The Yoga world's "OH SHIT!" Moment

THE YOGA WORLD’S “OH SHIT” MOMENTIt was humbling to have my writing be the center of attention within the global wellness/yoga community, at first. Then I asked the important question of why.
1.Why is this the first piece from the wellness and yoga world about the importance of vaccination?
2.Why did it take so long for my essay to get published?
3.Why is it causing so much “controversy,” within wellness/yoga spaces?
And most importantly: 
4.Why have none of the celebrity yoga teachers stepped into this conversation, before my piece went public, and especially now?

I started with the last question first, and decided that the answer was: they didn’t want to lose followers or money. They also identified as “Highly Sensitive,” which is white-woman code for “I don’t like to be uncomfortable or cause disagreement” (being a Highly Sensitive Person is a real thing, but I think that white women in particular tend to lean on this term in order to avoid growth/change/discomfort).
I made a post calling all white yoga teachers with large followings of 10K or more to open up conversation about the importance of vaccination within their respective communities. I made sure to state that I should not be the only voice on this matter, and that it was their duty to help protect their communities from harm by dispelling misinformation and pseudoscience within their far-reaching platforms. A few responded as expected; they virtually patted me on the head and told me how brave I was, shared my post/article, and then moved on to their trendy, instagrammable lives. One--who happens to be one of the most famous yoga teachers alive, with a bestselling memoir, speaking engagements all over the media, etc., snapped back at me, claiming in her direct message that she’s done enough work and posted a picture of herself getting vaccinated only to receive threats from cyber-bullies and get her Facebook account hacked. She continued on her rant saying that she and her business lost so much money and how dare I even bring her into this conversation in such a public way. She said that she felt attacked by me, that if I had wanted her help so badly I should have reached out to her, instead of tagging her in my “offensive,” post and “calling her out,” publicly.

This was also someone who was considered a revolutionary socio-political activist within the Yoga world; she spoke out against racism, cultural appropriation, Republican policies, and even wrote an article featured in NYT about how the Yoga Industry rejects Qanon culture after the Jan 6 attack on the US capitol.
So why was she so touchy about me asking her to share the load and use her platform to de-platform misinformation within the wellness community? It was right there in the erratic jumble of words she threw at me: she had lost money for sharing a singular picture of herself getting vaccinated. 
How did she lose money through something as simple and innocent as a post on Instagram? Followers who had been consumed by alternative health rhetoric intersected with her social and professional community in such a way that a large enough percentage cancelled memberships, created facebook groups against her, and even went as far as hacking into her Facebook page and posting blatant misinformation which confused her pro-vaxx followers enough for them to also unfollow, block, and report her accounts across social media.
Large platforms like hers don't exist as fun tools to connect with friends and family; they stimulate business growth and bring in a sizable paycheck. While many yoga celebrities openly share things about their lives, they exist as a personality to entertain the masses attracted to their respective niche. They literally feed themselves through the algorithm of clickbait and heart shaped likes and comments, especially over the course of this pandemic, which has eliminated/minimized in-person gatherings, workshops, and retreats, which account for the majority of their income. 
Social media masks itself as a tool for connection--which in many ways it is--but it’s true purpose is to mine profit off of friendly faces and business moguls. This woman felt attacked by me because the industry which had once supported her comfortable lifestyle in the limelight was now wreaking havoc on her bottom line. She was hurting, and I almost felt bad for her.
Then I remembered how many lives had been lost to COVID because people with immense platforms and social responsibility dropped the ball and let misinformation permeate within their communities in order to avoid conflict or personal discomfort, and I felt less bad.

The more I pondered on the actual question at hand--the “why aren’t more yoga celebrities talking about this,” question, the more I realized that not only were they not talking about it, they were inadvertently promoting misinformation, pseudoscience, and anti-vaxx sentiment, and had been for years by contributing to each and every trend within the industry in order to stay relevant. Their moral compass wasn’t just all over the map--it was shattered. And, for people who loved sitting in the seat of the teacher in order to bask in the limelight of popularity, they certainly did not want to do the unpopular thing amongst their followers by following what is supposed to be the true North of Yoga: to do no harm. That’s right, Ahimsa.

Weren’t these people supposed to be all about oneness? Weren’t these leaders supposed to be a “guiding light,” within their communities? Weren’t these people against alt-right groups like Qanon and All Lives Matter weirdos? Yes, but…
There is always a but.
BUT…
This topic isn’t in my “scope of practice”
This topic will offend people
This topic is too controversial
This topic is too nuanced
There are so many other topics that deserve to be centered
This isn’t my responsibility
I support bodily autonomy, I am pro-choice
I will rant for hours about why racism is bad and how I am an enlightened white lady, but I won’t tell my white woo friends who post misinformation online that they are wrong because they actually are “good people”.
It was much deeper than them not wanting to talk about the division within their respective communities, it was them not being able to grasp their role in all of it.

