How can we play our part in safe community building in yoga?

Moving on from research reflections (for now)

I’ve had an influx of new followers. If this is you, you may be interested in my initial reflections on my research so far, or my second round of reflections. My call out for research participants back in October 2024 will give you a good idea of what I’m doing and who I am, exactly. Whether you’re new, or if you’ve been here a while, thank you and welcome. In the last post I urged you to seek out the stories of those who have experienced harm and abuse in yoga contexts. Today, I have some ideas on community building.

Sometimes I worry that people don’t want to engage with my work because it’s depressing, all doom and gloom (as one individual said to me), and (as another said) the opposite of why they do yoga. But this is a head-in-the-sand attitude. And, to the contrary, I believe my work is in line with reasons people practice or teach yoga: to expand their minds, to seek healing for themselves and support others in the same endeavour, to be part of community building. It’s not too negative (as I’ve also been told). My research is an academic project but it is born from a desire, as a yoga teacher and practitioner, to create a place in which people can safely heal, grow, and feel a sense of freedom from oppression. These things cannot happen if you, or your student, feels unsafe or at risk of harm, right?

But how can we move towards safeguarding or harm prevention if we don’t know what harm in yoga looks like? How can we say we want to prevent it, if we can’t adequately name it? How can we build yoga communities that, genuinely, foster a sense of safety and space for healing? How can we, as yoga teachers and enthusiasts, be trauma-informed if we remain unclear about the trauma that some in our community, and industry, have endured. People have been traumatised by yoga, in yoga classes, by other yoga teachers and spiritual leaders. I’ve heard it first hand, repeatedly.

For me, education and safe community building are key. Both involve talking, and listening, and learning new things alongside others. As yoga teachers, we often find community on training courses and what I’d love to see in trauma-informed yoga trainings (and yoga teacher trainings, in general) are fewer references to how the body-keeps-the-score and more education about why we need to be trauma-informed. I’d like to see more clear, truthful, informed, education about how that guru who’s quotes on ‘love’ that you keep posting to Instagram has, in fact, been accused of raping devotees and coercing them to secrecy. Perhaps I’m an optimist but I believe that, if you knew about the accusations, and believed survivors, you would probably stop posting those quotes. (This is an unveiled reference to Osho.) I’d like to direct you to Sarito Carroll’s memoir, in reference to this.

There are so few places to learn about abuse in yoga, or to talk about it with others, which is why I’ve created a space where we can do both.

A few years ago Jacqueline Hargreaves, from The Luminescent and the SOAS Yoga Studies Online platform, asked me to create a course based on my research. You can find this, titled Spiritual Abuse in Modern Yoga, here.

Since completing my fieldwork, and in the time between recording that course (2022) and now (2025), my thinking has evolved, somewhat. Firstly, during my interviews, I found a real sense of joy when connecting with my research participants, which I hope they don’t mind me saying, and I believe some of them felt too. There is no joy in harm and abuse, of course. But there is joy in human connection, even online. Secondly, there are things that I want to add to the course content. Thirdly, honestly, learning about abuse is hard, it can bring up difficult feelings, and is something we shouldn’t do alone, for our own mental wellbeing.

As a result, I’ve created a new offer that builds on the initial course I created with SOAS:

Power and Community in Yoga: a hybrid course of pre-recorded lectures, and group discussions online, live and interactive. The course examines abuses of power in modern yoga and how yoga communities have responded to injustice.

The course has 2 parts:

Part 1: Spiritual Abuse in Modern Yoga

• 12 hours of self-paced study.

• 3 x 1-hour pre-recorded lectures delivered by me.

Part 2: Community Connections

• 3 x 75 minute live session via Zoom hosted by me.

• Discussion, questions, and further learning.

• Connect with other like-minded people in the yoga world.

Part 1 is the SOAS Yoga Studies online course I mentioned above and can be booked via the SOAS website here and Part 2 can be booked via my booking page here. If you’ve already taken the SOAS course and you’d like to join in with the live discussions, you are very welcome to book Part 2.

Please note: each part must be booked separately.

I know many of the yoga teachers who follow me are either trained in, or interested in, trauma-informed yoga but (unless you’ve been through harm in yoga yourself) are you really, adequately, informed about what trauma in yoga contexts is, what it looks like, how it plays out, the complexities of power dynamics, how abstract ideas of god, or service, or karma, are used to harm?

My hope, and aim, with both parts of this course offering is to change this. Afterwards, I hope you will feel empowered to talk and think about abuses of power in yoga in new ways. I hope you will be equipped with ways of thinking about how different kinds of abuse are used to enable one another, that is, spiritual abuse, financial abuse, sexual abuse; how the yoga industry has responded to abuse; the ways in which cases of abuse have been represented in the media; and what recovery from injustice can look like. Is this possible within the yoga industry? I will make time to discuss examples and models of recovery and community in the live sessions.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts, too. Sign up now.

The live sessions run on October 1st, 8th, and 15th, Wednesday evenings 7-8.15pm UK time, 8-9.15pm European, 11am-12.15pm Pacific, 2-3.15pm Eastern. Find your timezone here.

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I teach in-person yin yoga classes at Calderdale Yoga Centre in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire on the first Friday of the month, 6-7.15pm. Dates for 2025 are:

5th September, 3rd October, 7th November, 5th December.

Book here.

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I contributed to a book, The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide: Social Justice, Science, Politics, and Power, edited by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee. My chapter is titled ‘Trauma, Yoga, and Spiritual Abuse’. Other contributors include Donna Farhi, Jules Mitchell, and Jivana Heyman. If you’re a yoga teacher, I highly recommend reading. You can buy your copy here from Bookshop.org (aff link).

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