Book Review: Matthew Remski’s Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond
The Problem with Romanticizing Yoga and Wellness as a Health Utopia
The wellness space is often romanticized as a utopia where we live out our fantasy life of the perfect self and the perfect body. While I don’t want to take away anyone’s delulu sesh or sense of whimsy, I often think this romanticization is why abusive leaders and complicit senior staff remain an open secret in yoga circles for so long, until accusations go public, seemingly out of nowhere.
I am grateful for the yoga communities I am in, but I do not pretend to see good where there is not, or ignore problems that exist.
And if we love our yoga practice, we have to be aware that yoga is a business, and the people that we give our trust to can be in it for the money and attention. It should not take away from our practice to face the reality that this space can be a fertile playground for narcissists, scam artists, and perpetuators of sexual assault who may get away with it because of how they manipulate wisdom traditions to spiritually bypass student concerns.
Our yoga practice is about understanding our illusions and experiencing truth, and it is why books like Matthew Remski’s book Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond are a valuable resource for students and teachers. It is, by no means, a perfect book; its western bias and lack of intersectional thinking are made abundantly clear, but the research serves an educational purpose for those interested in understanding the culture of sexual assault in the Ashtanga yoga community.
Note: This review is based on the first edition. Remski has since revised and expanded his book last year under a different title, Surviving Modern Yoga: Cult Dynamics, Charismatic Leaders, and What Survivors Can Teach Us.
Practice and All Is Coming traces the sexual misconduct scandal that broke in the Ashtanga Yoga community in the mid-aughts. Ashtanga practitioners in Canada and America began to speak out online and to media about their experiences of sexual assault by K. Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
As I read through survivor accounts and interviews with folks that were part of the Ashtanga scene in Remski’s book, I learned some new things. One of them being that the Ashtanga series “went through many changes between 1964, when the first non-indian students began showing up in Mysore” (69), with Karen Rain’s speculation that “Jois might have also changed his sequences to give him more sexual access to more women.”
I learned that if you were in the community, you heard rumblings before it erupted into the mainstream. Beryl Bender Birch, a Power Yoga “pioneer” said “everybody knew”, citing an incident as far back as 1987 (158). In Jois’ summer tour of southern California that year, a participant spoke up about his wife being molested in class to the group, with Jois feigning ignorance, and everyone else freaking out.
Remski also unpacks how this abuse went on, with some practitioners brushing off what they personally experienced, downplaying inappropriate touching during hands-on assists, or witnessed happen to others, while other practitioners spoke up only to be victim blamed and shut out.
Remski also shows how yogic teachings under the guise of tradition were used to bypass legitimate concerns of non-consensual touch, and the painfulness of the practice that was seen as something to brag about, which led to ignoring pain sensations. Tracy Hodgeman wrote a letter to her teachers sharing how she had a torn rotary cuff, and the shoulder specialist said that this wear and tear was something he occasionally saw in “professional weight lifters and old people”, where the cartilage that cushioned the shoulder joint was worn down (202).
In sharing interviews with survivors and reposting blog posts and letters, Remski draws connection between the Ashtanga yoga scene and cult dynamics, as he used to be in a cult, and noticed similar parallels when he fell into the Ashtanga world.
Yoga Teachers and the Saviour Complex
As I read about the unraveling of a yoga community from the inside out, a major theme I kept coming back to was the power dynamics between yoga teacher and yoga student.
Many students want to trust their teacher to help them to feel better whether that’s through the physical body or the mind. Sometimes, that trust belies a desire to give away our power.Remski quotes from Gregor Maehle’s blog post where he shares to his friend about projecting idealizations onto someone and taking self-responsibility and they responded with wanting someone else to save them:
“What you say sounds much too difficult and tiring. I just want to totally surrender to a person that fixes all my problems in return (235).”
We want someone else to come and save us, but we are the ones we have been waiting for. Having a teacher doesn’t mean we don’t do the work too.
