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#metoo, Activism, Articles, Buddhism, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, rape culture, social justice, Yoga culture January 2, 2020 January 2, 2020
In the aftermath of Julie Salter's viral testimony that Swami Vishnudevananda (b. Kuttan Nair 1927, d. 1993) sexually used and abused her for three years while she was his personal assistant, the Sivananda Yoga administration has released a number of statements, one of which asks other complainants to email a Montreal PR firm.
Here's Salter's testimony:
The International Sivananda Yoga and Vedanta Centres homepages now feature a pop-up statement, dated December 16th, committing to "honesty and transparency" and promising the appointment of an independent investigator within "a few days". This hasn't happened yet.
On December 25th, 3H0 recording artist Snatam Kaur gave a concert of devotional music at the Sivananda Yoga Bahamas ashram with senior Sivananda dignitaries in attendance. She sat in front of a larger-than-life portrait of Nair, and opened by quoting her guru Yogi Bhajan, also accused of sexually abusing his secretaries who worked for years for little or no pay. In a 2017 interview, Kaur lauded Bhajan as "very devout Sikh".
Here's the latest communication from the Sivananda administration:
Sivananda students around the world — including the reported 45K graduates from the organization's signature Teacher Training Course — who are wondering how the accountability process may unfold might benefit from a brief review of institutional abuse crises in the yoga and Buddhism worlds from this past year alone, and how the organizations have responded.
The publication of my book this past March brought together the testimonies of sixteen women who describe Ashtanga Yoga founder Pattabhi Jois sexually assaulting them under the guise of "yoga adjustments" between 1982 and 2002. Prior to the book, Jois survivors Anneke Lucas, Karen Rain, and Jubilee Cooke had all published their testimonies independently. Rain and Cooke went on to publish what is now the white paper on how yoga institutions should respond to abuse.
The story was covered in a Yoga Journal personal essay, and then mainstream outlets like the New York Daily News. The New York Times touched on the story as part of a longer feature in November.
While some individual Ashtanga leaders have published statements of accountability and allyship with the Jois survivors, no official statement has been made to date by the Jois family or by any entity that would represent Ashtanga Yoga worldwide. Sharath Rangaswamy, Jois's grandson and inheritor of the family business, issued a rambling personal statement on Instagram that's now deleted. (Reprinted here. More commentary here.)
No-one in the Ashtanga world has taken steps to commission an independent investigation, or to raise reparations funds for survivors. Meanwhile, senior Ashtanga figures like Eddie Stern continue to obfuscate what they knew and when.
IYNAUS and RIMYI (two influential arms of the Iyengar Yoga global body) gather together considerably more administrative power than anything found in the Ashtanga world. After their botched attempt to internally investigate testimony against Manouso Manos was exposed, they hired an independent investigator who found the testimony credible.
IYNAUS and RIMYI delisted Manos, and barred him from using the name "Iyengar" in association with his continued teaching. He's doing it anyway in Russia. Recently, he gave a workshop at a secret location in Los Angeles, attended mainly by other Iyengar teachers:
No concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Shambhala International
Ten months after an independent investigation found that Shambhala leader Mipham Mukpo had committed sexual misconduct (even though many people refused to participate in the investigation), the Shambhala Interim Board has announced that it supports the return of Mukpo from "retreat" in Nepal to bestow Tantric initiations on devotees this coming summer. The initiated practices involve participants visualizing Mukpo as a divine being.
The announcement also comes after a group of Mukpo's former aides released a scathing description of his assaultive behaviour over the years.
In Mukpo's own statement of intentions regarding the upcoming retreat, he makes no mention of the testimony against him, nor of any steps he has taken to mitigate further harm. Survivors and disillusioned members mocked Mukpo's statement on reddit.
While Shambhala entities continue to fundraise for various projects, no concrete efforts have yet been made by the organization to raise reparations funds for survivors.
Bikram Choudhury…
…is making money on the lam in Mexico, even after the airing of the Netflix doc, which added visuals to the far better-researched 30-by-30 podcast of the previous year.
There's a warrant out for Choudhury for failure to pay the first of what will likely be many judgments against him.
Rigpa International
Sogyal Lakar died in exile in August. The year before, an independent investigation found that Lakar had sexually, physically, and psychologically abused many students over decades. The report came one year after eight former devotees described their experiences.
Even when organizations do a seemingly good job at investigating and confirming abuse testimony, we're not seeing mitigation and reparations. For members of the Shambhala, Iyengar, and Rigpa communities, this might feel especially demoralizing — that the organizations to which many have committed the best years of their lives have mounted transparency campaigns that ultimately allow for the return to business-as-usual.
Opinion: It's really like waiting for world leaders in the Global North to take decisive action on the climate crisis. They have the science, yet they are powerless, feckless, or nihilistic in response to the momentum of the culture. Whatever initiatives are taken are ineffectual or performative.
I don't have answers here, but the stalemate does make me think of two things: how cultic organizations are designed to self-perpetuate in part by restricting outside input and avoiding outside scrutiny. Secondly, it makes me think of the distinction that activists like Aric McBay make between those who believe that corrupt systems can change, and those who don't. I'll end therefore with two grafs from McBay's Full Spectrum Resistance.
Many of our [organizing] obstacles have been part of the culture(s) of the left. So I should clarify some of the terms I've been using, especially liberal and radical. Some people use radical as a synonym for "extreme," but that's misleading. The word radical originates in Latin, where it means "of the roots"—as in, from the grassroots, or root problems. Radicals see the dominant culture as having deep-seated problems that require fundamental changes to fix. They want to uproot entrenched power structures like apartheid, or patriarchy, or capitalism. As such, they tend to advocate (or at least support) political action that falls outside of what the political establishment considers acceptable. (Phil Berrigan's argument that "if voting changed anything it would be illegal" is something radicals understand well.)
