teaching inclusive, safe and ethical yoga – part 1: Empowerment

Ahimsa, the ethic of non harming can take on a number of meanings in the yoga classroom, including ensuring safety, being trustworthy, maximising choice, collaboration, and prioritising empowerment [1]. These principles are important in a broad range of settings but especially vital in yoga contexts where many practitioners expose their bodies, minds, and vulnerabilities.

While yoga promises tools for self empowerment and healing, yoga classrooms have not always been empowering, safe nor inclusive spaces for all, nor have our practices always been consonant with empowering our communities. 

Whether through replicating inherited behaviours and practices from past generations or adopting business practices meant for commercial contexts, or not understanding the ways in which violence, victimisation, and other traumatic experiences may exclude victims/survivors of trauma, many common practices in modern yoga fall short of these principles. 

This 2-part essay Written by Yonnie Fung considers the ways in which our practices in yoga may erode empowerment, take away from agency, and undermine safety.  It is hoped that by highlighting these areas that we can focus our efforts to evolve as a profession and be better able to serve our communities.

EMPOWERMENT AND TRAUMA

Trauma is universal. Global statistics consistently reveal that domestic and sexual violence, physical abuse and sexual abuse affect between 35 per cent to 70 per cent of women [2]. The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study of 17,000 people found that  28% of study participants reported physical abuse and 21% reported sexual abuse [3]. The World Health Organisation reports child abuse as having affected 1 in 4 adults, and child sex abuse as affecting one in 5 women and 1 in 13 men [4], Trauma affects returning veterans [5], people of colour[6], members of the LGBT population [7],  users of the public mental health system, substance abuse and social services [8].

For any yoga teacher, it can be safely assumed that our classes will be attended by at least some whose lives have been impacted by traumatic experiences - even if such people, choose not to identify as such.

EMPOWERMENT AND AGENCY 

Empowerment refers to measures designed to increase a person’s autonomy. Approaches may vary according to context but they share the common theme of increasing one’s capacity to help themselves, not viewing people as passive or helpless victims to be rescued.

Yoga, at its best, can empower practitioners to reclaim their bodies, to take control of their own emotions and to establish tools for emotional resilience.   Facilitators can guide participants towards making choices about their own bodies, to develop confidence, to listen to and trust their sensations; and ultimately to develop independence. Trauma expert Judith Herman underscores the importance of empowerment in the trauma context:

"Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this basic principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest" [8].

EMPOWERMENT: ACKNOWLEDGING POWER DIFFERENTIALS AND SHARING POWER

Classroom settings involve uneven power dynamics where the teacher inherently has more power [10]. They have the right to speak, their words carry weight and they are assumed to be experts in the room. The student, by contrast, has less of a voice.  They are tacitly expected to listen and follow the teacher’s instructions.  They are not experts.

The authoritarian styles of many yoga lineages exemplify power differentials between teacher and student starkly.

Within them, teachers are granted the right to decide which postures a student is allowed to practice, in which way, in which order, at what time, whether or not to use props, which ones, and in which way.   Over time, students may become habituated to viewing the right to place their bodies into a particular posture as a reward which needs to be earned, foregoing personal autonomy over their physical bodies and sense of self. Ashtanga teacher Zoe Ward describes how postures are viewed as hers to be given and taken as a teacher:

“If someone is collecting poses, I will stop giving them, even if the body is working fine. If someone is interested and humble in their work, I may let them play with things that haven’t physically ‘earned’ yet. Some people don’t like me for requiring this work" [11].

Authoritarian structures can disturb a person’s sense of autonomy and diminish the value of their own lived experience and expertise of their own bodies. 

“After 6 years of deferring to the authority of a severe Teacher, I found myself incapable of trusting my own judgement. Everything I learned, from my own work and my own body, required the approval and validation of my teachers before I could trust it” [12].

The all knowing teacher is believed to know the practitioner’s body better than the practitioner knows themselves. Far from empowering a student to trust their own bodies, students are required to ‘submit’ or ‘surrender’ to the teacher’s physical manipulations(13), a process which makes following one’s own limits and being guided by one’s own sensations impossible. In the words of Sharath Jois, the current head of the Ashtanga lineage:

“Knowledge can be transferred only after the student has spent many years with an experienced guru, a teacher to whom he has completely surrendered in body, mind, speech and inner being. Only then is he fit to receive knowledge" [14].

EMPOWERMENT: ADJUSTING LANGUAGE

The simplest and perhaps most overlooked way yoga teachers undermine their participants’ empowerment in the classroom is through language choice.

Cueing students to move their bodies in language that might sound like an instruction, direction or command can be disempowering.   Common examples are:  “I want you to do X” or “you’re going to raise your arm” or “step your right foot forward for me”.

