Between Devotion & Disillusion: Holding Complexity in Ashtanga Yoga. Re: Taylor Hunt and more.
Some members of the international Mysore Ashtanga yoga community have spoken up recently about being harmed in their relationship with American Ashtanga yoga teacher Taylor Hunt. Their voices matter most in this conversation right now, and I’m not interested in speaking over them with uncertain details, nor of centering myself in the story.
I write to acknowledge the collective pain arising and to address the communal questions this conversation raises. As a survivor of sexual assault, as an authorized Ashtanga yoga teacher, and as a longtime Ashtanga yoga student currently in Mysore practicing with Saraswathi Jois, I can offer a limited yet nuanced perspective.
First, for those outside the Ashtanga Yoga community:
Mysore (Mysuru), in South India, is where Sri T. Krishnamacharya cradled modern yoga as we know it around the world today. It is where Sri K. Pattabhi Jois founded the potent and formative Mysore Ashtanga Yoga methodology (from which many other trendy approaches to yoga practice like “power” and “flow” have been derived), and where his daughter and disciple Saraswathi Jois continues to teach the family tradition every morning at 84 years old. It’s also where Saraswathi’s son, the late Sharath Jois (who is also my teacher and also Taylor Hunt’s teacher), grew up and became a global force for expanding Ashtanga Yoga practice and the Mysore culture worldwide. The international Ashtanga Yoga community around the world is still in mourning after Sharathji’s sudden death last November, which makes all the internal social media debate over the last year feel especially tender, like people throwing punches at a funeral procession,
For context: I’ve only practiced with Taylor Hunt once, just a few months ago, when I dropped into his Mysore program in Savannah while passing through town on a road trip to Atlanta, Georgia. It was a steady, sweaty practice that I enjoyed. We talked afterwards about Sharathji’s death and shared a moment of felt grief. This does not excuse his history of harm but it reminds me that harm is not always visible and that there is still a lot of grieving to do. I admired his Trini Foundation work, supporting recovery from addiction through yoga, and I posted a cheerful selfie with him after that practice. I had no idea then of the abuses in his community. Some of my friends online now seem to have known his dangers then, but no one reached out to me directly when I posted a photo supporting his shala.
It reminded me of something that happened years ago: I once posted a picture of Sharathji assisting me in karandavasana on one of his teaching tours in California. In the picture, two other teachers are on their mats beside me watching his assist. An acquaintance on social media messaged me just after I posted the photo to say that one of the two Western guys in that picture had raped her while they were hanging out together and studying in Mysore. From what I understood, Sharathji had been informed and this guy’s authorization to teach had since been revoked, but he was still coming to classes on tour. I took the photo down after she reached out to me but I remember feeling uncertain about what that would accomplish.
Which brings me back to now.
What does deleting a post, or de-platforming a teacher, really do to prevent harm in any degree? Maybe it offers courtesy to survivors, and I can say, as a survivor, that some courteous acknowledgement can make a difference. But true accountability goes deeper.
How do we actually create conditions where harm is less likely to occur? Where we can more collectively and consciously practice ahimsa?
This week, I approached Saraswathiji to ask her what she thought about the situation with Taylor Hunt. She was not yet aware of the situation when I first asked her about it, and she asked me to see his picture. When I told her the little I had heard, and pulled up his picture on my phone, she shook her head: “He is not my student.” The next day, however, she returned to the subject. After receiving a call from another one of her students overseas, she wanted to speak further and understand better what had happened. All I could share was what I had heard through social media: that Taylor had reportedly engaged in physically and psychologically abusive behavior in and around his classes, and that he had been involved in dishonest sexual relationships with some students. Much remains unclear.
What struck me was her sadness: “Some people are spoiling yoga,” she said. And also: “Yoga is meant to be cool.”
The words “spoiling” and “cool” lingered with me. A spoiled fruit might look the same on the outside but it no longer tastes delicious on the inside. Being cool is about not being “hot-headed”. It requires patience. Perhaps spoiling is what happens when ego and ambition overheat the fruit that was meant to stabilize and cool the mind.
Saraswathiji suggested the most important thing for a student is to feel that they are learning and practicing correctly, slowly, slowly, posture by posture, in right relationship with their teacher.
This raises the question:
What is right relationship with a teacher?
How are we to regard our teachers, or, for that matter, our gurus?
Saraswathiji holds her father and guru, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, with unshakable faith and devotion. This is undoubtedly part of her steadfast commitment to her own students.
And yet, this very devotion has been criticized within the international Ashtanga community by those who have felt disillusioned by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. For some, his touch was profoundly healing; for others, it was profoundly harmful.
In 2018, significant public attention was drawn to reports of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois performing physically and sexually abusive assists. Read: Guruji: A Portrait of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students by Guy Donahaye and Eddie Stern, and read Surviving Modern Yoga by Mathew Remski for reference.