We all have those “Oh shit,” moments, but imagine realizing that 50% of your yoga friends, followers, students, and patrons have been indoctrinated into harmful belief systems and, for lack of a better word, cults. 
Imagine having 120K-2M people whom you influence daily and knowing that you contributed to their rapid progression into whatever the fuck has become of that half of the yoga community?
It would almost be too much to bear, wouldn’t it? Most people would shut down, but white women often have the knee jerk reaction which names any constructive criticism as an attack.

For me, my “Oh Shit,” moment came in the wake of my brother’s suicide. That loss hit me so hard, it catapulted me into a realization that the wellness world was not all I had thought it to be. It opened my eyes to the massive harm this industry does to young women. I had been drawn to the allure of women who looked like me being these beautiful, bendy, spiritual beings. I put them all on a pedestal. If they chanted, I learned how to chant and read sanskrit. If they wore Alo yoga clothing, so did I. If they steamed their vaginas, I did too. 
For years I swallowed the well-calculated lies of alternative health, I sought the Divine through ancient cultural practices that were not of my own ancestry, and celebrated trendy celebrity yogis whose names and faces were all over festivals, workshops, trainings, books, social media, and articles profiting their brand of fucked-up kool-aid which they shamelessly continue to peddle to the masses. What’s more? I strove to be like them. I chanted in sanskrit and read all of the books and philosophy, not to understand, but to sell to my students. I practiced diligently, not for mind-body-breath connection, but to sell my bendy body for likes on Instagram. 
I did not understand that this was not wellness, that what I was practicing was not yoga, and that I was causing blatant harm to myself and others. I allowed a franchised studio to control my life, my health, my relationships, and my success as a yoga teacher, because I had been trained to believe that one must put work before all else--sacrificing the Self for the benefit of someone else’s bank account. I went from cleaning toilets at a flagship studio to hiring new teachers for franchisees in a matter of months. I was likable. I led a well-structured and creatively sequenced yoga class, and I had a beautiful singing-voice to captivate customers with during savasana. I could sell memberships instantaneously, with the flash of a smile and a hint of mystery which led to the consumer craving more; more spirituality, more exotic philosophy, more flexibility, more “community”. 
I did this for years. 
I did this even after having my dream job of studio manager ripped away from me after I miscarried my first planned pregnancy, citing my “failure to perform at adequate levels” as a “threat to the success of the business owner and the safety and security of her family.”
I did this after being shunted off the top rung of the ladder, anxiously clinging to somewhere in the middle for coveted class times and styles while 20 weeks pregnant with my first-born. I did this after being asked not to talk about the Parkland High Shootings and encouraging my students to vote for gun control in the upcoming local elections because it is our sacred yogic duty to protect our community from harm. I did this while balancing motherhood and leading YTT groups through fast-paced 8-week certification programs. I did it even after I woke up to the fact that I spent years of my life suffocating myself and propagating harm to benefit the large monster of this spandex-clad industry. 
I was trying to cope with my past trauma with methods of spiritual bypassing. I collected all of the crystals and cleansed them in the moonlight, and I swore they connected me to God and the Angels--that they had healing powers that would somehow cure me. I fell into the spiral of orthorexic “purity culture” trends--eating specific vegetables and fruits, making strange herbal concoctions, drinking alkaline water and celery juice every morning in order to “cleanse” my system of impurities that would block my connection with Spirit and fix my gut. I knew that all of this was silly, and as a yoga teacher, most of it was a performance to keep my students on the hook. I wanted so badly to be perceived as “inspirational,” not only for my perspective, but for my looks. I modeled my behavior after teachers whom I admired, I used similar cues as theirs in my classes until I found my own style. I bought the same yoga clothing and I pushed my body to extremes. Throughout all of this I knew that right under the surface of my actions, was self-scorn and ridicule. In other words, I knew I was full of shit. I was grounded in reality, but as someone who believes in magic, I wanted to be admired for the persona I was creating. I shared deep, personal things about myself on Instagram and I watched my followers and class numbers grow. I was politically active and vocal. I was a cocktail of white feminism and new age spirituality. And, boy was the attention glorious.

