It’s not a witch-hunt, it’s just a word of caution
My friend recently accused me of spitting at my social and professional colleagues. How can I promote loving kindness if I openly disagree with many methods and attitudes in the broadly understood healing world?
Well, I believe it’s my duty to talk about the ‘‘dark side’’ of yoga, spirituality, and even medicine.
I would never try to discredit people who, in business terminology, could be called my direct competitors. The people who share the same vision, mission, and principles as me. Whose genuine goal is to teach you how to become independent from their help. The more teachers and therapists join this league, the higher the chance the world will become a better place.
If I criticise particular teaching methods, it is not out of spite. Nor to sadistically shame or blame. I do it to raise awareness. I tell you true stories I experienced firsthand to be harmful or saw my students or friends suffering from. And I can back it with evidence much broader than anecdotal.
Who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. I did some of the things I described below myself. If you read my newsletters and blogs, you know I did a few coming-outs regarding my past.
Harmful actions don't necessarily stem from putting profit or power above ethics. Many teachers have good intentions and genuinely believe they help others. But good intentions aren't enough if you want to make a difference in other people's lives.
With this lengthy intro, let me get to the point: whom I criticise and why.
Let me start with New Age gurus who teach it is enough to do a positive affirmation to cure yourself of virtually anything. The fact you believe you're healed doesn't make you healed. You can ignore your body and focus on spiritual development, but that doesn't solve your problems. You avoid the real issues, pretending they don't exist or that they can't touch you anymore. This phenomenon has its name: spiritual bypassing.
A friend of mine spent decades in Buddhist meditation circles, feeling spiritually superior to everyone around her. She recently woke up with a realisation she can’t function in daily life, plagued with procrastination, unable to finish any project.
I don't hesitate to say that spiritual bypassing is harmful because it often is. I was part of a spiritual-bypassing organisation before. And the gap between the teachings and the actual behaviour among leaders and followers was too huge to ignore. These people were running away from their fears and challenges to the safety of an ashram.
''The Universe Will Provide'' gurus aren't competitors for somatic practitioners more than McDonald's is a competitor to organic beef slow-food burger joints (forgive the non-vegan parallel). Yes, we all deal with mind and body connections and healing. But that doesn't make us equal, nor even similar.
If someone has authority, he has enormous power to influence others. Directly or indirectly. Whether he knows it or not.
I'm not afraid to say that the doctor who gives you a diagnosis in the form and tone of a life sentence can make your condition WORSE. Words have consequences, so if the expert suggests you're irreparably broken or will be in pain for your entire life, that's precisely how you will feel (see footnote). In my first edition of Heal from Within program, I had a student who was told by the doctor she has to be very careful about her hip and should avoid all activities she loves, including yoga. After a few weeks, she slowly discovered her body wasn’t as fragile as she was made to believe and learned how to move with ease and joy.
I won't shy away from saying that many yoga teachers literally, with brute force, damage their students by offering 'adjustments'. My Ashtanga yoga teacher friend had a chronic SI joint issue after the teacher pushed her deeper into a hip-opening pose. Matthew Remsky has a huge database detailing many such cases (see footnote).
Many teachers of any modality re-traumatize their students in the classes without even knowing. It's easy to make your student feel stupid, inferior, and not good enough. My friend was publicly challenged by a Hatha Yoga teacher at a yoga retreat. She had to prove that her version of doing a particular posture is better for her body than his. I don't blame the teacher only. I wasn’t too far from such an approach myself. It's the fault of the teachers' training he attended. Sadly, a dogmatic approach that doesn’t care about students’ well-being is systemic.
That leads us to the guys on the top. The inventors of methods, schools, and systems that teachers or practitioners only blindly replicate. In the realm of spirituality, that’s the gurus. I can talk forever about the fact that most gurus, yes, the absolute majority of them, sexually or mentally abuse their followers. I wrote about it before. And again, Matthew Remsky is a scholar who follows all such cases closely and writes about it extensively.
In modern Western medicine, the main problem is the dogma of science. A patient is just a body made of parts that can be fixed like a machine. Most doctors overlook the broader context in which disease appears: your life story, and your emotions. They were trained to act this way in medical schools.
If science cannot provide a good answer (e.g. fibromyalgia, autoimmune diseases, chronic pain of ‘‘unknown origin’’), it might make you feel hopeless.
Psychiatrists are taught to prescribe Prozac to people with severe anxiety. It works in 1 out of 5 people*. That’s almost a lottery! This statistic reminded me of my old student. She told me she had been on drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist for panic attacks when she met me. She learned how to deal with anxiety and never needed to return to drugs again. Nor to return to my classes, for that matter.
Maybe you’re reading all of this wide-eyed with surprise. Or perhaps you had the misfortune to taste some of it on your own skin. I know how it feels to put all your trust and time into a solution that ultimately turned against you or brought you back to square one.
But I want to end this post on a positive note. As painful or disappointing as your experience was, I bet it taught you something about yourself. Perhaps even made you ready to dig deeper. You can't turn back time, but you can turn your life around.
PS. If you’d like to know more about my approach to teaching and try it out yourself, sign up for my newsletter.
FOOTNOTES (more resources):
Spiritual bypassing explained: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201901/what-is-spiritual-bypassing
The language the doctors to talk about your condition matters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUANsPdkkEU
A huge scholarly work of Matthew Remsky whose goal is to collect evidence of violence and abuse in the Yoga and Buddhist circles (includes forceful adjustments in yoga and guru abuse) and get to their root causes: https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/wawadia-injury-touch-abuse-trauma-in-modern-yoga/
*The quote about 1 in 5 success rate of Prozac comes from dr Judson Brewer, American psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author in the interview with Tara Brach, meditation teacher and author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1gUtrM5Wnw