Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
36: Somatic Dominance
1.2k Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Episode 36 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this listener-requested episode, Sarah and Laurel discuss somatic dominance, a phrase coined by author Matthew Remski to describe the manner in which teachers of movement, and yoga specifically, can come to exert control over their students, and the potential for abuse of this control.
Content Warning: This episode contains references to physical and sexual abuse.
We discuss:
- The definition of somatic dominance
- How some teachers use somatic influence, purposefully or not
- Sarah’s experiences as a Jivamukti Yoga teacher and practitioner, including the famously aggressive physical adjustments, the culture of explaining away behaviors and pain as karma, and whether Jivamukti Yoga can be considered “cult-lite”
- How we can all monitor and adjust our teaching methodology to avoid unconsciously creating unwanted somatic influence over our students
Matthew Remski book: Practice and All is Coming
Remski article on Sharon Gannon’s Somatic Dominance
Remski article on Michael Roach, Christie McNally and Ian Thorson
NY Times article: Michael Roach and Christie McNally
NY Times article: Diamond Mountain University and death of Ian Thorson
Sign up here for the Movement Logic Newsletter and receive a free Hips Mini Course!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Topic Introduction: Somatic Dominance
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Cork, physical therapist, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversdorf, strength coach and yoga teacher. So this is a listener requested topic this episode. We're going to be talking about somatic dominance. Now you may have already learned a lot about somatic dominance, or this might be the first time you're hearing about it. And in any event, we're coming at it today with our personal perspectives.
00:01:04
Speaker
And speaking of listener requests, you know what I would like to request of a listener? What's that? Any listener. Every listener. If you want us to talk about something specific, the best way to go about it is to write a review. And in that review, say,
00:01:23
Speaker
Hey, could you talk about this? Could you talk about shoulders more? Sure. Can I know a little bit more about the knees? Great. Things like that. We love that stuff. So if there's anything you want us to talk about, write a review and stick it in that review. We read all of them. We do. OK. So back to this episode. And this is really the only time we've ever had to do this.
Defining Somatic Dominance
00:01:47
Speaker
I am putting in a little content warning here because this episode does contain references to physical and sexual abuse.
00:01:54
Speaker
So Matthew Remsky coined the phrase somatic dominance and full disclosure before we start this episode, Matthew is a colleague of both of ours. I gave some background to him on my experiences with Jeeva Mukti Yoga for some of his writing. In particular, we spoke about the period of time when Sharon Gannon and David Life, who are the co-founders of Jeeva Mukti Yoga,
00:02:17
Speaker
were working closely with Michael Roach, which was roughly 2007 to 2009. Matthew Remsky spent three years studying under Michael Roach and talks about it at length in his Conspiraturale podcast, which is a great podcast. If you're not already listening to it, you should. It's one of my go-tos, my favorites.
00:02:37
Speaker
So if you've read Matthew's book, Practice and All is Coming, you will have probably experienced the same horror that I did when starting to unpack the abuse that so many people, and women in particular, suffered at the hands of BKS Iyengar, Pitavi Joyce, and other yoga teachers in positions of power.
00:02:56
Speaker
There is a lot to learn about the behaviors that led to this abuse and assault. A lot of this has been brought to light by Matthew's investigations and by the bravery of the women who were abused in coming forward and speaking about what happened to them. I'm going to link to all of the different pages and sources that I got this information from in this episode. What we're going to talk about today though is a little more subtle.
00:03:22
Speaker
And Matthew does a really good job in his writings of helping to clarify that it's not just the big obvious abuses that constitute somatic dominance, but the small behavioral shifts that we all make, consciously or not, to assert control over a room.
00:03:38
Speaker
and what those shifts might look like because whether we like it or not, if we've taught a yoga class, we've probably asserted some amount of somatic either dominance or if it's not that extreme, maybe somatic influence over our students.
Somatic Dominance vs. Somatic Movement
00:03:54
Speaker
So, what is somatic dominance? Well, the word somatic is a word that means it's referring to the body, especially as distinct from the mind. So, you may have heard the phrase somatics or somatic movement, which is generally considered movement for the sake of movement, movement for its own sake.
00:04:11
Speaker
I went down a rabbit hole with somatic movement and some very bizarre claims around how somatic movement uses a highly specialized type of eccentric contraction, and that kind of broke my brain. Pendiculation. Oh, my God. And then we're like, oh. So thankfully, this episode is not about somatic movement. And I just want to say, I really do enjoy all the somatic movements that I've learned. It's a lot of like rolling and flowing. Feldenkrais. Yeah, it feels good. I think there's just
00:04:41
Speaker
of maybe some pseudoscience going on. In any event, this is a movement style. It's a totally different thing from somatic dominance. I just wanted to make that part really clear.
Subtle Influences in Yoga
00:04:52
Speaker
Right on. Let's get Matthew Remsky's definition of somatic dominance. That is, the manner in which teachers assume possession and authority over students' bodies. Here's a quote from him. Somatic dominance is a primal nonverbal deception that frames control as care.
00:05:11
Speaker
This same deception is perfected by the abusive, charismatic leader and their enablers. And in the worst cases, obscures the lines between lineage and intergenerational abuse, between devotion and trauma bonding.
00:05:26
Speaker
We briefly talked about this in our cueing part two episode when we were talking about hands-on cueing and the possibility of asserting somatic dominance that is sort of disguised as quote unquote assisting or deepening the experience or deepening the pose.
00:05:42
Speaker
And as we mentioned earlier, we see this often with men over women's bodies. We see it with teachers, male teachers over women's bodies. We see a lot of charismatic male leaders using tactics of bullying, physical, emotional, sexual assault. And we've seen in the past few years with the Me Too movement in particular, not just in the yoga world, but in all worlds, this abuse dynamic being brought to light. But
00:06:10
Speaker
somatic dominance doesn't have to be so overt and so aggressive. And when I was writing this episode, I remembered, randomly, this one experience I had at the Ojai Yoga crib, which was a annual, like a yoga weekend where lots of teachers came into Ojai and, you know, you could take a class with this person and then I'd take an afternoon class. It was like a yoga conference, right? It was cool. Ojai's beautiful. So I think it was 2010. And there's this teacher named Eric Shipman.
