Bikram Loses Million Dollar Law Suit

Minakshi Jafa-Bodden has prevailed in her lawsuit against yoga teacher Bikram Choudhury, as previously discussed here.

A Los Angeles jury on Monday ordered Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, to pay about $924,500 to a lawyer who alleged that he sexually harassed her while she worked for him and that she was fired after she began investigating claims that he raped a yoga student.

Attorney Minakshi Jafa-Bodden said in her lawsuit that she suffered gender discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment during her time working for Choudhury.

. . .

Jurors deliberated for about a day before returning with a unanimous verdict in favor of Jafa-Bodden, said Mark Quigley, who along with attorney Carla Minnard represented Jafa-Bodden.

“Jafa-Bodden faced retaliation and intimidation when she refused to stay silent about witnessing illegal behavior,” Quigley said in a statement released after the jury's decision Monday afternoon. “This verdict sends an important message, that speaking out when you see signs of sexual abuse is the right thing to do.”

When Bad People Teach Great Yoga

As discussed here, Bikram Choudhury has a long, documented history of being an awful person. He's sexist, lookist, bigoted, and almost unimaginably arrogant. He's also been accused of multiple sexual assaults and his accusers may finally get their day in court. Six women have come forward with claims of sexual assault, harassment, and rape.

Dana McClellan and Sarah Baughn have gone public with their experiences. Both were young and deeply enamored of Choudhury's yoga, swore by its effectiveness, and enrolled in teacher training. But, their fondness for their teacher evaporated when he started molesting them.

Baughn said she always discouraged Choudhury's advances, and reminded him that he had a wife and she had a boyfriend. But Baughn claims Choudhury would not stop his sexual pursuit, and would insist she brush his hair and massage him. “I was shocked, and I was sick,” she said of his unwanted advances. Baughn says Choudhury more than once touched her in a sexual way and even climbed on her, she said.

. . .

"You know, he told me that I was going to be like Mother Teresa, and I was going to influence the world if I only followed him,” McClellan said. But she claims the yoga guru raped her during a teacher training program in San Diego in 2010. McClellan claims Choudhury flattered and touched her and schemed to get her alone.

In her legal complaint, McClellan alleges Choudhury pulled down her pants and forced himself on top of her. She said she begged him to stop and tried to fight him off.

. . .

Baughn and McClelland said Choudhury ruined their lives, smothered their self-confidence and trust and left them with deep emotional scars.

. . .

And they said, poisoned their love and devotion to an ancient art of healing.

Chipping Away at Lululemon

Chip Wilson is bad for business. He announced earlier this week that he will step down as chairman of the company he founded in 1998 -- a yoga-themed retail chain he created to address the scourge of feminism and named to mock the Japanese.

But the news just keeps getting worse for Lululemon. Yesterday the company took a beating on Wall Street after lowering its sales projections. Shares fell 11.7%.

Under the new chairmanship of Michael Casey and with new CEO Laurent Potdevin, Lululemon will try to rehabilitate its image and stock price.

Lululemon Athletica Inc (LULU.O) named a new chief executive on Tuesday and said founder Chip Wilson will step down as chairman, as the upscale yogawear retailer tries to expand globally and put a series of embarrassing quality issues and other gaffes behind it.

The company said Laurent Potdevin, most recently president of trendy footwear brand TOMS Shoes, will replace Christine Day as CEO in January and emphasized Potdevin's role leading TOMS' global expansion.

Lululemon, in the early stages of a push into Europe and Asia, was forced to recall some of its signature black stretchy pants in March because they were see-through. The incoming CEO said quality will be a top priority when he takes the helm.

"Product and quality for any premium brand such as Lululemon is absolutely paramount," Potdevin told Reuters. "It will be a very clear area of focus for me."

One hopes not insulting the public with one outrageous statement after another figures into Potdevin's plans because that would appear to be the larger problem. Most recently, Wilson announced that  women whose thighs touch are bad for their overpriced yoga pants. You can never be too rich or too thin to be a Lululemon customer. Their stores shun the over size 8 woman, burying a minimal selection of sizes 10 and 12 in the back. And if you're over size 12, forget it. Your ass is too fat for Lululemon's bottom line. Wilson explained that the extra fabric would cost too much, ignoring the obvious fact that other companies manage to eek out a profit making larger pants for far less than Lululemon's roughly $100 price tag.

Amazingly these aren't the worst things he's ever said or done. A rundown of some of Chip Wilson's greatest hits can be found here, such as his pontification on the toll feminism has taken on women's lives and health.

"Women’s lives changed immediately [after the pill]. ... Men did not know how to relate to the new female. Thus came the era of divorces," Wilson wrote in a blog post in 2009.

"With divorce and publicity around equality, women in the 1970′s/80′s found themselves operating as 'Power Women.' The media convinced women that they could win at home and be a man’s equal in the business world.... The 1980′s gave way to Power Women dressing like men in boardroom attire with big shoulder pads. They went to 3 martini lunches and smoked because this is what their 'successful' fathers did in the business world.

"... Breast cancer also came into prominence in the 1990’s. I suggest this was due to the number of cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill (initial concentrations of hormones in the pill were very high) and taking on the stress previously left to men in the working world.

"Ultimately, Lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time."

Strangely, these ideas didn't go over well with the store's customer base.

Also unpopular was his plan to stem the problem of youth unemployment in the Third World. Where most of us call that exploiting child labor, the forward thinking Wilson saw it as a way for impoverished children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Then there was his childlike glee at the unintentional hilarity of Japanese people who "try to say" Lululemon. Wilson seems almost impossibly tone-deaf.

The ironic contempt of a yoga clothier for women's bodies that stray from a largely unattainable ideal has even alienated some of Lululemon's most ardent supporters. "Luluheads" lit up social media with their outrage over Wilson's comments about thigh "pressure." And at least two Lululemon ambassadors have written public kiss-offs.

"Chip Wilson can kiss my fat yoga ass," says Alanna Kaivalya, whose long relationship with the store included twice acting as an ambassador and teaching free yoga classes in their stores.

I have taught free classes for Lululemon all across the country, and only been paid in sweat-shop-labor-made Whisper tanks. I felt like it was good exposure, and I always try to teach when it's asked of me, but eventually something didn't add up. Why wasn't I feeling good about participating in these "community building" events? Because they weren't for me, or for the students, they were for Lululemon.

I mean, it's great free advertising, right?

Get a bunch of people in a vacant store filled with nothing but Lululemon product and feed them 60 minutes of free, good quality yoga. And when they're just coming out of their yoga buzz-filled shavasana, turn on the lights and start up the cash registers. Ka-Ching!

Brilliant move. Except, the yoga teacher has just given up her Saturday and will probably go teach three more paid classes that day just to make what she needs to pay her electricity bill that week.

Word to the wise: When a business is making a profit on your free labor, you're being exploited. This is something more and more TED speakers -- and TED refuseniks -- are learning. It's something I grokked early on in the new age marketplace. People who are passionate about their non-traditional careers and interests are a very exploitable commodity. Teaching yoga is a labor of love.

