New clarity resulting in renewed happiness. Age 56.
The magic of spiritual growth through psychological healing, creates consciousness expansion and an increased ability to love.
The spiritual truth that all life’s circumstances come to teach me what I need on my journey towards Self realization makes it possible to live in the world, and not get too overwhelmed by the darkness.
The most recent trigger was finding out that a former yoga teacher has been spreading vicious lies about me, slandering my personal and professional reputation. This is someone I liked and with whom I studied for ten years, four to five times a week.
It took time to remove myself, to go underneath the hurt and betrayal. I had to look at the defensiveness that came up, a childish need to prove that the accusations are false, when in reality there is nothing to prove.
The essence of harm is that the perpetrator has to justify their action, which invites projection onto the victim. In this case I was the victim of slander; however, as an adult there is no need to take such things personally. I needed to look deeper. Children are not emotionally equipped to resist these projections; they have to accept the lies. I had to look at my childhood, to find clarity about my emotional reaction in the present.
I was so attacked and vilified in my childhood that it left me with a strong need to prove that I’m good, as though deep down I weren’t.
The recent work on myself is moving me beyond that compulsion and curing me from the anger that hid behind the acceptance of negative projections. This anger was intense. It was a problem my entire adult life. On the one hand, I would accept a negative projection from someone to whom I gave away my power. My guilt complex would have me take on their burden, and I would feel in some way that, deep down, I am bad, or that I am to blame, or whatever it was - even as I tried to defend myself. My defensiveness made me appear guilty of something, and anyone prone to project used this to assume the worst. On the other hand, my anger would flare up, but not to the unkind souls who saw me in a negative light, but towards those who love me.
When I initially heard about what this teacher has been saying about me, I was shocked. I have no contact with that teacher, so I did not get defensive with him, but I was having these repetitive thoughts proclaiming my innocence, and then noticed my internal monologue. Then I started to wonder if there was perhaps a shred of truth to the lies. Not that I actually did anything my former teacher had been saying, but, perhaps energetically, I thought, I was guilty. I spent some time inside that space, while simultaneously, people close to me communicated that I was no fun to be around - that I jumped to blame and making them wrong.
As above, so below.
As I was trying to accept blame from the teacher I wanted to continue to see him in the positive light I had for the past twenty years I’d known him. This failure to adjust my perception of him pushed down the anger connected to his injurious treatment. Ceding my power to this teacher had me question myself on very basic facts about myself, bringing me to a child part who felt she had to accept the blame. She could bear it. She is a martyr who can take anything without blinking. That is her only job. She knows no anger; she is never reactive. However, hiding behind this martyr was the anger, held by a separate part, which was coming out against those close to me.
As for the teacher, he has spent much of his adult life projecting positive qualities onto a perpetrator who was his beloved guru, while he projected negatively on his own students who were not powerful in his eyes. These “regular” students were at best rather ignored. Celebrities and students with worldly power were treated differently. Even as he acted normal towards them, without overtly pleasing or worshiping behavior (that was reserved for the guru), they just happened to receive much more of his attention.
I am not the only regular student who was the target of his extreme negative projections. He has lashed out and distanced others, exhibiting meanness and cruelty, to people who faithfully practiced with him for decades. Perhaps this relates to the mounting pressures regarding his guru’s abuse - a truth he has worked long and hard to suppress with considerable success that is now reaching mainstream news. Being increasingly confronted with this truth, which he has witnessed and enabled for his entire career, who knows, maybe he is struggling to keep up appearances. Being called out publicly, he is made accountable for his own actions.
My hurt young girl wants to continue to love and protect my abuser. My hurt young girl wants to continue to love and protect this teacher.
I have spent many years integrating parts and healing from my internal split. As the abuses of this teacher’s guru are increasingly being made public and the conversation about the cultish behaviors in the ashtanga yoga world that enabled the abuse is on, I hope it will call up the question what it means to invest all your love and professional life in protecting the wrong person. Surrendering yourself to a guru whom you know is not enlightened at the onset only means creating a psycho-emotional repetition of unresolved childhood trauma. Not only will you not grow spiritually, you are sure to take on some version of this teacher’s flaws. Only healing, feeling the original pain underneath the attachment, can truly shift one’s perspective into balance to bring about true wisdom and true love.
The healing I received from this situation has made me present to the ways in which I have made negative assumptions about people, gossiped or spread groundless rumors. I have looked hard at the many ways in which I felt small and insignificant, and from that place failed to be accountable for the effects of my actions.
My anger at my teacher has been reunited with the original injustice and directed at the abusers of my childhood, for forcing me to take on their negative projections. This does not mean I won’t do what I can to stop this teacher, but I find myself energetically freed, less split, able to see various controversial issues from all sides. My lived understanding makes it impossible to stay angry, at least for now. In looking behind the surface, everyone reminds me of the saying: “But for the grace of God, there go I”
Inner work results in outer changes. Inner work reduces the polarization of different parts inside the self stuck in contradictory roles, of either carrying the pain of the trauma or rejecting it. The inner turmoil created by young parts who were emotionally arrested when their needs were denied, reflects the outer turmoil in the physical world, which is ultimately a reflection of ourselves by way of our triggered reactions.
Our own negative emotional reactions to essentially neutral circumstances show us what we need to work on, whether this is me finding out about my teacher’s defamation, or him being confronted with a rising number of voices sharing the ugly truth he tried to hide. Looking good means nothing. The question is: can we change ourselves?
Opinions on the commodification of yoga in the west and what true yoga is, are all semantic. What matters is the lived experience and the increased self-awareness through honest introspection and healing which decreases inner conflict and establishes inner peace.