 There have been dozens upon dozens of sexual abuse allegations in the yoga world. But by far not everyone, including the yoga practitioners, know it. What's more important is that there is an inherent reason in how yoga is conducted, which creates the perfect conditions for sexual abuse. In order to understand why it is so, and what we could do about it, we'll start by looking at some prominent, high profile sexual abusers of the yoga world. Bikram Chaudhuri, the founder of Bikram Yoga, also known as Hot Yoga, according to articles by The Guardian and New Yorker, has faced lawsuits alleging not only sexual harassment and assaults, but also racism and homophobia. Bikram's former legal advisor, Minakshi Jaffa Bodin, said he inappropriately touched her and wrongfully fired her in 2014 after she began investigating sexual abuse claims from other women. Minakshi managed to prove this in court, and Bikram was ordered to pay $6.5 million for these charges. Another worthy mention is Patabi Joyce, the founder of Astanga Yoga, who also for a while was known as Madonna's and Gwyneth Peltrow's guru. There are countless accusations of Patabi Joyce inappropriately touching both men and women during yoga practice, while covering that up as adjustments. There's also no shortage of pictures showing Joyce doing exactly that. In an article written by Karen Rain, a former student of Patabi, she shares two pictures of him sexually abusing her during yoga practice and describing it in the following words. For me, the most frequent and dehumanizing form of assault was when he placed his penis against my genitals and moved his pelvis rhythmically, while I held my body still in various yoga poses, some you can see in this photograph. And in the photo of me in the backband, he's not even using his hands. His pelvic region, his genitals are the only thing making contact with my body, my pelvic region, my genitals. According to an article published by The Wolves, there were other women who said that Joyce was groping their breasts, humping, rubbing, or penetrating their genitals using his fingers under the guise of adjusting their postures, sometimes while pinning them down with his body weight. In 2019, our Sharath Joyce, Patabi's grandson, published an acknowledgment of his grandfather's misconduct saying, it brings me immense pain that I also witnessed him giving proper adjustments. One could say that maybe these are just two individuals who abused their position of power. But unfortunately, if you take a closer look at all the sexual allegations that are out there towards dozens of yoga gurus, they seem almost endless. The number of them have been proven in court. Others rely on a huge number of reports. We also have to keep in mind that the subject is a difficult one to open up and talk about, meaning that most likely the number of sexual abuse in yoga cases is even much higher. If so many yoga gurus and instructors end up conducting sexual abuse, it only makes sense to ask, what makes it happen so often? It cannot be just a coincidence. To answer this question, we can start by looking at something that Karen Reign mentioned in her article. She described her thought process after the incident of being sexually abused by Joyce, writing, At the time, the idea that the guru of the system could be abusing me seemed impossible. I believed that Patabi Joyce was not sexually abusing me. At times, I even tried to glorify the sexual assaults. I wanted to believe what some people claimed and still do, but Patabi Joyce was transferring a healing energy to me by touching me that way, rather than feeling pitiable that thinking would allow me to feel lucky like I was being blessed. The statement starts to point us to what I believe is the problem of the yoga culture and its gurus. Part of the yogic culture explains that the student should trust the guru completely. If you will read spiritual literature, the advice to not doubt your guru comes up again and again. In an article published at the New Indian Express called Trust Your Guru, it says, If you want to make use of a guru's presence, you must be willing to allow that presence to overwhelm you, to overpower you, to destroy you in one way. At least for those few moments that you are with him, you should no longer be yourself. What you consider yourself to be should be absent in his presence. So one aspect is the presence of the guru and the quality of who he is does things to you. On the spiritual path, when people spoke about trust, what they mean was that you allow someone else to enter you. If you have to allow someone else to enter you, you have to become vulnerable. Once he enters you, you're subject to anything. This article was published by Sutt Guru of the Isha Foundation, one of the leading spiritual gurus and organizations worldwide. And yet again, it is a representation of a very common teaching presented by the yogic and the spiritual cultures. What such teachings lead a person to believe is that the guru may never be wrong, that they are pure and superior, and that total trust and submission should be undertaken in order to benefit from the contact with the guru. This in turn leads to perfect conditions for the guru of abusing that trust, devotion, and submission. Researcher Amanda Lucia in her article Guru Sex, Charisma, Proximity Desire, and the haptic logics of the Guru-Disciple relationship says, usually when sexual accusations arise, the headlines discuss the particular personalities of the guru or the devotees involved and investigate the psychological causes. Instead, I suggest that there are structural aspects of guru-disciple physicality, haptic logics, which tend to produce these social effects. This also leads to the same prospect that instead of looking at individual cases of sexual abuse in yoga, it is important to consider the structure, presentation, and dynamics of the yogic culture that create the near perfect conditions for so-called gurus to perform sexual abuse, usually without being challenged or apprehended. Besides the mystified and sacralized image of yoga that leads to these problems, it is also important to consider the power dynamics that the culture of yoga creates. As Eliza Griswold describes it in an article written at the New Yorker, in the western context gurus become rock stars and students compete to carry favor with them. This gives gurus significant influence over their students, which is sometimes misused. Any power dynamic can be dangerous We naturally tend to justify what our revered idols do, even if it's wrong. We also want their favors and thus we become more susceptible to their manipulations and abuse. In such professions as therapy, there are ethical codes that have been developed by mental health associations for the purpose of setting professional standards for appropriate behavior, defining professional expectations, and preventing harm to people who go to therapy. No such standards seem to exist for such a wildly popular and widespread practice of yoga, which often claims to be a healing practice not only for the body but also for the mind, and contains a very close, intimate relationship between the student and the guru.