Remski brings this idea of transference from cult dynamics, and how it can show up in yoga teacher and student relationships. A student may transfer ideas onto their teacher. The student will project onto the teacher their ideals of what a savior is, that they may unconsciously draw from past relationships.
If students may exhibit a tendency to want to follow a teacher, it is up to the yoga teacher to do what is right, which isn’t always what a student wants. Ashtanga is a demanding practice, waking up for a daily morning practice that can go for up to 2 hours, and the students who are committed to this practice are attracted to its harsh, yang-like discipline. However, many devotees of Ashtanga experienced chronic pain.
In 1996, Pattabhi Jois’ next-door neighbour, Dr K.R.I. Jagadish had yoga students come to him for soft tissue massage and physiotherapy, and he was concerned enough about the injuries that he apparently spoke to Jois and said “This is really ridiculous. Creating Ashtanga yoga is a gimmick” (97). Jois’ answer was, “You give me that money, and I will stop teaching.”
Jois charged $600 per student per month and he had 60 students in one class with one instructor. He had a capitalistic incentive to overlook the best interests of his students, which may have been to reduce the intensity, in favour of pocketing more profit.
Teachers are responsible for setting and reinforcing boundaries with their students, even more so for the students that idolize them and believe they can do no wrong.
It reminded me of something I read by Swami Vivekananda on how students can look for their teacher that I have taken to heart.
The Three Conditions of a Yoga Teacher, According to Swami Vivekananda
The three conditions of a yoga teacher, according to Swami Vivekananda have stayed with me since I read “Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher.” It is clear and simple way to see whether a yoga teacher is honest.
Vivekananda names “purity, sinlessness, and not teaching for an ulterior selfish motive (money, name, or fame)” (402-404).
Purity refers to a “real thirst after knowledge and perseverance” for it. This purity is in “thought, speech, and act.” This is a yoga teacher that knows “the spirit of the scriptures”, (402) as he emphasizes practicing yoga, not just the words, which he says can lose the spirit. What I enjoy is that Vivekananda reminds us not to be pedantic in our striving for the truth.
Sinlessness looks to a teacher’s character and personality because a teacher is a “transmitter” (404) and if he is not pure, what he transfers holds no spiritual power.
It is important to know the ethics and values of your yoga teacher. Some students don’t want to bring politics into yoga, and they simply want teachers with personality who don’t take things too “seriously”, but there needs to be a balance between personality and integrity. We need yoga teachers who have the best interests of their students at heart, and this happens when teachers serve with a personal code of conduct, because it will determine how they teach.
The final condition is understanding why they teach yoga. Vivekananda says a yoga teacher must not be teaching for an ulterior motive that benefits only them, but their “work must be simply out of love, out of pure love for mankind at large” (404). It’s a yoga teacher who believes in the practice because it has benefited their life, it has helped them become a better person, helped contribute to their healing, their health, their consciousness.
If your yoga teacher meets these three conditions, it is safe for you to learn from them.
Whether you are a student or a teacher, these three conditions of a yoga teacher are relevant today. Notice Vivekananda does not mention a teacher’s physical appearance or their technical expertise. He was not worried about the learning. That would come. What cannot be taught as easily is the inner qualities that make a teacher safe and enjoyable to be around.
Yoga and Wellness Space Is a Microcosm of the Real World
I honour the choice of those that have walked away from yoga, and I also hope that if we still find joy in practice, that we can love without believing that love means defending abusers.
Reading books like this reinforce how we may use yoga to escape but as I have said in the past, the yoga space is a microcosm of the real world. Yoga can be a space to escape, but it doesn’t mean we get to ignore what is happening before our eyes.
Right now, with the popular rise in right-leaning ideology in the western political landscape, it is vital we do not opt out and bury our heads in the sands. We need smart minds and compassionate hearts. We need critical thinking skills and media literacy.
When we educate ourselves with the past, we better understand our present, and we can choose to change our future.
Written By: Irene Lo