Defamed

Photo taken in 2014 teaching a prison yoga workshop at the studio. The owner/teacher offered the space free of charge

Recently, I asked myself why I have at times elicited extremely fierce negative responses in certain people who then continue to negatively project on me, probably for the rest of their lives. It would be of obvious importance to remove any part I might play in such a pattern. The question led me to a yoga teacher, one who ended up spreading vicious lies about me with incredible vigor and persistence.

In the late 1990’s I moved back to New York from Los Angeles where I had taken up yoga. I liked Mysore style ashtanga, practiced at one’s own pace and level, and found a place. The studio owner/teacher had a slight speech impediment, a certain kind of lisp. He seemed rather kind; having asked about injuries and finding out about some of the violence of my past, he was always mindful in his adjustments. In his features I saw a boy who could barely hide some deep shame.

In hatha yoga, the kind focused on postures, spirituality is often conflated with physicality. Ashtanga yoga, the most intense of the physical yoga styles, had a guru who was regarded as a great spiritual teacher. I already had a spiritual path, following the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, separate from hatha yoga. Ahstanga was the ideal physical therapy in my healing process. In 2001, the great guru came to teach in New York. As it was organized by the teacher, he closed his studio and told everyone to go take the workshop, so I went to take classes with the guru together with 400 others. While we were all upside-down, the guru groped me. I was shocked and furious. After a few days I returned and told the guru off.

This event showed me how spiritually advanced the great ashtanga guru truly was. Once the workshop was over, the teacher privately apologized to me, well aware of what he termed his guru’s “regrettable flaw.” Seeing a good, innocent boy in the teacher, I did not think to call him out on his own responsibility. He continued to glorify this guru in public and regrettably copied him on some other flaws. One edict in the yoga studio was that women on their period should not come in for practice. And once there was a religious event with a notice on the door asking that women on their period would abstain, for the sake of “purity.” But during our meeting after the guru’s workshop I felt grateful for his acknowledgment and sympathy. I thought he was a much better teacher than his guru, who lecherously stared at body parts and felt entitled to act on his base impulses. The teacher’s adjustments were never in the least tainted with any type of lowly desire. His corrections seemed more energetic than physical and felt completely safe. As I had told him about having been stabbed in the knee as a child, the second he noticed my knee slowing me down in the practice, he would come over to say that I could take it easy. It was sweet, made me feel cared for, and it also offered a rare validation of my childhood experience.

There was somebody who came to practice at the studio, whom I’d started to notice from the year 2000 onward. It seemed as if he had been programmed just like me. In 2004, that person became the catalyst to many more memories of my childhood in the network. These were strange days, just like the movie, playing on the screen of my mind. Our psychic connection in no way matched physical reality. We went out a few times and that was that. As my psyche opened, many parts awakened. The teacher sometimes seemed to catch a little bit of my ethereal parts and their diaphanous transmissions, but just as often I felt that he was coloring the subtle sphere with his own projections. In the network, psychic gifts are induced in slaves and used extensively, because no one can ever be held accountable in the real world for any misdeeds performed energetically. It fits perfectly in the world of toxic power, to use invisible and untouchable means to keep the secrets of the network safe. Psychic communication is an aspect of power never openly discussed because it is often used negatively, to maintain power or to manipulate people. In childhood, I used my gifts to help me survive. In the mornings at the yoga studio, I observed my parts and would then go to therapy, which was usually late-morning after yoga and as many times per week. We would examine the different overlays of past network situations that were being evoked by the many parts that were surfacing.

The yoga environment carried similarities to the network. There was the abusive guru at the top of the hierarchy, who gave his “blessing to teach” to his most obedient students. In Mysore ashtanga, the teacher has the authority to decide if you can add the next pose to the series you are learning, or move on to the next series. Those students of the ashtanga guru whose submission was not complete, who dared to take issue with his transgressions or those who believed students should be able to decide for themselves if they wish to try new poses, were forever banned from the inner circle of ashtanga. The rigid power structure, which holds everyone trapped in the negative spaces of trauma, ignores abuse and gaslights victims. I believe that mind control slaves were naturally drawn to the ashtanga yoga studio. And the teacher was drawn to celebrity students.

