Sexual abuse by yoga gurus

Allegations of such abuse have been made against modern yoga gurus such as Bikram Choudhury,[1] Kausthub Desikachar,[1] Yogi Bhajan,[2] Amrit Desai,[3] and K. Pattabhi Jois.

For example, a guru, Asaram Bapu, who has some 400 ashrams around the world, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 for rape by a court in Jodhpur,[31] and at least six women have brought sexual assault lawsuits against Choudhury.

[34] Before then, hatha yoga had been practised in secret by solitary, ascetic yogins, learning the tradition as a long-term pupil or shishya apprenticed to their master or guru.

The medieval relationship between guru and shishya was one-to-one, well-understood in traditional Hindu society, based on trust developed over many years of instruction.

She argues that instead of seeking causes in the personality or psychology of individual gurus, the root cause is "structural aspects of guru-disciple physicality, haptic logics, which tend to produce these social effects.

"[40] Lucia notes that one element of this is the guru's charisma as described by Max Weber, reinforced by Émile Durkheim's concept of the way that the sacred is "generated, concentrated, and apotheosized.

"[40] She observes further that the spiritual power of gurus is created by belief among their devotees that they embody "cosmic energetic forces", personified in Hinduism as the goddess Shakti.

[40] The yoga scholar Andrea Jain cites what Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad wrote in their 1994 book The Guru Papers, that the guru-disciple relationship is dangerous because it embodies "the seductions, predictable patterns, and corruptions contained in any essentially authoritarian form".

[46] The psychotherapist Josna Pankhania and the yoga teacher and researcher Jacqueline Hargreaves write that "shocking levels of abuse were deeply entrenched" in Satyananda's Mangrove Mountain ashram in Australia in the 1970s.

It defines harassment as "any form of unwanted or unwelcome behaviour that violates people’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.