Record #2: Cult #2, Mysore, India

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains detailed, explicit accounts of sexual assault in a yoga context.

In this episode, I tell the story of my first trip to Mysore, India to study with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois—the founder of Ashtanga yoga and a man revered by thousands of practitioners worldwide.

What I witnessed in that shala wasn't hidden. It wasn't secret. It was normalized. Women were being sexually assaulted during "adjustments" while dozens of students watched. And the most devastating part? Some of them called it healing.

This is about what happens when you see abuse clearly and stay anyway. About how I convinced myself that confronting one man made me empowered, when really I'd just learned how to function inside a violent system. About the decades  that followed, and why it took decades to understand what I'd actually done.

This is Part Two of a longer project documenting the three high-control spiritual environments I've been part of over thirty years. I'm not here to reform these systems. I'm here to document how they work.

ABOUT MAGS: Clinical Ayurvedic Specialist, former certified Ashtanga teacher (one of only 20 women worldwide), and founder of ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I walked away from the Ashtanga community in 2017 on principle and now run a clinical Ayurveda practice and create content analyzing power structures in yoga and wellness communities.

FIND MY WORK: 

Website: https://magnoliazuniga.com/ 

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https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo?app=desktop

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

This is Magnolia. I'm a clinical Auratic Specialist, former certified Ashtanga teacher, and someone who spent 30 years inside high control spiritual environments. This episode contains detailed accounts of sexual assault in a yoga context. If you need to pause, pause. If you need to stop, stop. What you're about to hear is chapter two from a longer project I'm working on. And this one is about Ashtanga Yoga, about my time with Patapi Joyce, and about how I convinced myself that witnessing assault and staying anyway was somehow feminist. I'm not looking for pity, I'm not looking for attention. This is for documentation. This is what institutional abuse looks like in yoga and spiritual communities. This is record number two, cult number two, Mysore, India. I mailed a letter to them to let them know that I was coming. I was told not to expect a response. This was pre-internet days. So this would have been the first sign, a ritualized sort of submission. But it was called tradition. And that's how it worked back then. There was no online registration, no Instagram announcements, just a formal letter mailed to the Mysore Shala in India requesting permission to study. The streets were shadowed and unfamiliar, making everything feel kind of like a warning. My boyfriend was with me, but he wasn't he wasn't committed to transformation in the way that I was. He was a passenger, kind of a passenger in life, generally speaking. But he was definitely a support person in one way or another. You see, I knew I was being catapulted into the next phase of my life. I knew this was for me. I knew I was entering this kind of reckoning, a rupture, a new beginning. But for him, he was just kind of along for the ride. It was entertainment for him. He hovered on the edges, he was kind of a voyeur to the unraveling. But I could already feel the difference between us hardening at that time. I was burning everything down to start something new, to start something real. And he was still watching from a safe distance, kind of untouched and uncommitted. Which didn't really surprise me then. And it was kind of a bit of a foreshadowing into what the men of Ashtanga yoga would be like, also. I mean, I didn't hate him, not exactly, but I saw it clearly, the comfort he came from, the privilege he carried, like armor. He could afford to dabble. Right? I couldn't. I couldn't, I didn't feel like I could dabble. I was hungry for truth, for something beyond performance. Maybe I wanted to be a wit witness, maybe I thought he'd jump too, but even then I knew he wouldn't last. The fire wasn't meant for him. He needed to be around his creature comforts. So after what felt like endless, an endless, mildly dangerous rickshaw ride, we were dropped off in front of our hotel room. It was a broken, dilapidated building. And this too was a clear foreshadowing of what was to come. But at that time it almost seemed romantic in some way. So we got off the rickshaw, and as we dragged our heavy suitcases across like cracked concrete and uneven sidewalks, he looked at me and he asked, Who told you to come here? I said, My Ashtanga teacher is back home. He stopped and looked at me. Do they like you? And this was a solid question