Trigger warning. A preliminary summary of testimony given by former child residents of the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain, north of Sydney, Australia. Ive compiled it for the broader yoga community, with a call for practitioners to both support the victims of abuse and reconsider key elements of modern yoga literature and method. ____ For ten years, I’ve carried around a little blue book called Yoga Nidra, written by (or transcribed from talks by) Swami Satyananda. It was produced by the Yoga Publications Trust. At home, it sits on my shelf beside at least twenty other YPT volumes, with their primary-colour spines flashing like a row of crayons. Yoga Nidra details a technique I first learned and fell in love with during a yoga therapy training in California. The practice has been profound for me in many ways. But I don’t know how I can continue to use this method, much less teach it to my students, now that this testimony against Satyananda has accumulated. The notion of leading people into a vulnerable, trance-like state by using a technique that was invented by an alleged rapist who then validated it by correlation with obscure medieval sources is intolerable to me. The power and utility of the methods emerging from Satyananda’s legacy rest on an implicit appreciation of the man’s integrity, which is now under serious, even fatal, attack.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 21:04:08 +0000
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