More on Trauma, Retribution, and Iyengar Yoga

from Leading with Love: Inspiration from Spiritual Activists

 

Like love and wisdom, trauma is cumulative. Every new trauma re-opens the doors of past traumas. The traumas can be personal, collective, and intergenerational. No one is exempt from experiences of trauma, but definitely some people have experienced more traumas, and more repeated and severe traumas, than others.

 

Global white supremacy, empire, patriarchy, and capitalism create a breeding ground for both individual and collective traumas. Theft of people, land, and resources over centuries…wars fought to control these people, land, and resources…ensuing genocide…divide and conquer strategies pitting neighbor against neighbor…hypermasculinity as a survival response to incessant violation…abuse within families, especially of women and children, repeated over generations….I hope you get the picture.

 

We are all trauma stewards. We are all required to tend to, and hopefully heal and recover from, our own traumas, if we are to survive in this world. As adults, we each need to develop ways to feed and house ourselves, which requires some level of functionality, despite the blows we have endured. We’re extremely fortunate if we develop livelihoods that nourish us spiritually, and enable us to be present as trauma stewards for each other. Due to structural inequities, as well as cultures of violence, neglect, and blame developed as a response to trauma, many people are just surviving.

 

Even some with accumulated material wealth are just surviving, from a soul perspective. They are spiritually bereft. #45 reminds us daily of the brutality and systemic violence our nation is built upon, and the ill-gotten generational wealth, shaped by generations of abuse, that put a sociopath in power. We witness daily the unspeakable ravages such a person, operating within systems and institutions built on oppression, can commit. We witness the hordes (stil a significant minority of this nation—30%) who respond to the dog whistle of his trauma, which resonates with theirs, who support him unquestioningly. They resonate with his fear of white annihilation, scarcity mindset, desperation to blame the other, and inexorable smugness of white superiority, because what else do they have to cling to? They even insist their God is white.

 

This is what our nation is made of. This is the culture Iyengar Yoga has emerged from. This is what all our institutions have emerged from, including IYNAUS.

 

Our nation is also shaped by struggle, boldness, vision, and resilience. Too many heroes to name from over the centuries, but off the top of my head, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Grace Lee Boggs, Charity Hicks….

 

Will we take it upon ourselves to shift and transform our culture and its institutions? There’s a part of me that says, fuck it. I am so thoroughly disgusted with mainstream society and I long to disengage from all of it.

 

But then I get hungry, and thirsty, and cold. I need a vehicle to acquire necessities. I need electricity to heat my home and wifi to communicate and get information. I need a goddamn debit card. I have not managed to get off the grid.

 

So like most of us, I am carving a middle path. I practice harm reduction. I am stewarding my trauma through somatic, creative, spiritual practices. I build community with others on parallel paths. We compare notes, teach each other, share food and resources, and support each other.

 

We are all survivors of abusive lineages and colonization. Most of us have been both survivors of harm and perpetrators of harm. How could it not be so? What parent has never lost their temper and lashed out at their innocent child? Or have times of shutdown or dissociation, when we are emotionally unavailable? In our intimate relationships, haven’t we all done and said hurtful things? When we open up so wide for each other, we make ourselves vulnerable to each other’s traumas. I’ve not met anyone who is exempt.

 

Iyengar Yoga in the USA is no exception. No institution is exempt. We need to regard each other and all our institutions through a trauma-informed lens. Why the fuck would I ever expect an institution to protect and serve me? Every institution and system was designed to serve the dominant power structure, and to protect their property.

 

IYNAUS emerged from a need to control who could represent, control, and access the teachings of BKS Iyengar. The community had grown exponentially worldwide, and Guruji was no longer able to personally mentor each teacher, nor monitor what each nation was doing. So associations were set up, with guidelines established locally, and overseen from a distance by Guruji.

 

Is it any wonder that despite the extreme minority of men in yoga classes, at least the past 5 presidents of IYNAUS included only 1 woman? Is it surprising to anyone that the culture of IYNAUS and Iyengar Yoga is overwhelmingly white? Even in a nation that is increasingly BIPOC, and will soon be majority BIPOC, the culture of Iyengar Yoga lags far behind.