Kaivalya had also grown increasingly concerned about the LGATs and cultishness in Lululemon stores, as discussed here. But the final straw was the non-inclusiveness of Wilson's comments about women who happen to have thighs -- an attitude that stands so at odds with the principles of yoga.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela hung up her Lululemon ambassadorship because Wilson's thigh-bashing comments starkly revealed what has long been an undercurrent of misogyny in the store's corporate culture.

In 2010 I was flown to Vancouver to attend Lululemon's inaugural Global Ambassador Summit: three days of networking, exercise, and immersion in lululand. The organizers described it as an opportunity to "create awesome" and in many ways it was. At a roundtable discussion with a senior executive, however, I enthusiastically raised the idea of focusing more deliberately on pregnant women, whom I knew loved their clothes. The answer? A bemused snicker, and an explanation that Lululemon was about "aspirational fashion -- and there is NOTHING aspirational about pregnancy." I smiled weakly, astonished at the incongruence between this arrogance and the attitudes of the lulu team back in New York.

I immediately thought of this interaction when I heard Wilson's interview. That same macho derision toward female bodies, especially heavy ones. Most of all: a repugnantly familiar misogynist tendency to reduce a woman to her body parts. This cultural malaise reaches far beyond loudmouths at lululemon. The anti-choice movement is notorious for defining women as little more than uteruses. Ardent "lactivists" are guilty as well, disdaining women who choose not to breastfeed. Even the breast cancer awareness movement has embraced a do-it-for-the-boys campaign to "save second base." Wilson's comments, in correlating a woman's worthiness to wear lululemon with the distance between her thighs, (that's an inverse relationship, FYI) partake of the same disturbing trend.

There is "nothing aspirational about pregnancy." I don't even know how to begin to process such a statement. Chip Wilson has created a company that is utterly contemptuous of women's bodies. Perhaps it can be rehabilitated under its new leadership but I'm not optimistic. Wilson will still sit on the board of directors and will no doubt continue to exert a great deal of control over the direction of his brainchild. This is probably little more than a cosmetic change. Only time and clothing sizes will tell.

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Colbert's Alpha Dog of Yoga

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Stephen Colbert skewered Lululemon's Chip Wilson the other evening, naming him Alpha Dog of the Week. For more background on the yoga tycoon's misogynistic, fat-shaming, racist blather see here and here.

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Lululemon's Law of Attraction Fail

What has Lululemon done to law of attract its shrinking stock price?! Numerous ham-fisted efforts to shrink women down to nothing perhaps?

The yoga-wear retailer is both alienating current customers and "making it tough" to get new ones, an analyst at Sterne Agee, Sam Poser, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. Poser downgraded the company's stock and sent Lululemon shares downhill 4 percent to $66.24 on Thursday afternoon.

"We believe that the core Lululemon customer has been alienated and will begin to look for yoga and active-wear pants from the likes of Nike, Under Armour, Athleta and numerous other brands," Poser wrote.

Lululemon did not respond to a request for comment.

Poser singled out the "mouth of the chairman," pointing to the recent controversy surrounding Lululemon chairman and co-founder Chip Wilson. In an interview on Bloomberg TV last week, Wilson attempted to address recent reports of issues with the company's yoga pants, which customers said were too sheer and easily pilled.

Wilson blamed the pants' problems on women's bodies, sparking outrage from consumers.

Yes ladies. Even women thin enough to fit Lululemon's yoga pants might be too fat to not rip them apart.

"Frankly some women's bodies just don't actually work for it," Wilson said (at 2:40 in the above video).

He didn't stop there.

"They don't work for some women's bodies," he continued. "It's really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there over a period of time, how much they use it."

Oh, women! With all your nasty, nasty curves. Your bodies just aren't adequate racks for the latest fashions... in yoga.

The poor pants! Will no one think of the pants and what is best for them?! Priorities, people!

It sounds like the problem is that even women in that target size 8 and under market don't have the "thigh gap" necessary to not cause undue stress to Lululemon's lovely, $100 work-out pants.

What is thigh gap? I only learned this recently and I was rather taken aback. This gorgeous, gorgeous, "plus size" model explains.

So it's no longer enough for women to be unnaturally thin. Our thighs aren't even allowed to touch... at all.

What I flashed on immediately was something Callan Pinckney says in the original Callanetics video. She shows an image of the "perfect legs" she'd grown up with. Four coins could be held at the places legs should touch. Note that one of those coins is between the thighs.

While this is also an overly idealized vision of a woman's body, what I can't help noticing is that the fashion industry seems determined to make women thinner and thinner. Ironically, the more public outcry there is against dangerous messaging that contributes to growing rates of anorexia and bulimia, the skinnier the fashion industry standard gets.

Worse still, the burgeoning yoga industry is following suit. Is it me or is there something particularly pernicious about the commingling of spirituality and fat shaming that issues from trendy yoga marketing. As I wrote here, it's just more of the hideous trend toward equating spiritual well-being with our material wealth and beauty. Reminder: Yoga means "union" with the divine.

Chip Wilson responded to the outcry over his odious comments with an equally odious non-apology apology. It's one of those I'm not sorry for what I said, I'm just sorry you got upset apologies.

For what it's worth, Wilson appears to understand that he's bad for his own brand, expressing concern that the cult status of his creepy, cult-like stores may be "chipped away."

So what have we learned? Well, for one thing, that Chip Wilson's apparent attempt to put into practice Rhonda Byrne's stellar advice to not "observe" fat people or think "fat thoughts" may not have proved to be the best business model. And we've learned that controlling your thoughts to attract health, wealth, and success may not be as important as just watching your mouth when you're on camera.

Yoga's Terribly, Horribly, Awfully Negative Year

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All I could think when I read this was "here we go again." Yet another man in a position of spiritual leadership turns out to have been abusing his power by exploiting women and just generally being a dick.

The guru behind a popular style of yoga currently facing allegations of rape and sexual assault inspired fear in his employees and runs his company "like a cult," a lawyer for a former employee told The Huffington Post Monday.

Carla Minnard, a civil rights attorney, says her client was one of the few to stand up to Bikram Choudhury, the man at the center of the Bikram yoga empire. In return, she says, the company threatened to have her client and her 8-year-old daughter deported.

“There’s a great desire to keep Bikram’s conduct in the dark,” Minnard said. “It shows an inability by anyone to restrain an individual who is a dangerous person.”

Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden, Minnard's client, is a former legal advisor at Bikram’s Yoga College of India, a Los Angeles-based yoga school. Jaffa-Bodden is the sole plaintiff named in an explosive but little-reported June 13 lawsuit against Choudhury, which accuses him of rape and sexual assault of employees and students. The suit additionally claims the yogi promoted a work environment inside his school that was rife with misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexual harassment and threats of violence.