that would matter more as the years went on. The air was thick. India has a scent, has a very certain, has a certain scent. I can smell it now. It has a weight that you don't soon forget. So we walked to our hotel, dragging our bags behind us, dodging trash, mangy dogs running by, motorcycle cutting through the dark. It was overwhelming, it was disorienting, and for me it was completely perfect. So I had arrived in my sort of study with the master of Ashtanga Yoga himself, Shri K Patabi Joyce, the founder, the living lineage holder, and the man so many in the community in the world all revered. A couple mornings later, I registered, I was handed my start time, and there was something really sacred about those early mornings, about being chosen for this first slot. At the time, I kind of thought it meant that you know you were serious, committed, worthy if your start time was, you know, 5 a.m. or something, 4 30. I had spent years chasing that feeling, that feeling of belonging, of devotion, the clarity of structure and sacrifice. And places like this promised meaning, order, even holiness in some contexts. And I didn't know it then. But I wasn't chasing yoga, I was actually chasing certainty. So I arrived the next morning before sunrise at my start time, and I open the doors and the foyer, there's a foyer, and then there is the actual shallah space, the actual room in where the students are practicing. And the foyer is sort of a smaller room where the students wait, and that they are it's full of students sitting cross-legged on the floor waiting for their turn. The room beyond us, the shalla, was silent except for the rhythm of ujayi breathing, that sort of rhythmic, ocean-like sound of the breath, and the thump of feet hitting mats, you know, deep inhalations, controlled exhalations, bodies in motion. It was intoxicating. The air was dense with a sweat of 50 people, each absorbed in their own memorized sequence. There was no music, there was no talking, it was just breath, heat, and sacred effort. So in the foyer, I took my spa, I sat down, we waited in silence, watching the people in the next room practice. And every time someone entered to begin their practice, those of us waiting kind of inched closer to the doorway. From where I sat, right against the door frame, I had a clear view inside. The students were right in front of me. I could have reached out and touched them. It was really glorious. And then the next moment it completely shattered. She was in Yoga Nidrasana, on her back, ankles crossed behind her head, her neck, and her clay hands were clasped underneath her around the small of her back on the mat beneath her. And I watched Patabi Joyce walk up to her, silent, focused, deliberate, without warning, without ceremony. He grabbed her ankles with one hand and pressed them down. With the other, he pressed his palm against her crotch, then through her thin cotton pants, he pressed his middle and ring fingers into her slowly, deliberately. I watched his first knuckles disappear. Her face remained calm, still, stoic. He walked away to the next student. She continued her practice, and I was sort of frozen in time. When I talk about this now, and I get that look, and you probably have that look right now. You know the one. It's that flicker at the edge of the eyes, it's the doubt. It's not spoken, but it's bullhorn loud. I have been seeing, hearing, watching this expression ever since that day in 2004. Doubt in me, doubt in the experience, doubt in the witness, all of it. Just enough of it to make me question my sanity. Did it happen? It was visible. It was unmistakable. And then I heard one more. I was next. That was my cue. It was my turn. Not to speak, not to intervene, to remain silent, to enter the room, to roll out my mat, to start my practice, to offer my body to the room. It wasn't as simple as walking in. I moved because I was supposed to. I moved because everyone else did. As I practiced, my body moved towards something ancient and cursed. And it was in that moment I really understood, or I really had felt that this practice was cursed. Like it had already been decided. I mean, maybe it had. And he was clearly sick. But he was strong. Not only physically strong, but he was energetically strong. He alternated around the room. The room was not very big. It held about fifty students, very close together. He alternated between grabbing and massaging buttocks and back bends, grabbing breasts, and even dry humping women in the downward dog transition out of Mayurasana. No one stopped him. There was no secrecy. It was calculated, it was normalized. This was shocking to me. It was part of the deal. I remember looking around the room at other people, completely focusing on their practice and acting like it wasn't happening. And I thought I thought it was insanity. This silence was its own kind of violence. The way that no one flinched, the way the room kept breathing like it