It seems that both truths exist, and the community has not yet metabolized their contradictions.
The recent revelations around Taylor Hunt seem to strike this same nerve. Until we acknowledge that medicine and poison can come from the same plant, we may keep looking for scapegoats for rage instead of doing the deeper work of shadow integration.
Questions:
Is it the role of a teacher, or guru, to embody our ethical standards and mirror our moral values?
Is it the role of the teacher, or guru, to point us toward the inner work by which we refine those standards ourselves?
Is it the role of the teacher, or guru, to show us what we still need to learn to free ourselves from suffering?
Of course we want our teachers to model the success of moral and spiritual refinement that we seek. But sometimes the most powerful lessons seem to come through failure. Theirs as much as our own.
A few reflections:
To respect someone does not mean you must agree with them.
To learn from someone does not mean you inherit their mistakes.
To love someone does not mean you force them into your expectations.
As a survivor of sexual assault in a religious institution in India, I know institutional justice is not always the outcome of institutional injustice. The harm I endured was never acknowledged by the institution. There were no reparations. And yet, that lack of external-validation aligned me with a profound inner-healing journey.
Through my Mysore Ashtanga yoga practice, through diversifying my community, through connecting with nature and the divine, through reclaiming my agency and relinquishing my identification with victimhood, I have found a great path of healing.
Questions:
How are those who have been harmed in relationship with Taylor holding this moment? Is it a healing moment? Or is social media turning pain into a PR spectacle? What about those who never felt harmed, but felt profoundly helped, how do they hold their truths in the midst of conflicting narratives?
How is Taylor living through this? His once very active social media accounts have vanished. Has shame pressed him into silence? Is that healthy for him, or for the collective Ashtanga Yoga community? Taylor is part of the healing process too, not as a brand nor even as a teacher, but simply as a human being woven into a larger system.
Samsara is a jungle. The jungle has poison. As Ashtanga Yoga practitioners, we can come back to Patañjali, the jungle doctor we refer to in the Mysore Ashtanga Yoga opening mantra, and remember that poison cannot be exiled but it can, in the right proportions, become medicine. The task before us is to discern how.
The Yama and Niyama of the Patañjali Yoga Sutras can offer a thorough reference point for discerning “right relationship” between teachers and students:
Yamas (restraints)
Ahimsa (non-harm):
Teachers: Refrain from abusing power in body, speech, or mind; create a safe container for practice.
Students: Refrain from harmful projections or retaliatory cruelty; speak truthfully about harm without weaponizing it.
Satya (truthfulness):
Teachers: Be honest about conduct, boundaries, and capacity.
Students: Be honest about experience, needs, and discernment in relationship with teachers.
Asteya (non-stealing):
Teachers: Refrain from exploiting student’s trust, intimacy, or energy.
Students: Refrain from misappropriating teacher’s credibility.
Brahmacharya (wise use of energy):
Teachers: Discern and steward full spectrum of energy responsibly; avoid entangling students in relationships that compromise integrity.
Students: Discern and steward full spectrum of energy responsibly and practice healthy boundaries, avoiding over-dependence on the teacher.
Aparigraha (non-grasping):
Teachers: Do not cling to status, control, or students as possessions.
Students: Do not cling to teachers for validation or salvation; allow space for autonomy and growth.
Niyamas (observances)
Śauca (clarity/purity):
Teachers: Maintain clean physical, mental, and relational environments.
Students: Approach practice with sincerity and self-responsibility; honor the shared space.
Santoṣa (contentment):
Teachers: Do not demand performance or ambition from students beyond their capacity.
Students: Practice patience with process rather than striving for status or favor.
Tapas (discipline/heat):
Teachers: Guide students through discomfort skillfully without turning discipline into harm.
Students: Commit to steady practice without glorifying pain or mistaking suffering for growth.
Svādhyāya (self-study):
Teachers: Reflect on personal patterns, shadows, and power dynamics in teaching. Regularly review philosophy.
Students: Reflect on personal triggers, projections, and inner work in learning; learn from both inspiration and disappointment. Regularly review philosophy.
Īśvarapraṇidhāna (surrender to the divine):
Teachers: Remember yoga is not about empire-building but orienting beyond ego.
Students: Remember that teachers are not gods; surrender is to truth or the divine, not to personalities.
These principles do not excuse harm, but they can guide how we metabolize harm into accountability and healing together.
Harm in our microcosm definitely matters, but if we multiply that harm through infighting, we really lose sight of the macro suffering that calls for our compassion and collaboration.
All of this unfolding while the wider world burns: genocide, conquest, fascism, ecological collapse. In the midst of so much human drama, let us not forget the non-humans too.
Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu
May there be healing and happiness for all.