 

IYNAUS as an institution reflects the community that comprises it. In our nation it has traditionally been a practice of the educated upper middle class. The middle class serves, in this nation, as functionaries of the upper class, and have been given access to many resources in exchange with compliance, and willingness to uphold the power structure. As such, are we surprised that our community struggled to figure out how to hold Manouso Manos accountable for decades of sexual abuse? And that allegations of other men abusing their power in the Iyengar Yoga world remain unsanctioned and unabated?

 

We excuse none of it. But I am thoroughly convinced that healing will come from outside the institutions. I hold their feet to the fire, at the same time that I actively build the alternative.

 

Iyengar Yoga Detroit Collective has a reach that extends beyond our city and region, due to globalized technology in the face of Covid-19. We have Iyengar Yoga practitioners from around the world able to participate in our webinars, workshops, and weekly classes. We are able to share our imperfect, evolving, trauma-informed, anti-oppression practices. We have study groups and committees explicitly addressing the prevention and correction of harm. We have a fund to support our many projects. We are in conversation with other communities with the same goals. We identify with the global Healing Justice movement, as defined by Cara Page and Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, emphasizing the relationship between social justice and healing trauma, individually and collectively.

 

How do we hold each other accountable without relying on institutions bound to repeatedly betray us? This is the starting point for radical, revolutionary love. We must create these containers for each other. It’s our only hope for healing. Transformative justice and restorative justice circles can meet with or without survivors, with or without perpetrators, because participants understand that harm occurs in social and historical contexts. There are many ways TJ/RJ sessions can be structured, and no one structure fits every situation. Each community must take responsibility. TJ/RJ is not a quick fix. It will require multiple sessions, with expert facilitation, possibly over weeks and months, and even years. As we know, healing happens in layers and spirals, and hopefully, never truly ends. TJ/RJ is the alternative to cancel culture, which never really works because it doesn’t address root causes. If healing happens in layers, acts of harm result from layers of trauma.

 

In the words of abolitionist Angela Davis, “We have to imagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. We can’t simply assume that somehow, magically, we’re going to create a new society in which there will be new human beings. No, we have to begin that process of creating the society we want to inhabit right now.”

 

 

Is Guruji the Problem?

Remember that scene in the “Black Panther” film when the white man wakes up from his coma in Wakanda, and Shuri addresses him as “colonizah”? Our Detroit audience loooved that line. The dynamics between them illustrate a classic misogynist, colonizer mindset. “Alright, where am I?” Ross demands gruffly of Shuri, who is clearly in power, but whom he is treating like a servant by his tone of voice, body language, and incredulity. If you glance at the comments in the YouTube post, you will see colonizer mindset of white folks upset at Shuri’s use of the term, decades and generations after historic colonization of Africa, evidence that there is no such condition as “postcolonial” to be found. Our minds remain colonized, and colonization has become more subtle, through institutions, economics, and multinational corporations moreso than governments.

 

Meanwhile I am reeling from another exposé of harm in the Iyengar Yoga world, and heartbroken to learn of a senior teacher’s alleged abuses. I sincerely hope restorative and transformative justice practice will be employed to address lingering trauma and prevent future harm. It’s the only way to heal and go forward.

 

Furthermore, author Anneke Lucas uses this situation to build the argument that the harm inflicted is rooted in the patterns and behaviors set by BKS Iyengar himself. Guruji.

 

It’s not a new argument, and I’ve addressed the issue in previous essays. Lucas’s perspective grounds itself in a larger anti-guru, anti-lineage movement. Too many spiritual leaders have inarguably committed harm, and the conflation of spiritual devotion with unchecked power is absolutely toxic and nearly ensures abuse.

 

If it were possible to oust all abusive spiritual leaders, would we also dismantle the spiritual traditions? What is the role of elders, gurus, and mentors? Would we cancel our own grandfathers? It’s one thing to write off someone we have no relation to, as an intellectual exercise. It’s another thing to attack an entire lineage and tradition in which a teacher has been treasured and beloved, despite harms committed. I firmly believe we need to wrestle with the contradictions, hold that tension within ourselves, without clinging to either/or positions that fail to address deeper issues.

 

What deeper issues?

 

Our embrace of hierarchy as a species, for example, can create unhealthy power dynamics. Why do we continually put certain people on pedestals and give them power? We need to acknowledge that as complex social beings, we yearn for leadership, and benefit from others’ experience, talent, and genius. We need to acknowledge that at the spiritual core, we are all equal, but we are not all equal when it comes to knowledge, experience, and wisdom. We need to build firm containers for each others’ brilliance to be taught and shared. We need our teachers and mentors if we are to grow, as individuals and as a society.

