Yoga Student’s Bill of Rights
Exposure to and understanding of yoga are often being shaped by business interests and market forces. When someone who holds yoga dear sees yoga being portrayed with dubious purpose or in a less than sacred light, it’s easy to feel disheartened.
I have often derided the “yoga industry” or “commercial yoga” as though it were a boogie man that is out to get us. The emergence of new anti-establishment voices in the yoga blogosphere has spurned even harsher scrutiny of “yoga culture.” Expansion of the internet and social media has led to more of a real dialogue about yoga then at any other time since it became my life pursuit. However, some of these new voices have caused me to question my own.
When we criticize the “yoga industry” or “commercial yoga”, who exactly are we referring to? Yoga Journal? Yoga Alliance? Lululemon? Big name yoga teachers who have managed to make a buck? Or perhaps, it’s really just the commodification of yoga that presents us with an unresolvable dilemma and no place in particular to point the frustration. Fact is, regardless of the commodity, industry only exists where there is a consumer to be had. So, it stands to reason that a predominance of educated and informed consumers can reflexively shape an industry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naive as to believe that a bunch of high-minded yogi’s are going to somehow magically refute supply side economics. But we certainly do ourselves a disservice if we simply cede to the corrupting forces of greed and advertising. And while bitching about it may make us feel better temporarily, it’s not all that useful in the long run.
As discussed in a previous post, Yoga Alliance Approved, My Ass, there is no proper trade organization to represent or provide leadership to the grassroots professionals who make up both the underclass and the backbone of the yoga industry. Consequently, corporate interests are entirely framing the equation and often well-intentioned people are forced to bend to the pressure. For those who wish to see Yoga presented with greater integrity and authenticity, our best bet is to offer some form of proactive empowerment directly to the yoga consumer.
Recently, I was in the back of a NYC taxicab and happened to take notice of the prominently displayed: “Taxi Rider’s Bill of Rights.” I can recall a time when this required sticker did not exist and there were a whole lot more taxi riders getting taken for a figurative ride by shady drivers. Perhaps a public service announcement for yoga students might also encourage better discernment of disreputable operations and a more thoughtful consideration among the industry.
Here is a proposed first draft:
Yoga Student’s Bill of Rights
As a yoga student you have the right to:
- Be personally introduced to your instructor
- A safe and courteous instructor who is attentive to your needs
- A knowledgeable instructor who instills confidence
- Decline to be pushed into anything that feels wrong to you
- Not be compared to anyone or made to feel small
- Ask questions and get sufficient answers
- Feel comfortable and that you are among friends
- Be discerning and make your own determinations
When we talk about the “yoga world” or the “art world” and what we are referring to is the cold influence of money on these pursuits, we discredit all the honest and sincere people making art and teaching yoga in their communities who are merely living out their passions and doing their best to get by. We are part of “the industry” too. If there were not people like us just banging it out everyday then there would be no market to exploit.
My point in this has less to do with social activism and more to do with needing to feel that everything is not entirely rigged to only benefit the proverbial bottom line. Even if it is rigged that way, I want to encourage the sort of thinking that at least makes it seem possible for human beings to still do right by themselves.
A lyric by Mos Def about hip-hop comes to mind:
“People be asking me all the time, what’s getting ready to happen with hip-hop? You know what I tell them? You know what’s going to happen with hip-hop? Whatever is happening with us. If we smoked out, hip-hop is going to be smoked out. If we doing alright, hip-hop be doing alright. People talk about hip-hop like it’s some giant living in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople. We are hip-hop. Me, you, everybody. We are hip-hop. So hip-hop is going where we going. So the next time you ask yourself, where hip-hop is going, ask yourself, where am I going? How am I doing? And you get a clear idea.”
In the spirit of consumers making informed choices, this video blog, offers some philosophical distinctions between different approaches to yoga practice and discusses why attempting to standardize yoga curriculum is inherently problematic:
J. Brown:
I applaud you for stepping up and taking leadership on some of these issues, when, frankly so few other yogis, especially the women who dominate American yoga – and benefit from the current disarray and lack of collective introspection – can or will.
I tend to think that we can and should create a minimum of standardization without creating a one-size-fits-all model for yoga teacher training as a whole – for some of the reasons that you suggest.
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We do have a problem, I think, with poorly trained yoga teachers being shuttled throiugh fly-by-night programs, and we have a problem with those program being run by studios largely for monetary reasons and to brand their own yoga styles
Imagine how great it would be if people of different persuasions went to common yoga school to receive a base line of training. The cross-fertilization that occurs in any “campus” setting would be wonderful. I think taking training out of the studios would cut down on quite a few problem that we encounter currently.