Liberals, in contrast, see the problems in society as comparatively superficial. They accept most of the established power structures of society—say, corporations or the parliamentary state—and they seek to work within those structures to make change. Liberals try to use "representative" systems of political power, either by electing someone sympathetic to them or by persuading someone already in power to grant concessions. Radicals may do this, at times, but radicals also like to build up their own community power and create movements that can exert political force more directly.
— Loc. 803.
So: here's to a radical 2020 for our spiritual communities, and life on earth.
Articles, Poetry December 12, 2019 December 12, 2019
I have the great good luck of being able to come to work in Montréal in the late fall every year. Being away from my family is at least a little soothed by how much I like this city.
I know this is idealizing, but it does seem that Montréal has resisted the breakneck speed of gentrification I feel everywhere else. I can still feel the layering of history here, the simultaneity of decay and repair, change and conservation. I can see how the tradesmen jerry-rig, how foodies improvise, and I have friends who still know what rent control means and feels like.
On Friday night I walk with my friend to get breakfast bagels from the Fairmont bagel works, which is is open 24/7. Orthodox men hurry by in their high fur-trimmed hats, heading to synagogue. The smoke from the wood-fired ovens is now contested by the eco-concerned, and the bakery has agreed to chimney filters. Yet the bagels roll out, placed warm in my hand by a woman who's maybe from North Africa. I look behind the counter and one baker is a younger white woman, maybe from the old family, and the other is an older Indian man. He draws a line of forty bagels out of the oven on a 12-foot long narrow wooden paddle, blackened by the years, then flips them into the air to land in the basket below for sorting. Like he's done it forever, or as if a bagel oven is just a flat tandoor, while fire is fire the world over.
That morning, I had cappuccino pressed out for me at Olympico on Ste-Viateur by the same red-haired tousled insomniac who's been working there for twenty years. I sat at the window and imagined seeing Uncle Leonard or Irving Layton strolling past.
After coffee I took a long walk. I stopped in at the curio shop on St-Laurent that's crammed with old ephemera, mostly from the Cantons de l'Est: a thousand crucifixes, packs of pinup playing cards, 45 records, smoking paraphernalia, countless wristwatches in golden tangles under dusty glass. The place reeks of turpentine: the owner keeps opened cans of the vintage wood stain to touch up the vintage furniture pieces. The things we use to preserve things must themselves be preserved.
I bought a tacky toy Jesus action figure for our older boy and antique dinky cars for the younger. I also bought two old cigar boxes I'll woodburn their names into for Christmas. They need secret boxes, just like I did.
The old man has been there forever. I finally chatted with him. I do more of that now, because time is always getting shorter and the point is to connect with people. I never knew he was from Barcelona. He said he got his landing visa in 1963 and bought the building in the 1966 for 10K dollars. He doesn't know how long he'll keep coming to work. With all the heart problems he's supposed to give up coffee and sugar and salt and everything he loves, but is it worth a few more years? He shrugs. I told him that if I didn't see him next year that I hope he will have enjoyed the coffee. We laughed and laughed and then I bonked my head on an old wooden sled hanging over the door.
Leaving the shop, I remembered that I used to sing in choir events at L'Oratoire Ste-Joseph. I hopped a bus for an impromptu pilgrimage. Montréal seems to remember, on my behalf, what it meant to grow up Catholic in the 1970s and 80s.
The Oratory is such a weird building. The basilica rises up on top of the crypt church, which is turn is above the crypt. "Yo dawg, I heard you like churches…"
It's so big you actually take escalators between the dreary floors, like in a department store, but going from the piety section to the penance section. The architecture is neo-fascist but with melancholic statuary, as if the builders knew that the empire was hollowed out, leaving nothing but the depression of its idols.
…the architecture is neo-fascist…
…but the statuary… why the long faces?
The whole scene basically sums up the somatics of my early adolescence, when the ideology demanded awe, but the dead saints and the men who towered above seemed so distant.
I texted my partner to tell her I was visiting the "Temple of Emotional Avoidance", and she texted back: "Overseen by the High Priest of Preoccupied Guilt?" Yep. Nailed it.
Check out that pipe organ. I don't talk about this much but the first job I had was as a church organist. By the time I was 22 I must have sung and played for a thousand funerals and about half as many weddings. I never played this particular instrument, but I played organs like it, and now I look at it and understand why the whole thing always made me so uncomfortable. It's like some kind of Nazi war machine with a seat for a single lonely man at the centre to pull all the levers and make himself feel like the entire universe is singing for him, or forced to sing because of him. I remember the nausea of waiting to start playing, gathering myself for the grandiose takeover of space.
Down in the crypt a tourist from Senegal asked me to take his picture, posed beside the altar to the virgin. I imagined he thought I was one of the faithful, and so I adopted that affect for the moment, and believed along with him. I made sure he was happy with his smile, and that his rosary was visible.
I handed back his phone and strolled on to pause before the main altar to Joseph, "Patron of the Church". The full absurdity finally hit me. The whole complex is dedicated to the father of Jesus. Stepfather, I guess. It's a multimillion dollar monument to fatherhood, and it's cold, remote, eerie. It's both clichéd and self-fulfilling. At least the culture is transparent about these things, if not about the fact that whatever money and social power is sitting in that building came in part from payment and political tribute made to the Catholic admins of residential schools.
It's a mark of great privilege that I can walk through this part of my past with detachment and stylized irony. I was physically abused in a Catholic school, but I wasn't violated, not in that way, in a building like this. Many were. I had my emotions mocked and twisted into the jagged shapes of toxic masculinity. (Yoga helped roll these out.) But I wasn't forced to give up my language or forget my ancestors.