These phrases subtly imply that the movement is in service of the teacher. This may conjure up triggering dynamics for sexual abuse survivors, those that have experienced rape, or were molested as children where their bodies were manipulated in the service of others. 

Another problem with prescriptive language is it’s implied choice-less-ness.  One of the key experiences of trauma is having no choice.  Children in abusive or neglectful homes, women in abusive relationships, being held hostage - in all these scenarios, victims feel they have no choice.

Prescriptive cuing reenacts choice-less-ness.  Furthermore, in cases where survivors can not  avert the abuse, they become habituated to choice-less-ness and can lose the neural ability to make choices [15]. While invitational language will help to re-establish this neural ability, prescriptive language potentially entrenches it.

EMPOWERMENT: INTEROCEPTION

Thirdly, prescriptive cueing interferes with a student’s interoception which is critical for our sense of embodiment and wellbeing. Broadly defined, it is the sense of signals originating within the body [16]. It emerged as a basic survival system that allows one to monitor what they need to preserve life.

Interoception allows us to detect afferent/visceral sensations including when we feel hungry or thirsty, feelings of pain, stress, sadness or anxiety.  It has much broader applications extending to our ability to make decisions, regulate our emotions, empathy and addiction [17]. Practising yoga asana is an opportunity to re-establish interoceptive capabilities if participants are guided to listen to their own internal cues.

Many trauma survivors can have experiences of both hyperactive and compromised interoceptive capacity.  Children, in abusive environments for example, develop extraordinary abilities to scan for warnings of attack, becoming very attuned to recognise subtle changes to their external environment [18].  However, this comes at the cost of their ability to feel what is going on internally. 

Interoception may also switch off in situations where people learn that their needs will not be met, or their needs anger their caregivers.  Children raised in neglectful homes  become habituated to having their needs ignored so over time, their ability to perceive their needs become weakened [19].   While this helps victims survive, in the long term, being unable to identify and fulfil one’s own needs can make life very challenging.  

Yoga can help to reestablish interoceptive capabilities if participants are guided in such ways that encourage them to listen to their own bodies [20]. Prescriptive language further entrenches the pattern of not listening to the internal cues - in other words, they encourage disembodiment when the situation calls for the opposite course of action.

As yoga teachers, we should be striving to facilitate in ways that do not reenact trauma dynamics of neglect and abuse, rather, to work against these dynamics to create safe spaces to practice and develop safe and respectful relationships to practice [21].

Empowering and enabling students means creating conditions of safety should be one of our highest priorities. However upholding this obligation to physical safety can at times paradoxically disempower students contributing to anxiety and dependency.

Verbal suggestions can cause hyperalgesia which is an increased sensitivity to pain.    Common classroom examples might be cautions on how it is “dangerous to hypertextend” or to the need to ‘protect the knee by doing x’, or the suggestion that certain alignments as ‘unsafe’ or ‘destabilising.’

Such alignment cues are intended to help people avoid injuries, but the negative language of pain and harm can have a noticeable effect [22] which induces anxiety about impending pain increase [23] and  creates fear or anxiety of movement.  Such language encourages a mentality of helplessness and dependence on the teacher without whom one won’t know how to move safely. They may plant the seeds for the belief one can’t trust their own bodies, or that they can not move safely.   

EMPOWERMENT AND TRANSPARENCY 

The yoga world has seen every major yoga lineage mired in scandal and its leaders exposed as perpetrators of different kinds of abuse to their community members [24]. While the lineages were different, the responses played out in similar ways. Leaders in the various lineages were not transparent or accountable.  When survivors spoke out, many in the community denied their experiences, discredited the survivor’s credibility and isolated the survivors. 

Others have attempted the moral impossibility of placing a foot in each camp - on the one hand, stating their support for the victims while on the other, expressing their loyalty to perpetrators and the power structures that allowed the abuses to happen [25].

As Herman observes, “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator.  All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing…The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering” [26].

In the aftermath of truth being exposed, we can experience a range of mixed feelings which being in this conflict entails. This can manifest itself in sympathy for those abused, without the costs of supportive action - carrying on our daily lives as though nothing has happened. 

We can compound the harm to survivors and betray the trust of our communities  by continuing to display images of perpetrators in yoga centres and in our public communications, or by continuing to capitalise off our proximity to perpetrators, referencing perpetrators in honorific terms or in ways that don’t reflect the truth of their actions.[27]

Such actions isolate survivors and send a clear messages that their painful experience is meaningless and does not matter to us.  They also signal to our community that we do not support the needs of victims of sexual abuse.

“… remembering, truth telling, and support for survivors is the prerequisite for recovery and healing [28]”.