Whether all the allegations prove true or not, much of Choudhury's behavior has been well-documented and he appears to be an equal opportunity hater. Gay people caused AIDS and "these blacks just don't get my yoga" are just some of the sentiments ascribed to the guru. The substance of the suit is worse. It alleges that when Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden got wind of his abuses she was threatened with deportation and worse.

The most recent charges come from Minakshi Jaffa-Bodden, Choudhury's former legal advisor. Jaffa-Bodden claims that she became aware of allegations of sexual assault and harassment during a multi-day training conference; when she approached Choudhury about them, she was told that it would be "best" to "not look into it any further." When she attempted to stand up to the yoga guru, his company threatened to have her and her 8-year-old daughter deported. In March 2013, Jaffa-Bodden says that she was forced to resign by Choudhury himself. He apparently made her sign a resignation letter by threatening her physically.

In addition to black people and gays, Choudhury has such a history of slurring entire groups of people that a former student listed and categorized the hate. Objects of his ire included the Chinese, the tattooed, Mormons, dog owners, sluts, and women of every body type and hair style: "Chubbies, too skinny, small-breasted, without make-up, with short hair, with long hair, but worn up."

Sydney Towne said she kept a list of Bikram's behavior when she trained with him full-time from April to June 2012 because "he dislikes so many types of people" that "a list seemed like the only way to keep track of it all." She loved Bikram Yoga, but hated the way Bikram himself "completely takes advantage of people and their desire for wellness."

"I think he preys on people and there's such a cult of personality around him that people don't question his clearly inappropriate behavior," she said. "I completely believe all accusations against him."

Choudhury seems to have something ghastly to say about just about everyone. He is fond of his own penis, though. Quite, quite fond.

Meanwhile, if you want to buy your yoga pants at Lululemon, be prepared for similar judgmentalism and cultishness. Much like Abercrombie & Fitch, Lululemon recently took a publicity hit for its tendency to sideline women over a size 8. Those clothes, if they're stocked at all, can be found in an unsorted heap in the back of the store... under a table.

Far from an accident, the exiling of larger clothing by Lululemon is a central piece of the company's strategy to market its brand as the look of choice for the stylishly fitness-conscious, according to former employees and consumer advocates. They say this treatment of larger clothes and customers reflects the culture that Lululemon represents -- one that falsely suggests skinniness is the paramount feature of health. Lululemon declined to comment.

The judgment and in-group, out-group dynamics reportedly permeate the company culture of Lululemon. Former employee Elizabeth Licorish describes a sorority girl type of hierarchy in which employees scrutinize and evaluate each other constantly and it takes little to be found deeply wanting.

I hoped to exercise my love of running, earn an employee discount, and take free fitness classes. But, soon after enduring Lululemon's intensive training program, I realized I'd been indoctrinated into a bottomless pit of groupthink I'd never be able to survive.

The Lululemon culture consists, on the surface, of catchy manifestos. Lululemon wants you to know it's "elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness" and "creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives." But, dig deeper, and you'll learn about Landmark Forum, the ultra-secretive, eerily cultish educational series, which Lululemon employees are "strongly encouraged" to attend. Before you're in line for Landmark, you're bombarded with Brian Tracy motivational CDs and a book club that culminates with Atlas Shrugged. Successful Lululemon employees can recite Brian Tracy better than the Pledge of Allegiance. Mention Chip Wilson, Lululemon's founder and former CEO, and their eyes will light up and quickly glaze over. They'll tell you, quite seriously, that he saved their lives by elevating them to greatness.

All this sort of made walking into work feel like time traveling to Salem. Because, with the Lululemon creed and catechism comes a collective mentality that thrives on scapegoats and leaves you feeling worthless if you subsist on anything but spring water and kale. Once, another employee sneered at me from across the floor and said the soda I happened to be enjoying would "rot me from the inside out." Eventually we were all issued reusable acrylic cups and forbidden to drink anything but H2O. We'd be encouraged to give "feedback," a terrible, calculated misnomer for ruthless criticism that could veer from professional to personal in 60 seconds flat. If a customer dismissed your sales pitch because, let's say, he was in a bad mood, one of your fellow team members would pull you aside and say your conversational style lacked genuine authenticity. She'd insinuate that you lack authenticity. That you aren't equipped enough as a human being to sell yoga pants.

And, unsurprisingly, at the heart of this world of LGATs, motivational speakers, and measuring everyone's spiritual worth by their material success, is a corporate leadership that knows The Secret.

A cult following is the most coveted accessory in retail, and Lululemon's is even more lustworthy than its Velocity Gym Bag. It wasn't built on the work of some Jobs-ian swami, however, but on the sources of Lulu founder and chairman Chip Wilson's own spiritual awakening. Wilson has mixed a heady self-actualizing cocktail from equal parts Landmark Forum (seminars based on the philosophy of Werner Erhard), the books of motivational business guru Brian Tracy, and Oprah-endorsed best seller The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. He is now hard at work formalizing them in a Lululemon "internal constitution."

"It's the first time I've heard of anyone almost directly using the techniques of cults and applying them to their business," says Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands. Drawing on those techniques, and with virtually zero advertising, Lululemon has converted the most popular yoga teachers from Beverly Hills to Boston (and their students) into a devoted -- and self-propagating -- clientele. In a little more than 10 years, Lululemon has grown from a single storefront on the surf side of Vancouver, British Columbia, to a public company with more than 100 outlets and $340 million in annual revenue. "I have not been able to find any company that compares with what they do," says Suzanne Price, a retail analyst with ThinkEquity, who points to Lululemon stores ringing up $1,800 in sales per square foot, compared with only $600 for retailers such as J.Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Wilson claims he didn't start Lululemon merely to sell $90 leggings, but also to help his customers limber up for their journey to self-esteem and empowerment. As he writes in the "Chip's Musings" section of the company Web site, "The law of attraction" -- the central tenet of The Secret, that visualizing goals is the key to attaining them -- "is the fundamental law that Lululemon was built on from its 1998 inception." He goes on to explain the company's meta-mission: "Our vision is 'to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness,' and we are growing so we can train more people and spread the word of The Secret -- which to us at Lululemon is not so secret."

Lululemon talks a good game about authenticity but it quickly learned that being too authentically yogic was a bad business model. "Yogis" turned out to be "too slow" on the sales floor so they dumped them for runners who also like yoga. This brought them the driven, "type A" personalities needed to create a yoga themed business empire.

Other challenges to Lululemon's "authenticity" branding have included exposed hypocrisy and outright fraud: the use of child labor in China, the manufacture and sale of expensive seaweed bags bragging a litany of seaweed related health benefits that turned out not to contain a whit of seaweed, and a name that reportedly owes to the company founder's delight in mocking the Japanese. 

