Evaluating a Yoga School or Ashram

Make sure your yoga bliss is not built upon the misery of others and financial exploitation of others.

Here is a rule of thumb when pondering whether to get involved with a dharma teacher or yoga teacher:

Dharma teaching (which includes yoga) is meant to assist us to become aware of
our cravings so that we can question those cravings and become free in relation to our cravings, rather than being manipulated by those cravings.

IMO, a yoga or Dharma teacher should not behave or speak in ways that instill craving and discontent in students.

Quote

“Jivamukti gives you this antidote. You have something now. You’ve been in therapy, you’ve done all these things, but you’re still not healed,” she said. “You feel like you want a way to move forward with your life and transform, and they give you something. They give you something you can dedicate your whole life to.”

Whether it happened or not, this statement could instill discontent in many students, then hold out the yoga school as the solution. It is merely sales talk of the kind used to make us discontented with our smartphones and think we must, must must, upgrade to New Phone Z which will make us Awesome People Living Extraordinary, Brilliant Lives.

Here is something else to consider when assessing whether to become involved at a yoga
school.

Is it what it seems?

Are newcomers and teacher trainees and staff members all on the same page?

Or is the yoga school akin to a secret ridden family?

Is yoga taught there by teachers who consider themselves workers among workers, members of the human family?

Or are upper level members and the teachers involved in a secret job -- venerating the leader as some sort of guru, with newcomers excluded from this?

No matter how you feel you have benefitted and been healed by lessons at a yoga studio, your good feelings are not clean if your good feelings are produced by
teachers who are keeping secrets from you, teachers who are competing with each other to flatter the guru, and who are putting themselves into debt so as to obey the teacher and take special classes.

[www.yahoo.com]

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[www.yahoo.com]

[www.slate.com]

“where the lines between workplace and ashram were blurred and where supervisors doubled as gurus"

Quote

At Jivamukti, Lauer-Manenti was known as Lady Ruth, an honorific bestowed on her by Geshe Michael Roach, a tantric Buddhist most well-known for leading a three-year silent retreat in the Arizona desert at which one of his followers died.

[culteducation.com]

Note that the yoga teacher is described as having formerly studied with "Geshe" Michael Roach, a most controversial neo Vajrayana guru

[culteducation.com]