It happened more than once that, after I had mastered a pose, the teacher held out on giving me permission to move forward, without explaining why. After ten years, I’d had enough and left the studio in 2008, sending the teacher a message that I was moving myself forwards in the series and starting a home practice which I’ve maintained to this day. In 2010 I was writing for an online yoga magazine and had been asked by the editor to write an article about the abuse I endured at the hands of the ashtanga guru. I wrote the article but first sent it to the teacher, letting him know that I understood his attachment to his guru, and if he preferred, I would not publish the article. My loyalty to him was mixed with a strong protective feeling he elicited from me; I didn’t want him to get hurt. While I had just given him the power to nix the article, he responded that he did not have such power, but, he suggested, I should rather examine my motives. Using his authority to try to guilt me into not publishing instead of just being honest, had zero impact. Yet even as I noticed, I saw mostly the vulnerability hiding underneath his hypocrisy. The article came out, and didn’t go anywhere; it was perfectly ignored by the entire yoga community.

In 2011, when I started bringing yoga to prisons, the teacher generously let me use the space for several events and workshops, entirely free, which is almost unheard of in New York City. In 2014 I started my prison yoga non-profit and the teacher became my fiscal sponsor, (which meant that tax-deductible donations to me were made out to his non-profit, and he sent tax receipts to my donors until my non-profit would be official.) For his service he would take a percentage of my donations. Surprisingly, he insisted on taking only half of what I proposed. For a while I was in constant communication with the teacher and his business partner. The day the notice came that my non-profit status was finalized, I had just deposited an amount into their account. The lawyer service I used advised to have that last deposit reversed. There was confusion about the commission and I received an abrupt reply from the business partner, saying that this was not worth his time and they would “eat the costs.” I felt terrible, and asked the teacher to discuss, go over the details, to not end things badly. I offered to make a personal donation of at least the amount of the percentage, which was less than $200. The teacher chose not to talk with me, but he did want me to understand that I had handled the situation badly, that this did not end on a good note and I should keep this in mind as I started my business. My guilt complex and protectiveness never had me fall for his hypocritical “teaching moments” but was expressed in that I didn’t stand up for myself. I never replied, didn’t defend myself, didn’t get upset over his avoidance and condescension. I felt guilty for not being able to make things right, only seeing a helpless boy underneath a thin cover.

From the lawyers, I had learned that, in spite of what the teacher seemed to believe, returning a deposit cost nothing; I reversed several deposits in my prison yoga years. To be absolutely sure, as I was recently going through these old emails and got crystal clear on how rude and condescending both men had been, I called the bookkeeper who’d handled taxes for my non-profit, who confirmed once more that they would have incurred no costs in returning that deposit. The cost apparently related to the business partner’s feeling that he’d wasted his time on my organization.

My soft spot for the teacher was still so strong that not even what followed knocked me out of my guilt-ridden blindness. While not willing to talk things through with me directly, it seems he had no problem talking plenty behind my back. In 2016 the article I had written about my experience with his guru was re-published. In 2017 the ashtanga world exploded as the MeToo movement encouraged many victims of that guru to step forward. Someone wrote a book which mentioned my story. My article was now being shared. I was interviewed for the New Yorker Magazine. In 2018 my article was published again. My eyes were finally opened to the incredible prevalence of the abuse of the guru. I had never visited the studio in Mysore, India, where he apparently was humping and groping people every day, in plain sight. Not only that, others came forward to reveal that he had caused countless physical injuries and had also cheated plenty of students out of money, making up exchange rates in his favor, sending people away without refunding their remaining time, etc.