For all its adherence to The Secret, Lululemon somehow law of attracted a grisly homicide as one sales girl brutally stabbed and bludgeoned another to death, purportedly over a stolen pair of yoga pants. CEO Linda Day made a grand public statement about how convicted murderer Brittany Norwood's actions were "the antithesis of the values of our company." Well, one would think that murder is contrary to the values of most companies. One would even think that it goes without saying which renders it an odd statement indeed. But it also conspicuously avoids addressing how it fits with their like attracts like philosophy. But then, we all know that among law of attraction adherents we're all responsible for everything we attract until it's so horrible that we're somehow not anymore.

None of this bears much resemblance to what I learned when I first started studying yoga. For my teachers, it wasn't about having a perfect, beach body, but about listening to your body's unique wisdom and moving in tune with it. It was about health and spiritual alignment -- not "fitness." I've long been aware that the growing popularity of yoga was a double-edge sword. A beautiful, traditional practice proliferated in the West but it also succumbed to faddishness, vanity, and pecuniary exploitation.

My first teacher was based largely in Kripalu yoga. I also spent time at Kripalu. Amrit Desai created a beautiful, patient yoga style that people of every age, condition, and body type could benefit from. He also turned out to be an inveterate womanizer, manipulator, and hypocrite. Oh well. The more things change...

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Verdict: Yoga is Not a Religion

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In a fairly unsurprising decision, Judge John Meyer has found that children in Encinitas, CA schools are not being religiously indoctrinated by a yoga program.

The ruling denied a request by a family in a San Diego suburb to ban the local school district from including yoga in physical education, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and separation of church and state.

"Yoga as it has developed in the last 20 years is rooted in American culture, not Indian culture," San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer said. "It is a distinctly American cultural phenomenon. A reasonable student would not objectively perceive that Encinitas school district yoga advances or promotes religion."

As discussed here, the parents who brought the case to stop yoga in their school district had their own very clear religious bias and were enthusiastic supporters of Christian programs in schools. This was not a case about not wanting religion in schools. This was a case about what religion should be taught in schools. If this was in any way unclear, their attorney Dean Broyles made it quite explicit in his post-trial comments.

"There is a consistent anti-Christian bias in these cases, and a pro-Eastern or strange religion bias."

I'm sorry. Who's biased?! A "strange religion" bias? Wow.

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Christianist Group v. "Neopagan" Yoga in Encinitas

Well. I knew it. As soon as I saw that a group was suing the Encinitas school district over its yoga program and claiming it violated the separation of church and state, I knew it was only a matter of time before I could draw a straight line to some Christianist group far more concerned with what religion these kids might be exposed to than with religion in schools per se. And I was right. Both the plaintiffs and the attorney are every bit as supportive of Christian-based school programs as they are derisive of the vaguely Hindu incursion represented by yoga.

One of the parents spearheading the lawsuit, a Mary Eady, works at Truthxchange, a Christian group dedicated to stopping the "rising tide of neopaganism." Attorney Dean Broyles works for the National Center for Law & Policy, or NCLP, whose slogan is Faith + Family + Freedom. It's an affiliate of the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a conservative Christian advocacy group.

In a broad sense, the plaintiffs could have a point. Yoga is born of religious tradition and has some spiritual overtones, even if, as practiced in the West, those overtones are, dare I say it, spiritual but not religious.

If anything I'm as ambivalent about the idea of yoga as a strictly secular exercise program as I am at the targeting of yoga as if it were equivalent to prayer in the schools. That spiritual lineage is now not only secularized, but trivialized. I'll never forget the sense of horror I felt when I first saw a yoga shirt with the printed slogan "Have a Namaste." Namaste is a mystical concept that roughly translates to "me bow you," and translates idiomatically as "The God in me bows to the God in you." There is something a little sickening about yoga as a commodity, completely devoid of all spiritual context or that subverts the spiritual precepts that underlie it.

I'm not sure that what is being taught in Encinitas, can even fairly be called yoga.

"We're not teaching religion," [Superintendent Timothy B. Baird] said. "We teach a very mainstream physical fitness program that happens to incorporate yoga into it. It's part of our overall wellness program. The vast majority of students and parents support it."

At the same time, I can personally attest to the physical benefits of yoga. When taught properly it is a harmonious practice that encourages students to listen to and respect their bodies' needs and limitations. The movements are fluid and patient in a way that most physical fitness regimens cannot claim. All of that can certainly be gained without religious overtone. But without knowing the specifics of the yoga curriculum being offered in Encinitas, I can do little more than speculate as to either the benefits or the drawbacks, which it would seem, the school district is still evaluating.

To a large extent, it seems that Broyles is arguing a straw man by railing against the religiosity of yoga, writ large, rather than the specific program being taught. And it has brought about some rather comical hyperbole. He has deemed the Salutation to the Sun sequence as "sun worship" -- something that after years of doing yoga would never even occur to me.

But Eady was disturbed by what she heard when she observed one of the classes.

“They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth," she said, "and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercises."

Some of us would consider that an acknowledgment of a basic, scientific fact. Without the heat of the sun, there would be no life on Earth. My daughter learned the same thing in grade school science classes. Kind of a stretch to call that a religious observation, let alone a Hindu teaching. But for all I know, Eady may be anti-science, as well.

Equally risible is her contention that the character-building component is "very different from sports programs."

“It’s stated in the curriculum that it’s meant to shape the way that they view the world, it’s meant to shape the way that they make life decisions," she said. "It’s meant to shape the way that they regulate their emotions and the way that they view themselves.”

I have yet to encounter the sports program that doesn't claim to teach values and life skills: teamwork, leadership, confidence, loyalty, etc.

Said Broyles, "If you research yoga and Hinduism, most people would say Hinduism is yoga and yoga is Hinduism." I don't know who "most people" are but his own employer, the NCLP, said in a press release that yoga is "inherently and pervasively religious, having its roots firmly planted in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and western metaphysical religious beliefs and practices."

So which is it? Is it a Hindu practice or a multicultural practice, drawing from numerous Eastern and Western traditions? And how can anything be firmly planted when it derives from that many different influences?

As Superintendent Baird points out, here in the States, 90-95% of yoga practitioners are not Hindu. I don't know from whence he draws that statistic but I, for one, don't know a single practicing Hindu among the many, many yoga practitioners and teachers I count among my friends and acquaintances. I know they're out there and a number of yoga schools trace back to Hindu gurus, but that doesn't mean they require their students to convert to Hinduism. I can't say that's never happened but I've never encountered it. The yoga teachers I've known through the years have been Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and, of course, those who ascribe to no particular religion.

It would appear that the Jois Foundation, which is partially funding the Encinitas yoga program through a grant, is similarly multicultural. Director Eugene Ruffin points out that, “Our organization is made up primarily of people who are members of the Abrahamic faiths." But the Jois Foundation is connected to the K. P. Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute and Jois was a Hindu, even if his yoga practice was very much outside of his family's religious background. A quick scan of his life story illustrates how absurd is Broyles's contention that "Hinduism is yoga." Yoga, as we know it, came out of a narrowly defined sectarian practice and is not something practiced by all Hindus. Hatha grew out of Tantra, which as I recently pointed out is sometimes erroneously and reductively described as a "sex cult." Imagine what Broyles would do with that if he knew it, which he apparently does not. But Hatha and its many derivatives like Ashtanga, have wandered very far from those roots. As practiced, in yoga studios all over the Western world, the Hindu influence is vestigial, at most, and amounts to some Sanskrit words and very general concepts of union with spirit.

