Pal has done a lot of work here to excavate what I’ve said about myself in the past, all to serve the conclusion they made — years ago — that I am a fraud. They’ve found some mistakes in the various iterations of my timeline, through bios and bio-fragments published by myself or hosts/employers over the years. I believe these are all clarified on my current “About” page. Without any transparency about their own positionality, they’ve lampooned my study of Ayurveda as being primarily bookish (which is fair, if completely unremarkable). They made fun of my first YTT trainer, a beloved teacher in San Francisco. And they’ve fairly, if inaccurately, pointed out three instances of scope-of-practice overreach in my language. These are important to note.
1) In early advertising copy for Threads of Yoga, I was incorrect in my description of it as a “new translation.” The text itself directly denies this, while also directing readers towards scholarly translations, but I did not take enough care there, and have since corrected this where I can.
2) For a while, I used the term “Ayurvedic Psychotherapy” to describe an aspect of the consultations I used to provide. It seemed appropriate at the time, because the matters I would discuss with clients were often psychological, and the setting often seemed to carry the feeling of what I knew from my experience with a psychotherapist. I wasn’t as clear as I should have been at the time that this was overstepping a training boundary. When I understood this through feedback from friends studying psychotherapy formally, I removed that language and had to reconsider how I spoke about and conducted consultations. I’m almost certain I never used the terms “psychotherapy” or “psychotherapist” as stand-alones, as Pal insinuates. The descriptor “Ayurvedic” was an attempt to bridge a cultural and practical gap. I wanted people to know that Ayurveda purports to address all areas of life, that that address happens through something that looks like talk therapy, but also includes somatic practices. It’s still a fair description, but not one I’m willing to use, because can be confusing, and as of 2015, “psychotherapy” is now a controlled term in Ontario. It wasn’t before. Nor was “Ayurvedic Health Educator” or “therapist” for that matter — and they still aren’t.
3) Within the copy of my consultation page, I once had a line suggesting that I was using pulse-diagnostic techniques. That was there because the overreaching correspondence content of Frawley, along with Vasant Lad’s book on the subject, made it sound like this was possible through self-study, experience, and practice. Combine this with enthusiasm and an inferiority complex, and yes, I overstepped with this. When I later understood how impossibly complex pulse-reading is in Ayurveda, I struck that language from the copy.
What Pal gets wrong is that while I did create a series of courses that offered a “certification” I felt would be similar to the one I earned, the series was never completed. I started “teaching” Ayurveda in 2005, but only in limited intro-lecture type events to various YTT groups. Pal is misinformed to use the present tense to say that I “sell therapy and psychotherapy”, in part because all of my time now is devoted to study and writing, and in part because I find that the “consultant” role in popular Ayurvedic practice is now too undefined for me — both generally and in terms of the formal training that I would have available to me for it to make sense any more. If I were to see clients privately again, I would do a formal psychotherapy training. I’ve now suspended the consultation page from my site; I thank Pal for flagging it. I no longer even have an office.
I’ll segue now to some thoughts about the attempt to shame me that drives Pal’s post. I am now as open as I believe I can be about my training and relationships in the yoga world. The short form bio is that I’m an auto-didact who has had some good and several terrible encounters with teachers. Getting clear and public about this did not come all at once, nor easily because the six years prior to my first YTT were spent in two abusive cults.
People emerge from cults confused and traumatized, and I was no exception. What do we say about ourselves after years in Satyananda Yoga, Bikram, 3HO, Anusara, Jivamukti, Ashtanga, if we’ve been enmeshed in cultic dynamics? How many people at this moment are quietly scrubbing mentions of Jois and trips to Mysore from their pages? How do we talk about the things we learned that were good — either from or despite our abusers — whilst avoiding the social stigma of having been a cultist? My choice in the beginning was to say very little about myself. That wasn’t sustainable. Then I moved on to a stammering stage, as Pal describes it.