With this privilege I'll withdraw my attention from this architecture, and pour it into who has survived it. Because survivors know what it means for everything to collapse, and what works when it does.
I don't know if I'll ever bring my boys to this place. With the little time we have it seems more important to help them find new spaces of awe, built by people who survived rather than imposed control, by people who played in forests instead of cutting them down.
Articles, Satire November 27, 2019 November 27, 2019
🤩🙏🤩 I'm SO excited about this UNIQUE and SACRED event at this PRESTIGIOUS London yoga studio! ⭐🌟🔥😎💰💰💰
No hun — it's ME who CAN'T WAIT to get on an airplane and fly ✈💨✈ to this glorious offering! The teacher is a 💎💎💎 top-level doTERRA Wellness Advocate💎💎💎, and the theme is 🕉🕉🕉 THE YOGA SUTRAS 🕉🕉🕉.
OMG. Like, my two FAVOURITE things. ✌
To be clear: it doesn't promise this in the ad copy for the event, but maybe that's because this wisdom is so potent it has to be COVERT. Maybe the workshop is like a 🐴 TROJAN HORSE 🐴 for entering the doTERRA world!!!
All I can say is that I hope hope HOPE the veils will be removed and that this workshop will FINALLY unlock for me and the 🌎 WORLD 🌎the hidden link between 🙏 ancient yogic wisdom 🙏 and the power 💪👊💪 of essential oils. This podcast only WHETTED my APPETITE! I just know there are so many hidden connections in this content that can heal the traumatic wounds that separate us from the past, from mystery, from 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳Mother India 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳, and from each other!!!
The old 👴💀👴 patriarchal 👴💀👴yoga vision always told us that Patanjali instructed a retreat from social interactions, the renunciation of not only householding but sensuality 💃💃💃 itself, and that the whole point was to meditate until the organic world became meaningless and ultimately disappeared. Basically: sit still and do NOTHING until you die! ☠☠☠ I hope that this teacher can show me that the 🔍🔍🔍 HIDDEN TRUTH 🔍🔍🔍 of the text, which NO ONE has really been ready for yet, is that Patanjali was really a FEMINIST VINYASA-FLOW TEACHER 😱😱😱 who understood the community-building POWER of multi-level marketing. 💰💰💰
It was only a few months ago that I saw that this teacher helps to spread the word about the doTERRA Yoga Collection. Check it out!
🧨🧨🧨"The body achieves what the mind believes."🧨🧨🧨
Sing it! Truth to the MAX! It's getting hot in here! 🔥🔥🔥 And just look at that box, with its EXQUISITE trio design, referring to the gunas, the doshas, or even the TRIDENT OF SHIVA 🔱🔱🔱!!!
So I've been using these oils according to the instructions on the sales page, and it's been AMAZING. Here are the instructions:
The perfect yoga poses to pair with doTERRA Anchor's aroma are Seated Meditation, Seated Twist, and Bhu Mudra (one hand on the heart, the other on the Earth).
Ideal yoga poses with doTERRA Align's aroma are Warrior II, Triangle, and Gate pose.
Use doTERRA Arise while practicing the following yoga poses: standing arms high, standing side stretch, and Half Moon.
Pro-tip: what I've noticed is that when I do those exact poses with those exact oils smeared all over me, it's JUST LIKE doing those poses while smelling different oils. It's AMAZING. I'm SO grateful.🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏
On a DEEPER level, I've always intuited (and intentioned) that essential oils continue the great Patanjali legacy of EXTRACTION. I mean, they take the ESSENCE of the plant life — so sattvic, so green, so blended and steeped — and distill it so that, like meditation, it can penetrate inward on SO many levels. 💉💉💉
I believe the TRUE NATURE of renunciation is fully revealed through multi-level marketing. For instance, if you start bringing your friends and yoga students into your downline, you'll be letting go of all needless social attachments, without even thinking about it! 🤷🤷🤷 And financially, the system is so effective it makes the vast majority of sellers see through the basic delusion of expecting money for labour — when in reality all value is manifested. 🍄🍄🍄 This is an AMAZING lesson for the ego. 🤯🤯🤯
I'm all about the Ninth Limb, friends. 💰💰💰 ABUNDANCE 💰💰💰. It comes AFTER completing samadhi, which is just a little boring, TBH. 💤💤💤
The Ninth Limb allows you to observe with equanimity as your impermanent relationships disintegrate and your householding attachments go into foreclosure. Because, in your essence, you are NEVER indebted, to ANYTHING. You have no mortgage in the divine realm. 🏡🏡🏡
Plus if you totally get into the oils, like, really snort them HARD through breath of fire and other pranayamas — 😤😤😤 I hope to learn these in the workshop! 😤😤😤 — they are so potent that they will destroy your 👃👃👃 olfactory nerves 👃👃, and then you will have progressed on the path to sensory control. Bonus: I read somewhere that applying eucalyptus to your jade 🥚🥚🥚 egg 🥚🥚🥚will make you renounce all 💋 lust 💋, thus aiding the holy practice of 🙏 Brahmacharya 🙏. I know that's mainly for women. But exclusion is so wrong! I put MY jade egg in my 🍑 BUM 🍑. I've started with the smaller size but plan to work my way up. It's so NOURISHING to learn how to sit with discomfort. 🥴
Of course, everyone is at a different level in their personal JOURNEY. Some people find renouncing their friends and money too hard, and really need to hope in something. Luckily doTERRA provides. Do your children have autism? There's an oil for that. Auntie has cancer? A little dab here and there, and to SANITIZE the IV needles. When facing Ebola, I believe that Doctors Without Borders should all be carrying On Guard starter packs, and they should be recruiting mothers in WAR ZONES into their downlines.
