if my experience was accurate, Sarah B. is just the tip of an iceberg). But instead of speaking up when they saw something dubious, they felt pressure to conform. I don’t want to undervalue this pressure—it was based on huge financial ties, careers and bank loans, huge interpersonal ties, a supportive community and knowing firsthand how much the yoga could changed lives—but if that pressure defines your community, then the possibility for someone to abuse it is present.

Joslyn Hamilton Another quote from that interview: “The attitude that yoga is somehow exclusively virtuous, and therefore exclusively safe, might be the most dangerous idea of all.” Can you expand on this?


Benjamin Lorr I think people should always be wary of anything sold as “the answer.” That is a sign that you are being asked to check your critical thinking functions at the door. It makes people enormously vulnerable. And I think yoga—because it kind of waltzed into the West from India and was immediately romanticized—is very susceptible to this mentality.