When Melissa Shuman (not her real name) signed up for yoga classes at her local studio, she never thought she’d end up leaving her husband of 10 years and their children for her yoga instructor. But she did just that—two weeks after they started having an affair. Six months later, the affair ended. Melissa confided everything to another married woman from class whom she had grown close to, only to find that her friend was also having an affair with the teacher. “I was totally brokenhearted,” she says. “I was devastated.”
As yoga continues to jump-start the lives of people across the country, more and more devotees of the practice are succumbing to the common pitfall of student/teacher attraction. But if the feelings are mutual, what’s wrong with their dating?
“Everything,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD, PT, yoga teacher since 1971 and author of 30 Essential Yoga Poses: For Students and Their Teachers (Rodmell Press). A founder of Yoga Journal, Lasater is currently president of the California Yoga Teacher’s Association. “Yoga is about the coming to wholeness of the student. If a teacher is going to be midwife of [his student’s] spiritual unfoldment, then there is no way he can have a relationship with his student that is about the teacher getting his needs met.”
“It’s a set up,” says Janice Gates, author of the forthcoming Yogini (Mandala Publishing). Gates interviewed a dozen well-known female teachers for her book, repeatedly hearing accounts of abuse of the teacher role. “A male teacher in a room full of mostly women, dressed in tight clothing, moving, breathing and sweating—all looking to him for direction. Most teacher training programs simply don’t prepare them to handle that skillfully.”
Yoga teacher Ana Forrest has dealt with this issue personally and professionally throughout her 32-year yoga career. “Before I had any kind of ethics, I did have sex with my students. I finally stepped into this place of position and authority and… people wanted me!? It took me awhile to figure out what was screwed up about that. People do stupid stuff. They think they have a passion that overcomes the student-teacher boundary.”
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a cornerstone text in yoga philosophy, describe eight “limbs” of practice. The first two, the yamas and the niymas, are guidelines for skillful living. The first yama is ahimsa, commonly translated as nonviolence or non-harming. “It’s very much akin to the medical ‘First do no harm’ directive,” says Lassater “It’s almost impossible as a teacher to become intimately involved with a student and not create suffering.”
Our body-obsessed Western culture tends to separate asana (the physical postures) from the other eight limbs, reducing 5,000-year-old yogic practices to a mere fitness program. Many within the yoga community feel that teachers who focus only on the physical shouldn’t call themselves yoga teachers—or call their classes yoga.
Ana Forrest perceives a greater responsibility in the work. “If you learn to teach Forrest Yoga,” says Forrest, “you are learning how to create a sacred space and a sanctuary for people to work their healing, and a lot of their healing is around sexual disorders, injury and abuse. As people do yoga, their sexuality comes up. Can we hold steady with their burgeoning sexuality? Sex is a wonderful thing [but] don’t fuck your students! Because the messes we make on so many different levels are just not worth it.”
In recent years, the yoga community has seen an increasing acceptance of sexual relationships between teachers and students. One teacher jokingly justified dating one of her students by pointing out, “All the guys do it.” Some studio owners don’t want to address the issue—unless they start getting a reputation, are threatened with lawsuits or begin losing business.
Many teachers don’t want to deal with the issue either, especially as yoga becomes more of a business and teachers are competing not only for students, but for jobs. If the teacher in question has higher student numbers, others are hesitant to approach studio owners. As one teacher, who asked not to be identified, says, “When I first started teaching, I wouldn’t have hesitated to bring up this issue to studio ownership. Now, there is no way I’m going to make waves… I need to keep my job.”
This concerns Lasater. “It interferes with the teacher’s ability to teach the student,” she says, “and it confuses things for the other people in the class. At any given moment, is this about the sexual relationship or about the student/teacher relationship? The person who stands to lose is the student. Because when the break-up occurs—which it almost always does—the student has lost not only her romantic interest, she has lost her teacher.”
“This is what I tell my teacher trainees,” says Forrest. “Number one, if you fuck your student, you lose a paying student. Two, when your roving eye goes elsewhere, you lose a student period. Three, when you do this, it is very evident to everybody else and you create havoc, so it’s really lousy business.”
Under what circumstance does someone stand up and state his truth, and when should he remain quiet?
“I think the question is more, ‘Why would someone remain quiet when she knew harm was happening?’” says Lasater. She uses a personal litmus test to determine when she should speak out: “If this were happening to my daughter, would I recommend the studio?”
Lasater goes on to describe “idiot compassion,” a Buddhist concept that she often sees in the yoga community. To illustrate the concept, she adopts a high, soft voice, “Oh well, they were just acting out of their karma, we don’t want to hurt them and upset this teacher because we’re so loving and wonderful and we understand and forgive.”
The Ethics Quandry
What can a student and teacher do if they feel a legitimate attraction? Lasater answers: “As a married woman, say I had an attraction to a student. I would first get some counseling. If it continued, I would tell the student to study with another teacher. [Even] if I were a single woman, I would not date my students. I knew a male teacher and a female student. She felt attracted to him; he felt attracted to her. They sat down over tea and decided that he would no longer be her teacher. They separated for six months; she went to another class. Six months later they started dating and [eventually] married.”
Both the California Yoga Teacher’s Association and The Yoga Alliance have strong guidelines for teacher behavior, yet there is no Ethics Board to mediate and resolve transgressions. With the rise in violations of the teacher code of conduct, many in the industry feel it’s time to create an ethics board to manage licensing and oversight of teachers. Other therapeutic professions have strict codes of conduct, so why not yoga teachers? Doctors, therapists, clergy and counselors all have governing boards that establish acceptable standards of guidance and care. If harm is done, these communities have a clear recourse for action.
In an ideal world, teachers and students would be able to participate in a learning experience that benefits both without harming either. Until that happens, maybe it’s time for a Yoga Board of Standards. As teachers, don’t we want to do everything we can to guarantee that students are receiving quality instruction with a high level of integrity?
A Board of Standards would ensure that teacher-training programs cover the depth of this issue and its impact on students, teachers and the studio community. Therapists would be available to anonymously support teachers, students and others struggling with this problem. It would be an opportunity for healing and resolution, rather than today’s mess of gossip and recrimination.
These shadow issues in the yoga world will continue to surface until we address them directly. We need to be able to find sanctuary and refuge in yoga class, instead of yet another place to be caught by patterns and suffering
Lisa Maria is a journalist and yoga instructor who writes frequently about yoga for WLT.