2022: The Year I Almost Stopped Teaching Yoga

A horrible, drawn-out yoga experience at the tail end of 2021 forced me to stop in my tracks and ask myself: WTF am I doing in this nightmare of a “community” led by bullies and grifters, its inner circle populated by sycophants, amoral opportunists, and your run-of-the mill traumatized or otherwise vulnerable cult members?

I won’t go into detail about the experience itself, but it pushed me into a year-long crisis of faith in what I have devoted myself to doing for the last twelve years: teaching Bikram Yoga. Before I proceed, a content warning: in the following paragraphs, I will be making references to the sexual violence committed by Bikram Choudhury and abusive Bikram Yoga culture.

I thought I had completed my reckoning in the immediate aftermath of the exposure of Bikram’s harmful actions in 2013. This is something I did in private or with trusted friends, because we weren’t allowed to talk about it in any real way with our higher ups, and more importantly, with you, our students. It’s bad for business, many of us were repeatedly told. This was the time before performative public statements of denunciation were in vogue.

I spent much of this year sitting with the bitter pill of the truth: that Bikram Yoga culture is rotten to its core. I sat with my anger. I sat with my disgust and let it twist my guts and seep into my every cell. I let myself be with the discomfort of it all and let that discomfort lead me somewhere. In this time, I asked myself repeatedly: how have I been complicit, how am I still, and how do I stop? How do I move forward?

Bikram himself is no longer at the center of Bikram Yoga (though I heard through the grapevine that a new teacher training led by him is in the works), but because we never properly reckoned with what happened as a collective all those years ago, Bikram Yoga culture continues to be rotten.

The rot, cut off at the head but never ripped from its root, lives on.

Because it isn’t just the rapes and the sexual assaults. It's the denial and glaring silence in the face of them. It is the continued rampant bullying and abuse of power between studio owners and teachers, and oftentimes between teachers and students. It’s the exploitative business practices. This is a big one. Did you know that most of your yoga teachers (who don’t have one or five other jobs) cannot afford to do yoga themselves? Industry-wide, we are paid poverty wages (some not paid at all) and often treated like emotional punching bags by power-tripping studio owners. Emphasis often: not every studio owner does this, but it is way more common than you think. That’s yoga/spiritual narcissist culture for you. The world is asked of us teachers, and a studio’s success hinges on our work, yet we receive no material benefits to speak of beyond meager pay per class. So many good teachers with good intentions and solid heads on their shoulders are no longer teaching. If you have ever found yourself asking, whatever happened to so-and-so? How come they aren’t teaching anymore? The answer is probably that it became, in one or all the ways, untenable for them.

You don’t hear about this much because most go quietly and bitterly away. New Age pseudo-spirituality says we’re not supposed to be “judgmental.” We’re not supposed to be “negative” for the sake of our students and the successful evangelization of The Yoga, as some like to call it. What this means is: we’re not supposed to tell the truth.

Even in writing this and sending it out, I have phantom fears of blowback and retribution and I have to remind myself over and over again that no one in this community has any power over me anymore. It’s important to talk about these things. It’s important to keep talking about them. It’s important to hold the line. Otherwise, nothing ever changes. Abuse and all sorts of other fuckery thrive in bypassing and silence.

It’s been isolating as hell, deprogramming from the cult and making the necessary severances. But it was important for me to reach my limit with all of this. To come to a point where I stood firm in saying to myself: None of this is OK. I have little to no control over the actions of the people around me, but this is where I draw the line. This is where I stop.

… And let the consequences fall how they may.

We are in the business of care and of healing. Yoga should be a safe space for everyone involved: teachers and students alike. It’s a shame that a practice with such incredible life-changing benefits carries with it such a massive and barely addressed shadow. In speaking about it with you, it is my hope to chip away at some of that shadow. But I am just one person; so much more needs to happen for things to fundamentally change.