"Surrender to the people that are in charge.”

Jivamukti Fallout: A Trauma-Sensitive Tipping Point in Modern Yoga?

[www.decolonizingyoga.com]

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In the article and a follow-up video, Kaminoff described growing wary of the Jivamukti scene in the early 1990s, as Gannon and Life became increasingly clear about their intentions to “remystify” yoga. He described how they built their faculty and business through a culture of emotional surrender and free labour, noting that leaders in cult-like environments become incapable or unwilling to distinguish disagreement from disloyalty. He criticized their militant veganism, their penchant for showing animal slaughterhouse films during yoga classes, and their negative attitudes towards their students having children.

(Corboy: It is out of line to show "animal slaughterhouse films" during a yoga class, especially if students are not told beforehand, and thus given a choice not to participate.

One becomes relaxed and vulnerable during and after yoga sessions. Those animal cruelty films are shattering and can leave a person with horror, even re-activate PTSD. And such films would foster extreme guilt and very likely lead viewers into a state of shock, especially during or after a yoga class.

Afterwards, horrified students would be desperate to find someone to cry with, someone to rely on.

Which would **vastly** increase the power of any teacher who is in the room - and who orchestrated this trauma inflicted on the students.

Full on sexual harassment does not happen "out of the blue". It is a late stage
symptom of social pathology that has operated in the shadows.

Persons who fled Jivamukti after seeing that film would be the ones who trusted their emotions enough to turn their backs on the glamour of Jivamukti.

Others would leave Jimvamukti later, after friends, 12 Step buddies, coworkers or therapists told them, "You paid for classes at that place. You were instructed to give utter devotion to the teacher and then the teacher has you watch an animal cruelty documentary after yoga has relaxed you? You were ABUSED. Get the F out of there!"

After these persons leave Jivamukti, who remains after being made to watch that horrifying animal documentary?

The more docile people, the people who were unable to trust their own emotions enough to leave, or who did not have friends who could tell them to get away from Jivamukti.

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A Trauma-Sensitive Paradigm Emerges

Those who disagree with Kaminoff’s approach suggest that appeals to personal agency in student-teacher relationships are both insensitive and insufficient when a person’s power of choice is compromised.

Jess Glenny, a British yoga teacher and yoga therapist specializing in working with people who have experienced sexual, emotional and physical trauma, was one of many who begged to differ with Kaminoff’s statements on the Jivamukti case.

“This woman is an abuse survivor in process of recovery,” Glenny wrote in an online comment, referring to Faurot.

“This isn’t about her choices. It’s about the way her neurology has responded to abuse. It’s biologically determined by her experiences. If someone has lost a leg, we don’t chastise them for not being able to run when someone tries to mug them.”

“Some of my clients are very, very vulnerable to this kind of behaviour,” Glenny said, referring to Lauer-Manenti’s harassment of Faurot.

“They often don’t have an understanding of appropriate boundaries. They can be triggered into a reflexive passivity and a need to placate in order to survive when someone makes a sexual advance on them. People with these issues are in our yoga classes, and we all need to be aware of this.”

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As both scholar and survivor, Wildcroft doesn’t see the belief in American-style free will as an eternal tenet of yoga philosophy, nor that it refers to an essential attribute of the yoga student. For her, it’s more of a placebo – which means it’s also a resource, and perhaps the privilege of those who haven’t been affected by trauma.

“Free will is a powerful story, she said via Skype. I’d caught her after her evening classes. “It’s a story we may need. But not everyone can tell it.”

I asked her what she thought about Kaminoff’s statement that people fall prey to abusive persons or organizations because they “choose to suspend their critical thinking.”

“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” she said. “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege.

“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.

“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.

“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”

A Workplace, an Ashram, or a Cult?

Inside the sexual harassment lawsuit against Jivamukti Yoga.

[www.slate.com]

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spiring teachers at Jivamukti, the downtown Manhattan yoga studio famous for its sweaty, ecstatic classes and celebrity clientele, quickly get used to kissing the feet of founders David Life and Sharon Gannon. “They walk in the room and you learn to get on your hands and knees,” one former Jivamukti teacher tells me. “Everyone’s doing it, a hundred people around you, from the very first day of teacher training,” guru devotion is woven into the studio’s culture. Its teacher training manual lists ways to “keep a teacher precious in your life.” Among them: “Become an extension of your teachers—teach what they teach,” and “Do what they say.”

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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. Lady Ruth was quirky and ethereal, heedless of pedestrian personal boundaries; former teachers I spoke with describe her probing for details of their romantic relationships and casually stripping in the studio offices to change clothes for class.

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For the casual student, it’s easy to overlook the spiritual trappings—the chanting and philosophical instruction—that accompany Jivamukti classes. But for dedicated practitioners, the quest for transcendence is taken very seriously, requiring intense devotion. Teachers and apprentices say their constant presence is expected at the studio and at expensive retreats, immersions, and Tribe Gatherings—essentially yoga festivals—all over the world.

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In reporting this piece, I spoke to a half-dozen current and former Jivamukti teachers in addition to Faurot and Kaminoff. All asked to remain anonymous, and all described an intense, all-consuming environment, where the lines between workplace and ashram were blurred and where supervisors doubled as gurus. “Now that I’m out of it, I’m like, yep, that’s a cult,” says a teacher who left Jivamukti last year and is digging herself out of the debt she amassed following Life and Gannon to various yoga gatherings. “Everybody follows it so blindly.”

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If Jivamukti is a cult, it’s hard to elaborate its dogma. Certainly, it’s known for its commitment to animal rights and strict veganism; one former teacher tells me that the vegan militancy she developed at Jivamukti contributed to the dissolution of her marriage. Several teachers say that Life and Gannon frown on childbearing, both because of humans’ environmental impact and because children distract from spiritual practice. Mostly, however, the doctrine is about devotion itself.

“There are certainly people who go there just to get a workout, but the people who stay and do the teacher trainings are ones who really resonate with their message philosophically,” says Kaminoff, who now runs the Breathing Project, a nonprofit continuing education program for yoga teachers. “They’ve never been shy about what their message is and what their philosophy is, and it involves surrender to the people that are in charge.” In a video of a talk she gave on New Year’s Eve 2014, Gannon, robed in white and wearing a playful gold party hat, describes complaining—about anything—as “more poisonous than ingesting a poisonous substance.”

Corboy: We are each different and have different dietary needs. Not every person
can stay healthy on a vegan diet; your diet should remain your own decision. Anyone else -- butt out.

(Heh, that would be a great one liner to say to a pushy yoga fanatic -- Get your butt out of my dinner plate."