00:06:40
Speaker
and lots of people love him. I had never worked with him or even seen him before so he was doing a lecture in the evening and so I was like well I'm gonna go to his lecture. So sitting in the room he comes in and he goes to the front of the room and sits in his chair and then is just completely silent and doesn't say anything and while he's being silent and
00:07:04
Speaker
everyone else is also being silent because we're like, well, we're waiting for you to talk. And he spent, I mean, it was really, it was a long time. It was maybe 10 minutes of not talking, which is a really long time to be not talking when you're in front of a room of people who are expecting you to be talking. And what he was doing instead was kind of making a lot of intense eye contact with various people in the room, maybe people who were
00:07:27
Speaker
I have no idea, but maybe it was like students of his that he recognized or people who, I don't know. It could literally be anything. I don't know. But I was sitting there and I wasn't saying anything because it's this social contract that we had all entered into. This man is here to talk. It's not my job to put my hand up and go, are you going to start talking anytime soon? I mean, you totally go down. I kind of wish I had. And honestly,
00:07:54
Speaker
2023 Sarah Court probably would have, much more likely than 2010 Sarah Court. You know, it wasn't a verbal agreement that we weren't going to talk, but everyone just sort of fell under this like thing of well until he talks, we're not talking. And this was well after I was done with my experiences at Jeevan Mukti Yoga. And now, because of that experience, I had a pretty critical eye for this kind of thing. And so I was sitting there being like,
00:08:21
Speaker
is this like the second coming of Jesus Christ? Like why aren't we all sitting here waiting for this man to start talking? And the experience for me was very off-putting.
Cultural Influences in Yoga Communities
00:08:32
Speaker
I did not enjoy it. And so I then kind of
00:08:36
Speaker
didn't I didn't then value the rest of his lecture because it felt manipulative yes it felt manipulative and again I don't know why he was doing it I can't I can't claim to know why he was doing it he may not have meant to be manipulative but I experienced it that way
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, it seems sort of strange that someone like you and probably several other people in the room had never maybe heard of him or been to any of his offerings and then you go in and there's someone on stage and you sit down and that's just usually not how it goes where they just sit there and stare out and be quiet for 10 whole minutes. Long time. 10 whole minutes. Yeah. I found it weird. So that's an example of a kind of somatic, we can just call it influence, let's say.
00:09:21
Speaker
that is not the overt aggressive kind. I don't know if we could call it abusive, which is in Matthew's definition. But that kind of lesser version of it, that not actual physical abusive component of it, can also be done by a woman. It doesn't have to be performed by a man. For example, in one of his online writings, Matthew Ramsey talks about a video, and he has the video so you can watch what he's talking about.
00:09:47
Speaker
Sharon Gannon one of the co-founders of Diva Mukti teaching a class and When she enters the room everybody in the room starts doing this very deep waist level bow With their hands in prayer and then looking up at her So it's it's this very kind of you know, you're making yourself smaller than the teacher. That's the idea that is a very unsettling image of
00:10:14
Speaker
Well, what I find interesting about it as well, as someone I was involved in Juve Mukti before Michael Roach, and then during the Michael Roach period, a little bit after,
00:10:25
Speaker
Can you say a little bit about who Michael Rocha is? Yes. Yes. Let me finish this idea. Okay. Then I'm going to do a little bit about him and I'll stick it in earlier. All right. That bow was absolutely an influence from Michael Rocha because it didn't used to happen. But when he came on the scene and the Jeeva Mukti crowd saw Michael Rocha's followers doing it to him, they adopted it and started doing it to Sharon and David as well.
00:10:52
Speaker
That was definitely part of his influence. Michael Roach, if you don't know who he is, is a Buddhist teacher. This is where it gets a little complicated as far as what title I give him, because there's a lot of debate around whether he deserves or should have the title of Geshe, which is a Tibetan Buddhist title.
00:11:22
Speaker
But he studied Tibetan Buddhism. He was in monastery for a huge period of time. And then he came out and started teaching in the United States and in other countries. You know, you can, I would recommend, there's a great article in the New York Times that talks about him and his partner, Christy McNally.
Physical Adjustments and Harm
00:11:43
Speaker
In essence, they created something they called Diamond Mountain University.
00:11:47
Speaker
but it kind of had cultish qualities. I'm getting that. And then there were some very strange things that happened and somebody died and it's very problematic. Let's link that one in the show. I absolutely will.
00:12:01
Speaker
So this deep bow that everyone is doing to Sharon Gannon in this video, here's what Matthew Rumsey says about it. He says, right from the beginning of class, there is a contagious way to be there. It's sophisticated because it looks like respect, surrender, and even gentleness. And the teacher and some students might even feel all of those things deeply and authentically. But the impact is that the people in that room who show strong buy-in for what she's doing,
00:12:30
Speaker
are now under her somatic influence. And we are later on definitely going to unpack the difference between what is somatic influence versus what is somatic dominance. It seems like you have to have somatic influence before you can have somatic dominance, maybe as a kind of step one. Yeah. But you don't have to transition to dominance. And ideally, you don't. Correct.
00:12:53
Speaker
As a teacher you have to have some amount of somatic influence because you are influencing the students in the room. Otherwise you would just be another student, right? But there's ways to do that and that's what we're going to talk about where we don't cross over into that dominance.
00:13:08
Speaker
aspect. What this is making me think of though is that the other students in the room bowing in supplication are contributing to the influence. Absolutely. Because if you see everybody bowing, probably you're going to bow, right? If you see everybody else not talking, you're not going to talk, right? And that's a really big part of somatic dominance is that you are impacted by the people around you as well as the teacher.