 

The other side of this coin entails our desperate hunger for scapegoats. “If there were no prisons, we would realize that we are all in chains,” observed Maurice Blanchot, 20^th century French philosopher. This explains why mainstream America rejects abolition of the prison industrial complex and the Defund the Police movement. As long as the problem remains “out there” and not within each of us, we feel safe.

 

Our unprocessed trauma compels us to point fingers at the other, and makes it unnecessary to look within. As long as lynching mobs believed that the negro was the problem, they avoided the recognition that they themselves, white people, created the brutal and violent racial hierarchy based on their imagined superiority. And that the great lie of white supremacy was rooted in their own feelings of inferiority and fear, borne of generations of their own trauma and oppression. All too often, the oppressed, given half a chance, become the oppressor. Their ancestors had fled the wars, genocide, starvation, plagues, torture chambers, and class oppression of Europe, only to recreate the trauma here in the New World, with a new underclass.

 

So now we come back around to BKS Iyengar.

 

We are not yet engaging in a robust public discussion about the issue of race and colonization in the context of Iyengar Yoga. Born in 1918 and raised under British colonial rule, BKS Iyengar was of a generation and temperament that swept racism under the rug. What he knew to do was the same thing my parents, growing up under Japanese colonial rule in Korea, knew to do: put your head down and work hard. By work hard, I mean, as if your life depended on it. As if it’s the only thing you can do to ensure survival. 

Perhaps they did not have the language for oppression and exploitation. The ugliness of colonization is that it’s designed to take over our minds as well as our resources, livelihoods, and culture, so that you admire the colonizer, emulate them, internally reject your own upbringing, and question your own right to autonomy and independence.

 

BKS Iyengar, Guruji, was indeed “the Lion of Pune.” But he was also a product of generations of colonization. It was the particular time and place his soul chose to reincarnate in, just as each of us have spiritually chosen to be here now.

 

He was 29 when India gained independence in 1947, but a nation does not shake off nearly a century of colonial rule overnight. Yoga as an indigenous practice, like many indigenous arts, was in disrepute, and he found little interest among Indians in the yogic path. Not until the Western* elite “discovered” him did he begin to gain recognition, and even then, only under their terms.

 

[*I deliberately use the term “Westerners” in this essay, as used by many Indians, to describe white bodies of the European diaspora, and people raised in nations established by white bodies, which lie primarily to the west of India.]

 

American violinist Yehudi Menuhin hired him as his personal yoga teacher, and began taking him on his travels. Guruji was introduced to and embraced by European royalty. But what were the terms of that embrace? He describes the conditions of apartheid of the nations he traveled to, without using this terminology. He was exoticized and objectified, treated as a mascot, like an unusually skillful servant one would show off to friends. A status symbol.

No one in the aristocratic circles of Europe wanted to house this foreign black man. On one visit, he was stuffed ungraciously into a dusty storage attic, into a space so small there was no room to even practice. This is one of very few stories on record, told by his granddaughter at the 2019 Iyengar Yoga USA convention, that mention the racism he faced. Guruji himself, just like my parents, never ruminated on those days publicly, and never criticized his sponsors. They say he fell out with Menuhin eventually, but I don’t know the terms of that disengagement.

 

In only one interview I have seen does Guruji mention the dilemma of racism and colonization. He describes how the slave, so to speak, had to teach the slavedrivers. He had to find the inner strength to not only face the colonizers, but to demand their respect as a trusted authority.

 

I believe that’s what accounts for his reputation as a harsh disciplinarian in the classroom, in contrast to his playful, nurturing personality described by his family. Guruji had to break through the tamas of Westerners' comfortable habits and entrenched minds, and the conditioning of Westerners to habitually and unconsciously view Indians (and other Black and Brown bodies) as inferior. Sometimes Guruji conveyed his lessons angrily, an absolutely understandable and healthy response to the colonial condition. You could say he embodied the suppressed rage of generations. Guruji’s anger never emerged outside the yoga hall, and I've heard no stories of private abuse. His outbursts were channeled through the teaching of āsana. Before and after class, everyone describes him as good-humored, loving, unfailingly generous, and affable.