In this media storm the teacher, one of the guru’s prominent disciples, was asked to comment by journalists and yoga practitioners, and by accounts told anyone who mentioned me in this context, that if they needed to talk about his guru’s abuse, he would also need to tell them about my abuse. Then he would spin stories that, when they reached me, I couldn’t even guess which actual event might have gotten twisted into such a tale. From what I heard and saw in writing, my best guess is that they were his interpretations of psychic messages that had been flying through the ether when I had practiced at his studio, mixed with his own extreme projections. When I did vaguely recognize a situation, it seemed as if the teacher had found a gossiping ally who had told exactly the opposite of what had happened. I found out about the defamation and libel from five different sources, all sharing similar but different stories that seemed to build on each other, over time increasing in their extravagance. I am still left to wonder how many people he told or wrote that never reached out to me, that might still believe these lies to this day.

He claimed that I was “financially dishonest” but most of the stories were about what he termed “sexual stalking,” basically all that was wrong with his guru dumped on me. While I felt protective of him, he felt even more protective of his guru.

I sent him an email ordering him to stop with his defamation, that it seemed as if he believed his own lies. In spite of my shock and upset, I added that I forgave him, which was completely premature and once again part of that damned protectiveness. I even still felt bad, as if there were still something to be ashamed about, even though I was never “financially dishonest.” I never followed anyone, dated or slept with anyone I met at yoga, never did anything either “sexual” or “stalking.” Had any of these things actually occurred during the time I practiced with him until 2008, I strongly doubt he would have offered his studio for my workshops or become my fiscal sponsor afterwards.

In these last weeks, after asking myself the question how I could have attracted the teacher’s extreme negative projection, I finally understood that softness that made me so blind towards the teacher, that while I was witnessing and experiencing the signs of his unhealthy behavior, I still went ahead as if nothing were amiss. As I struggled with all the leftover feelings of guilt and shame, it suddenly hit me: little Wouter, the seven-year old boy from the network whom I had loved so much and tried so hard to protect when I had been nine, had had the same kind of lisp as the teacher. Moreover, the teacher looked like he could have been the grown-up version of Wouter. I subconsciously saw Wouter in the teacher all the time, which is the reason I could only see an innocent little boy in the man and why I wanted to shield him so badly.

The terrible guilt the teacher evoked in me was about failing to save the sweet little boy, and then being singled out by the billionaire responsible for his death. The way this had occurred was that when Wouter had died, I had seen the vulnerable, scared little boy in the billionaire - I saw that Wouter represented to the billionaire his own unloved child self. It was the billionaire who, after I was disobedient, sent an endless, vicious, destructive, torturous barrage of negative projection my way. His switch was not only about his own feelings towards me, it was that he himself had no choice inside a power system that required complete submission and obedience, to which he himself was a slave.

The ashtanga community and its dynamics of a toxic power structure were completely familiar, which is why I stayed in it for so long. I have to ask myself if there was another layer to the teacher’s extreme generosity towards me after my article was published back in 2010. He was never greedy and had his own interest in bringing yoga to underserved communities, but - was there perhaps another purpose that I was supposed to extrapolate from within the negative space, to keep me silent henceforth with regards to his beloved guru? Was his fiscal sponsorship a shady bribe? I have to ask, because it is the way things work in a dictatorial hierarchy, and he was extremely protective of his guru. It is almost too crazy to think that he would try to obtain, in the most complex and roundabout possible way, the very result that I had initially offered him on a silver platter, but, if he expected my loyalty to an unspoken agreement he believed we had that I would support and not expose his guru, it could at least account for the extreme viciousness of his attacks against me.

I finally made room for anger at the teacher, and I found my way to another layer of grief for little Wouter and his awful death.

There is no wisdom in the negative space of power, only unresolved pain and parts entering into an emotional repetition of old trauma stories, resulting in either taking on blame and shame in the inferior position, or warding off the uncomfortable feelings in the superior position. The old-school power system mimics the ancient network; they are based in unresolved trauma and serve to cover abuse. Inside such structures, all cosmic laws are broken and qualities associated with spirituality lost.