A lot more than a year ago
There is a term now for people who practice yoga alone at home. It’s ‘home practitioner.’ Sounds straightforward, if you forget that once upon a time, a large number of people who practiced yoga in India did this, and there wasn’t a term for it at all. It was called ‘doing yoga.’
However, after seven years of doing yoga/being a home practitioner, I decided to teach. Until this moment, I hadn’t even registered the debate around using the word ‘yoga’ for a personal practice. I followed online classes – anything that was free, accessible, usable, that taught me something new and healed me. I practiced wherever I could fit my mat at that moment – a room, a hotel room, someone else’s living room, public parks, backyards. I read up on all the things I was confused about. Let’s call this the Eklavya period of learning.
Deciding to teach, however, meant deciding to learn in a more structured way. It meant institutionalizing myself, so to speak. I thought it was only fair, because that’s what people expect of teachers. A bargain. I learnt for free. I won’t be teaching for free, so this is the moment to spend.
Learning how to teach yoga means choosing a path. There’s the path of the guru-apprentice, which I already knew I wouldn’t follow, having formed a general idea of guru basically being a euphemism for potential butt-grabber. There’s the teacher-training path – vaguely and badly regulated by something called Yoga Alliance (whatever that is, it’s definitely not Indian) and generating this hybrid entity called a TTC – teacher training course of 200 or 400 hours – a finite period, unlike guru-following. Since path 2 seemed to involve less risk of butt-grabbing and looked less expensive, I took that one.
Then the second problem – what do you learn how to teach? Most of my online classes were in a style that was poetically called vinyasa flow. But there didn’t seem to be a vinyasa flow TTC within my vicinity. So I picked Ashtanga, because vinyasa flow seemed to have stemmed from it.
A month later
I was practicing Ashtanga to prepare for the TTC, also through online videos. I was struggling quite a bit, sweating a lot, not sleeping much, and getting drunk most evenings to bring my energy down. But I felt fine.
A little more than a year ago
I made it to teacher training in Mysore, where we practiced the Ashtanga Primary series in a rooftop shala facing the hills at 6:30am every morning. Halfway through, I had a breakdown of sorts. One day, I woke up and went to class and couldn’t do a single forward bend (the Ashtanga Primary series is famous for being heavily invested in forward bends). I couldn’t do anything, to be more precise. My body had gone into resistance. More than that, I was miserable. I didn’t feel like talking, thinking, eating or listening. My mind had caved in. I spoke to one of my trainer-teachers about it and he told me to do a lot of deep backbends. Two days later, I was racing back to life. Problem solved. I continued to get drunk to sleep at night, but I was also happy. I watched Chamundi Hills light up every dawn. I was in company, but as alone as I needed to be. TTCs aren’t so bad after all.
A year ago
Fresh out of Mysore, I decided to continue practicing Ashtanga alone, because it was addictive. I’d like to think there was a better reason but there wasn’t. And going back to my old ways, I started looking it up online. It was a nice juicy rabbit hole, with old teachers poetically talking about knees and hamstrings, young teachers picking apart poses, a thousand how-to videos, anatomy geeks, rebels and traditionalists. I spent hours online, because anyway I couldn’t sleep.
I knew I wasn’t going to teach Ashtanga. I was very clear that if I did teach, my classes would be adapted to the students’ needs, bodies or even moods. Which meant vinyasa flow, the only term umbrella enough to cover more or less everything. I still wanted to practice it, though. Because I’m a nutjob, I told myself.
Somewhere in the middle of all these juicy meanderings was when I found Karen Rain’s post about Pattabhi Jois having sexually abused her. It was a speedbreaker on my Ashtanga road. Karen Rain, formerly Haberman, was one of six students in a very early-days video of Pattabhi Jois directing them through the Primary series, that I had watched repeatedly on mute. I watched it on mute because there was something vaguely military about Jois’ staccato Sanskrit counts. I watched it for the pleasure of watching a pre-digital video, and for the grace of the practitioners.
From Karen Rain, I navigated to Anneke Lucas’ Pattabhi Jois abuse story, though that was actually a precursor, published in 2012. This one had a resolution of a personal kind, but for me it was darkly shadowed by the abuse that Anneke Lucas had faced as a child. This was the point when I started feeling a mad obsession rising. I took up yoga to heal, to be alone, to integrate and, simply, for pure pleasure. I imagine that healing was the reason a lot of people chose to do yoga. To work towards healing (possibly from abuse) and then to face abuse seemed to me to be an almost unimaginable contradiction.