00:13:29
Speaker
Okay, so this is where I am going to spend a little time, Laurel, talking about my experience with Jiva Mukti Yoga. I'm here for it. Thank you. And if you're not familiar with Jiva Mukti Yoga, it is a very... God, how do I describe it? It was once described to me when I told... I believe he was an Ayyengar practitioner. I said, I do Jiva Mukti Yoga. He goes, oh, that rock and roll shit.
00:13:52
Speaker
And I said, yes. Because it does have a rock and roll vibe. Sharon and David started in the punk rock world of Seattle. They were badasses. And then they did a bunch of yoga. They had a huge influence on their lives. They started this style of yoga that they called ji mukti yoga. And it had several features that really differentiated it from other styles of yoga.
00:14:18
Speaker
One of the features is these very full on intense physical assists or adjustments. This is not a light touch. This is not a guiding hand. This is something like lying your entire body onto someone's back while they are in Paschimottanasana, forward fold. So you're putting half of your own body weight on top of somebody else's body in order to
00:14:47
Speaker
quote unquote, deepen the experience for them. Or standing with your own feet on somebody's upper thighs in Supta Virasana, reclining hero pose. Ouch. Yeah. Literally ouch.
00:15:02
Speaker
Laurel, have you ever taken a Jeeva Mukti class or a class that was inspired by Jeeva Mukti in terms of that intense level of physical adjustments? I did. When I was a brand new teacher, I got this book of coupons to yoga studios all over New York City where I got to try a class once or twice for free. Jeeva Mukti was on there. I'd heard of it. Very famous studio near Union Square. And so, yeah, I took a class. It was really different than what I was used to. Tell me more.
00:15:32
Speaker
Well, I got a lot of adjustments and I wasn't used to that. They were pretty aggressive. I didn't get hurt, didn't hurt, but I was really overwhelmed a little bit with the amount of aggressive adjustments happening. And there was a point in class where a male instructor, we were all in pigeon, no props. And he said, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. And then we stayed there for a very long time.
00:16:01
Speaker
I think I lost circulation to my foot. It did start to hurt, but I knew better at that point. I knew that that wasn't right. I knew that this place was a little fucked up. So I didn't go back. But it definitely left an impression on me. It gave me some perspective on what some people think yoga is. For some people's experience. Pretty sure that's not what I thought it was.
00:16:24
Speaker
So these very intense physical adjustments, we learned them in our teacher training. I did them on people. I had them done on me. Jiva even had a thing called an in-class private where if you were taking the class, you had a second
00:16:40
Speaker
teacher, not the person leading the class, but someone who was working just with you and they were doing these intense adjustments on you for the entire class. So every single pose you were doing was getting quote unquote deep. That sounds exhausting for the practitioner and the teacher.
00:17:00
Speaker
Yeah.
Training and Trauma in Jeeva Mukti Yoga
00:17:01
Speaker
I mean, it's intense, but the intensity was there. That was kind of their thing, right? And so in essence, if I try to give this some sort of like musculoskeletal context, when you get yourself into a shape, you're using something called active range of motion. You're moving yourself there under your own steam. You're going as far as you are able to on your own. There is something called active assisted range of motion, which is when
00:17:25
Speaker
I help you get a little further into it. And for most shapes, your body stops you. Your muscle spindles stop you with about 5% more.
00:17:36
Speaker
potential movement into that range. Because your nervous system is like, we're not going to that full capacity because who knows what's going to happen there. We're going to stop a little bit short of it. It's like the stop light is not right in the middle of the intersection or the stop line at an intersection is right in the middle of the intersection. It's before the intersection, right? Yes. It's like stop before you go too far. Exactly.
00:17:56
Speaker
This is, you know, doing this kind of extra stretch on people. It might feel good, which to, if you are somebody who likes the feeling of stretch, which not everybody does, it probably feels good to you, but it doesn't have a lot of value. It's not then, you're not then more stretchy, having done it, for any measurable amount of time. You're also not able to control that amount of movement, right? And very arguably, I mean, nobody was measuring is this 5% more. You were just encouraged to push.
00:18:23
Speaker
And it was kind of not acceptable to not allow the assist to happen. The only circumstances that would have been acceptable would be something like, I broke my ankle. Or you would have to have a very
00:18:39
Speaker
serious kind of an injury. Did you need a note from the doctor? I mean, no, but I mean, I wish you kind of did, frankly. I wish any doctor was anywhere near any of this. It was understood that if you were taking the class, part of that being in that room was that you were agreeing to these deep assists, these deep adjustments. And the only people that I ever saw getting just a straight up pass were like the celebrity yoga teachers who would come and take class because they weren't Jeeva Mukti teachers or Jeeva Mukti students per se. So for whatever reason, they got to be like, no, thank you. What? Yeah.
00:19:09
Speaker
Let's be clear, people got injured from it. I have an injury in my neck that happened in teacher training because from day one of teacher training, we were doing 10-minute shoulder stance and 5-minute head stance every single day with no problems. That seems like a lot to start with. It's a lot. Nobody teaching or practicing had any qualifications beyond yoga certification.
00:19:34
Speaker
discussion particularly in teacher training as to the physiological effect of these assists or the possibility of injuring someone with your assist. Were you ever injured from an assist because you were injured from doing too much of a pose, but were you ever injured when someone actually like put their hands on you? I wasn't, but I knew people that happened. And this was the general tone of the general agreement of the teacher training was that you were not questioning anything. And the reason I know this is because on day one or day two of the teacher training,
00:20:03
Speaker
I had a question. And I was like, I have a question? No, I had a question. And it was about, they were using the word God. And ichivamauti yoga is a purposely spiritual practice. They're like, the practice of yoga has a spiritual end. And I was like, cool, I'm in. But then they're using the word God. And I started to think about people have feelings about the word God, not always positive. And so I can't remember what my question was, but it was about the use of the word God.