 

Geeta Iyengar, an infant when Indian independence was won, was of the first generation to get out from under the boot of British colonial rule. Geetaji, bless her heart, was often openly furious with us Westerners, and minced no words. Her voice would bellow in the hall and make us all quake: “You people come here to take. You don’t come to learn. You don’t even read Guruji’s books. You come for ‘points’ to take back. You go home and have workshops, ‘Teachings from Pune,’ and teach the points you get in class, and make money from what we teach you. You don’t even care about Guruji. You don’t even practice.” 

 

Geetaji was describing the colonial condition. Europeans, North Americans, South Africans, Australians, and Israelis—the entire white global colonial world—and later the Chinese, other East Asians, and practitioners from all over the world, were constantly pouring in to RIMYI to bow before their Indian teachers, but some, to Geeta's sharp eye, coming as “spiritual tourists,” extractors, capitalists, and egotistical power mongers to take back trinkets of knowledge and sell them to raise their own status. Geeta was calling out the extraction and commodification of a sacred practice.

 

[A generation later, RIMYI decided it was their turn to capitalize on the popularity of yoga and Guruji’s reputation and legacy, and cash in themselves. A month’s study at RIMYI went from $200 in 2005 to $450 by 2017. They started hosting mega-conventions with 1000+ students just like the other regions of the world, and charging Western rates. They relaxed the RIMYI admission rules, so that instead of requiring 8 years of study and letters of recommendation, virtually anyone could come, pay the money, and take classes. Why beat them [sic] instead of joining them? Or is this a redistribution of wealth? Reparations/compensation for generations of exploitation?]

 

Meanwhile, many in the first generation of foreigners compelled to travel to India to study with Guruji directly were responding to his particular vibration and energy field, no doubt influenced by their own unprocessed trauma. Tada Hozumi comments that, “The reason why (almost all) famous embodiment teachers are white is because white people are the most dissociated people on this earth, so the medicines themselves simply decided to travel where they were needed.”

 

That is, the first generation of mostly white practitioners in the USA and elsewhere recognized something they needed from Guruji: the way the practice made them feel, the healing it provided, the insights they gained. They wanted to share it with others, and took it wholesale to their white communities. Some in the first generation went on to internalize his harshness, and project it on to their own pupils. They said things like, “My teacher would never allow that. Do it this way instead.” Or “You would get slapped for doing that in front of Mr. Iyengar. Never do that again.”

 

Many in second and third generations of Iyengar Yoga, however, had time and distance to process the emotional baggage of the teachings, and develop teaching in ways not shaped by colonization, that did not include bullying and shaming.

 

I fear that we are experiencing a clash of generations and cultures in Iyengar Yoga. Second and third generations of Iyengar Yoga students, especially those who have never studied directly with BKS Iyengar, are no longer willing to subject themselves to the methodology of the Guru and his “disciples.” We have language and reference points for abuse and trauma that were not employed in popular culture a generation ago. We will not tolerate misconduct or abuse in the yoga classroom or elsewhere. We agree that corporal punishment has no place in the yoga classroom.

 

At the same time, it’s almost exclusively white folks who are calling out the Guru and his followers. They are operating through a white lens and the POV of the colonizer, and its residual effects and traumas, which can last for generations. If the healing that was required in the 1970s and 80s was simply embodiment (as a departure from dissociation), perhaps the healing that is required in this decade is empowered embodiment to heal trauma. That is, we are seeking somatic practices that address the harm we’ve experienced, individually, collectively, and intergenerationally.

 

But we cannot do this effectively without understanding and coming to terms with the harm experienced by the accused perpetrator, Guruji, through the unspeakable harm of colonization. As timeless as we claim yoga is, we cannot remove Guruji’s teachings from the context he was living and practicing in. As Westerners, we cannot absolve ourselves of the hegemonic imperialism of the West and the lasting effects of the brutal British empire. Even now, we cannot escape coloniality, and our own distorted, colonized minds.

 

If Guruji developed his famous fire and shakti as a response to overcoming the oppression of whiteness, then it feels disingenuous for white folks now to blame him, as an individual, for aspects of the culture of Iyengar Yoga they reject. It’s like blaming street protestors for making trouble, without acknowledging the systems and institutions they are protesting, and the reasons behind their drastic actions.

