Issue 2: A Letter From The Editor

Alice Neel, titled Kenneth Fearing, 1935 Open Source Images

A Letter From Rebecca.

This, the second full issue and third issue in total of Inside Yoga Magazine, is a scary one for me to write. This issue, titled The Accountability Issue, is the full expression of me pondering what accountability looks like in the yoga space.

‘No More Hiding’ is the tagline, and it is as much a reminder to me as it is a declaration to you, the reader, about what we are taking on in this issue.

Accountability brings with it things like the language of power dynamics, the truth of our reality, and holding both the people and organizations that are bad actors in our industry to task…but also holding ourselves to task.

I wrote what is now a viral article about the Yoga Alliance’s CEO salary at the end of July of this year, and that sparked some thoughts about our role in our industry’s situation.  Mainly, I wondered where we were in our own story of accountability.

Magnolia Zuniga, one of our contributors, takes on the hardest of topics—Yoga Has a Predator Problem.  This is something that we all have known for a very long time.  But Magnolia goes further, and I think we should too.  She asks the question, “Now what?” 

Now what indeed.  As the issue goes on, we hear from Nana Amoako-Anin about what we in the yoga industry can learn from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  And Kate Hart Waters covers what it means to reckon with our institutional abandonment on a personal level.

How do we make sense of all this? This…kerfluffle we are in? 

One thing we can do is starting to investigate the stories we tell ourselves and each other about how this industry works.  Like in cult networks, we need to do our own discovery of thought-terminating clichés; these are the phrases designed to end conversations rather than open them.  Those words or phrases pretend to say a lot, but are indeed designed to stop people from asking questions and thinking about the industry in new ways.

The words “agency” and “free will” are some such words I have found.  They are often used as our version of choice feminism.  The idea that we should celebrate the fact that we get to make the choice, without taking into consideration that every choice comes with context and circumstance. 

Finally, we arrive at this idea of our own accountability.  I am reminded of what we are now learning to teach our school-aged students as they enter high school and young adulthood.  We teach how to not be a bystander.  Because those bystanders who stand by and do nothing while people are hurt are also accountable. 

And that is what we have become as an industry collective. 

At best, a bystander.  At worst, someone actively covering their eyes so they don’t have to see all the hard things.  We hide not only from what others are doing in our industry, but also we hide from our responsibility to each other.

I am often bemused at how yoga pros will quote elaborate scientific details about ecosystems of all kinds.  The ecosystems our animal friends inhabit, the ecosystem of the interconnectedness of the muscles, nervous system, and fascia in the body.  The ecosystem of all living things on the planet we call Earth.  And yet we deny our participation or understanding that we, yoga professionals, are also all in an ecosystem together as well.  And our ecosystem is kind of a mess.  A mess we can’t clean up if we don’t even acknowledge that we belong to it.

So…no more hiding.

No more standing on the sidelines while our most vulnerable participants are served up to predatory teachers on platters because we are unsure of what we can do to stop it—or if we even should. 

No more defaulting to opt-out mode when we discuss yoga organizations and what they do or don’t do for us.  They impact us even if we never choose to send them one dime of our money.

And no more acting like our choices are only our own and do not exist within a system of not only agency but also self-determination. (That is my contribution to this conversation.)

We aren’t on our own. 

And there is both great power and great responsibility in that knowing.

Welcome to the accountability issue.  May it serve to be both uncomfortable and freeing.  Like all good liberation is.