It would appear that the curriculum offered in Encinitas is also far removed from Ashtanga "Power" Yoga. Not only is the Jois Foundation legally separate from the K. P. Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute with a different mission, the curriculum is set by the school district, not the Jois Foundation. This is not a rapid sequence of asanas geared towards raising inner heat.

"We are probably using some of the poses found in Ashtanga yoga," Baird told ABC News. "But we have modified this extensively to be done by students of this particular age. And all body types can be successful [with] what we are doing in our classes."

While the program is popular with most of the school district, a number of parents, like Eady, opted their kids out of the classes. According to Broyles, these kids are being unfairly ridiculed and bullied by their peers. If true, that's unfortunate, but it's got nothing to do with yoga.

Kids will bully other kids for being different. Period. That's in no way specific to kids whose parents pull them out of yoga classes. It's also hardly an argument against kids being different, or parents making choices they deem necessary for whatever reason. The problem is the bully behavior which is better targeted by anti-bullying programs. But the ADF opposes anti-bullying programs because they interfere with their Christian right to teach their kids to hate gay people.

The ADF and its allies also invest considerable efforts in seeking to overturn some anti-bullying school guidelines on the grounds that such policies persecute the “Christian perspective” on LGBT rights and that demanding tolerance is a front for promoting  “homosexual values.”

The ADF advocates for a roster of faith-based programs such as abstinence only programs and "character development" programs that are little more than teasers for evangelical events. They are quick to accuse civil libertarians who try to stop them -- like the ACLU -- of a "war on Christianity." I'm betting we won't be hearing from the Jois Foundation that this lawsuit constitutes a "war on Hindu."

Finally, let’s consider fundamentalist Good News Clubs, which are presently in well over 3,000 public elementary schools around the country. Good News Clubs, which are sponsored by an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship, are ostensibly after-school “Bible study” programs that require parental permission to join. But that description is misleading. Good News Clubs are not about “study,” they are about religious indoctrination. Further, the clubs produce the false but unavoidable impression in very young children that they are part of the school; they set up shop in public school classrooms immediately after the bell rings, so as to appear a seamless part of the school day. And finally, Good News Clubs instructors tell kids attending the clubs to recruit their peers at school.

It turns out that Encinitas public elementary schools that sparked the national outcry over yoga stretching are rife with Good News Clubs: all nine public elementary schools in the district have a club, reported Assistant Superintendent Miyashiro. And their presence has been made possible by the legal firepower of the ADF and lawyers like Dean Broyles. When it comes to unhealthy entanglement between church and school, a classroom of first-graders stretching their hands to the sky seems to be, for now, a matter of far less concern than the well-organized conservative Christian proselytism that is already making deep inroads into public education.

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Pigs in Zen

I've been so immersed in events erupting from the the scandal-plagued, power-abusing Vatican all week, I missed the news about scandal-plagued, power-abusing Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki. Funnily enough, the latter story broke wide with an article in the paper of record the same day Pope Benedict's resignation was announced. Of course, rumors had dogged the aging leader since the 1970s, but it was in January of this year that an announcement from senior teachers was posted on the Sasaki community website.

In early January, the senior teachers of Sasaki's community admitted in an on-line statement that the community "has struggled with our teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi's sexual misconduct for a significant portion of his career in the United States."

In truth, to call them rumors is generous. It seems the living legend's inappropriateness was known about and actively enabled for decades. Then, in November of last year,  Zen priest Eshu Martin, who had studied under Sasaki for over ten years, threw down the gauntlet with a post on the Sweeping Zen website. The title, "Everybody Knows – Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi and Rinzai-ji," is an obvious allusion to one of Sasaki's more famous students, Leonard Cohen. This reference does more than point to the fact that Sasaki's behavior was common knowledge. Cohen's masterpiece speaks to the ubiquity of deceit and injustice in this game of life we are all participating in.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the founder and Abbot of Rinzai-ji is now 105 years old, and he has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. Many individuals that have confronted Sasaki and Rinzai-ji about this behaviour have been alienated and eventually excommunicated, or have resigned in frustration when nothing changed; or worst of all, have simply fallen silent and capitulated. For decades, Joshu Roshi’s behaviour has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

Everybody knows that you love me baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful Ah give or take a night or two Everybody knows you've been discreet But there were so many people you just had to meet Without your clothes And everybody knows ~ Leonard Cohen

As is so painfully typical in these situations, abused women who complained were shamed and shunned, while the abusive leader was venerated. From the New York Times story:

Many women whom Mr. Sasaki touched were resident monks at his centers. One woman who confronted Mr. Sasaki in the 1980s found herself an outcast afterward. The woman, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, said that afterward “hardly anyone in the sangha, whom I had grown up with for 20 years, would have anything to do with us.”

. . .

Several women said that Zen can foster an atmosphere of overt sexism. Jessica Kramer, a doula in Los Angeles, was Mr. Sasaki’s personal attendant in 2002. She said that he would reach into her robe and that she always resisted his advances. Surrounded almost entirely by men, she said she got very little sympathy. “I’d talk about it with people who’d say, ‘Why not just let him touch your breasts if he wants to touch your breasts?’ ”

Almost more appalling is the blatant subversion of Buddhist teachings Sasaki used to manipulate women and justify his sexual acting out.

In the council’s report on Jan. 11, the three members wrote of “Sasaki asking women to show him their breasts, as part of ‘answering’ a koan” — a Zen riddle — “or to demonstrate ‘non-attachment.’ ”

. . .

“He would say something like, ‘True love is giving yourself to everything,’ ” she explained. At Mount Baldy, the isolation could hamper one’s judgment. “It can sound trite, but you’re in this extreme state of consciousness,” she said — living at a monastery in the mountains, sitting in silence for many hours a day — “where boundaries fall away.”

Not the first time I've heard a spiritual leader reinterpret the surrender to spirit as a surrender to himself. If you don't surrender to his ego, you're just too much in your ego. Get it? But most appalling was this gem:

One monk, whom Ms. Stubbs said she told about the touching, was unsympathetic. “He believed in Roshi’s style, that sexualizing was teaching for particular women,” Ms. Stubbs said. The monk’s theory, common in Mr. Sasaki’s circle, was that such physicality could check a woman’s overly strong ego. [all emphases mine]

Uppity bitches. Someone had to knock 'em down a peg or two. The irony here is the implicit admission that sexual abuse is not about sex. It's about power and dominance.