00:20:33
Speaker
And I basically immediately got shut down by Sharon. The answer that I got was essentially like, don't ask questions. You have to let us just teach this to you. And I had so much kind of
00:20:50
Speaker
confusion and discomfort in those first few days of the teacher training, because there's so much coming at you. I finally, on day three, and I remember this happening, and in retrospect, now I know what happened. On day three, I gave up. I gave up any attempt to ask questions, to try to maintain any sort of control over my own body. So day three was when I gave them somatic dominance over me.
00:21:19
Speaker
In that moment it seems like your only alternative would have been to leave the training. Yeah. Yeah, and in that moment it actually felt good Because what felt bad was all of this cognitive dissonance that I was having all of this confusion all of this like well Wait a minute. They're saying this but they're doing this and I don't this is seems really insane And there's no there's hardly enough time for sleeping. There's no time to do anything except eat and then run to the next thing What is happening?
00:21:46
Speaker
And I wanted to learn what they were teaching. I had had a really good experience as a student before I became a teacher. And so the only way for that to happen, it seemed, was for me to just kind of give over. And so that's what I did. The word jivan mukti or jivan mukta is a person who is liberated while living, someone who attains enlightenment while they're still in a human body form.
00:22:12
Speaker
there was this striving towards this. That's what we were all supposed to be going for. But what it meant, a lot of the time, anything that showed up as less than this liberated while living person would just be attributed to, well, that's your karma. Karma was thrown around a lot as a, well, why did I lose my car keys? Well, karmically in the past,
00:22:39
Speaker
you threw someone's car keys away, and so now you've lost your car keys. What a convenient response. And, you know, I remember specifically one time in a different workshop with Sharon. Somebody asked Sharon, they said, you know, I've got this pain behind my shoulder blade. What is that from? And she gave a kind of very convoluted, completely non-musculoskeletal answer that essentially ended with, it's your karma.
00:23:04
Speaker
And so pain was very often relabeled as healing. For example, during the teacher training, we practiced seated meditation starting at 20 minutes a day. And I don't remember exactly, but I believe building up to 30, maybe 40 minutes. And this was before I knew exactly what was going on with my hip. I had hip dysplasia. This was before I had any understanding of the fact that I had arthritis in my hip. And it was very uncomfortable for me.
00:23:34
Speaker
senior teacher who was assigned to be my mentor, I would talk to her about it. And then eventually, I think what happened was I just, because her response was never like, oh, well, let's find you a better position that doesn't hurt. Her response was, you know, you just need to push through basically.
00:23:52
Speaker
like the teacher who told you, like, Pigeon, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right or something like that, right? Yeah, it's your fault. Yeah. And so I think what I did in that very confusing time was I just kind of absorbed the pain into my own psyche till I didn't actually feel it anymore. And then I was praised by her when I stopped talking about it. So you think you stopped feeling the pain? Like, did you remember, like, you actually did stop feeling the pain? I stopped feeling the pain, but I don't think
00:24:21
Speaker
You kind of dissociate it. I think that's exactly what I did, is that I dissociated myself away from the pain. And since then, I've had multiple hip surgeries. I've had a hip replacement. There's literally things wrong with my hip, or there were, right? But that was not anywhere in their mode of yoga. And to be fair to David and Sharon, they would argue exactly the same thing. They would say, yeah, no, that's not what we do.
00:24:46
Speaker
So it wasn't handled particularly well. And any physical discomfort was explained as kind of, you're too attached to your physical form. You want to go beyond this physical body. And so dissociation from your physical form was actually really encouraged. And there were lots of sort of miracle stories about senior teachers that healed their pain using jeevumukti yoga. And this dismissal of the physical experience was enabled throughout all of the teachers and all of the senior teachers.
00:25:16
Speaker
I remember one time taking a class from a senior teacher, and during that class, one of my teacher training cohorts, someone who was in teacher training with me, so this was after our training, he was practicing those hands-on physical assists on me during class, which is what we would do all the time before we mauled our students. We practiced it on each other. So he was doing those on me.
00:25:42
Speaker
She came over at one point to change how he was assisting me. So he was assisting me in rotated chair, rotated kurtasana. And the way we learned to do it is you would take your legs, your thighs, and you would basically like clamp onto the sides. You'd go behind the person doing the chair pose, the rotated chair. You would clamp your legs around the sides of their hips in order to hold their pelvis in place, theoretically. And then you would use your hands to increase the rotation of their spine.
00:26:09
Speaker
And when she came over, she changed the way that he was doing it so that instead one of his knees was actually between my legs and his leg ended up pressing up against my vulva.
00:26:24
Speaker
And he said something to her, to the effect of, I don't, we were in the middle of a class. I don't think he used the word vagina out loud, but he said something along the lines of, I'm touching her. I'm like touching her, touching her. Like it was very clear that that's what he meant. He didn't mean like, my hands are touching her back. He meant my leg is touching the intimate part of her body. And he was uncomfortable. He was uncomfortable. And you were uncomfortable. Here's what's crazy. I actually wasn't uncomfortable because I had,
00:26:53
Speaker
taken any potential discomfort and just shoved it so deep inside that I took everything that happened in Jeeva Mukti as something that was getting me towards an enlightened experience. And this was an opportunity for me to not be attached to my physical form. He was uncomfortable. I should have been uncomfortable, but I wasn't. I mean, I'm not blaming myself, but you know, he expressed it to the teacher. The teacher basically ignored him and he did the assist.
00:27:21
Speaker
And then we moved on, and neither one of us discussed it afterwards, me and my fellow teacher that was doing the assist. And I believed that this was all in service of my own enlightenment. And this is what somatic dominance does. It requires a student to ignore any questions about what might be happening, like, hey, should this man's knee really be touching my genitals? And it teaches you to just behave with unquestioning obedience
00:27:51
Speaker
and to take part in this kind of magical thinking that all of this, including this experience, is leading to my spiritual growth. Now here's what I want to say very clearly. I do not blame my cohort member for doing this. I am not sitting here being like, this person abused me. I think the abuse was much higher in the hierarchy. I just want to be very clear. I'm not sitting here being like, this man abused me. I am sitting here being like this system of yoga
00:28:21
Speaker
contains a lot of problems, including a lot of turning a blind eye and dismissal of behavior that is essentially abusive.