was normal, the way the world did not stop. I felt so invisible. I hadn't been touched. Everyone thinks that I was a victim of Patapi Choice. And let me be clear, I was not. He never touched me. But being a witness, watching him assault other women, devastated me. I didn't know what to do. Not only did I know, did not know what to do with what I was seeing, but I I only know that it changed me. And then that same morning I started noticing what I hadn't seen initially, the ways that other women were responding to him. So in the mysore room, at the end of your practice, you do three assisted backbends, meaning you stand at the top of the mat, you fold your arms over your chest, and you wait for the teacher to come and to give you three assisted backbends, meaning you go from standing and you go to touching the top of the head to the mat. And you do that three times with the teacher's help, and then the final backbend is when you bring your hands to the floor. So your teacher always has access to you. In the miceo room, you waited standing with your arms folded across your chest until the teacher came. You did not skip that. So after those backbends, I started noticing that Joyce would then, after that final backbend, massage women's buttocks, and they would collapse onto his shoulder, arms wrapped around him, sobbing, you know, quietly, sometimes sobbing loudly, and he was massaging them, and their bodies were pressed together, and that was very disturbing. And what I did the next that day and my whole the whole time that I was in Mysore, my first trip, I was there for about six months. And I would talk to women, as many of them that would let me talk to them about it, and I would ask them about it. So in quiet conversations, many of these women called it a release. They called it healing. I called it assault. But I listened to them tell me about their experiences. And at the time that's all I could do. So a few days later I wrote to my teachers in Los Angeles, and I told my teacher what I had witnessing. I s I told her, I said, he's molesting people. She responded, Nobody's perfect. I stop him when he has tried to do this with me before, and after I told him not to, he never did it again. He's still human after all. She told me I could stay no. I could stand up for myself. So, you know, this was all we had. To her credit, she didn't gaslight me. She was honest, brutally honest, devastatingly honest, and she was working with the best tools that she had, and that was her voice. Still, I couldn't understand. Why would she send me into a room where she knew women were being molested? Why prepare me and not protect me? Or worse, in her case, why did she say nothing at all? So I wanted to run. I wanted to run home. I felt fear, shame, disbelief. It was all very intense. And also I had traveled so far. So far. I hadn't crossed continents just to turn back. And she said, you know, I'll be in Mysore soon. Let's talk about this in person. So I then decided that I was going to that I couldn't practice in the Shalla with Joyce. I Sherat, Joyce's grandson, was assisting Joyce in the room while this was happening. Sherat would witness these assaults happening. Sherat knew they were wrong. I decided I could not practice with Patabi Joyce. So I started practicing at Sherat's Shala. Sharat, after he would assist his grandfather, would then walk down the street to his own shallah in a separate home where he would teach about 10 students. And I went to Sherat's Shala the next morning and I said, I signed up for a month and I said, Sharat, I am here because of the way that your grandfather touches women. I don't like the way that he touches women. Sherat looked at me and his eyes got really big and he stepped back from me a couple steps as though, almost as though I had slapped him in the face. But he stared at me like a deer in headlights. Didn't say a word. And then he walked into the room to teach. Now I practiced in his shalla every day. Sharat wasn't particularly kind to me or unkind. He was pretty neutral with me, and I got the sense that it was because of what I'd said. You don't speak about these things. And while I was practicing in the shallah, it obviously had a very different energy than the main shalla. Far less students. But I was beginning to question my decisions. I was thinking, is there a way that I could practice with joy? So you know, I came all this way to study with the master of Vishanga Yoga. Yeah, I get that some of these women like it. I don't understand. I don't understand what they're doing or what they're talking about, but that's not my business. Let me take care of myself. Is there a way that I can make this work? You know, again, I've traveled so far, but I also knew that my teacher was coming to Mysore and that we were gonna talk in person. So we met and I said, What if I go tell him to not, you know, touch my vagina? What if I go talk to him? She said, What are you