Have you experienced harm in a yoga context?
A call out for research participants
This is not my usual kind of post.
As you may, or may not, know alongside teaching yoga and training yoga teachers I’m doing a PhD.
I’ve reached the stage in my work where I’m looking for participants. My area of research is abuse in yoga contexts and I would like to interview people who have experienced this.
I wonder, is this you?
In my research so far, I’ve found that (on the whole) the voices of those who have been harmed, who are victims, and survivors of abuse in yoga have been sidelined. My aim is to challenge this norm and centre survivor voices.
If you are interested in being interviewed but we don’t know each other, or you’re unfamiliar with this side of my work, I have linked a few things below to give you a sense of who I am, and how, in the past, I’ve talked about abuse in yoga.
All of the links come with a content warning - they include details of physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
In 2022, Harriet McAtee invited me to speak on her Nourish Yoga Training podcast In Our Experience. In 2021, I gave an online lecture for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, ‘Yoga, Sexual Violation, and Discourse’. You can watch it on YouTube here. I start around minute 37 but I recommend watching Shameem Black speak in the first half (she is one of my top fave yoga academics). I wrote a chapter for The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide (aff. link), published earlier this year, on trauma and yoga. I’m also including a link to the panel ‘Silenced Voices’ from the 2019 Brighton Yoga Festival. I was an audience member, rather than a speaker, for this event. It’s a good example of what it is to be survivor centred.
My work has changed over the years and my hope and expectation is that it will change further through the process of interviewing, and hearing more stories from those who’s voices have been excluded and silenced in the yoga industry and academic discourse.
Here is some more information on the work, and the call out for participants:
Abuse can include (but is not limited to) spiritual, sexual and financial abuse, sexual harassment, manipulation and coercion. Abuse may include one or more of these things, experienced at the same time or separately. The experience may have been ongoing or a one time instance, perpetrated by another member of the community.
A yoga context can include a place you practice or teach yoga, a yoga community or workplace, where you trained to be a yoga teacher, a place that you visit or somewhere you live. Yoga values and practices (e.g. asana, meditation, a sangha or other yoga teachings) should be central to the community. It may or may not be a place where you follow a particular teacher or teachings.
Who can participate?
You can take part if you’ve experienced abuse in a yoga context - the experience of abuse is self determined.
You must be over the age of 18.
What is the process?
If you’re interested in knowing more please email Amelia (the researcher) to arrange an informal and confidential conversation. (This is a no-obligation conversation.)
If you both want to go ahead, following this, you will be sent a consent form and a list of possible questions.
A second, formal recorded interview will take place.
All conversations will be online.
Participants will be anonymised and the researcher will follow a process of informed consent.
How to participate:
Email me, Amelia: survivingyoga@gmail.com
If you know someone who may be interested in participating in this research, please do forward this information to them.