Cult-like Dynamics in Jeeva Mukti Yoga
00:28:31
Speaker
It creates conditions both inside the student and inside the cohort where abuse can happen very easily, often in somewhat mundane circumstances, like let's practice hands-on assists. There are larger forces at play with regards to how that happened, I think is what you're saying.
00:28:50
Speaker
And when I tell these stories, I'm very aware that it sounds pretty close to the kinds of things that you hear happening in cults. And I would argue, and Matthew would agree with me, Matthew Remsky, that Chief Mukti is kind of like a cult light, because you've got charismatic leaders, you've got an army of followers who deeply believe in the cause, and you've got no questioning allowed.
00:29:15
Speaker
I'm also aware that the easiest response is, why the hell would you let this happen? Which is what a lot of people say when they watch a documentary about cults. Why would these people let this happen? Are they stupid? The cult members. Yes. Why would they let this happen to them?
00:29:32
Speaker
What's very interesting is a lot of people in cults are actually very intelligent, weirdly. But the only answer that I can really give is it's the boiling frog, right? If that had happened to me in the very first Jeeva Mukti class I ever walked into, I would have been like, these people are fucked in the head, and I would have walked out of there. But it didn't. I had tons of great experiences as a student. And then I had a very intense teacher training experience.
00:29:56
Speaker
which also resembled what they do in a cult where they remove you from your regular surroundings. We went to Omega Institute in upstate New York and we stayed there for a month. There was not good cell service. We didn't have TV. There was no internet. I remember trying to make a phone call and you had to stand on this one spot on top of a tree trunk and then you get one bar. We were very cut off and we were very immersed in the experience because
00:30:24
Speaker
you had very little time to do. I remember I always had indigestion because the hour that we had for lunch, half of that I had to do laundry. I would do something else, like my homework. I was always shoveling food down and then trying to use some more time to do something else. This is a pretty standard cult practice where you separate people from their friends and family.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I wanted what was being promised, which was this experience of peace and wholeness and spiritual growth. And so then the way that I was mentored to teach as I was becoming a teacher was very much as you as a teacher are controlling the room, which to some extent is true because
00:31:09
Speaker
If you walked into the room as a teacher and you just started practicing yoga and you didn't say anything, then you're not really teaching. It would be very confusing for the students in the room. But there wasn't really any discussion around power dynamics or how to make language or cueing choices that might be inclusive versus exclusive or anything like that. And I do clearly remember after teacher training, the very first class that I taught,
00:31:38
Speaker
When I told people to get into a pose and they did it, I was so struck by like, wow, I am in a power position. But nobody told me how to not abuse it. Right. And Jeevan Mukti also did what they sort of referred to as the Dharma Talk at the beginning of class, which a lot of other styles of yoga kind of did as well. But essentially, they would have a
00:32:04
Speaker
monthly topic if I remember and so you were encouraged to speak around that topic and the topic might be something like Ahimsa, non-violence. It might be part of a yoga sutra or something like that but then you're also establishing yourself as this sort of teacher, the spiritual teacher right from the start when your experience with this is you know what a couple of months old, right? You're far from being an expert. I would contrast that with
00:32:28
Speaker
After teaching class, going into the back admin area and seeing Sharon yelling at one of the front desk people about something that I knew had nothing to do with them, but this would get explained away as sometimes you will see your teacher doing things that you don't understand. There was always an explanation for something.
00:32:52
Speaker
it was a lot easier in that moment to just be like, I mean, I guess that's a thing than to be like, what? What are you talking about? And so anyone who's using somatic dominance tactics, they're banking on you having poor enough self-esteem that you're just going to go along with it. And luckily for me, I actually hit a point where I was like, you know what? I'm out of this because there's just, there's too many examples of things that just, I saw that were in my opinion, just wrong.
00:33:20
Speaker
And not only were you not really allowed to fight back about it, but who were you going to go to? There was no HR department. There was no oversight committee. There's nobody to complain about. And if you did complain, you were the one at fault, pretty much. So people learned not to complain. I do remember thinking at the time that there were a lot of people
00:33:44
Speaker
who were looking specifically, well, a lot of people look to yoga to improve their lives in some way. There are a lot of people at Jiva Mukti, in my opinion, who were looking to that practice because it had a spiritual component, overtly, as something that was going to make their lives better. And Jiva Mukti kind of explained the being in the world as, you know, everybody else who's not engaging in this kind of practice,
00:34:13
Speaker
is engaging in the world in a self-centered or shallow manner. And so they're not seeing the reality of what could be. And so here with our spiritual practice, that's what we're doing. And I remember thinking, you know, if you have some sort of mental health issue
00:34:33
Speaker
Of course the rest of the world doesn't make sense to you, and you don't make sense to the rest of the world. And here are these people, these very charismatic people, surrounded by people who seem to adore them, who are saying, of course it didn't work, because the world is wrong.
00:34:49
Speaker
come in here and you're going to learn what's
Personal Reflections and Corporate Contrast
00:34:52
Speaker
right. And there absolutely were a lot of people in and around the studio over the years who, you know, I'm not a psychotherapist, and I knew a lot less than that I do now, but I certainly could tell that they had some sort of mental health issue that was not being addressed. And it certainly wasn't being addressed by Jeeva Mukti Yoga. I'm going to take a breather. Because that was a lot. I've actually never told anybody
00:35:18
Speaker
any of that before. Well thank you for sharing. Thanks. I want to contrast this with your experience as a teacher and your teacher training because you worked for a more corporate yoga company. A very corporate yoga company. Can you tell us more about what that was like? Yeah, I mean listening to your story and everything that was able to go down at Jiva Mukti, that would never have flown where I taught because a corporate business is structured so that
00:35:47
Speaker
There is kind of a system of checks and balances where people in higher positions of power are keeping people in lower positions of power in check, and so there's an HR department. It's also a corporation, so the bottom line is king. In other words, they don't want to get sued.