gonna say? I said, Well, I'll walk into his office and I'll say, Don't touch my vagina. And she's kind of started laughing at me and she said, You can't, you can't say that. So we started role-playing, and she started helping me on what to say and how to say it. She started coaching me. And she, you know, she coached me on how to enter his office and asked him not to touch me. We rehearsed the words, I don't like how you touch ladies and ladies' area, you know, and she told me to make sure that I touch, you know, I put my hands over my breasts, my crotch, my bum, and and you know, for those that are not familiar with Joyce, but Toby Joyce did not speak um very good English. So there was a language barrier that uh she was trying to, we were sort of trying to navigate. And then she said, he'll deny it, and if he continues to deny it, then tell him that you want to be married someday. That will make him stop. But I didn't want to. Get married someday. I didn't even want to be touched. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to study. But somehow in this place, asking not to be assaulted had to be rehearsed like a performance. See, at the time, I thought I was doing something kind of feminist and something sort of kind of revolutionary. I was going to stand up to this, you know, guru master, and I was going to stand my ground and be just this, you know, standing up for myself. Look at me, everyone, right? In retrospect, I have a lot of thoughts about that. You know, my I was softening my boundaries into politeness, my fear, and ultimately my worth had to be framed as future domesticity. That was what he valued. Me as property to another man. That was what he valued. He didn't value me. The next day I stepped into Patabi Joyce's office. My heart was pounding. I closed the door. Sherat, his grandson, and a future lineage successor opened the door. I closed it again. He opened it again. Fine. I began to speak to Joyce. Who's touching? He demanded, feigning shock. I say, You, Guruji, I said, you touch ladies and ladies' area. I stood up and pointed, my crotch, my breasts, my butt. He grunted. Oh, who's touching? Realizing he wouldn't budge, I added the marriage line. I told him, Guruji, I wanted to make I want to get married someday. You are the master of Ashtanga Yoga. I want to learn Ashtanga Yoga from you. But I want to have husbands someday. So no touching, please. And then his eyes completely changed, his face completely changed. You know, he completely softened. It's like he understood, it's like he saw me for the first time, right? Before I told him I wanted to get married someday, he looked at me with complete disgust and disbelief. How dare! But then the moment I tell him I want to, you know, whatever. Ah, then he sees me. Ah, he said. No problem. You come take practice, no problem. I said, no touching, Guruji. No touching, he repeated. So here I am thinking, I'm like, you know, I mean, girl boss wasn't a thing at the time. It was not a term. But that's essentially what I was doing. I thought I was girl bossing my way through patriarchy, right? So the following days I go and I practice. Sherrat is definitely not happy about the fact that I switched back to the main shala. After back bends, Padabi Joyce came to do my back bends, and then he grabbed my buttocks, like he did with most women. I grabbed his hands, I moved them to my waist, I looked him in the eye, and I put my finger to his nose and I said, No Guruji. He grabbed my finger and he said, That is correct method. And then he waddled away. There was a student behind beside me that was practicing and had heard the whole thing. He stood up and leaned over and said, How does it feel to be your guru's guru? And then he went back to practice. It took me decades to understand what those moments revealed, to see how quietly it rewired my sense of safety, to realize I had been performing power. I was protecting myself in the only language that he respected. He only valued women, I mentioned this earlier, but through the lens of a man's possession. Not because marriage meant safety, but because a woman already claimed by another man was, in his eyes, off limits. It was not about devotion. It was about territory. And the most twisted part, like I said, I walked away thinking I handled it. When really I had made myself palatable enough to be spared. Those women who thought they were being chosen, who thought they were being healed, these are the ones that still haunt me. That some women encouraged it, that others spiritualized it, and that I stayed in the community because I thought feminism meant letting each woman decide for herself what counted as harm. Choice feminism. The idea that if a woman chooses it, it's inherently feminist because she chose it. I told myself if it didn't hurt them, maybe it wasn't wrong. If they chose it, then I didn't have the right to name it. I was never silent. I told my students, I told my