It's true that the FDA warned doTERRA about some of these claims, but I know what's true in my heart, AND in my diffuser. Yeah, whatever, FDA. Blah blah blah. F U Big Pharma!!! 🖕🖕🖕
Also there's all this FAKE NEWS out there about doTERRA being some kind of PYRAMID SCHEME. LOL. They trot out TOTALLY BOGUS NUMBERS like how almost two MILLION doTERRA wellness advocates made ZERO in commissions.
What I totally hate about this hating is that it glosses over the POWER and STRENGTH of there being 2 MILLION wellness advocates working HARD at their DREAM of a 🌎 world 🌎 filled with aroma. 👃👃👃
And oh, as for all those stories about doTERRA wrecking havoc in people's lives? Sorry — I'm not here for the sob-fest victim olympics, and NEITHER IS PATANJALI.
I hope to manifest through this workshop that the teacher will SHOW me how Patanjali's third chapter on special yogic powers possibly contains coded messages on how to use essential oils to REALLY treat medical conditions at their SOURCE. But why stop there?
Seriously tho. I want a blend that will help me tolerate the unbearable venality of consumerism. I want an oil that will soothe my facial muscles when they get cramped up in my permanent fake smile I want an oil that will make me more resilient in the face of predatory marketing. I want an oil that will heal me from my yoga injuries, and make me forget that there are yoga cults. I want an oil I can sniff when I'm in the depths of climate despair. I want an oil that will sequester the carbon I will spew as I fly to this workshop.
Anyway, I've totally gone on long enough! It's time for my mid-morning self-care RITUAL. That's right: some ME time. I'm just gonna blend all the Yoga oils together and roll em on my orifices to bless the nine gateways 💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋 of my holy body temple. Patanjali says the human body is disgusting, so I hope that this workshop will provide an aspirational translation for sutra 2:40.
One last thing, dear TRIBE: I'm so overwhelmed with GRATITUDE that such a prestigious business is hosting this OFFERING. It's truly a watershed that an elite yoga company is so open to this essential wisdom. They're taking a real stand here. The BEST companies make their customers feel like they could all be in the upline 💰💰💰, and that's the vibe I get. It's also so cool that this is coming after the super-successful ♿ Accessible Yoga ♿ training they JUST hosted 👍. It fits right into the biz model to make this offering SO accessible at ONLY 700 pounds. But that's post-Brexit, so who really knows what the actual cost will be. My belief is that money is only an illusion when you have ABUNDANCE. 💰💰💰
Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, rape culture, Yoga, Yoga culture, Yoga pedagogy November 23, 2019 November 23, 2019
Eddie Stern's Statements About the Crimes of Pattabhi Jois (Post and Podcast)
Last week, I released the following video of the late Maty Ezraty puts Eddie Stern at a meeting of senior students in Mysore in the early 1990s, at which Jois's abuses were openly discussed and acknowledged.
Ezraty recalls that she and Chuck Miller decided at that time to actively distance themselves from Jois. Stern went on to help Jois publish a book, to host Jois at U.S. events, and co-edit Guruji, a collection of interviews that glorify Jois.
Yesterday, Eddie Stern released a statement about the criminality of Pattabhi Jois. The statement is co-signed by his partner Jocelyne and can be found here on his site.
Through present-tense phrases like "The stories that are being reported on the actions of Pattabhi Jois…", the Sterns imply that they have only become aware of Jois's abuses recently, or since survivors like Anneke Lucas and Karen Rain have spoken up.
The Sterns' statement was simultaneously published with this podcast excerpt with Eddie Stern, hosted by Leanne Woehlke.
In the podcast, Stern says:
I've read the reports of these women. I didn't know what he was doing. And after reading the book, I could confidently know that — the Matthew Remski book — I could really confidently say I didn't know about those things.
However, this same book recounts how Anneke Lucas went to Stern in 2001 after Jois assaulted her in New York. Here's the relevant excerpt:
Anneke said that after Jois had returned to India, she went to Eddie Stern to report the groping incident. He was Jois's host, after all.
According to Anneke, Stern's wife – another senior Jois student – was also at the meeting.
"Eddie referred to 'Guruji's unfortunate problem'," Anneke said, "apologized and told me I had done the right thing. His wife also offered words of sympathy.
"At the time," Anneke said, "I was satisfied with the acknowledgment alone. But Eddie carries his share of responsibility by failing to warn me and others, and by persisting in spreading an image of Pattabhi Jois as though he was an enlightened guru."
Nine years later, Anneke showed Stern a draft of the article she was about to publish.
"Eddie's first question was 'Why do you want to humiliate him like that?' to which I answered: 'He humiliated himself.' Eddie agreed with me. (PAAIC, p. 319)
Additionally, Stern told me via email in July of 2016 that he had flagged the infamous Jois adjustment video as inappropriate content. The video was subsequently deleted from Vimeo, but is now reposted here (trigger warning).
"I am very happy that they pulled it down," he wrote, "and I hope that you will reconsider the need to continue using that video to prove/make some kind of a point."
In his open letter to John Scott, Guy Donahaye says that Stern was a source for confirming Jois's assaults:
Eddie Stern acknowledged the abuse and supported my action although he has as yet been unable to make a proper public statement. He is also the person I turned to for confirmation about KPJ's actions after Matthew Remski had contacted me.
The structure of the podcast focuses on Stern's own pain and concerns that he has been "targeted" for enabling Jois over the years. He describes being in therapy, and how he's learning to listen.
Woehlke expresses sympathy over Stern being held responsible for Jois's actions. She worries aloud that the discourse over Jois's criminality will "undermine the good of a practice that can help so many people and especially someone like yourself who has been one of the primary teachers of this form of the Ashtanga tradition."
Stern told Woelke that the movement to remove images of Pattabhi Jois from shalas — initiated by Jois survivors like Karen Rain and Jubilee Cooke — constitutes a form of denialism:
I don't think it should be brushed under the rug, which is what I believe people want to do when they want to take Pattabhi Jois's photo off the wall and stop using the opening prayer.