For yoga teachers to be a part of the recovery process, we need to share our histories and be transparent and accountable about that history with our communities. Not doing harm in this context can not be a passive choice, it necessitates activity on our part - reflecting on the behaviours that enabled the perpetrator’s behaviour, examining whether or how our own attitudes and behaviours contribute to the survivor’s trauma and isolation.  Passive inaction compounds the damage suffered by survivors.

EMPOWERMENT AND CRITICAL THINKING 

Any environment that supports the empowerment of its members needs to adhere to the value of transparency and accountability.  For this to happen, the freedom to question and engage in critical dialogue is essential. The inability to question, choose or challenge is inherently oppressive.  It’s presence is a breeding ground for dogma.

Creating environments that discourages questioning and open discussion undermines a student’s agency and empowerment.  Common examples include levelling the claim one is ‘over-intellectualising’, ‘over-analysing”, brushing questioning aside by prioritising ‘practice over theory’, conflating critical thinking with ‘spreading negativity’ or ‘being judgemental’ or adopting a mantra of ‘live and let live’ - on the face of it a harmless ethos, but works to terminate further inquiry and absolves one of the need to engage or respond in discussion.

Thank you for reading this.

Feel free to share your story, question or feedback below this post, we love to hear your voice too!

REFERENCES

1. Fallot, R. D., & Harris, M. (2009). Creating Cultures of Trauma-Informed Care (CCTIC): A self-assessment and planning protocol. Washington, DC: Community Connections. Retrieved from http://www.healthcare.uiowa.edu/icmh/documents/CCTICSelf-AssessmentandPlanningProtocol0709.pdf
2. UN Women, http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures
3. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/practicing-effective-prevention/prevention-behavioral-health/adverse-childhood-experiences
4. 30 September 2016, https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment
5. RAND Corporation. Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery, April 2008. http://veterans.rand.org/
6. Bryant-Davis, T., & Ocampo, C. (2005). Racist-incident based trauma. The Counseling Psychologist, 33, 479–500. 
7. A. L. Roberts, S. Bryn Austin, Heather L. Corliss, Ashley K. Vandermorris, Karestan C. Koenen,  April 15, 2010, “Pervasive Trauma Exposure Among US Sexual Orientation Minority Adults and Risk of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” American Journal of Public Health, online: URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2978167/
8. ^[Jennings, A. (2004). The damaging consequences of violence and trauma: Facts, discussion points, and recommendations for the behavioral health system. Retrieved from http://www.theannainstitute.org/Damaging%20Consequences.pdf  
9. Herman J., Recovery from psychological trauma, 04 January 2002, Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1819.1998.0520s5S145.x
10. Fahad Alsobaie, M, 2015, Power and Authority in Adult Education, Journal of Education and Practice,Vol.6, No.15, URL:https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JEP/article/view/22709
11. https://www.ashtangadispatch.com/the-role-of-a-mysore-teacher-by-zoe-ward/
12. URL: https://www.ashtangadispatch.com/the-role-of-a-mysore-teacher-by-zoe-ward/
13. URL: http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/tag/yoga-adjustments/
14. URL: https://sharathjois.com/the-practice/parampara/
15. J Herman, 1997 p 98
16. Farb N., Daubenmier J, Price C. J., Gard T, Kerr C., Dunn B. D., Klein A., Paulus M. P., Mehling W E., 2015, Interoception, contemplative practice, and health, Frontiers in Psychology, vol.6, p 763 URL: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763
17. J Herman, 1997 p 99
18. J Herman, 1997,  p 99
19. Ainsworth M, Attachments Beyond Infancy, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5431/41e657bda74736ff87ac10d70643cd639892.pdf
20. Neukirch, N., Reid, S., Shires, A. 2019, Yoga for PTSD and the role of interoceptive awareness: A preliminary mixed-methods case series study,European Journal of Trauma & Dissociation,Volume 3, Issue 1, pp 7-15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejtd.2018.10.003.
21. Van der Kolk, B, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
22. URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-nocebo-effect-5451823/
23. F. Benedetti, M. Lanotte, L. Lopiano, L. Colloca, When words are painful: Unraveling the mechanisms of the nocebo effect, Neuroscience, Volume 147, Issue 2, 2007, pp 260-271.
24. Remski M, 2019, Practice and All Is Coming Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond, Embodied Wisdom Publishing
25. Yoga Talks Podcast “Synthesizer of Contemplative Traditions”, Feb 05 2018 interview https://www.jbrownyoga.com/yoga-talks-podcast/2018/2/richard-freeman and “Conflicts and Confluences”, April 23, 2018, Interview https://www.jbrownyoga.com/yoga-talks-podcast/2018/4/kino-macgregor
26. Herman, J., 1997, p 8
27. Rain, K., 2019: URL: http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/responding-to-kino-macgregors-statements-on-pattabhi-jois-by-karen-rain/
28. Herman, J., 1997, p 8