Grace Schireson, who was on the "witnessing council" that issued a report on the problem in January, cites the Westernization of a Japanese practice. Interviewed by the Times, she claimed that the Japanese view their teachers with a healthy dose of skepticism and are less inclined to put them on a pedestal. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Japanese are less deferential to authority than Westerners. I think that basic problem is more a facet of human nature than culture (See Milgram). I put the question to my husband who has spent years studying martial arts, and is fairly well acquainted with Japanese teachers and customs. Leave say, he did not find that to be so. If anything, he found that Japanese teachers are more expectant of deference and that his own teachers were surprised by the "many questions" American students ask.

I have little knowledge of Japanese culture, but I do know that it is notoriously male dominated and incredibly sexist. Groping women on trains is so common in Japan that women-only cars had to be established. Such violations are fetishized, pornogrophized, and popularized in manga.

That said, the report offers a very insightful take on the dynamics that allowed this problem to go on for decades.

When ongoing questions of misuse of sexuality or power unfold in a spiritual community, it is rarely a matter of one person’s actions. Reading through the painful and heartfelt accounts documenting Joshu Sasaki’s sexual relationships with students at Rinzaiji down through the years, we see how, knowingly and unknowingly, the community was drawn into an open secret, and people’s ability to practice the dharma suffered. Despite individual and collective attempts to address boundaries, repentance, and rectification, these behaviors appear to have continued over more than four decades. We have reports that those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished.

Understanding that our practice is to bear what is unbearable and not to turn away from reality, how could this be so? We suggest it has something to do with a view of spiritual authority and “enlightenment” that we in the West have created in the name of Zen. To be fair, this is not just a problem of Zen. It arises in various Buddhist communities, and more widely in other religious congregations. We are unfortunately susceptible to enthrallment, which is hardly "seeing things as they really are." There are certain problems that may arise when one sees a teacher as comprehensively enlightened and fails to deal with the certainty that he or she, like oneself, has a shadow or deluded aspect. We imagine that “enlightenment” is separate from or outside of ourselves. The community may attempt to protect the teacher, the seeming embodiment of enlightenment. If we hold such a model, it is often impossible to recognize or admit that there has been an abuse of power. We fear the loss of our enlightened teacher and thus the opportunity to become enlightened ourselves.

It is not about a single individual, but about a very toxic synergy of power dynamics that can arise in any hierarchical structure. Even a deeply pathological leader cannot maintain a grip on a community unless he is enabled by followers. And even leaders who start out with the best of intentions can be seduced and subverted by the adulation of their followers. (See Zimbardo.) The search for enlightenment is subject to any number of pitfalls if we aren't keeping track of the shadow. (See Jung.)

This scandal put me in mind of a similar one at the Kripalu Institute many years ago -- not because these things are uncommon. They aren't. But because I was a fly on the wall for some of the aftermath of the Kripalu scandal. I spent a week at the Massuchusetts ashram shortly after the whole thing went down. I was just there for some yoga, rest, and relaxation, but it ended up being quite a lesson in the dynamics of disillusionment.

I did a little googling to refresh my memory on some of the details and I came across some interesting perspectives. But first, for those unfamiliar with the particulars:

In 1994, [Amrit] Desai resigned after admitting to having sex with followers.^[2][5][7][8] Kripalu paid $2.5 million to settle a purported class action lawsuit brought by more than 100 former residents who had served as unpaid staff. Kripalu financed the payment partly by selling its adjacent Foxhollow property, which it had acquired to provide housing for its most senior members.^[5][9]

One New York Times article pointed to yet another, more recent yoga scandal. The author manages to completely miss the point.

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The characterization of Tantra as a "sex cult" is extremely reductive, but that's not the dumbest part of the article. The author goes on to explain that Hatha increases circulation in the pelvic area and heightens the passions, which is true. Of course the same could be said many forms of physical exercise.

Where the article really enters the realm of the absurd is in the suggestion that sex scandals like the one at Kripalu were simply the result heightened sexual appetites. The idea that this was just a bunch of sexually adventurous people doing what comes naturally is absurd. Heightened and spiritualized sexuality could just as easily enhance committed relationships and increase closeness and intimacy between partners, as is, indeed, often the case.

The problem is one of dynamics and abuse of power, not human sexuality. In the case of Kripalu and similar scandals, many women claim to have been intimidated and coerced. Victims who complain are ostracized. Many lies are told and secrets kept. This is not about consensual sexual activity, openly engaged in by willing participants.

More to the point, as the subject of this post illustrates, these scandals are hardly unique to the world of yoga.

Finally, I read some excerpts from a book that addresses the Kripalu crisis. Steven Cope's Yoga and the Quest for the True Self speaks brilliantly to the group dynamics and larger lessons learned when people are ready to take their power back.

It was not the scandal that forced the death of the old forms of yoga at Kripalu. Quite the opposite. It was the impending death of the old paradigm that required the scandal. It is clear that the fact of Amrit Desai's affairs had been in the unconscious of the community all along. It was not new information. Quite a few individuals held the secret. It was simply information that could not be brought to the light of consciousness until the community was more or less ready for it.

In 1994 when the scandal erupted, Gurudev had not suddenly changed. In fact, the sexual misconduct was by that time many years old. Amirt was who he had always been -- ambitious, brilliant, sometimes a sincere yogi, sometimes just a smooth performer, too often a teacher who was too charming for his own good. It was the community's own capacity to see and bear the truth that had changed.

The bonfire was just as much a sign of success as of failure.

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A Deeper Look at the Time Monks

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I found another interview with Time Monk Cliff on Project Camelot. I wanted to flesh out, if possible, some of the information from my previous entry on their October 7 prediction. There are some interesting morsels to chew on, below. But, the main thing seems to be the near certainty of economic collapse. Here is the overview from Project Camelot dated 3 October:

We seem to be in the initial phase of this forecast cycle. Clif has now gone on record to say that more precise ongoing analysis, exactly corroborated by his own inside information from human sources (15 and counting as of 1 October), forecasts a global business banking shutdown next week (or soon after) which then precipitates a series of events going from very bad to worse still.

It is our opinion at Project Camelot that we are witnessing a controlled demolition of the global economy: a Financial 9/11.

There is some further context on Time Monk George Ure's site Urban Survival.com:

So we look forward to the balance of this weekend and as late as Thursday/Friday of next week with a heightened state of awareness/concern/trepidation (or 'fear lite') because of predictive elements that go to the idea of:

• A major event which could dramatically impact 2, 2.2, or 22-million Americans.
• This 'impact' could be the range of something fairly minor like "My bank card doesn't work anymore" to a 'blinding flash from a terror attack' on US soil.
• This latter is somewhat supported by references early in the data to 'attack on US interests" and the fact that al Qaida has a nasty habit of trying to influence outcomes of elections, such as was the case with the Spanish train bombings a few years back.
• The 'events' of next week will linguistically be characterized by about a 20% natural disaster/earth related component, a 40'ish percent impact that will be 'military' in nature and a 40% (or higher) impact that will be 'economic' in scope.

