What follows will take time to read. But this information may enrich this discussion.
In yoga circles there has been a lot of soul searching about who has chief responsibility - teacher, students?
This applies just as much to meditation teachers as yoga teachers.
Many teachers present their best behavior early in the student teacher relationship. Later, as the teacher's manners become more troubling, assertive
students leave, persons unable to trust their emotions remain, creating a docile group that reinforces each other's docility.
Some teachers actually target exactly those persons who are most vulnerable.
A detailed discussion can be read here.
[
forum.culteducation.com]
Then, there are persons who have been traumatized in early life and cannot identify and trust their own emotions when another person
unknowingly or intentionally breaches the boundaries. It is very common for persons with this background to seek healing through a meditation or yoga practice. One yoga teacher who is a trauma survivor put it this way.
“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege.
“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.
“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.
“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”
(The rest of this article is quoted below. It applies as much to meditation as to yoga - Corboy)
There have been discussions about who has responsibility in some discussions
about problems with some yoga teachers.
There's a valuable discussion on the Decolonizing Yoga website.
What follows is some material from that article that directly pertains to this'
discussion.
Many students of meditation and or yoga despite being adults in the legal sense are unable to access and trust their own emotions. Many times persons in this predicament have been traumatized. In situations where a trusted authority figure
knowingly or unknowingly pushes past that person's boundaries, that person's mind
and emotions go into a freeze reaction. This is NOT consent. It is up to the teacher to be informed about exactly this and know not to interpret silence as signifying compliance/consent.
Though this material describes the responsibilities of yoga teachers, it applies just as much to meditation teachers and Advaita teachers.
Jivamukti Fallout: A Trauma-Sensitive Tipping Point in Modern Yoga?
Excerpt
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A Trauma-Sensitive Paradigm Emerges
Those who disagree with Kaminoff’s approach suggest that appeals to personal agency in student-teacher relationships are both insensitive and insufficient when a person’s power of choice is compromised.
Jess Glenny, a British yoga teacher and yoga therapist specializing in working with people who have experienced sexual, emotional and physical trauma, was one of many who begged to differ with Kaminoff’s statements on the Jivamukti case.
“This woman is an abuse survivor in process of recovery,” Glenny wrote in an online comment, referring to Faurot.
“This isn’t about her choices. It’s about the way her neurology has responded to abuse. It’s biologically determined by her experiences. If someone has lost a leg, we don’t chastise them for not being able to run when someone tries to mug them.”
“Some of my clients are very, very vulnerable to this kind of behaviour,” Glenny said, referring to Lauer-Manenti’s harassment of Faurot.
“They often don’t have an understanding of appropriate boundaries. They can be triggered into a reflexive passivity and a need to placate in order to survive when someone makes a sexual advance on them. People with these issues are in our yoga classes, and we all need to be aware of this.”
Quote
As both scholar and survivor, Wildcroft doesn’t see the belief in American-style free will as an eternal tenet of yoga philosophy, nor that it refers to an essential attribute of the yoga student. For her, it’s more of a placebo – which means it’s also a resource, and perhaps the privilege of those who haven’t been affected by trauma.
“Free will is a powerful story, she said via Skype. I’d caught her after her evening classes. “It’s a story we may need. But not everyone can tell it.”
I asked her what she thought about Kaminoff’s statement that people fall prey to abusive persons or organizations because they “choose to suspend their critical thinking.”
“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” she said. “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege.
“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.
“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.
“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”