I’ve said that yoga saved me from depression; it also saved me from the self-stripping process of being a cultist. The inflationary self-descriptions of my learning models — Frawley first among them, and there were many others — established a framework for creating the “legitimacy” that I clung to. Padding my bio with the names and qualifications of everyone I studied with, however briefly, was a way of holding onto something “real” in an industry literally built (as I now understand) on half-truths. From their panning of DG White’s scholarship on Krishnamacharya’s bio, Pal is uninterested in this phenomenon, even as they criticize me through a pseudonym. Nevertheless, half-truths and outright falsehoods govern the culture. Jois’ system is not a parampara, vinyasa has no pre-modern existence as a sequences of postures, Iyengar did not teach “medical yoga”, Kundalini Yoga was never a thing, and Michael Stone, as Pat O’Hara mentioned in her elegy, was not a Zen teacher. Yoga itself is aspirational: so too are the bios of its evangelists. It took me about four years to realize that I was playing that game, on a small scale. I was mimicking larger men, because it served me. The debt I owe for those years I can pay for through the work of trying to analyze and describe how that happens.
My former self-presentation, which Pal is deconstructing here, shows more than inconsistencies: it shows the process of someone coming to grips with a broken self and the recent past, while having some gifts to offer, related to that past. I was not entirely sure of the provenance or meaning or value of these gifts. I attached them to external signs to create the image of a more coherent personality than was available to me.
Since Pal is so big on omissions, I’ll point out their own most important omission: I have mobilized my personal history into two things I now believe are more helpful than whatever insights I have into yoga or Ayurveda. I openly talk about cultic experience and abuse — I’ve gotten over the stigma of my own entrapment. I am now, in addition to the other content I produce, an advocate for ethics, transparency, and a well-defined scope of practice for yoga teachers. I’m doing this because I’ve lived it: I have felt what it is like to go beyond what I truly know. The foundation of the cultic is deception, and I’m now preoccupied with how deception is central to the narratives of authority in yoga.
I’ve blocked Pal from FB not just because of their mendacious ad hominem comments over the years, but precisely because of what they have shown in this article. If someone is willing to obsessively track and pick apart the language I used to describe my life in my early 30s as I was recovering from cult abuse, as if there’s nothing else that’s relevant in my work, or as if I am not a learning and changing person — then they just don’t get to see me. Also, I will no longer tolerate their network, which includes one prominent Ashtanga thought leader who has lied to my employers and emotionally abused and harassed my family.
My autobiography sins are real, small, and now addressed. This criticism of them is so over the top it’s obvious there’s little I could do to satisfy it. I suspect this is because the obsession is about the actual content I produce, grandiosely flagged by Pal as ruining the “possibility for peace.” Ironically, this fetish for arguments from authority is exactly why I opted to say so little about myself from 2011 to 2015 — and every time my character and training was attacked during that period instead of the actual content, that decision was validated. However, a further irony is that that same Ashtanga thought leader mentioned above once showed me how concealing my bio details was a form of patriarchal power in itself. I learned that from her, and published what is now current, in an effort at transparency.
So I am happy to say that I’m somewhat capable of agreeing with and learning from people who have never met me, and who despise me for reasons likely concealed from themselves. If yoga is about learning and changing, perhaps I have learned something. What I notice about Pal and others is that this that entertaining the possibility that I have looked at my mistakes and attempted to correct them is impossible. They need me to be a symbol. Which leaves us with a final irony. My “pathology”, as Pal would diagnose it (according to some undisclosed expertise) is purported to be that I can’t help but attack gurus. The diagnosis is a defence against what I observably try to do, which is to humanize them, to show that if they are special, it is because they are wounded. Understanding the intergenerational violence of the Krishnamacharya lineage, or looking at Roach through Shaw’s lens of traumatized narcissism — these are acts of empathy. These acts would fail if I were to dehumanize my subjects as per Pal’s treatment of me here.
