Yoga & Manipulation Scandals volume X

 In these days there's a huge scandal of Akif Manaf,  a well-known and recognized yoga teacher based in Turkey getting arrested for sexual abuses and fraud. It's one of the thousands scandals which now becomes international as yoga travels & social media use became so common.
  How does it work? How do these yoga teachers ( usually quite good ones) becomes so manipulative?

 Most of them starts their yoga journey as anyone else_ starting taking lessons, loving it, improving it, taking the teacher's training and starts giving lessons. Yoga is all about relaxing the body & mind and opening awareness, right? After a good lesson, usually we understand better teachings, new stuff, because a good pranayama, a relaxed body and a mind who has been able to stay focused on the internallity is much more receptive. At that moment, we might be more apt to internalize soe information. Or maybe we are in a more vulnerable phase of our lives? (many people starts yoga in a crisis time of their lives), a quest of an alternative truth, a sense of meaning, or even a quest of a promess might help these ''prseudo gurus'' to pull us in their manipulative game.

 To keep an eye open on what's going on in your yoga journey, you don't need the fbi; a yoga teacher is simply a person who knows how to teach you yoga. In the Sivananda teacher trainings they say a teacher is like a candle which takes a piece of light from one candle and lights an other one_ as simple as that! Yes, you should rely on the practice of a yoga teacher who has a yoga alliance recognized certificate (still, if it doesn't feel good stop!) but for all the spirituallity and yoga philosophy, you can only share opinions with your teacher. Your yoga teacher has a general training about spirituality&yoga philosophy, is probably interested and developped him/herself about the issues but this sharing should never go further than an exchange of knowledge; no teacher beholds the truth to impose it to you.

 Some common behaviours to question about ''pseudo gurus'' could be to notice if you are spending way too much money. Is your yoga teacher completely intolerent to criticism? Does it make him mad if you say you don't really believe that we could awaken chakras? A yoga teacher should accept you and welcome you as you are as long as you don't disturb a class. Is the teacher promissing some extraordinary ends? Are you going to get enlightened after the yogaa lesson? or are you going to open all of your chaakras to live happily ever after? Getting cured from your disease that you've been suffering since quite a bit? Yoga does have benefits, but there is no short cuts in life, and yoga is just anotther path to find your way just like any other methods.


  All these said, we might be vulnerable, there might be charismatic yoga teachers popping out exotic concepts full of promesses, the only way to protect your self is the ''real enlightment'' , acknowledge yourself! Read about yoga philosophy from different authors,  different cultures of yoga, compare it, find similarities, practice different branches of yoga, if yoga teaches non-attachment, it's not non-attachment to your beloved-ones (we often hear manipulative gurus telling you that you should let go when your attachment to family/friends takes you time to commit more about yoga), well, non-attachment does exist in yoga philosohy, but also towards the teacher and any specific philosophy, you should be able to nurture yourself from hinduism, atheism, islam, christianity and all that you can imagine without getting too much attached to any of them!

Namaste,

Meriç