Your videos, as always, are very provocative. Whether yoga can really survive with integrity as a householder based movement – when its roots are in a more Hindu ascetic tradition – is a fascinating one.
I think the real downside currently is that so few people entering yoga see themselves as true spiritual warriors — again, the women in particular. They’re more interested in becoming local chieftains and “princesses” and acquiring a status and prestige that they feel they could never achieve elsewhere.
Of course, you’re branded a sexist right away for suggesting this, but the fact is, women are very easily distracted by the perqs of power, status, glamor and celebrity. I dare say we have the American commercial yoga we have today due to the preponderance of female consumers and the yogini teacher corps that panders to them incessantly.
One of the reasons I so applaud your interventions. The more men step up and draw everyone but especially the women into uncomfortable dialogues and reflections about themselves, the stronger and deeper and truer American yoga might one day still become. We’re a long way away from providng a true public service.
Hey Stuart- Sorry for the delay. I appreciate your perspective. The only place we may disagree is when you say: “I think taking training out of the studios would cut down on quite a few problems that we encounter currently.” If not at yoga centers, where should yoga teacher training be happening? The university? The hospital? That’s fine for clinical applications (which I support) but there is immense value to yoga being learned and taught as a preventative care model in people’s communities. Not simply as a high art for those of greater privilege.
Here’s the thing, the only way to learn to teach is to teach. Sure, you can provide supervised ‘field work” but that is still not the same thing as someone, of their own accord, fulfilling the responsibilities of being a yoga teacher on a daily basis, over time. The problem is that when new teachers are first starting out they need to know how to only teach what they know, and not be attempting to do more. And, more importantly, the yoga centers and individuals who hand out certifications need to take responsibility for the teachers that are certified under their auspices.
Even still, the issue has to do with peoples attitudes towards the physical work of yoga practice more then creating training hoops to jump through. If we are choosing to use simple forms, working at a measured pace with attention and breath then no one gets hurt. Only when we are engaging our bodies recklessly, barreling through a whole bunch of a stuff at break-neck speed with little attention or breath that folks get into trouble. Training standards cannot prevent people from being poor teachers. Only the sensibilities of the teachers who mentor them can. (Key word being mentor.)
Lastly, making a distinction between ascetic and householder traditions, or liberation versus the given condition is not something new. Yoga predates the Hindu ascetic traditions (albeit unsubstantiated with texts due to the fact that yoga was only an oral tradition for so long.) However, any good scholar of the Vedas would admit that the creation of deities occurred later. The vedantists were debating the same thing (Kevala-Radical Nondual, Vishishta-Qualified Nondual, Dvaita-Thesitic Duality.) Or simply look at different translations of Samkhya. You can have 24, 25 or 26 principles depending. You seem to support a classical interpretation that is rooted in academia. Regardless, the notion of householder has existed alongside the ascetic throughout time. For me personally, making these distinctions was important.
You might also appreciate seeing the response to this post from the “anti-establishment voices” I mentioned. Make sure to scroll down and read the comment thread between me and the author and between the author and another smart gentleman named “the moment already came.”
http://thebabarazzi.com/2012/09/06/our-resonse-to-j-browns-yoga-students-bill-o-rights-consumers-are-manufactured-bills-of-rights-are-often-presumptuous/
As for the Bill of Rights itself, I do think it’s a great idea, and an example of of what’s know in industry as “voluntary self-regulation. ”
I have written on these topics myself, and I have always said, yoga has no justification for resisting state regulation – and indeed should expect it – unless it plans to institute a system of voluntary self-regulation.
Police yourselves – or others will do it for you.
The specifics you mentioned –
- Be personally introduced to your instructor
- A safe and courteous instructor who is attentive to your needs
- A knowledgeable instructor who instills confidence
- Decline to be pushed into anything that feels wrong to you
- Not be compared to anyone or made to feel small
- Ask questions and get sufficient answers
- Feel comfortable and that you are among friends
- Be discerning and make your own determinations
I could see some language about –
- A teacher who doesn’t flirts or dress, act, or speak in sexually provocative and inappropriate ways
- AA teacher who spends an inordinate amount of time discussing her personal life in a way unrelated to yoga or to the class practice
- Undue class time devoted to marketing and publicizing yoga products and events.
- Unwarranted or unrequested “touching,” however well-intentioned.
Those are off the top of my head. I’m sure others have many other ideas.
Hi Stewart,
Thank you for sharing your opinion. With all due respect, I would like to reject every single one of your additions to the Bill of Rights.