A few months later
I guess obsession peaked. I read every Ashtanga #metoo story. I followed every near-psychotic Facebook thread. I read everyone’s response, the way other people watch Youtube response videos. Kino McGregor, Ashtanga’s celebrity youtuber, said #ibelieveyou, impatiently followed up with a what do you want, in an interview (penitently followed up with an apology). Tim Feldman, Kino’s husband and less of a celebrity, said something. Mary Taylor of the delightfully idiosyncratic Freeman+Taylor acknowledged the abuse, muddled her way through her initial statement and then grew into a more complete response – where, a little like I was brought up to do, she tried to balance kindness and delicacy towards every aggrieved party. Who else, I asked myself. I looked up every yoga teacher I used to follow on youtube. I stopped watching asana videos, practice videos, jumpback videos.
Instead, these were the questions I asked of the internet: Did David Garrigues respond? Has John Scott said anything? What about those anatomy guys? Do they agree that Jois was fixing (or whatever) people’s mula bandhas?
I was still practicing Ashtanga at this time. I was sleeping about three hours a day, and I felt fine. I worked on three projects at the same time, slept at around 1am so that I could wake up at 4am and spend two hours pacing before dawn. I didn’t wake up to practice. I still did my practice late in the morning. I woke up because I didn’t have a choice.
I felt this terrible need for things to change, for everything to change, for everyone to change. I felt it like it was mine, my story, my pain. Why? I had never really interacted with yoga teachers, yoga gurus, yoga cults, not even with yoga mythologies. I found it hard to explain to my world why it mattered, though I kept them updated about each of my readings.
Eventually
At some point, a general consensus was evolving that Pattabhi Jois was indeed a sexual abuser/purveyor of ‘inappropriate adjustments’ – the terminology shifted depending on the identity/school of the speaker. There was a much more limited consensus that Sharath Jois, his grandson and the head of the family business, if you want to call it that (they called it KPJAYI), needed to speak up about the abuse. There were a few scattered calls for actual change.
Gregor Maehle’s acknowledgement and response to Karen Rain’s statement seemed to be a turning point in the Ashtanga story. It was a personal response, asking that floating question – why didn’t I notice? Why didn’t I respond? This question is so hard to answer that I wonder whether the silence from the majority of the Ashtanga community had something to do with their unwillingness to do it.
I stopped following almost every former Ashtanga resource, except for Grimmly’s blog, which faithfully kept track of the abuse narrative, as it had once kept track of every Ashtanga publication, asana introspection, Krishnamacharya investigation and other needles in the Ashtanga haystack.
At this time, I had modified my practice. I kept the structure, but added more backbends, more twists, changed the form and the variation of poses and went at a slower pace. I was coming back from a month-long break which I spent sleeping, eating and being drunk. I had stopped following even Ashtanga news during that time. Complete internet shutdown, yoga shutdown, communication shutdown. Coming back, I had felt the need to make a change.
In the more recent past
I’m trying to figure out how personal this story actually is. This was supposed to be an Ashtanga #metoo timeline. That story was not about me. But my way of navigating it is, much more about me and my practice than anyone else. Obsessive people don’t turn into journalists. You can tell someone else’s story when you let go of yourself, if you follow the traditional standards of reporting. I don’t let go of anything. I took it all personal, in the words of Tony Hoagland. the breeze and the river and the colour of the fields; the price of grapefruit and stamps. The actions of Pattabhi Jois, the silence of Sharath Jois, the betrayals of feminist sisterhoods, the limitations of language, the lack of conversation between antagonistic forces.
I had stopped practicing yoga.
In this period of silence, both external and internal, I read Guy Donahaye’s blog – breaking an extended silence, he spoke about Pattabhi Jois, the abuse, himself and yoga itself. Something Tim Feldman tried to do but only managed in the title of his article.
Guy Donahaye, one of Jois’ early students, edited a eulogizing book called Guruji, about his former – well, guru. It has been taken out of publication now.
I learnt some things from Guy Donahaye’s blog – or maybe some things came awake in me when I read it. They’re important enough to make a list, I think. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- Pattabhi Jois didn’t just abuse women. His ‘appropriate’ adjustments, done to men, caused injury, hurt, humiliation, self-doubt and other forms of harm.