00:36:09
Speaker
do this kind of shady shit, you are increasing the likelihood of that corporation getting sued and that's going to hurt their bottom line. It's going to hurt their reputation. And so it's just a little bit more, I would even say decentralized in the sense that these leaders of a corporation are answering sometimes to investors at that point. This was not a publicly traded company, but in other words, bosses have bosses, right? And Sharon and David had no bosses.
00:36:37
Speaker
And they were also the teachers, right? So I had to answer to a manager. A manager had to answer to a manager for the region, or regional manager had to answer to, you know, you see what I'm saying here. So that system of checks and balances maybe shielded me from some of this type of
00:36:56
Speaker
thing occurring. Now that's not to say that I didn't occasionally experience or witness somatic dominance in the classrooms of this studio that I taught for. I certainly did, but I was never, thankfully, a part of this type of experience
00:37:13
Speaker
and things weren't carried out to this extent from my perspective now and i'm only going to speak from my perspective so i'm grateful for that and and i do think that you know of course largely this depends on the people that i encountered and the way that they approach teaching yoga but ultimately i do think that the structure of the company i worked for and the structure of the studio that you worked for the difference
00:37:38
Speaker
between those structures may actually have really kept me safe, kept other students safe, simply because there's accountability.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah,
Everyday Somatic Influences
00:37:47
Speaker
absolutely. At the end of the day, accountability is built into the business model. Yeah. So the way that this somatic dominance was practiced and exploited at Jeeva Mukti was at one end of the spectrum of this sort of large spectrum of maybe starting on one side with somatic, let's call it influence, versus going all the way to the end to somatic dominance. But there are these smaller, subtler ways that we all may have been either on the receiving end
00:38:15
Speaker
or that we have done that have perhaps been received as more dominant or domineering than we intended. For example, and this is something that I've talked about this with a few different people and let me be clear, I've only spoke about this with other women, but I am not the only person who has done this. If you've gotten a massage and the massage therapist is doing something that actually
00:38:43
Speaker
hurts or is a little too hard, do you just let them do it or do you speak up about it? I mean, I am a clinician and yet I never speak up. You just sort of let it happen. Yeah, grin and bear it or don't grin and bear it. You don't grit your teeth and bear it. There's definitely been points when receiving massage where I was like, oh, it's a little too much. I've experienced very few massages. It's not really my thing. I'm not a big fan of lying on a table and having someone
00:39:13
Speaker
I'm not sure if I value receiving massage as much, even giving myself one with like a pair of therapy balls. But I will say that I have been in uncomfortable situations while receiving a massage where I wasn't really quite sure that what was happening was even appropriate actually, that it hadn't been communicated to me ahead of time. And I kind of didn't really speak up to the fullest extent that I
00:39:37
Speaker
Looking back maybe now realize that I could have so this idea that we can always just say no is I Understand that to be not true. Yeah, because there are forces at play power dynamics at play They're actually incredibly powerful in the moment that
00:39:53
Speaker
whose power diminishes retrospectively when you look back at them and go like but but so this is where like when it's happening and after the fact really are different and certainly in yoga classes where i just endured too strong of an adjustment this could be another example where i really kind of wanted to say that's enough but i didn't and then they went a little bit further and i was like that was too much that didn't feel great situations where
00:40:20
Speaker
even potentially in more traditional exercise type formats where I don't want to push harder, but I'm being yelled at to push harder and I'm pretty sure I've had enough. These are subtler examples of that. Yeah. The one time I ever took a spin class
00:40:38
Speaker
I realized that I was not the right person to take a spin class because you are in charge of the intensity. You could dial it up or dial it down. And the teacher kept wanting us to dial it up and I just kept dialing it down. Because I was like, you don't know. Right. What do you know? Make me. Yeah, exactly. Really big part of my personality is make me. So then another category might be what I know as, Laurel, the yoga voice. You know?
00:41:07
Speaker
Exhale. Yes, or even just slowing your voice down, making it more mellifluous. And going up the register and down the register. And in fact, speaking in a way that is very sing-songy and unlike the way you talk normally.
00:41:27
Speaker
Right? There is that yoga voice, and I think a lot of teachers, I mean, I certainly imitated the yoga voice sometimes, and you are, there is a, it is a sort of energetic feeling in the room that you're creating. Solar to lighting and music and incense. Exactly. And the understanding of anybody walking into that room is that you don't talk too loud, you don't make too much noise, you move your props quietly, you're respectful of the
00:41:55
Speaker
general vibe that the teacher is setting up in that room for everyone to have their experience. There's a social contract to that, right? I remember seeing brand new students come plumping into the room and the teacher would especially run over and be like,
00:42:10
Speaker
If you didn't know, you were taught real fast that that's not how you enter a yoga room, right? Yeah. So there's that, right? And that's a type of control over the room. Yes. It's not a bad type necessarily, but you're creating something, right? Right. Well, the voice though is really, it's a little off-putting because it's so inauthentic. Right. It is not a true expression. Yeah. And there's something kind of
00:42:36
Speaker
that gets under your skin with that after a while where you're like... I find it deeply annoying now. Yeah, it's super annoying. I think in a way kind of putting yourself on a pedestal of like, I am somehow calmer than you because listen to my voice. Don't you want to feel like me? I'm the yoga teacher and this is how I feel. It's like a register lower and slower and you take the edge off.
Fostering Inclusivity in Teaching
00:43:04
Speaker
It's a whole bunch of things. Yeah.
00:43:06
Speaker
Well, so then what about if you're teaching a training or a workshop and somebody in the class questions what you're doing, right? Like, you know, I got very quickly shut down. How do we each respond? Well, the reality is that when you're starting out as a teacher, if a student questions you, which that rarely happens in like a group class,
00:43:36
Speaker
like gen-pop class, we'll say, is a newer teacher trainer. I mean, I definitely went through a period of being a newer teacher trainer. There were times when students would question me and where they were kind of questioning me somewhat aggressively, like they were confused or frustrated or whatever it was, tired maybe. They were like, I don't understand. Why? Or that's different from what I've heard.
