Why F*cking Your Yoga Students is Wrong

Hey, yoga teachers! Thinkin’ about hittin’ it with that hot newbie in luon over there? I doubt the Trig teacher who got it on with her lawfully legal sixteen year old student kept her job. But don’t worry, you’ll probably keep yours. After all, we’re all adults here. No biggie, right?

Wrong. In more ways than one. Cause it’s not about age. Its about ethics.

Regardless of what you’re teaching, for a student-teacher relationship to work, there is an inherent and necessary power dynamic. Transmitter of knowledge and receiver of knowledge. Implicit and necessary. If there isn’t, you’re not teaching.

And, obviously, if you’re not teaching yoga, you’re not a yoga teacher. You’re something else.

I wear many hats in my shala: bootcamp general, therapist,  standup comic. The army doesn’t think it’s a good idea to sleep with a commanding officer, and few folks would cosign shnogging your shrink. Heck, having worked in a comedy club for many years, I can tell you whole heartedly it is rarely a good idea to nail a comic (I kid!).

It doesn’t take an ethics professor to see that the underlying issues of power dynamics aren’t age specific.  And, as the adage goes, power corrupts (if you’re not vigilant). My students are off limits, though they are gorgeous, intelligent, and often quite in synch with my beliefs.

Why the line in the sand?

Because the aim of yoga is to allow the spirit to find it’s true nature as observer of the world– and its a teacher of yoga’s responsibility to guide the student towards that mark. The process itself is ugly, uncomfortable, and as wildly arduous as it is necessary.

Lust over trust? You can’t teach yoga that way.

As students (and every teacher is foremost a student), we work so hard to get tranquil thought; thought that isn’t corrupted by bullshit, tainted by the phenomenal world. According to the yoga sutras, uncorrupted thought comes through impartiality to virtue, vice, pleasure, and pain. Tranquil thought is free of sensuous passion… and I can’t help but ask, how many flings fill that critera?

I’ve got no fingers up.

A yoga teacher has to treat every student as a spiritual aspirant. Teaching methods not congruent? Fine. But to literally f*ck up and deteriorate an aspirant’s spiritual path by breeding insolvency? This doesn’t just make someone a bad teacher– it makes them something far worse.

To engage in a sexual relationship and not edit the student-teacher dynamic is an act of violence and dishonesty. But, listen, I know, it happens.

Lets be radical to the brink of hyperbole for a moment. If sleeping with someone who isn’t old enough to consent is called statutory rape, what do we call it when we sleep with someone who isn’t far enough along on their path to know better?

Spiritual rape?

Think that title is ugly? Remember the stakes.

Swami Sivananda says to “Bear insult, and bear injury” is the highest spiritual practice. Go ask a rape victim how easy that is. Teachers are human, and they make mistakes– but no amount of 200-hr trainings or branded yoga mats will make it any less wrong or the stakes any less high.

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3. Painfully Honest
4. 3 Ways Yoga Makes Better Runners