 

Certainly we all have free will and individual choice, but we must contextualize our actions and decisions in history, politics, and culture, if we are to understand it and transform it.

 

I will not reject Guruji, nor the tradition of Iyengar Yoga. I straddle both worlds, as an immigrant from a colonized nation, who is now an unwitting representative of the American empire. I identify with Guruji and Geetaji’s anger. I recognize and resist white supremacy daily, and with every breath. My resistance is not always pretty nor graceful. I employ the profound tools I was taught by the Iyengars to wrestle, question, explore, evolve, to pray, and hopefully, heal. I carry the trauma of generations of colonization, and I hope, I also carry the healing. May it be so.

The Gift of Somatic Particularity in Iyengar Yoga

 

 

 

What in the world could that mean?

 

It’s a term I made up and just now started using, to describe what we are doing when we say we practice Iyengar Yoga. To say Iyengar Yoga is about “alignment” is both too narrow and too vague. Narrow, because usually folks are referring to the physical body only, and vague, because just how do you align the body with the mind, and the mind with the soul, as we are urged to do?

 

When we say Iyengar Yoga is about precision, that is also misleading. Yes, we frequently engage precise, incisive actions. Not just “stand on your feet,” but perhaps “join the feet and lengthen the big toes forward, while pressing the outer edge of the feet down and the inner heels together.” Why? Is it just to be bossy, dogmatic, and controlling? Precision itself is not the goal; it must serve a larger purpose.

 

So, what if we define the practice of Iyengar Yoga as a methodology to somatically understand and heal ourselves, by developing sensitivity to the particularities of our complex body/mind/breath matrix, through the technologies of āsana and prāṇāyāma? ie Somatic Particularity.

 

BKS Iyengar gifted all of us with an entryway into the body/mind/breath matrix. He taught us how to pay attention, feel, and come into relationship with the particularities of our bodies: Is the weight more on my right foot or the left foot? Why is one foot turning out? How does that relate to the hip pain, or to abdominal cramps? What about tension in my temple when I sit at my desk, or feelings of anxiety?

 

Through the somatic particularity of Iyengar Yoga, we learn to pay attention to ourselves. We start with the basics, the placement of the arms and legs, and how they relate to the trunk. With practice we become more observant and more detailed: how do the actions of my arms and legs affect my spine, my physiological body, and my emotional state? In āsana, we start to connect the observation of the physical body with the state of the mind, our feelings, and thoughts.

 

Through our individual practices of somatic particularity, we also learn to pay attention to social and cultural conditions and patterns. We become more sensitized not only to our own state, but also to the “energy in the room,” in our neighborhoods, in our cities, and beyond.

 

This is where the gift of somatic particularity comes in. Iyengar Yoga gives us specific tools to shape these observations into actions of healing and transformation. We learn not only how to heal the tweaky knee or aching neck, but also how to regulate our nervous systems, lower our blood pressure, calm the breath, manage trauma, and much more. Perhaps we can also apply somatic particularity to shift the dynamics in relationships, at home, work, and beyond.

 

How does this happen? There are no easy recipes or universal remedies. Sometimes the healing can happen in a flash, with one well-timed and attuned āsana. But usually the transformative healing evolves over years and decades. Through somatic particularity, we begin to understand how an action in one body part has a ripple effect through the entire organism.

 

Often the particularity is important. We move, as we are taught, from the gross to the subtle. The more particular and granular we become in our awareness and our actions, the more we access the subtle body. Abstraction does not typically bring about transformation. Abstraction usually happens in our minds, intellects, and imaginations, but the body functions concretely. No ideas but in things! as poet William Carlos Williams insisted.

 

This concreteness, this “thing-ness,” is the profound gift of Iyengar Yoga and somatic particularity. I have not experienced another somatic practice which consistently awakens this level of concrete sensitivity. Iyengar Yoga gives me the specific tools and techniques to engage the complex and magical instrument of the human body for the purpose of transformation and healing. We press this, we pull that, we turn this way and that, we invert, we extend, we compact, and all the while we are reshaping our minds and souls, always coming back to the body and its particularities.

 

May our devotion to this practice of somatic particularity be a transformative tool, to liberate ourselves and our communities, to expand our minds, hearts, and imaginations, to create the world we know is possible.