In 1910, an eccentric American yogi named Pierre Bernard (a.k.a. Modern yoga has been fraught with stories of charismatic male yoga teachers who promoted their teachings as spiritually pure and later abused, or otherwise took advantage of, students who believed their mentors were gurus or saints. “The whole culture,” adds Rain, “says, ‘It’s okay.’”
It’s because he had a mystique around him.” In short, Jois may have had a particularly powerful sense of control over his students’ advancement, but he was also operating within a community that, arguably, empowered him to take advantage of students. “He could do what he was doing not because he was my father or uncle or doctor. She told me that she quit the yoga scene entirely in 2001, exhausted by chronic pain and moral disgust. Rain described in meticulous detail the daily cycle of assault and rationalization in which she was ensnared. Many of the women say his status outshone his abuse, allowing him to manipulate a cultural aura of spiritual authority and implied consent. Whether they spent days, months, or years with Jois, however, all of the women describe an environment in which the guru was permitted to freely assault his female students. Rain was even featured in a famous 1993 video that helped take Jois’s method global. Another, Karen Rain, practised the Ashtanga method for eleven years, over which she spent twenty-four months in Jois’s shala. One studied with him in Manhattan for a week and then for three months at his modest yoga gym, or “shala,” in the Lakshmipuram neighbourhood of the city of Mysuru (which changed its name from Mysore in 2014) in southern India. Six of the women I spoke to for this article had relatively brief encounters with Jois. They’re speaking out now, in part, because of the larger reckoning around sexual assault and toxic power dynamics. The women describe Jois groping their breasts and humping, rubbing, or digitally penetrating their genitals under the guise of “adjusting” their postures, sometimes while pinning them down with his body weight. Over the course of a two-year investigation, I interviewed nine women across North America who all told me they were victims at the centre of the community’s dark secret: Jois assaulted his female students-in public-on a regular basis. As a long-time Toronto-based practitioner and teacher of yoga, I first heard about Jois’s alleged behaviour several years ago. For more than thirty years, practitioners have whispered about the intent-and nature of-Jois’s hands-on yoga adjustments, and rumours of sexual abuse have persisted long after his death. The yoga guru is accused of engaging in repeated acts of sexual misconduct and sexual assault, enabled for decades by a devotional culture that saw him first and foremost as a benevolent father figure. In the wake of recent #MeToo conversations, however, Jois’s legacy is now in crisis. The captions speak of “openness,” “surrender,” and “purification.” But what really elevates Jois’s exercises into yoga, many practitioners believe, is the ethics one holds while practising, the purity of one’s intentions, and the philosophical view that the body is a vehicle for piety.
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There are hundreds of yoga studios worldwide dedicated to Jois’s gymnastic religion, plus thousands more that offer Jois-derived techniques through classes marketed with popular terms such as “Flow,” “Vinyasa,” or “Power.” Yoga practitioners are everywhere on Instagram, hashtagging with #YogaChallenge, #OneBreathAtATime, and #PracticeAndAllIsComing, feeding a workout scene hungry for connections between athletics, beauty, and self-realization. Today, Ashtanga is at the centre of the multi-billion-dollar yoga economy-one that also includes yoga methods such as Kundalini, Iyengar, and Bikram (the original hot yoga). Podcast Listen to an audio version of this storyįor more Walrus audio, subscribe to AMI-audio podcasts on iTunes.