Here are some of the highlights from Project Camelot interview with Time Monk Cliff. [All emphases mine]

C: Our information for October is part of a context that we’ve been picking up for a number of years relating to what we call “The Death of the Dollar.” We started talking publicly about “The Death of the Dollar,” I think on July 4th, 2007, but we’d actually been picking it up in the data a number of years before that.

We have a tendency to see, to find, really big events showing up years ahead of time and it takes us a while to sort through everything and really get a handle on what was going on. The closer we get to the event, the more data-points we get within our source that allows us to get a broader picture. So, at this stage, we’ve got a pointer that said we would hit a sort of an emotional plateau.

. . .

K: So what you are seeing in the future, at least in the next 5 months, linked to the October 7 economic situation, is that it’s dire now but it’s gonna be something…

C: Brutally true. OK. This weekend we’re putting up a new report that continues to refine that, because we’re getting in new data. In the market descriptors, the market section there, we’re gonna be describing it as brutally transformative.

. . .

Will we have food shortages? Sure. Will we have rationing on everything? Sure. Exactly where and when? That’s speculation at this point. But it’s actually occurring as we speak.

So, again, total fiscal meltdown. From there we drift into what some would find surreal, but this is where it actually starts to make sense to me.

K: I found a really interesting point that was recurring in some of these reports, which was talking about, in essence, what appeared to be a battle with aliens.

C: Oh sure. Yeah, we’ve got really strange stuff in there that suggests, for instance, that we’re gonna go through a summer of hell in 2009 here in the US that will precipitate a seething anger and so forth into actual bloody revolution. AmRev-2 we’re calling it. But it’ll just be part of a global wave of revolution against what we call The Powers That Be.

This is also coincident with a meta-data layer that we call Secrets Revealed, where events of revolution goes on. Certain institutions will be captured by the populace and the data will be released that’s been hidden for hundreds of years, which then starts its own set of threads and means about revolution. They’ve been duped.

And if we go forward in time through 2010, we get into the area where we’re starting to get what we call Alien Wars… information about 2011.

Now this has to be understood, that the granularity out there is very sparse. We don’t have a whole lot of details. It does appear that this is not some kind of false flag operation. It also does appear that humans are involved at many different levels, not merely at a shooting level, but also as perhaps some kind of a prize level, like, you know, we’re what everybody is fighting over, that kind of thing.

I'd like to digress for a moment and point out something that perhaps many people are not aware of, and that is the derivation of the word apocalypse.

Apocalypse (Greek: Ἀποκάλυψις Apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil") is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton which literally means "revelation at the end of the æon, or age".

What follows is some exploration of the time leading up to 2012. Earlier in the interview, Cliff posits that some of the data pointing to that date may be skewed because of the collective charge around that date, due, I assume, to the Mayan calendar. But, of particular interest, here, is the intervening years. I'd also like to point out that, as I said in my previous entry, I'm getting some inkling of possible pole shift associated with these changes.

K: But what you’re now saying … you’re actually saying there‘s a place that we’re at here, emotionally, that’s actually we’re gonna go down from here to 2012 -- for the next four years?

C: OK. Up / Down. You really shouldn’t phrase it that way. Just like Buckminster Fuller used to bitch at everybody, because there is no up or down on this planet. There’s only closer to the center of the Earth and further away form it. An in and out kind of approach. So let’s not use pejorative terms like up or down because that implies certain things.

However, the emotional tonalities that we’re living at the moment, especially those tonalities associated with words like normalcy and nostalgia, and all of this kind of thing, will not be seen again. From October 7th onward, we won’t recover those, as near as I can tell in my data.

And it may well be the case that, you know, those things that come along, such as the global coastal events, subsequent magnetic shifts, and perhaps even a crustal shift and the destruction of most of the population on the planet, may indeed be the reason for that.

I have to say that the biospheric degradation, and the changes in the solar system, the magnetosphere, the heliosphere, etc. etc. all tend to support the idea that the language is spitting out to us, that the bizarre days ahead are -- however inconceivable -- are basically our destiny.

I can't speak to the veracity of The History Channel, but what follows is a brief examination of the Mayan Calendar with my favorite up-talker Daniel Pinchbeck.



Of special interest here is the supposition that there may be some correlation between an upcoming alignment with the black hole in the center of the galaxy and Charles Hapgood's "crustal displacement" or "pole shift" theory.

C: So our understanding of chemtrails comes from the archetype that The Powers That Be are intensely scared and scared at all these different levels. One of the things they’re scared about is not going into an ice age. If we don’t go into an ice age, as in Lovelock’s book, Gaia is doomed to go the way of, supposedly, Venus. We get extra-hot and everybody’ll die off.

And so, usually at this particular point in our orbital permutations we get to the 100,000-year cycle and we go into a mini ice age, which cools everything down, refreshes the oceans, etc., etc., That is not occurring at this point because we’re lining up with the dark rift on the side of the galactic central, and we’re getting extra radiation coming on in, which is heating everything up. Everything from the GRBs, the solar radiation, the heliosphere radiation pouring on in, etc., is raising the temperature on all the planets, in spite of the fact that, at this point in our cycle of 100,000 years, we should be cooling down, to the betterment of the planet.

So The Powers That Be got really scared and at least at one bespoke level of their internal fear they wanted to react and change the albedo by putting up a radiation shield that would cool the planet down as though we had glaciers all over the place, as though we had gone into the ice age. They hoped to trigger it that way.

Now, there’s also all kinds of other fears buried way down deep in the archetype that goes to some really strange stuff, like they’re really afraid of the pineal gland in humans.

Hold the phone... did he say pineal gland? He gets back to this further down, but first, some examination of some of the possibilities discussed in the previous entry regarding a radical consciousness shift, possibly correlated with planetary pole shift.

K: Really? OK. There’s a lot of talk about going from the third to the fourth to the fifth dimension -- the actual Earth itself -- as a result of the transformations that are happening on the planet. Have you been getting information about that?

C: We may be. I have to be somewhat vague because, again, it’s an issue of do we have it modeled correctly? In our SpaceGoatFarts entity, we have a subset called unknown and within that we have another subset called energy, and it splits off into these various different areas.

There appears to be a whole lot of information about extra energy coming in from space. The data-sets might be reflecting major changes at levels that might go down to what we call the ESR or the Electron Spin Resonance. So, who knows what that’s gonna cause?

Would humans be able to adequately project the result of something like the change in the electron spin resonance level across the whole of the solar system if we get into some of these energetic areas, in a way that we could meaningfully pick up? I don’t know. We might be getting some hints that there’s some huge changes along that level coming up.

As for popping into the fourth dimension… the fourth density or something, we don’t have any words specifically towards that, other than we’re picking up some of those that are coming from those people that are promulgating that idea out there. We’re not picking up any of the archetypes that I would suspect should arise. It doesn’t mean that we won’t. We’re just not at this moment.

K: OK, because, for example, it seems to me that maybe an archetype symbol would be the spiral.

