Illustration by John Mavroudis
Illustration by John Mavroudis
When Melissa Shuman* signed up for yoga classes at her local studio, she never thought she’d leave her husband of ten years and their children for her yoga instructor. But she did just that — two weeks after they started having an affair. Six months later, their relationship ended. Melissa confided everything to another married woman from class she had grown close to, then found out later that her friend was also having an affair with him. “I was totally brokenhearted. I was devastated.”
As yoga continues to climb to the top of to do lists across the country, more and more students are attracted to their teachers. If the attraction is reciprocal, what’s wrong with them dating? “Everything,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD, PT, yoga teacher since 1971 and author of, among others, 30 Essential Yoga Poses: For Students and Their Teachers (Rodmell Press). A founder of Yoga Journal magazine, Lasater is the current president of the California Yoga Teacher’s Association (www.yogateachersassoc.org) “Yoga is about the coming to wholeness of the student. If a teacher is going to be the midwife of their spiritual unfoldment, then there is no way that they can have a relationship with their student that reflects a power imbalance…a relationship that is about the teacher getting his needs met.”
"It’s a set up,” says Janice Gates, owner of Yoga Garden in San Anselmo and author of the forthcoming book, Yogini (Mandala Publishing). “A male teacher in a room full of mostly women, dressed in tight clothing, moving, breathing and sweating — all looking to him for direction. Most teacher training programs simply don’t prepare them how to handle that skillfully. If there is no training in self-reflection as to what drives their own behavior, and it’s all about being in the seat of authority, it can really backfire."
Shuman practiced with her teacher for two months, in private sessions and public classes. Discussing her dissatisfaction in her marriage, “he would always take my side and say, ‘these guys don’t know anything.’ He would notice my toenails when they were polished, when I’d get new pants, if I was losing weight. He was very, very attentive. I loved it. My husband didn’t notice if I did Botox. He didn’t notice when I got a haircut.”
Internationally known teacher Ana Forrest has dealt with this issue personally as well as professionally throughout her 32-year yoga career. “Before I had any kind of ethics, I did have sex with my students. I finally stepped into this place of position and authority and…people wanted me?!! It took me awhile to figure out what was screwed up about that. People do stupid stuff. They think they have a passion that overcomes the student-teacher boundary.”
Lasater goes on to explain the psychologistics for many female students. “There’s an informative book called Sex in the Forbidden Zone : When Men in Power — Therapists, Doctors, Clergy, Teachers, and Others — Betray Women’s Trust by Peter Rutter, MD. He says that especially for women in these power imbalances — it’s usually a man teacher and a woman student — the student is very often working out their relationship problems, their father projections on the male in authority. When the male in authority crosses the line and doesn’t keep the boundary of intimacy clear, that it’s a friend/mentoring relationship, not a sexual relationship, the women often receive it as sort of emotional incest. And it can do great damage to her.”
The tradition of yoga encompasses a wide range of practices in order to realize one’s spiritual nature and return to inner peace. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a cornerstone text in yoga philosophy, clearly describes eight “limbs” of practice. The first two of these limbs are the yamas and the niymas, guidelines for skillful living. The first yama is ahimsa, commonly translated as nonviolence or nonharming. Lasater comments, “It’s very much akin to the medical “First Do No Harm” invective. It’s almost impossible as a teacher to become intimately involved with a student and not create suffering for the student, other students in the community, and himself.”
Our body-obsessed Western culture tends to separate asana (the physical postures) from the other eight limbs, reducing yoga to a fitness program. Many within the yoga community feel it’s a misrepresentation of yoga if a teacher only focuses the physical — and that those teachers shouldn’t call themselves yoga teachers or call their classes yoga. It became clear to Shuman that her teacher was more into the fitness aspect instead of the spiritual teachings. “He’s an athlete…him being yogic is kind of a joke.”
Teachers such as Lasater emphasize the spiritual intent behind these 5,000-year-old yogic practices. “When people study yoga the way that I’m using it, not just asana, the teaching is about opening. And in order to be open and vulnerable and willing to let go of deeply held beliefs and fears, one needs to trust. And it’s difficult to trust of you’re not sure what your teacher is really wanting from you. Are they touching you to help you move into a pose more deeply and comfortably, or are they touching you for their own sexual gratification?”
Forrest comments, “If you learn to teach Forrest Yoga, you’re learning to work healing. You are learning how to create a sacred space and a sanctuary for people to work their healing, and a lot of their healing is around sexual disorders, injury and abuse. As people do yoga, their sexuality comes up. Can we hold steady with their burgeoning sexuality? Sex is a wonderful thing, don’t fuck your students! Because the messes that we make on so many different levels is just not worth it.”
What Lasater and many others in the yoga community have seen is an increasing acceptance of sexual relationships between teachers and students. One teacher jokingly commented on dating one of her students, saying, “all the guys do it.” Lasater has also witnessed resistance from some studio owners, who didn’t want to address the issue. Until they started getting a reputation, were threatened with lawsuits, and began losing business. “I’ve counseled a number of studio owners. You get a reputation for this and your studio will suffer financially. You need to be clear with your teachers that this is not acceptable.”
Many teachers don’t want to deal with it either, especially as yoga becomes more of a business and teachers are competing not only for students, but for their jobs. And if the teacher in question has higher student numbers, other teachers are hesitant to approach studio ownership. One teacher says, “When I first started teaching, I wouldn’t have hesitated to bring up this issue to studio ownership. Now, there is no way I’m going to make waves…I need to keep my job.”