When Tucker died by suicide soon after the birth of my son, all of these methods and tactics came crashing down around me, and though I was shattered I was also raw. That rawness left me with nothing but the true essence of myself; a person who was not afraid to talk about hard things. I started getting real with my students. I stopped trying to physically challenge or impress them with fancy sequencing, and I started to tap into their ability to connect to themselves. I challenged their critical thinking skills by questioning trends in the yoga and wellness circles that so many other people were teaching. I stopped chanting OM. I stopped saying “Namaste”. While I knew that wasn’t enough, it seemed revolutionary. Revolutionary enough for me to ask “What else? How else have I been causing harm?” I stopped pretending that all of it was OK. I was able to listen to marginalized people–many of whom have ancestral claims to spiritual practices which the wellness industry has stolen–and see clearly that I was the problem. My response was not to automatically withdraw myself from the continuation of harm, but rather to get unreasonably frustrated by it without the necessary clarity which allows for change and growth. I started to get more abrasive at the studio and with my students.  


I decided in late 2019 to pitch an advice column to Yoga Journal, and it took off. I answered difficult questions and the letters were published. I decided to quit teaching yoga by the end of 2020. A month after the pandemic hit I was done.
My writing became more of a gut-punch to my readers than a soothing balm in times of turmoil. I became even more vocal, blunt, and honest than I had ever been before. My editors at Yoga Journal softened the hard edges where they could, and often questioned if I should even be writing the things I was writing because I was a white woman.
Their preference was to seek out BIPOC voices for these topics--something which I wholeheartedly agree with.  The problem which inevitably unfolds from this, however, is that white women within wellness and yoga communities tend to gravitate to teachers and writers who look like them--writers like me.  They are often the types who fall silent and dismissive of uncomfortable truths due to their conditioning, and for that reason avoid listening to and learning from BIPOC. They will seek alternative facts that feel “nicer,” regardless of who is holding the mic--even if that person looks like them--but if enough people who look like them are talking about these hard topics and issues, they might start to shift their perspectives and choose differently than before. They will start to acknowledge our involvement in this shitshow.
And when I say “our involvement,” I mean everyone and anyone who partakes in Westernized Yoga and Wellness. The industry itself feeds off of our preferences. It tracks trends and expands on them, squeezing every morsel of dignity out of an already appropriated practice, as well as those who gobble it up.
The social conditioning to be accepting of what’s in style can only be defined by capitalism and it’s cruel manipulations of our reality. It makes us not only want something, but need it. We click the links, we stop drop and shop, we scratch the itch for more more more.
But, how has eastern spirituality, yoga, indigenous culture, astrology, veganism etc transformed to fit what’s in fashion throughout history, and how have White women been a driving force in the perpetuation of this booming industry since its birth?
Throw a stone and you’ll hit white women of all different ages claiming to be “magical thinkers,” But what does that mean, really?

Magical thinking is the gaslighting big sister of spiritual bypassing. It is the idea that if you keep your thoughts positive and keep a clarity of mind, body, spirit, etc. then you are “protected.” Protected from what? Who the fuck knows. As it applies to a pandemic; a deadly virus which does not discriminate and will show up whether or not you have an onyx stone stashed in your bra. 
As I continued to write my way into unpopularity, my column was reformatted, and I kept speaking up about the problematic practices of the white-wellness industry and how it has led us to this ugly moment in history. I saw the response from angry white “yogis” who refused to wear a mask and opposed COVID-19 vaccines even before they went into active trials. I wrote about yoga and politics, and I mapped a Venn-diagram between Q-anon, White Wellness, and the intersectional group that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. I lost friends, family members, and *GASP* followers on social media.
And that’s where I found my answer to my first, second, and third “Why?”
Why is this the first piece from the wellness and yoga world about the importance of vaccination? Because publications, teachers, and even yoga alliance were too afraid to openly speak about it, especially when they were all bleeding from the “White Awakening,” of summer 2020 as it related to the stolen practice of Yoga in the Westernized world. The last thing anyone wanted was to acknowledge the harm White Wellness promoting when it came to anti-vaxx rhetoric, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories.
Why did it take so long for my essay to get published? Because Yoga Journal didn’t want to cause an outrage amongst the anti-vaxxers they both profit off of (cover stories and features of yoga/wellness “gurus” trending on social media, wellness authors, etc.), but they also didn’t want to lose subscribers by the dozens during a time reckoning (see above).
Why is it causing so much “controversy,” within wellness/yoga spaces? Because for far too long, we have been allowing every white, sage-clad, yogi to choose their own adventure in the name of spirituality and sovereignty, and it’s all come back to bite us all in the ass. Oh shit is right.