Could your Yoga practice be doing harm?

Could your yoga practice be harming you? Could it be harming others?

Yoga is not a word not often associated with words like harm, selfishness, manipulation, trafficking or abuse. But, all of these hide behind Yoga.

They push Yoga to the front like a painted puppet, and make it perform. Whether it’s in hip-openers or ‘detachment’ or ‘karma yoga’ or other universal truths of our human heritage which they twist to their own purposes.

When the mats are rolled away, what happens? S-xual and spiritual abuse, thought reform, denial of intuition, traf*icking.

To name a few. And all in the name of Yoga.

F that. Yoga is not yours, 🔻it is not a front for you to get what you want or to perform as something you’re not.

Those who mis-use yoga, whether to control others or simply for personal gain (often at the expense of others). Time’s up.🔻

Skip to 2021 🏙️ The 2nd edition of this book came out, naming the damaging cult I was then in and their long-standing and serious abuses, together with those of many other yoga teachers/‘schools’. I was still too deep in for it to even feel relevant to me.

I never read or even looked at the book, just listened to the identical dialogues and whitewashed references of the teachers.

This book was out of print for years, it’s author has faced multiple court cases by abusers trying to deflect and claim she is in fact in the wrong, not them.

She fought them. Many might’ve given up, but she put her neck out for survivors and for future generations of yoga students, seekers and women. For this I am thankful.

Now that I have been free for 1.5 years I recognise that this book was, is, pivotal.

This is a book that not just me and other whistleblowers and survivors of abuse in yoga, but many yoga practitioners, especially women, will look back on and see as important, maybe a turning point in their understanding of themselves and their bodies in relation to whatever it is we call Yoga.

“I trust that with the whole truth out, all damage can stop. It it is time to ensure that it stops and there is No More Harm” - @umadinsmoretuli

#yoni #yonishakti #tantra #yoga #spiritualabuse #yogini