Gates interviewed a dozen well-known female teachers for her book, repeatedly hearing accounts of abuse of the teacher role. “People often don’t realize the depth of yoga. The postures, the breathwork, the chanting...it is deep, healing work. These practices are designed to release embedded patterns and to free us from suffering — not to create more of the same."
Lasater continues, “It interferes with the teacher’s ability to teach the student and it confuses things for the other people in the class. At any given moment, is this about the sexual relationship or about the student/teacher relationship? The person who stands to lose is the student. Because when the break-up occurs — which it almost always does — the student has not only lost their romantic interest, they have lost their teacher.”
Forrest responds, “This is what I tell my teacher trainees. Number one, if you fuck your student, you lose a paying student. Two, when your roving eye goes elsewhere, you lose a student period. So you are wrecking your student body. Three, when you do this, it is very evident to everybody else and you create havoc, so it’s really lousy business. You fuck your students, you lose money.”
Under what circumstance does someone stand up and state their truth, and when do they remain quiet? Lasater responds, “I think the question is more, why would someone remain quiet when they knew harm was happening?”
Many senior teachers suggest that people to find a way to say — as lovingly and compassionately as they can — that they don’t want this behavior where they practice and/or teach yoga. Lasater continues, “To support the studio owner to say to the teacher, ‘you cannot teach here for one year and we want you to get therapy.’ If it comes out of anger and hatred and punishment, it creates more karma, but if it comes out of ‘we care about you and we know your behavior creates suffering in others and in yourself, and we don’t want to promote that.’ “
Lasater uses a personal litmus test to discern when she should speak out. “If this were happening to my daughter, would I recommend the studio? Would I allow my daughter to go to this studio without telling her what’s going on? That shifted it for me. If someone called me up and asked me to recommend that studio, I’d say, ‘I want you to know what’s going on before you walk into it, so you walk into it with your eyes open.’ ”
Lasater goes on to describe idiot compassion, a Buddhist concept that she often sees in the yoga community. She takes on high, soft voice, “Oh well, they were just acting out of their karma, we don’t want to hurt them and upset this teacher because we’re so loving and wonderful and we understand and forgive. Compassion is the sword of truth! There’s a saying in Buddhism which I like, ‘The swift sword of truth yielded from the heart of compassion.’ Letting this behavior go on is not necessarily loving to the teacher or the student. Where’s your courage, your compassion, your love?”
What can a student and teacher do if they feel there is a legitimate attraction? Lasater answers, “As a married woman, say I had an attraction to a student. What I would do first is get some counseling work around that. And if it continued, I would tell the student to study with another teacher. If I were a single woman, I would not date my students. I knew a male teacher and a female student. She felt attracted to him, he felt attracted to her. They sat down over tea and decided that she wouldn’t go to class anymore and that he would no longer be her teacher. They separated for six months; they both got some work on it. She went to another class. Six months later they started dating and they got married.”
Both the California Yoga Teacher’s Association and The Yoga Alliance have strong guidelines for teacher behavior in the class setting, yet there is no Ethics Board to mediate and resolve transgressions. With the rise in violations of the teacher code of conduct, many feel it’s time for an ethics board to be created to field issues and manage licensing of teachers. After all, other therapeutic professions have strict codes of conduct they must adhere to in order to keep to safely and legally practice their craft, why not yoga teachers? Doctors, therapists, clergy and counselors all have governing boards that protect the rights of clients and insure that they are receiving good guidance and care. And if harm is done, there is clear recourse for action.
In Ana Forrest’s teacher trainings, she has her trainees play “The Ethics Game.” She’s developed a set of exercises to unearth all the rules they live by, then they get out the microscope and look at “the conflicting ones, the sabotaging ones and the crazy ones.” As well as the rules that are good. She also has her trainees work with an outside therapist of their choice during the training. “It’s very important for my teachers to develop the heart of and soul of compassion that imperative for me to certify them because I won’t certify people that don’t have that. It’s more than just do your homework. It’s develop, grow, evolve. Be of real worth in the world in this life.”
In an ideal world, teachers and students would be able to participate in a positive learning experience that benefits both without harming either. Unfortunately, until that happens, I believe that the time has come for a Yoga Board of Standards. As teachers, don’t we want to do everything we can to insure that students are receiving quality instruction with a high level of integrity?
A Board of Standards as I envision it would ensure that teacher training programs cover the depth of this issue and its impact on the student, the studio community and the teacher. Therapists would be available to anonymously support teachers and students struggling with this issue, as well as others. It would be an opportunity for healing and resolution, rather than what it tends to be now — a messy puddle of gossip and recrimination.
These “shadow” issues that no one wants to face in the yoga world — ethics and quality — are only going to surface again and again until we address them. And until then, people (including teachers) are going to continue to get hurt in yoga, emotionally and/or physically. Is this what we want people to discover in yoga? It’s time for us to grow up and manage ourselves so we can continue to offer the teachings how they’re meant to be offered — as tools for awakening consciousness, transformation, peace and joy. Then perhaps we can find sanctuary and refuge in yoga class, instead of yet another place to be caught by patterns and suffering.
Lisa Maria is a journalist and yoga teacher. She teaches throughout Marin County and at Yoga Tree in San Francisco. [click to e-mail]
*Details, including names, have been changed.