friends, I told anyone who would listen. Most people wouldn't. Around me too, I thought speaking up might change things. Around me too, victims came forward and I was ecstatic about the fact that finally the truth was coming out. Finally, teachers would not be, Ayashtranga teachers would not be able to dismiss it. I thought things would change. It didn't. And that's the part that no one prepares you for. When you tell the truth and the system doesn't flinch. Or when you tell the truth and people erase you because they want to stay in power. This happened so many times within Ashtanga. So many of my peers, so many of my peers that had power that I told, and they not only did they do nothing, but they completely erased my testimony as though it didn't exist, as though I didn't exist. I had not outsmarted the system. I had just learned how to function inside of it. I was girl bossing my way through violence, through silence, through institutional abuse and betrayal that rewarded my survival but never protected my safety. And that's the trap of girl boss feminism or choice feminism. It's kind of a brand of empowerment built on individual, well, at least girl boss feminism is a brand of empowerment built on individual success within broken systems. It tells you you're rising, winning, thriving. It makes you think you're the exception. But really, you're just the one most skilled at enduring harm in silence, polished, compliant, and grateful nonetheless. And I bought into this for decades. I thought if I worked hard enough, proved myself enough, I could belong without being broken. But girl boss feminism never promised safety, only proximity to power. It offers, sometimes it offers a seat at the table, but not that you can change the menu. Yeah. Ashtanga yoga was made for men, for boys, women, even though it's mostly women that practice it and mostly women that teach it, they have absolutely zero effect on the blueprint of Ashtanga yoga. Make no mistake, this is a practice for men. And that's a whole lie, right? Is that strength means that it didn't hurt, that independence means it wasn't abuse, and that surviving is the same thing as being free. One friend of mine had the nickname of, he was, he called himself the pit bull of the shallah. He was one of the first generation of practitioners. He was a photographer at the Shalla, and he told me that he had hours of footage of Joyce adjusting students that would never see the light of day because they will never understand. He told me. Joyce was like a grandfather to him, and he would protect him until the day that he died. Another friend told me that Joyce used to molest his girlfriend while she practiced next to him, and while he would assault her, he would look him in the directly in the eyes and sneer. But he didn't call it abuse. People think they go to study with these older generation Ashtanga teachers thinking that they're safe because they're not Joyce. They are not safe. They are the ones that enabled this, they're the ones that watched their girlfriends, wives, friends be assaulted. They thrived off of our confusion. They built careers off of our confusion, and they did nothing with their power. Maybe they would listen, but they would never do anything to make their position of power or or their place in the system vulnerable in any way. Another male student called me in a panic. Magnolia, my girlfriend's next posture is Yoga Nidrasana. I don't want her to get an adjustment. I don't know what I'll do. I will jump up and punch him in the face. Can you please come and teach her how to do it so she doesn't need help? I came to her house every day. I helped her with Yoga Nidrasana. When it was time for her to get it, Joyce gave her the posture, she got into the pose on her own, he watched, she finished it, he walked away. She was not assaulted that day. But the fact that we even waited to find out tells you something. I stayed for third for years after that, years after that trip. And people ask why I stayed. Why did you put up with it? The truth is that Ashtanga gave us something, structure, discipline, sense of mastery, belonging. For many of us, especially women, is the first time I felt powerful in my body. I'll get more into it in future episodes. The mechanisms of rationalizations, the way systems teach us to call captivity freedom. But that's not this story. This story is about the first time I saw it clearly and chose to stay anyway. If this brought something up for you, what I will say is this. If you are inside of a system that taught you to spiritualize harm, you're not alone, and you're not crazy. It takes years, decades, I believe, perhaps even lifetimes, to just name it. I'm Magnolia. You can find more of my work at magnoliazuniga.com or on YouTube at Magnolia Says So S-E-Z-S-O, where I post yoga and wellness critique and provide clinical guidance for people who are kind of done with the wellness platitudes. Thanks so much.