- Since the two men who’ve spoken most about the abuse scandal have both spoken extensively about the injuries they faced, it seems to me for empathy to form, one has to be able to express one’s own pain.
- Pattabhi Jois was part of a cycle of violence – that was perpetrated by his own family, the injuries his own teacher inflicted on him and those that he transferred to his progeny, including his grandson.
- The cycle of violence continued. Sharath Jois, by general consensus, is not a sexual abuser. One can imagine that constantly witnessing abuse, while being traumatic, also gave him an absolute horror of it, a desire not to repeat that pattern. But Ashtanga stayed physically harmful, adjustments continued to be painful and unnecessary, injuries were sustained and a different kind of power structure formed.
- Cycles of violence can mutate. The abused become abusers. History repeats itself with just enough alteration to confuse you into thinking that it’s not.
These points were not necessarily made as such in Guy Donahaye’s writing. These are part-learnings, part-inferences. They came to me in a time when I was underwater, isolated, not practicing yoga, and trying to understand something about my own past.
I finally understood, after shutting down every practice in my life, why I had followed the Ashtanga story for one year. I also finally understood why I had practiced Ashtanga at all. The term ‘cycle of violence’ made it clear in a way that #metoo and #ibelieveyou never did.
There was a study quoted in this blog that I had seen a long time ago and not followed up on, about the connection between yoga and corporal punishment. The truth is, the all-encompassing term ‘yoga’ is much more fluid than you could imagine. You could make it a physical practice, a breathing practice, a form of meditation, a prayer, a petition to the gods, a penance, a form of abuse, a punishment, a path to healing.
My healing practice had become a punishing practice. It did that because it had heard, in the Ashtanga narrative, a language my body had known and understood. My own participation in a cycle of violence had found its yoga mirror.
The baby and the bathwater
A much-repeated phrase, in the time of Ashtanga #metoo turmoil, has been let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I never understood this one. What’s the baby? What’s the bathwater?
I tried to break it down for myself. The baby could be:
- A personal practice
- Pattanjali’s Ashtanga
- Jois’ Ashtanga i.e. the primary, secondary and following series sequences of asanas
- Good stuff (whatever that may be – teaching, relationships, money, appropriate adjustments)
- The Ashtanga industry
None of these things look like babies to me, except maybe the personal practice, but to me at least it turned out to be more of a punishing parent than a baby.
The bathwater?
- Abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Pattabhi Jois’ abuse
- Bad stuff (inappropriate adjustments, overextended silence, ignorant assertions, bad ‘yogis’)
I can’t really understand the difference between the baby and the bathwater. Maybe I took it all too personal. Maybe the baby got wet in the bathwater. Maybe the baby’s not a baby at all. Maybe the bathwater is just dirty water. Maybe what’s inside is a two-headed beast. Who knows?
A time of change
A few weeks back, bang in the middle of a moment of confrontation in my own life, Sharath Jois finally spoke up about the abuse. He spoke about it like a child traumatised. His language did not belong to the world of #metoo, or even to the world of 2019. It belonged home, it belonged in childhood, it was a world of youth and fear and rage and shame.
A new collection of introspections starts making their way to the internet. A petition has been started that demands the foregrounding of the voices of the victims, but I’m uncomfortable with clause 3, which says the petitioner will ABSTAIN from writing or speaking about Pattabhi Jois and sexual violence in any way that takes an educational or leadership role. I ask myself – without the voices of the responders, would this story have come through to me, would I have understood why it connected, why I related?
In the meantime, I have not been practicing Ashtanga at all. I make yoga up as I go along. I say the words vinyasa flow to myself – not as a brand name, not as an alternative, just because the word flow is freeing, because vinyasa is breath and movement – you can vinyasa your way through any practice in the world.
On days when I’m hurt, tired, angry or sad, on days when I’m in pain, I don’t practice. I tell myself that the era of practice as punishment is finally done with. But non-punishment, non-repetition of cycles of violence, this is as much a practice as yoga itself.
For some inexplicable reason, I keep thinking about a book called The Girl’s Guide To Hunting and Fishing. The narrator ends by saying ‘we are both hunters and hunted.’ She means, we have found balance, we have found ourselves and each other, as partners. We have ended that destructive dynamic of hunter and prey.
I don’t know why, but somehow, in the past month, I felt that my yoga practice at least has tilted, been less of hunting, less demanding of me and of the world, more of movement itself.
I don’t say that I’ve found balance, just that my relationship with yoga has become more balanced.