Like, okay, you can't just sweep the guru under the carpet and then like, everything's going to get better.
When Woehlke and Stern begin to discuss solutions to the crisis, he has this to say about the consent movement in modern yoga:
I don't know if consent cards are like the answer. Um, you know, I see people selling consent carbs like all over the place now and I'm like, what are you turning sexual abuse into another industry? And it's just really weird to me. That cuts off an important line of communication to where, you know, I don't have to, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to sound, say the wrong way, but by using a card and just putting it on your mat, all of a sudden now you're not communicating with the person who's supposed to be your teacher. You just start putting out a stop sign there. One of the reasons I think that we have so many problems in our societies because of difficulty communicating. Like we don't know how to communicate. Um, in a lot of ways.
And sometimes there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of whatever. So I just question and I wonder: would working on communication be a better way to surmount these problems rather than something like consent cards? If people really like consent cards cause they, they're truly not able to verbalize it, I don't want to remove that from them. Um, I, I just am going to make that observation that people are turning sexual abuse into another industry by selling things like consent cards.
Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, Yoga, Yoga culture, Yoga pedagogy November 23, 2019 November 23, 2019
What Happens in the Next Generation On From a High-Demand Group?
Those who leave or escape from high-demand yoga groups seem to reorganize through two successive demographic splits.
The first split separates out those who must ghost out of the industry altogether to heal themselves and start over. Their drive to escape might be driven by the fact that they were abused too severely by the group to recover. There can be other factors as well, such as whether they have a pathway towards a different social circle and life, or whether they retained interests and skills outside of the group.
The second split occurs between those who stay within the industry, often because they need to.
I'll use the Anusara example here, but you could substitute in many different organizations. I'll call the splinter groups Category 1 & 2.
Category 1 is made up of those who figured out that John Friend created something toxic from top to bottom. They emerged with the drive to completely reorient themselves in relationship to their practice and self-understanding. It was a lot of hard work, and very lonely, because the rule book had been torn up. They might go through associations with other groups, and successive disillusionments as they detect similar patterns emerging. It takes them a long time to realize that the wisdom of disappointment has made them into leaders. I've seen many Category 1 people also start and follow through with training in a licensed therapeutic skill.
Category 2 consists of those who believed that Friend created something really awesome and it was just a damn shame that he let it get to his head or his ego or something and made "mistakes".
Category 2 goes on to basically replicate the dynamics they learned in the high-demand group, but with enough savvy to remain just above social reproof. They might apply these strategies to leading a new yoga group, owning a studio, or they'll skip sideways into an MLM (which gives you a sense of how they were thinking about yoga training to begin with).
The mechanisms are the same: puff yourself up in the name of inspiring others, whether you can follow through or not. For Category 2 people, charisma is not something to interrogate but to domesticate. Weber called it "routinization". If they remove the rough edges it'll all work out.
To switch examples for a moment, Category 2 people in the Ashtanga world seem to believe that they can keep all of the elements of Jois's scheme — the implied consent, the absence of informed consent, the performative stress, the mystifications around the value of the postures and their relationships to spiritual development — and somehow it will all be cleaned up if they manage to not assault anyone. They may even honestly believe they've never injured anyone through cranking adjustments. The more savvy ones add stuff like brand-new concerns over cultural appropriation. Or they contort themselves into oblivion pretending that going to Mysore every year is coherent with feminism.
In the worst cases, Category 2 people form their own high-demand groups. The best recent example is Reggie Ray and his alleged coercive control over Dharma Ocean. Ray broke away from Shambhala.
It's way better to work with (and especially for, if you're junior) Category 1 people. They tend to be hyper-aware of issues of power and fairness, and if they have blindspots they're happy to see and acknowledge them, and then take steps to mitigate. You'll also find that they're doing a wide range of supportive work within the industry, often for little to no pay. They're writing, researching, mentoring, creating content that has no concrete market value.
Category 2 people, by contrast, fold all of their labour back into brand-building.
One thing that makes Category 2 people crappy to work with or for is that they view themselves as the ethical exiles of the first group — those who were doing Anusara "right", those who weren't so stupid as to have sex with their downline and have weed trafficked in over state lines. They were the ones who were able to see the value in the method and not screw it up with their selfish desires.
This particular grandiosity can make Category 2 people impervious to critique. I've noticed their politics can become even more neoliberal and responsibilist, because after all, they were individually able to steer clear of John's train wreck, and they did that through their own grit and gumption, right?
This also means that many many maintain a long-term subtle contempt for Category 1 people who didn't "get over it", or who foster a "victim mentality". Accordingly, they'll be more resistant than Category 1 folks to new information about their student's needs. If they jump on the trauma-sensitive train or start using woke-talk it will be because it's a good biz plan.
In the cult literature, it's widely accepted that there are no predictors for who gets recruited and who doesn't. Similarly, I doubt there would be any predictors around who branches off into Category 1 and Category 2.
But if I were to speculate, I'd imagine that, while there might be psychological factors at play, Category 2 people were protected and supported by types of social privilege that insulated them from full disillusionment when the high-demand group fell apart. They had capital to move on with, for instance. Or perhaps they were always socially separated from those lower down in the group, and so they never had to learn from them about how terribly unequal things were.
Another factor might be that Category 2 people were more active as enablers in the original group (whereas Category 1 people might have done more bystanding), and so are better defended against self-examination. It's a lot harder to cop to the fact that you enabled than to the fact that you were a bystander.
Bystanding in itself is an "off" feeling, through which it's easier to access shame and perhaps even guilt. Those feelings are gold for disillusionment.
Somehow, the Category 1 person permitted themselves to be fully and wholly disillusioned, to such an extent that they would never be able again to rebuild in the same way.