00:43:59
Speaker
In the beginning, it was tough for that not to ruffle my feathers. My response
00:44:06
Speaker
was not to shut them down. It was to try to explain it in another way. But what I was drawing from were just pretty much what I had been told or what was in the manual or what I knew at that time to be true. And I think how I evolved was now like, I'm first of all, not afraid of student questions. I welcome them. I like them. I consider them the student's contribution to the discussion.
00:44:34
Speaker
and that students are important contributors to the learning process for the other students in the room, right?
00:44:40
Speaker
I figured out that it's not an attack on me when someone is unsure of what they're learning and why. And so I like to take an opportunity to look at the question and propose a couple of possible ways to look at it, to frame it maybe a little bit more specifically to what we're talking about, maybe to zoom back out and frame it the way they framed it and really use the question as a jumping off point for some type of group inquiry.
00:45:07
Speaker
and maybe that question causes another person to ask a question, then pretty soon students are kind of dialoguing to each other about it, right? So it becomes the topic of discussion. And, you know, there's a borderline where that might start to veer you too off track of the lesson that you're trying to teach. So it's constantly an act of trying to manage the time and make the learning relevant to the people in the room.
00:45:30
Speaker
and still get across what your plan was to get across, what the work is about, what the content is about. So it's tough. It's tough not to feel threatened. And it's tough not to go into that fight or flight mode, frankly, where you're like, this person's questioning my authority. I'm potentially feeling some level of shame now because I'm questioning my authority, because I'm not really sure what to say, especially if you're new. And you know what, frankly, it's easiest perhaps for some folks to just say, this is not the time for questions.
00:45:58
Speaker
or I don't answer questions, I don't take questions, or...
00:46:03
Speaker
Could you just wait and find out or to be kind of defensive about it? It's tough for a teacher that's new to self-regulate while the stakes feel so high and while they don't yet have the experience or tools to be able to self-regulate and stay calm and juggle all of these competing interests in the room. And it's tough. Maybe you only have one answer. And so when the student says, well, what about this? You have nothing else to say.
00:46:32
Speaker
That's not a great feeling. You can feel embarrassed by that. You can feel unprepared. You can feel any number of things. It can be easy to then turn that around and be like, we're not doing questions right now. You're the problem. Exactly. You're the problem with your question that I can't answer because I don't know enough. I think that does come with experience.
00:46:57
Speaker
That ability to be open enough to questions is, I think it takes time. What about if you are getting a student to mirror you in a pose? Is that somatic influence? To make their body look like my body somehow.
00:47:17
Speaker
Definitely, yeah. To suggest that that's the right way to do it for sure is. I don't necessarily think imitation, just do what I'm doing is a form of somatic, definitely not somatic dominance on its own. Anytime we're moving and asking students to follow along, we are influencing them as we've said, but where it maybe enters into the realm of control for control's sake is when we perhaps think that there is one way,
00:47:43
Speaker
that they should look and it should look like your body doing it because that's the correct way and then you start to potentially set up this dichotomous way of thinking about it like this way is right and this way is wrong and my way is the right way and so i'm going to micromanage your body in the moment this is reminding me of our conversation about feedback and bandwidth and how if you don't give the student
00:48:09
Speaker
room enough bandwidth enough to get it quote-unquote wrong maybe to do it the way that you aren't trying to teach them to do it maybe there is a purpose behind why you're trying to teach them to do it the way you're teaching them but if you don't ever let them explore and kind of get it wrong they'll never be able to feel the edges of right right they'll never be able to feel the edges of what you are trying to teach and it's not in service of learning as we found out like literally that does not promote motor learning it's really in service of control yeah and I had to unlearn how
00:48:37
Speaker
to learning a lot of learnings about unlearning. I learned to teach with an alignment approach, alignment-based teaching style, and I was taught to, in effect, micromanage position in the room and really over cue and say way too much.
00:48:56
Speaker
And I realized that, okay, after learning about the body and how it adapts and changes and how posture is not predictive of pain, I could kind of let go intellectually of this purpose of needing to fix alignment for the sake of safety. I could step away from there. I could make that leap. It was actually incredibly difficult to change my teaching style though, because I was attached to control.
00:49:26
Speaker
letting students just do the thing and look the way they looked meant that I had to relinquish control. I literally had to almost
00:49:40
Speaker
lower my somatic influence in order for there to be more balance in the room in terms of who was calling the shots. And yeah, the transition was tough and it took a long time, took years, right? It got better as time went on. But I have to say, man, teaching is a lot more relaxed and a lot more fun now because it's exhausting. It's actually exhausting to really not be teaching, but constantly maintaining
Promoting Consent and Transparency
00:50:06
Speaker
control. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is.
00:50:10
Speaker
Then going forwards, now that all of us are more aware of these concepts of somatic influence, somatic dominance, one of the things that I think is, because what can start to happen is you maybe are listening to this conversation and you're going, well, shit.
00:50:26
Speaker
I should never teach again because what am I doing? Am I being too controlling? Am I dominating these people? It can get easy to just be like, well, how do you do this and not do that? Because that seems terrible and I don't want to be that person, right? Certainly a starting place would be if you want to examine your own teaching and examine, okay, am I unconsciously doing some of these things?
00:50:53
Speaker
You want to look at, I would say, two qualities or two aspects. You want to look at the language that you're using and you want to look at the touch, hands on touch. So if we talk about language, the choices that you use in your language can be much more inclusive and can give students agency.
00:51:15
Speaker
You can create an environment that is open. Can we play a game? Sure. I'll give a cue that is very directive, that doesn't allow for a lot of agency, and you translate it. Great. Step your feet four feet apart. Take your feet as wide apart that feels like a good wide distance for you. Bend your knees to 90 degrees. Stack your knee directly over your ankle. You're going to bend your front knee.
