Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond

How do we co-create safer yoga and spiritual communities?
Through dogged investigative work, careful listening to survivor stories
of assault and abuse, and close analysis of the cultic mechanisms at play
in the sphere of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga community, Matthew Remski’s
Practice and All Is Coming offers a sober view into a collective and intergenerational
trauma.
It also offers a clear pathway forward into enhanced critical thinking,
student empowerment, self-and-other care, and community resilience.
Concluding with practical tools for a world rocked by abuse revelations,
Practice and All Is Coming opens a window on the possibility of healing—
and even re-enchantment.

While Mathew Remski is the courageous, insightful, and compassionate author of this informative, challenging, and thought-provoking book, this book is clearly a group effort.  Equal parts theory, training manual, expose, and memoir, Practice and All is Coming ... is a foray into the difficult topics of personal agency,  spirituality authority, and cult dynamics. In addition to his clearly articulated understanding of the problems inherent in many spiritual schools,  Mathew provides hope for healing the confusion and anguish that arise in the heart of sincere practitioners when they are betrayed by the revered powers in which they have placed their trust.  If you practice or teach yoga, please consider this book an essential companion on your path.

Christina Sell, author of Yoga From the Inside Out, My Body is a Temple, and A Deeper Yoga.

This text is a formidable contribution and necessary, painstaking collaboration that took incredible courage and fortitude to bring to light. It plays a critical role in allowing yoga to move forward in our generation and the next, to reframe what it means to practice yoga, and how. It encourages our yoga community to begin to move out of the darkness of its history of sexual assault, self-harm, and guru as god worship, and into the light toward healing. To enforce a no tolerance policy against sexual abuse and psychological and spiritual manipulation that can end generations of violence against women, men, & the self with our collective, informed, and compassionate will.

As a sexual assault survivor, it took me years, almost 2 decades, to move from victim to victor. This text was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to read. But, it was also one of the most important. ... Many times while reading, my body and mind viscerally pushed back against reading, my throat tightened, threatening to close; and the anger, so old now it has turned to grief, begin to rise up and threaten to make me mourn all over again. Mourn for justice that, just like for the women in this book, will never formally be awarded. 

The healing potential of this book lies in an equal two parts–one part admission and revelation and one part evolution–the demand for evolution in order to nurture healing and recovery toward ending abuse, coercion, violence, injury, and deceptive manipulation in yoga. Yoga should be about healing, not harm.

Dr. Ginger Garner, DPT, ATC/L, PYT, author, Medical Therapeutic Yoga

An utterly shocking exposé of the fascinating, messy relationships between yoga, narcissism, systems of control, and charismatic leadership. The author usefully synthesizes Attachment Theory and current research on cult dynamics, cutting through the gauzy mystique of the yoga industry with a strong analysis of power, rank, and privilege. Both sensitive and searing, Remski's critique is a tour de force that provides a much-needed public health service to yoga practitioners and teachers alike.   

Carmen Spagnola, Somatic Trauma Recovery Practitioner and host of The Numinous Podcast.

Amongst the responses to the revelations of sexual abuse that have marred a number of yoga communities, Practice and All Is Coming is unparalleled. Of immense value to both practitioners and academics, the
text centers the voices of the female victims of serial abuser Pattabhi Jois and illuminates the wider psychoanalytic and structural conditions that enabled such abuse. Practitioners will be gifted a demystification of transnational yoga and a way to both understand and prevent the toxic dynamics that have produced abuse. Academics will find a strong case for the utility—and even ethical necessity—for bringing cultic studies back into the field of New Religious Movements. With this ambitious and well-executed text, Remski has established himself as one of the most perspicacious and important scholar-practitioners of contemporary transnational yoga.
Ann Gleig, Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies,
University of Central Florida.

This is a horrifying and necessary tale that ... yoga practitioners and teachers need to know and reckon with. Jois and Ashtanga had a significant influence on what yoga is today in the U.S. and worldwide—from the ethics practices of teachers, to the way we pedestal (and isolate) teachers, to assists, to studio culture. This centers Ashtanga yoga, but as Remski suggests, it is relevant to every yoga lineage, and of course we know that it’s culture-wide. Remski recognizes the qualities of isolation, lack of agency, victim-blaming, and silencing present in these survivors’ accounts as implicit in rape culture. The responsibility therefore extends beyond the “perpetrators”, and falls on all of our shoulders as bystanders and participants in “yoga community”. We need to face and discuss this history and that of any harm in order to move into the true promise of living out yogic teachings— armlessness, integrity, generosity, non-attachment, and the wise use of sexual energies.
Jacoby Ballard, Yoga Teacher and Social Justice Educator

Starting with the first principle of yoga which is non-harming (ahimsa), and applying the clear seeing of meditation (dhyana), Remski offers us a framework for understanding how confusion and messiness around lineage and power has led to so much pain and suffering inside the world of yoga. This is also a guidebook in the yogic principle of self-study (svadyaya) helping us all look honestly at ourselves and our community. I am so grateful that finally, Remski offers us a way forward—with both practical means and inspiration - to remind us that yoga is a living practice and in the end, always about relationship.
Cyndi Lee, author of Yoga Body, Buddha Mind

Thank you Matthew Remski and the courageous women who have stepped forward to offer this pivotal work. Practice and All is Coming is a service to humanity, to the yoga world at-large, to long-time practitioners
and future generations so that we can evolve into cultivating a safe space that all beings deserve. This incredibly thorough, sensitive and somatically sophisticated work is ESSENTIAL to the evolution of yoga for the maturity to unpack the shadow of abuse, body-image distortion and power-dynamics effecting many without conscious
awareness of these undercurrents, while also recommending best practices and a PRISM method to move forward so that we may work towards ending abuse of all forms and transforming dominance-structures so that all beings are respected, safe and empowered in their journey of embodiment.
Shiva Rea, author of Tending the Heart Fire