Maybe disillusionment is not just something that happens. Maybe it's also a skill that can be developed.
Psst: here's a plug for my online seminar, coming up in February!
Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, Patriarchy, rape culture, Trauma, Yoga, Yoga culture November 22, 2019
Recent Notes on Somatic Dominance in Yoga, Buddhism, and How to Know When You're Doing It
1. It's Not Just Men
In YTT groups, I introduce the theme that the last century of global yoga has largely run on the fuel of "somatic dominance" by which teachers assume possession and authority over student's bodies, and the body itself is an object of surveillance and discipline that must perform its virtue.
In discussion, most groups rightly dive into truths about male violence, male charisma, bullying, and sexual assault.
So then I trouble the gendering of that story a little by showing clips from this Jivamukti class from 2014. Check out the teacher's entrance into the space after about 20 minutes of fawning speeches.
Take a look at that bowing sequence. You can't see the whole room but I assure you everyone is bowing right back in this parody of Tibetan monkdom. I know that's where it's from because they started the bowing thing after teaming up with Michael Roach over a decade ago. But he never took it that far. The teacher seems to be making intrusive eye contact with every person in the room; Roach never bothered with that. (Maybe he didn't have to, being male and 6'+, 200+ lbs.)
After I show the clip I ask:
What would it cost you socially to be in that room and not mirror the teacher with the bowing thing?
What would it cost you to chew gum, slouch on your mat, blow a fart, or yell out "Hey, are we getting started yet or WHAT"?
People get the point. They know they would feel way out of line, which is another way of saying that they'd feel controlled.
What I believe the teacher is doing here, unconsciously but habitually, is establishing a coerced "habitus" (via Bourdieu, very nice intro video below), or rules of somatic behaviour or ethos for that space.
Right from the beginning of class, there is a contagious way to be there. It's sophisticated, because it looks like respect, surrender, and even gentleness. And the teacher and some students might even feel all those things deeply and authentically. But the impact is that the people in that room who show strong buy-in for what she's doing are now under her somatic influence.
And so when, inexplicably, she lies fully on top of women at 1:57 and 1:58 or sits right down on the thighs of a woman in supta virasana at time cue 1:11:50, and gives a lecture about not finding fault in others, it's just par for the course. Implied consent, and intimacy conflated with care.
If there's a next stage in examining somatic dominance in Yogaland, it might involve seeing how it translated, in cycles, between generations and across genders in the 1980s and 90s, how it could be coded to express female strength and empowerment (even though it was an overflow of male violence), and how this further impeded survivors of Jois, Manos and the rest from being heard.
2. What Does Somatic Dominance Feel Like When You're Doing It?
How would you know if your somatic dominance circuits were turned on? I'm sure it feels different for everyone, but here's how it felt for me.
I'm using the past tense, not because I'm totally over it, but because it's very easy to remember how I did it when I was teaching active yoga classes, which I haven't done since about 2014. I also remember having to stop teaching in part because I was becoming more aware of my somatic dominance tendencies.
I remember distinctly crossing over a threshold into the teaching space. It could have been in the parking lot, at the front door, or in the lobby. If the studio was particularly modern and sleek and minimalist, the feeling was more acute: in some way the bare lines and white walls and flower arrangement were contagious with a kind of meticulous aesthetic attention that called perfection out of my body. I remember holding my breath more, standing up even more straight, feeling my skin glaze over with smooth hardness.
In some ways I'm describing basic somatic defensiveness via grandiosity, and I would have felt a degree of these things when stepping into any professional environment. If there was a suit involved it would have started at home with subtle fretting over how crisp my collar was going to stay on the commute — the collar signifying my armored skin.
But what made this particularly yoga-related was that as I was both holding my breath and puffing myself up, I was also aware of the pre-verbal tape-loop of all of the Iyengar instructions that were then embedded in my back-brain. In other words: I was turning basic social discomfort and self-defensiveness into a somatic virtue — a sign of transcendence over those very things.
I never met Iyengar but I've heard enough and I've met enough men like him that my gut says there were threads of intense social awkwardness and maybe even shame that the demonstration of asana mastery helped him overpower.
So the first somatic dominance is over myself. How does it pivot to take power over others?
Of the thousands of students I encountered in my classes, I'll imagine here someone generic: male or female doesn't matter. As soon as I instinctually identified that this person was NOT as erect as I was, I remember turning towards them and subtly doubling down, both trying to model something, and encouraging them to mirror me. I remember now with some shame the sense of gratification I had when they did mirror me, either then or in the class, and I understood it then as a good thing: that I had inspired a new confidence. But perhaps what I did in some if not many instances is that I procured a kind of compliance, and the gratification was not from having given them something, but from having their mirroring of me make me feel better about my own strained efforts to achieve comfort and dignity.
And the irony is that the person who came in slouchy or melancholic may well have been far healthier than I in their psyche-soma. If they were feeling crushed and drained of dignity that's one thing — and I assumed this was the case for everyone — but if they were just being themselves in somatic honesty, and were able to do that because they were less bound to our systems of self-objectification, I actually disrupted that out of a projective need for bodily validation. I created a problem were there was none, and I called it yoga or mindfulness, and I got paid.
All of this took place on a subtle level that created a nameless power dynamic that normalized the standard adjustments I then went on to apply, without clear consent or even the notion of what clear consent would mean or how it could be affirmative or informed.
One more thing about how stealthy this was. We used to say "strong and soft", which I suppose echoed the old "sthiram sukham", and gave me at least a sense of somatic continuity with an ancient nobility. I still appreciate this double instruction, but I think it can nurture the seeds of what I'm describing above:
In the Iyengar instructions, the strength and firmness was always built first, upwards from the ground. Strong feet, knees like so, quads engaged, do something something with your perineum and navel, micromanage you rib cage and especially your floaty ribs and don't forget the mystical kidneys etc. And after this pillar of nobility or self-defence was built, the teacher would ask you to "soften your eyes".