00:51:43
Speaker
Lift your arms up shoulder level, move your shoulder blades away from your ears, lengthen your neck by reaching the crown of your head as high up toward the ceiling as possible. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. So what if we try this? If you bring your arms out to the height of your shoulders, how can you make that feel more expansive for you? How can you feel like you're taking up more space? What would that look like?
00:52:07
Speaker
Right? So it's a lot less, what are they called when you, it's got a grammar term. Directives? Yes. It's a lot less directive language and it's a lot more inclusive. I would say inductive. Isn't that like a kind of oven? Inductive reason, is it conductive? Oh yeah, convection.
00:52:27
Speaker
I guess I believe, and I might be wrong, inductive reasoning is to present evidence and then go, what do you think? What do you make of that? And deductive is to present, I might be wrong about this, but deductive might be to present the answer and then to work backwards and go, well, what supports that? Or let's support this answer with evidence.
00:52:54
Speaker
Let's go back to this idea of the type of verb. So instead of a verb that is do this, put your foot here, move your arm here. You're going to use verbs that are more... Invitational. Yes.
00:53:09
Speaker
more, let's see how this feels. What if you try this? Or let's find a version of this that is more comfortable on your body. For you. Right. For you. So those are the language choices. Leaving things a little bit more open to interpretation. Exactly. And then if we talk about, are you going to put your hands on your students? Are you not going to put your hands on your students? Many teachers' trainings still teach hands-on assists. Hands-on assists are not automatically evil. But because of my experience,
00:53:38
Speaker
I backed away from them for a very long time. I just completely stopped doing them because I had to kind of recalibrate what I thought I was doing as a teacher. And I knew that this kind of aggressive, nobody was asking whether, I wasn't asking anybody whether they wanted or not. We were just getting it. And I knew that that was not, that was another way of asserting control, right? And it was something that I had personally obviously experienced as like a negative experience.
00:54:05
Speaker
I kinda just completely stopped doing it and then when I started doing more hands on things again I became like my experience of a gynecologist is that this is maybe not the right example for this episode but stay with me everybody, stay with me.
00:54:21
Speaker
When I've gone to the gynecologist, they usually tell you what they're doing either while they're doing it or right before they're doing it, right? I'm going to be inserting this. You will feel this kind of a pressure. Here, I'm going to put my two fingers. They're verbalizing what's happening. I most recently had a mammogram, and that was definitely the case. The technician was very like, and now this will happen, and now this will happen, and now we will squeeze your boobs. They didn't say that, obviously. Well, no. I knew it was coming. You knew. I mean, that's the deal. It's a big boob squeezing machine.
00:54:51
Speaker
But so now, I almost like over-verb, I kind of like verbal diarrhea. I tell the people so much about what's gonna happen. I get the feeling sometimes I'm like, just do it already, like stop telling me so much about it. But I ask people, I'll be like, I wanna, you know, I'm gonna put my hands on your shoulders to guide you in this direction, is that okay? And again,
00:55:15
Speaker
It's a social setting. They may not feel like they can say no, but I think just the fact that I'm asking indicates that I'm not going to go in there like a bulldozer and knock them over or push them past where they could go themselves. It's a lot better than not asking at all. Yeah. Yeah. Do you do that when you're doing hands-on or I know you're not doing hands-on at the moment, but back when you did. Not a ton. Yeah. So when I started off teaching, by the way, we in my training never learned these really super aggressive
00:55:44
Speaker
adjustments in fact we were really strongly encouraged away from them. The adjustments we would give would be more bringing awareness to some part of the body move toward this direction with you know using kind of touch light touch on the hands move more in this direction and so in the beginning no I wasn't asking permission at all I was kind of just going up and
00:56:05
Speaker
helping people. That's how I saw it. And then there was a couple things changed in society where we started to have different conversations about consent and the Me Too movement and all of these stories started to come out from
00:56:22
Speaker
People who had been abused and victims, right? And I started to actually see that my hands on assists could be presented much more clearly with a lot more transparency and that I could handle a lot more consent to my students. I actually backed further and further away though.
00:56:42
Speaker
from touching my students because I figured out that I could actually use other things. I could have them touch themselves with other things like balls, dirty balls, blocks, blankets, walls and receive information, different information obviously, without me having to
00:56:58
Speaker
kind of insert myself into their experience in that kind of a way. Although like you said, I think that hands-on assists have a place. I think they're actually incredibly powerful modes of communication and they can create when done well, a really strong connection trust between teacher and student. And so yeah, I definitely don't want to throw them out, but we need to be more careful, more responsible with how we're presenting them.
00:57:27
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. And in my practice as a physical therapist, which I spend a lot more time doing nowadays than I do teaching yoga, it's understood that part of the physical therapy is that I am going to be putting my hands on them, but I always ask before I ever touch anybody, is it okay if I put my hands on you? So that they can say, no. Everyone basically always says yes. And some of them act, some of them sort of are like,
00:57:51
Speaker
Of course it is like why wouldn't it be but it is it has become just to me vitally important that I do that not every PT does it but it's something that because of my experiences is meaningful to me and so I'm gonna give everybody the benefit of the possibility that they may have had some physical abuse trauma in their past and that not all touch is a
00:58:14
Speaker
received in the same way that it was intended.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:58:17
Speaker
No, it's not. All right. Well, I hope you have maybe not enjoyed this episode, but maybe learned some things from this episode. You know, it is very, very meaningful to me personally to be able to describe my experience and talk about it because it's not something that I really talk about ever. And so I appreciate your attention and your willingness to listen to this.
00:58:40
Speaker
And I appreciate Laurel as well for letting me talk about it. Hey, thanks for sharing. Thank you. I know to you listeners, you can check out our show notes for everything that I referenced, we mentioned and referenced during this podcast. You can always go visit the Move in Logic website and get on our mailing list. Finally, it helps us out if you liked this episode to subscribe and rate and review it on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:59:11
Speaker
Thanks everybody. We're gonna go have a drink now.