All Survivors Rise
CW: mentions of eating disorder-related ideas and behaviors, suicidal ideation, self-harm, exploitation of labor, cult-like mentality
Vice put out an article about the studio where I did my 200-hour teacher training.
So, the Bikram documentary came out on Netflix and abuse of power in the yoga industry got a little segment in the 24-hour news cycle. But it’s not just one bad apple (hint: it never is). Despite its lofty spiritual ideals, having essentially boiled down an entire technology for understanding our humanity to “love & light”, the Western yoga industry is absolutely a reflection of the racist, capitalist, patriarchal power structures operating in larger society. I’m just thrilled that this particular studio is being exposed to the purifying light of day right now because it was my home studio.
When I was still on Insta and I happened upon the @yttpshadowwork account that inspired the aforementioned Vice article, I read Every. Single. Post. It took hours and days and just when I thought I was finished, more stories would appear. It left me with an emotional hangover, but I kept reading because I also felt a deep sense of affirmation and catharsis.
Having experienced bouts of depression, anxiety, bulimia and suicidal ideation on and off throughout my teens, YttP Seattle was one of many places I went looking for salvation. At 18 years old, I’d had little success with therapy and was afraid of anti-depressants, even though I was self-medicating heavily with cannabis; yoga practice was the first time in what felt like ages that I started to feel hopeful about myself and my future.
All of the teachers were so self-assured and athletic and attractive, everything I thought I needed to be and wasn’t. They praised me for contorting my body into increasingly complex postures and taking multiple classes in a row. When I cried in half pigeon, I’d more often receive coveted physical assists. When some teachers suggested I should take the training, I felt seen, supported and utterly elated. The trainings were only held in NYC or Berkeley, but YttP was so special, I was sure I’d be welcomed into a caring community even if I was far from home. I don’t have any record of what I said on my application, but I’m sure it was obvious I’d drunk the Kool-Aid. After my college graduation, I landed a criminally underpaid nonprofit gig and moved into a cheap apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I knew exactly no one.
I learned some amazing things in teacher training. I studied practices to integrate my body and mind. I gained language that afforded me new ways of considering and articulating my internal landscape. I also heard, from people that I admired, deeply trusted, and hoped would one day offer me a job, ideas such as:
all of the bad things that happen to you are karma, so you brought them on yourself and are solely responsible for them;
if someone says or does something that makes you uncomfortable, you should always question your reaction instead of questioning their behavior;
performing free labor for the studio is a holy act of service and is the best way to show your commitment and loyalty;
pushing yourself into deep places of physical and emotional pain is the only way to achieve transformation;
inner transformation is always reflected in your appearance and positive change is shown by becoming thinner, more visibly muscular, and able to perform more physically challenging postures;
and let’s not forget kunjal kriya, the yogic technique of swallowing liters of salt water and vomiting it out to cleanse the stomach, lauded in passing without any other context.
The salary from my nonprofit job was so pitiful, I could barely pay for groceries and after rent and utilities, I had less than $20 in my bank account. I was exhausted after work, so I woke up at 5:45am most weekdays to make it to the 7am class to fulfill the required practice hours. When I graduated training in winter 2012, my apartment was full of cockroaches, the radiator was broken, the hot water was lukewarm at best and despite protests from me and my three roommates, our landlord only pretended to do anything. I was miserable, but still went through with the YttP 25-class “apprenticeship”, sure that I’d stood out enough in the program to earn paid teaching work afterward.
I completed my apprenticeship in March, right as I was leaving my awful nonprofit job for a more livable wage in the restaurant industry. I couldn’t submit my teaching availability for two weeks because of the unpredictable training schedule at my new job, which I communicated via email to the managers, with no response. One day, a week into starting my new job, I came in early for class, laid down on my mat and unintentionally fell asleep. A manager woke me up and berated me for not helping around the studio before class and for not putting in my availability. I never went back.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I barely touched those memories. I’ve distanced myself from that time and from the person I was because I felt, and still feel, deeply embarrassed by her existence. She still lives in my memory as a “crazy”, sloppy, weak woman with poor boundaries, who put herself in a lot of bad situations, disappointed a lot of people and just couldn’t “get it together”. I should have stayed just a little longer at my nonprofit job, even though I felt suicidal. I should have negotiated my schedule at the restaurant around possible teaching opportunities, even though the job was guaranteed money and the teaching schedule was fickle. I shouldn’t have been so sensitive as to let one manager’s lack of compassion keep me away from the studio, even though their words came at a time when I needed compassion the most. I packed my shame away somewhere, but it turns out I still carry it with me, the feeling that I was, and maybe still am, too ill or damaged to be a part of this place that had professed to be centered around healing.
On top of that shame, I built a story of being pushed out of the womb, a painful but natural process of gaining independence as a new baby yoga teacher. When other teachers or fellow grads would ask why I left, I chalked it up to cultural differences - nothing wrong with them, I’m just a tender baby from the West Coast who can’t handle hustle culture and directness. It didn’t even occur to me until reading people’s stories on @yttpshadowwork that opening studios near universities and selecting vulnerable people at a crossroads in their lives might have been intentional. That putting us through rigorous physical tasks and then directing us to share “a secret that very few people know about you” was a way of triggering trauma bonding with the studio staff, even though they shared no secrets of their own. That the shame I felt for being exhausted might have been intentionally fostered to perpetuate labor exploitation. That because they conducted four trainings a year, with 30 or more graduates from each, if I wouldn’t work myself into the ground for the dream of becoming a flawless, ethereal yoga teacher, somebody else would. Now I realize it was better I felt forced out, and it would have gotten so much worse if I had stayed.
Reading these stories has given me the opportunity and the permission to reframe my own story. I was not and am not a damaged or undeserving person. I was a vulnerable person who didn’t know where to turn for compassionate assistance with my mental health and was exploited for labor, by YttP and almost every other job I had in NYC, and discarded by people I thought I could trust. And YttP’s culture was not just direct, it was damaging. It exacerbated my preexisting mental conditions and normalized harmful behaviors and ideas, which discouraged me for several years from seeking safe housing and working conditions and appropriately valuing my body, my time and my labor.
In my 8 years as a teacher and studio manager, I’ve often struggled to reconcile capitalism and spirituality. While I still believe that businesses can be run in a spiritually conscious way, I also believe that the yoga industry is the commodification of spirituality itself, which is irreconcilable. For all the good it does, given that I and many others may never have discovered yoga outside of its commodification, I believe that the yoga “business” in its current form at best, distorts the teachings and community through the lens of profit and success and at worst, inverts the teachings completely, allowing people in power to weaponize these spiritual tools in pursuit of control and self-preservation at all costs. At present, I am still teaching public classes for profit, so don’t listen to me, I am a hypocrite.
Like everything else on this blog, I’ve written this account primarily for myself. But in posting it, I am hopeful that anyone who underwent an experience similar to mine will read it and feel vindicated, or feel at least a seed of self-compassion take root. Of course my story is influenced by and intersects with my various identities - visit the @yttpshadowwork insta page for more diverse stories where you can probably see your identities reflected because honestly it seems like the bullshit didn’t skip over anyone.
For more information on how many of your beloved teachers are being mistreated and undervalued, check out the Yoga is Dead Podcast Episode 2 - Karma capitalism Killed Yoga at this link or anywhere you get your podcasts.