C: [long pause] Yeah, but that’s all tied up in the idea of the eschaton and the singularity and so on. It’d be awful hard to separate that from those previous contexts and apply it.

We do see a whole… We do see mass kinds of changes coming in at various different levels that are affecting the data at unexpected places. And they’re pointing to things like, as I say, the pineal gland.

And in this coming report we’re gonna write about fluoride because there’s gonna be a huge emotional wave building in 2009 about the damage that was done to people as a result of fluoride and its interaction with the pineal gland. And a lot of people are gonna be very, very, very upset because they will feel that something has been stolen from them. And I think that what they’re going to be feeling is that the potential or capacity for a better expression of humanity has been stolen from them, once they know certain information.

So, yes, there is some evidence that flouride interferes with the function of the pineal gland, which is particularly concerning when you consider that the pineal is barely understood, as it is. Amongst metaphysicians like myself, it is, quite simply, the third eye. The pineal gland fully opens when the kundalini rises completely up the spine and activates it. So why would this threaten the "powers that be?" According to John Lamb Lash of Metahistory.org, it is the awakened kundalini which protects us from "alien intrusion." In other words, the archons. It is this spiritual opening which enables us to see through the illusion that the Hindus call "Maya."

Here is Graham Hancock on the Rishis, or ancient sages of India. (p. 157)

What we accept without question as 'reality' the Rishis described as 'the world of form'. They claimed to have discovered that this world is not in fact real at all but rather a sinister sort of virtual reality game in which we are all players, a complex an cunning illusion capable of confusing even the most thorough empirical tests -- a mass hallucination of extraordinary depth and power designed to distract souls from the straight and narrow path of awakening which leads to immortal life. With a synchronicity that seems strange to anyone who has studied the mysteries of Central America, they named the hallucination 'Maya' and taught techniques to overcome and dispel it. Such techniques, amounting effectively to a 'science of realization', included the single-minded pursuit of spiritual knowledge, meditation, contemplation, concentration of mind through the study of mandalas and yantras, and the correct fulfilment of ritual.

So, my back of the envelope calculation of what that all means, is that what the "powers that be" are terrified of, as the world is coming apart, is human enlightenment.

Thoughts on Powerlessness

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance,
complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness,
patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

So, I'm laying here, immobilized with the head-cold from hell, and it occurs to me what an ego-killer illness is. My husband refers to these episodes with cold or flu as "hitting the reset button." That sums it up well. These are massive interruptions in the momentum of our lives. You can do little but let everything come to a screaming halt, and even when you recover, you can't just pick up where you left off. Not completely. Some threads are broken. Some projects you wished to accomplish have already passed their freshness date and can't be taken up again. Even if it's a day or two, a chunk of your life is gone, never to be restored.

As I lay here, it's hard not to focus on all the things I cannot do. I need to unload and reload the dishwasher but I can't seem to stand upright for more than a few minutes and even that is torture. Shower. (See previous explanation.) Eat. My taste buds are compromised so everything sounds dreadful. It requires too much effort, anyway. Clean the house. (The standing and walking thing, again.) I'd love to do some yoga, but... the standing... oh, and the forward bends that would cause my sinus headache to reach critical mass. Or, just blog this wonderful article on yoga a friend sent me, but right now, I'm having trouble remembering what I even thought about it when I read it.


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With little to do but contemplate the great mysteries of life, I find that even this, my greatest passion, is lost to me. It's as if some giant hand has played 52 pick-up with my thoughts. They're all in a jumble. I'm not sure what I believe... about anything. Now, I'm no fan of certainty, but I usually have some idea, some running narrative in my head, about life, the universe, the myths that shape our reality... Today... I got nothin.' Things I believed a week ago now seem puerile and reductive. I am suddenly overwhelmed, not only by the unmeetable demands of my daily, material life, but by the acute awareness that "the more I learn, the less I know." It all just feels impossible.

Now, on some level, I know that my sense of awareness and capability will return; that I will find the pathways through my mind again. I will remember my sense of purpose. But for now, I'm just a heap of broken circuitry.

This is a mini ego death. I've lost my sense of self, if only for a day or two. And, it occurs to me what a beautiful thing that is. Uncomfortable. Definitely. Assaults on the ego are never pleasant, but they are absolutely necessary. A reset button, indeed. The universe is just clearing out some of the old programming and forcing me back to the beginner mind.

A little over a month ago, I faced a different sort of interruption in the streaming content of my life. My computer died, suddenly, without warning. It was a power supply issue, now resolved. I moved quickly through the five stages of grief, finding, strangely, that it was a relief having that electronic tether cut. I discharged a number of day to day responsibilities and distractions that I have accumulated in my online life. I saw that the universe was, once again, hitting a giant reset button, and forcing me to be still, contemplative, and receptive. I realized something. The internet brings a crushing weight of information. Having the world at your fingertips is as exhausting and overstimulating as it is fascinating. I thought seriously about never reconnecting to the www. But, here, as in all things, the struggle is to find that middle path that allows me to live in the material world without being consumed by it.


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The night before my new battery arrived, I dreamt of a bluejay. Bluejay's medicine is "appropriate use of power," if you don't know it. Bluejay and I have a longstanding relationship that started, to my knowledge, when I was attacked by one, as a small child. It dove straight at the top of my head and violently ruffled my hair. My mother insisted I must have gotten close to its nest, but I saw no nest, and it flew from a perch high in an old oak tree. No. Bluejay was trying, even then, to open up my crown chakra. So this night, before my battery unexpectedly arrived, I dreamt that I had a bluejay for a pet. I had saved it from some danger and it came to live in an open cage in my house, coming and going as it pleased. I expect it will take me years to sort out what, exactly, that means. And that's as it should be.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

"Yoga May Help Treat Depression, Anxiety Disorders"

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Emphasis on the word "may." The article so entitled is heavily caveated. First the good news:

Yoga's postures, controlled breathing and meditation may work together to help ease brains plagued by anxiety or depression, a new study shows.

Brain scans of yoga practitioners showed a healthy boost in levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) immediately after a one-hour yoga session. Low brain levels of GABA are associated with anxiety and depression, the researchers said.

"I am quite sure that this is the first study that's shown that there's a real, measurable change in a major neurotransmitter with a behavioral intervention such as yoga," said lead researcher Dr. Chris Streeter, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Now, for the bad news: None of the research subjects actually suffered from these or other psychological disorders.

[Zindel Segal, chairman of psychotherapy and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto] also pointed out that all of the people in the study were mentally healthy, and clinical depression and anxiety disorders involve more than the "daily fluctuations in stress and tension" that healthy individuals are prone to.

The control group used in the study sat and read -- a rather cerebral activity and far from stress reducing depending on what one reads. The study did not compare different types of physical activities, or even other forms of meditation. Segal again:

"We know that yoga can have a profound effect" on smoothing out life's daily ups and downs, Segal said. "But so does working out on a Stairmaster for an hour."

On the plus side, we now know a little more about why yoga is really good for healthy people.