What was the eye thing about? It felt interesting to have this play of tension between skeletal firmness and eyeball softness, so there was that. But I also think the soft eyes managed to spiritualize or Mona-Lisa-ize the entire presentation. So that you could be armored but also inviting and wise. So that if you were actually defending your body against your neighbour with a thousand muscular actions in your butt, you could also affect openness and intimacy with the person you were asking to mirror you.
What does this all have to do with charisma?
As I've mentioned elsewhere, charisma doesn't have to look like anything in particular. It's not how you hold yourself or defend yourself, as I've described here.
I believe that charisma is the somatically contagious feedback loop that initiates when all of the stuff I've described above begins to work to the advantage of the person performing it. And so they escalate it. Before long, it becomes their "method". The content doesn't matter. It could be Iyengar or it could be Ru Paul or it could be Donald Trump: charisma is the commodification of somatic defence, which, at a certain saturation point, can flip into habitual bullying.
3. Somatic Dominance, Buddhist-Style
In Yogaland, somatic dominance is explicitly part of the wellness programme, where posture is the sign of multiple levels of attainment. While lately I'm pretty consistent about pointing these critiques at "Yoga/Buddhism", I'd like to bring out the "Buddhism" presentations of somatic dominance a little more clearly.
There's no doubt that sitting with relative stability and stillness makes sense for whatever meditation is for whoever is practicing it. So I'm not talking here about what people do when they're sitting at home. I'm talking about how the posture of meditation gets translated in group settings into the somatics of control. How things like stillness, erectness, a wide and/or vacant gaze, a quizzical smile — can all be virally transmitted through a group so that suddenly it feels taboo to slouch, even if by slouching you would relieve the pain in your spine.
In the crudest examples, the Zen master literally beats you with a stick to force your posture into compliance. But how much more effective is it if you can encourage the student to straighten themselves, through manners alone?
I remember distinctly walking into Karme Choling in about 1995 and developing a wicked headache and backache from sitting up way too straight to listen to the warrior talk. I had no idea what was going on inside me, and no tools for investigating it. It would be decades before I understood the coercive stiffness at the root of the culture and its links to repression.
Trungpa himself modelled upright posture in most of his talks. They called him "perky", "inscrutable", "spacious" and other things, when the truth was that he had to maintain that posture as a defence against being shit-faced drunk most of the time. He was erect because if he wasn't he'd fall over. Of course he had to bring this somatic control into all areas of life. I'm sure teaching people to use utensils as though they were on the set of Downton Abbey helped keep a lot of them from keeling over into their plates.
When the next year I was brought to a Michael Roach event I interpreted the same feelings of erectness as excitement or "receptivity", especially in relation to the more natural transference that overcame me. The Shambhala shrine room explicitly reminded me of 1970s Sicilian Catholic kitsch, so I was less inclined to interpret the Shambhala headache positively. Michael's group was fringey and boho, so the headache I got from all the sitting there was more easily interpreted as a "blockage" related to my own hang-ups.
If I had had the tools I would have understood that what was really happening was a new form of repressive behavioural control. There were proper ways to be in Michael's presence. You could deviate from those ways in your body if the deviations expressed special insight or closeness to him. That's why we watched Ian Thorson tremble and spasm and bark and quiver and sometimes even fall over out of meditation posture and chalked it all up to his devotion to Michael tickling his kundalini. I didn't know him in the last ten years of his life, but back then I don't remember anyone asking whether he needed medical care.
Most of us weren't as "blessed" as Ian. We sat upright and still and got filled up with instructions to such an extent that there was no room for internal questioning, let alone breaking the spell in the room with any kind of challenge.
This happened in other contexts as well, subtler ones, and way closer to home. I remember the first time I hired my friend Michael Stone to teach at Yoga Festival Toronto. I passed by the room as they were setting up and 50 people surrounded him, all sitting stock still, mirroring him, arranged like a Renaissance painting. This is just part of what made his chaotic death so shocking to almost everyone.
As for myself: I remember leading meditation classes where I would open with the basic instructions about sitting upright, but then also model that uprightness myself, and lay it on thicker than I actually felt like doing, and then continued to straighten and ground and whatever as the people around me mirrored me.
And I kept going as I felt the relief of having others validate the sublimation of my bodily anxiety and shame.
Activism, Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, Patriarchy, rape culture, Trauma, Yoga pedagogy November 18, 2019
That Time Manouso Manos Started a Yoga Class with a Verbal Attack And Showed How Trauma Bonding Works
Special thanks to Cassie Jackson, who was there that day and helped confirm many details. Her testimony of Manos assaulting her is included in the IYNAUS investigative report on pages 15-17.
In January of 2017 I emailed Manouso Manos to request an interview. At that time, my research for the book that eventually focused on Jois and Ashtanga Yoga was casting a wider net. The working title back then was Shadow Pose: Trauma and Healing in the Cult of Modern Yoga.
I was upfront and honest about the project. I told him I was investigating intergenerational trauma in the yoga world, and would be citing the 1991 report on allegations of sexual assault against him. I wrote that I wanted to ask him if or how he had changed over the years, and how he understood his teaching within the legacy of BKS Iyengar.
This was about ten months before I heard about the sexual assault claim Ann Tapsell West was preparing to file against Manos, which was first dismissed by the IYNAUS Ethics Committee, and then substantiated by an independent investigator.
When I wrote to Manos I did not know that there were or would be contemporary allegations against him. I also didn't consider or research sexual offender recidivism. In this light, my initial query was naive.
Manos's curt responses included a threat to take me to court for writing about him from the public record. Then, paradoxically, he invited me me to come to one of his classes for free.
