Stains on the Lineage: Ashtanga's Reckoning
On September 6th, 2025, an anonymous collective of Ashtanga yoga practitioners on Instagram (@1percenttruth_) accused Taylor Hunt, longstanding Ashtanga yoga teacher, of “inappropriate sexual behavior.” They alleged that, among other forms of physical and emotional abuse, Hunt frequently coerces female students into sexual relationships. Two weeks have passed since their bombshell, and in that time, countless students and prominent leaders from the Ashtanga community have come forward to corroborate these claims.
The entire episode reeks of déjà vu. Back in 2018, a series of sexual assault allegations against primary Ashtanga guru and founder, K. Pattabhi Jois, very nearly destroyed the lineage. The esteemed yoga teacher was posthumously accused of groping, humping, and even fingering his female students under the guise of providing postural adjustments.
A Common Thread: Abuse Across Modern Yoga Traditions
The Ashtanga case is only the latest in a long line of global yoga/ sexual assault scandals. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, guru Satyananda Saraswati of Yoga Nidra faced investigations for child sexual abuse, and Integral Yoga guru Satchitananda Saraswati made headlines in 1991 for molesting his students. Bikram Chowdhury, creator of Bikram Yoga, accumulated five sexual assault-related lawsuits by 2014. The #MeToo movement in 2017 spurred a new onslaught of allegations, with Pattabhi Jois and Kundalini Yoga’s Yogi Bhajan joining the list of offenders. Nowhere in the yoga world feels safe – every lineage is a new can of worms, writhing with slimy intent underneath thin tin lids of ‘spiritual detachment.’
Every time these gurus come under fire, their respective communities are forced to grapple with the realization that their yogic teachings are ethically compromised. Some teachers, feeling that their philosophies are irrevocably tainted, close the doors of their studios permanently. Some condemn their gurus’ actions but refuse to abandon their pedagogies – instead opting to change the names of their studios (‘Bikram Yoga’ became simply ‘Hot Yoga’) or adopt new trauma-informed techniques (now, instructors often ask consent before providing posture adjustments). Still others reject the entire tradition of guru-disciple lineage (guru-śiṣya paramparā), which, they claim, feeds into cycles of sexual violence. They call for a “post-lineage yoga:” a movement that rejects the autocratic guru in a good-faith effort to democratize yoga, even as it flounders with the complexities of spiritual authority and orientalist epistemology.
Abuses are so interwoven in every fiber of these yogic traditions – from the modern brand names to the ancient education model – that perhaps the very fabric of yoga is sullied beyond redemption.
The question remains, then: what is yoga without sexual assault? Other lineage-based communities, such as Indian classical music, have successfully curbed misconduct by improving oversight and enforcing ethical standards. Yet, in the yoga world, sexual assault continues unabated, festering in the intimate and vulnerable confines of studios and ashrams. Why do these spaces – intended for healing and soul-searching – so often become ones of exploitation and coercion? And how does yoga itself abet these harmful patterns? The answer, I believe, goes much farther back than New Age misogynists and #MeToo.
Predatory Metaphysics: Gender & Power in Pre-Modern Yoga
Today, over 80% of global yoga practitioners are female. But in premodern India, circa 7th-13th centuries CE, yoga was a male-dominated tradition. Yogins (male practitioners of yoga) make frequent appearances in medieval ritual texts, art, and literature; they are usually human men who, by virtue of devout spiritual practice, have attained god-like metaphysical powers.
Yoginīs (female practitioners of yoga), on the other hand, are rarely mentioned. In texts on Tantric yoga, they are overshadowed by male ritualists; women, after all, are thought to be mere distractions from the spiritual path. When yoginīs do appear in ritual texts, they are terrifying and grotesque; fierce witch-like spirits who fly over the cremation ground, their feet turned backwards and their hair splayed wild as they accost innocent men. This textual canon reflects an age-old paradigm of patriarchy: men are impressively powerful, but women are only dangerously so.
The yoginī’s distinct role in medieval texts points to a long history of sexual skulduggery in yoga. In 7th century Tantric yoga texts like the Brahmayāmala Tantra and the Siddhayogeśvarīmata, the yoginī is a female ritual partner who provides bodily fluids for the male ritualist’s cāru (impure offering). These fluids are attained through a variety of sexual rites, in which the yoginī’s body is worshiped as a vessel for shakti, the divine feminine energy.
The 9th-10th century yogic text, the Kaulajñānanirṇaya, describes yoginīs as goddesses themselves and prescribes male practitioners to invoke them through ritual. This text promises that the yoginīs will appear to any successful (male) ritualist and “kiss” him with their vulvas, thus bestowing him with their supernatural powers. In such rituals, the yoginī exists to benefit the yogin; whether worshiped as a ritual object or as a divine being, the woman must surrender her sexual power for a man’s spiritual gain.
This gendered power dynamic is itself an outgrowth from an older, classical school of philosophy: Samkhya. In the Samkhya-Yoga ontology, women are potent sources of shakti: the fertile feminine force that animates the cosmos. However, premodern yogic texts were written exclusively by men and for men. Therefore, these texts tend to concern themselves not with the female practitioner, but with the male practitioner’s cultivation of feminine power. These texts suggest that yogins need not spend their own shakti – they should instead harvest it from yoginīs, who, of course, are assumed to have no use for it themselves.
On the Restoration of Tattered Textiles
Up until 2018, those who testified against K. Pattabhi Jois were dismissed and often met with vitriol. He was a great man and a great yogi, his defenders roared; how could he have hurt you? Yet, as many eyewitnesses have since confirmed, Jois’s abuses were hardly discreet. They were committed openly under the bright fluorescents of Ashtanga studios, so thoroughly entrenched in the practice itself that no one dared – for decades! – to question the master and his ancient methods.
For the yoginīs of the Ashtanga lineage, their shakti is not really their own. It is policed by men, crafted according to male standards, and eventually stolen: an impure offering to the deified male guru. Taylor Hunt – like K. Pattabhi Jois and many other yogins before him – gains power by draining that of his students. He elevates his own status by violating women.
The Ashtanga community is forever indebted to the teachers and students of 1percenttruth_ who are bravely working to expose physical abuses in yoga. But an insidious system of gendered metaphysics continues to pervade yoga spaces around the world, perpetuating a worldview that both enables and justifies the exploitation of women’s sexuality. Sexual assault is not just a taut thread that wrinkles a few lineages; it is the loom upon which these yogic traditions are woven. As we extricate one from the other, we must be prepared for the entire tapestry to unravel.
Acknowledgements
- Amelia Wood for her important work on abuse in yoga.
- Theodora Wildcroft for her bold attempt at redefining yogic education – I admit that I harbor a healthy skepticism of post-lineage yoga, but ultimately, it is the only way forward.
- Christian Novetzke, Shelby House, and the other members of the Spring 2024 JSIS public writing workshop, who supplied invaluable edits and discourse for this piece.
- The brave students and teachers at @1percenttruth_ , and everyone else who has survived abuse in a yoga space. Thank you for sharing your stories. We believe you. You are not alone.
Featured image (“Dakini with Consort”) courtesy of The Huntington Archive at the University of Chicago