“A teacher who doesn’t flirts or dress, act, or speak in sexually provocative and inappropriate ways” — I think that this one is already largely covered by “a safe and courteous instructor who is attentive to your needs”. Secondly, I don’t feel that this is a problem anyway to be included in the Bill of Rights. I hardly ever see it happening, and even if you find someone inappropriately dress, you can simply stop taking classes from this person. In fact, flirty dressing is extremely difficult to define, and even in the corporate world there consensus is to always blame the man for sexual harassment rather than the woman for inappropriate dressing. Even more importantly, I don’t want to see the language of sexual harassment and the like carried into the yoga world, since, in a sense, this is what we are trying to escape. We are all real people, and we want to be more in touch with our real selves. Being occasionally attracted to your teacher can certainly be part of your practice. I was, on various occasions, attracted to other teachers/students in the many yoga and dance classes that I’ve been taking, and it always taught me something new about dance and yoga that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
“- AA teacher who spends an inordinate amount of time discussing her personal life in a way unrelated to yoga or to the class practice” — this just means that the teacher is, in your opinion, wasting the time for which you have paid. The same can happen in any field. Besides, what would you do with such a regulation anyway? File a lawsuit after recording a certain number of classes and demonstrating that the asana practice did not comprise a certain fraction of the class? Then the studios start making you sign a waiver that you don’t mind the teacher talking… Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that there should be a law about it
- “- Undue class time devoted to marketing and publicizing yoga products and events.” – I am even more strongly opposed to this one. Students already do not realize the economic realities of teaching yoga. I would rather study with a good teacher who spends 20% of the class publicizing/marketing yoga product than with an average teacher who doesn’t.
- Unwarranted or unrequested “touching,” however well-intentioned. sorry, but this is just illogical. All “touching” in a yoga class is basically unrequested. How should we implement this guideline?
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Again, with all due respect, I would like to comment on some of your other statements.
“Imagine how great it would be if people of different persuasions went to common yoga school to receive a base line of training. ” — there are so many reasons why I don’t like this idea, I don’t even know where to start. Primarily, I don’t like the spirit – that there would be some entity that would be allowed to monopolize yoga. Just imagine this new Institute of Universal Yoga somewhere in Washington D.C. that will charge $10,000 for yoga teacher training. They would require everyone to attend mandatory training sessions throughout the year – again very expensive and very crowded, so that there would hardly be any value in them. They would prosecute everyone trying to teach yoga without an appropriate license. They would have a special department, checking out every local yoga studio in every studio, searching craigslist and facebook, looking for the black yoga market where uncertified teachers from India teach their own, unofficial version of yoga.
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The real problem is one of scaling. Once the popularity of something explodes, it becomes impossible to keep the quality on the same level. Read this article by Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City: “Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef”: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html
Basically, if 20 million people are going to practice yoga, you CAN’T have enough great teachers. You WILL have bad teachers, injuries, etc, so standardization would be natural. See what happened with pilates! A lot of people are teaching, sorry, complete garbage. They have no idea what they are doing. Sadly, the same happens even with ballet – in this case, we have, in many cases, former dancers with good and solid training who have no idea how to teach open adult classes, and many of them don’t care either. Many do care, but lack the training.
So what do you do? I think, the main focus should be on safety. The community – both the yogic and the scientific communities – should start from getting a much deeper understanding of the various safety issues involved in a yoga practice. Then somebody should take the leadership to analyze all of this experience and come up with some specific recommendations. For example, a certain set of yoga poses could be labeled as inherently dangerous, and one may require advanced training to be allowed to teach them. Say, one would need to have a minimum of 200-500 hours of teaching experience in order to be allowed to teach a headstand or to teach the transition from standing to Urdhva Dhanurasana. This shouldn’t be a legal guideline – if someone, say, taught pilates for 10 years and then took a 200-hr yoga teacher training, they already know what they are doing – but this could be an ethical guideline, included in a standardized set of teaching recommendations.
The question of hands-on adjustments is also interesting. I have to admit that of the adjustments I have received myself from various teachers in my life, most were of questionable value… We can discuss it next time…
Bill of Rights Addenda:
* Try to avoid using bait-and-switch tactics with students buying sessions … you will lose customers that way
Corollary to that: “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver”
Failing that: use your judgment (but realize there are possible permanent consequences)
*Students have the right to be trusted even if they don’t wear the “UNIFORM”
Corollary to that: segment your market beforehand …
Sometimes the upscale (wearing coded brands, let’s say) are less trustworthy than those who were brought up to respect other people’s property and their time …
*Newer students have the right to know if your studio encourages cliquishness and exclusivity
You choose what you want your studio environment to be like
As above, failing that: use your judgment (but realize there are possible permanent consequences)
What else can I say right now?
Yes, thank you!
Amen.
I’ve had A Bad Week on this front, watching teachers disrespect their students. It made me grumpy. And sarcastic.
Thank God someone is thinking straight.