So I made plan to go. I didn't expect a warm welcome. But I didn't expect to be ambushed. Continue reading "That Time Manouso Manos Started a Yoga Class with a Verbal Attack And Showed How Trauma Bonding Works"
#metoo, Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, rape culture, Yoga, Yoga culture, Yoga pedagogy November 16, 2019
About That Johnny Kest Scene in the NYT documentary
For the minority of yoga teachers (and smaller minority of yoga consumers) who have woken up to the fact that somatic dominance is a primary currency in commodified yoga, the Johnny Kest scene in the recent NYT/FX/Hulu doc was outrageous, but also recognizable and predictable.
There's been a lot of great commentary on it already — most of it nailing down how the embodied entitlement of implied-consent "adjustments" merges with Kest's patronizing shutdowns of the very straightforward feedback given by the women who were able to speak in the moment.
Theodora Wildcroft remarked that this is the kind of thing that exposes the mainstream industry as unworthy of public service — a blow to everyone moving in that direction. There will be much more to say on that point.
I'd like to highlight a few other things.
Reporter Katie Rosman opens the documentary by describing how in ten years of yoga practice she had never heard of the Jois abuse stories. There's a good reason for her to have been in the dark, as revealed when Maty Ezraty describes an intentional decision taken by some of Jois's students to not report his crimes. It's so well hidden, in fact, that Kest is able to freely advertise and monetize his authority as a student of Jois, which likely factored into the marketability of his training system to a corporate chain.
This is important to repeat: it's bad enough that Jois's crimes were hidden, now we see clearly that the invisibility of Jois's crimes has enabled brand profitability for teachers of Ashtanga and beyond. In the meantime, Jois survivors have left careers, suffered health problems, and racked up therapy bills.It was clear to me years ago that this wicked calculus would put Jois's survivors in class action territory if it were not for the fact that those who have profited on Jois's name aren't represented by any suable organization.
The documentary does not answer the question of whether Kest has committed assault. But it does show how easily he could.
Kest is operating in a somatic environment normalized by Jois, and which neither the industry around him nor its trade associations have challenged in any accountable way. The environment has changed in that adjustments have been standardized and domesticated within training systems, and the somatic dominance has crossed a gender line. But the basic premises remain. Here's an incomplete List:
The teacher assumes dominant and definitive knowledge over the student's body.
That knowledge is established by the objectifying male gaze* that diagnoses flaws that must be manipulated back into order. This means that the adjustment starts and can be felt before the touch. (*can come out of men's or women's eyes).
The interventions are endowed with transformative mystery and so there can be no informed consent. (I.e.: The student's body is to be enlightened to something it did not yet know. This can cannot be pre-explained.)
Thinking or talking about what's happening in the power dynamic encounter constitutes an interruption of esoteric communication. Asking questions means you're not tuning in to the silent sweaty wisdom of God.
The unregulated environment of implied consent, heavily gendered power dynamics and the value of silence provokes a spectrum of responses. Enthusiastic responses are instantly recruited to support the marketing narrative of the space, regardless of whether they are healthy or fawning (trauma-related).
This List begins to explain why what is so bizarre and outrageous to the awake yoga teacher/consumer seems perfectly natural to Kest. It's not just entitlement and male privilege on display. It is decades of a very specific matrix of embodied power relations that have become invisible to those ensnared in them.
This List also tells us why it's so hard for Kest's clients in that room to speak up. They've been told in dozens of implicit ways before they even enter the room that he's in charge and his authority threads back to a spiritual master. Plus: surely a national fitness chain wouldn't be endorsing and hiring someone unsafe. Add to that the sunken costs of getting to that conference and the cognitive dissonance of wanting to have a good time and not harsh anyone's mellow, and the path of least resistance beckons. In the most vulnerable cases it's not about the easy way out at all, but about having frozen.
The doc shows in clinical detail the spectrum of responses to a rigged game, from seeming acceptance, to awkward silence, to patient offers to help Kest see that consent cards might be a good idea, to a firm challenge on the necessity of consent, to someone who's able to say that the "diaper change" might trigger PTSD from past sexual assaults. Up until this point, this very spectrum has been used to justify and victim-blame, which is Kest's fallback position when he tells the story about how the same touch on two different people provokes different responses. The subtext is: what's he supposed to do with these crazy women? It's not his problem, is it?
The mainstream upshot of the Rosman report is that, without a doubt, yes it is his problem. But it's not a problem that he will have the resources to solve. And it's not a problem that whistleblowing on abuse can really change either, given that the Jois, Manos, and other stories are well-exposed now, and very little has happened on a systemic level. Think about all of the platformers and gatekeepers who let this stuff happen because the money flows? Rosman asked tough questions of Kest's corporate bosses, but how about the yoga conference organizers? How about his retreat hosts?
If you're a yoga administrator and you've watched all this reporting pour out in 2018-present and you don't immediately institute consent policies for your events, you're asleep at the wheel, IMO.
Trade/educational influence is also not enough, given that Kest has been certified by YA for how many years and sounds surprised to even hear of the notion of consent, even as YA has poured big money into trying to get the most basic best practices out there and part of the conversation.
At the end of the doc, Rosman asks the simplest question of all: How come barbers, manicurists, and massage therapists all need licenses to touch other people's bodies, and Johnny Kest doesn't? Some of us have been asking that for years, and I haven't heard a single answer to this question that doesn't appeal to a sense of grandiosity or narcissism that claims the yoga teacher is somehow doing something too special to understand.
#metoo, Activism, Articles, Charismatic Abuse, Cult dynamics, Gurus, rape culture, Yoga culture November 11, 2019 November 13, 2019
Maty Ezraty Fact-Checks Eddie Stern about the Crimes of Pattabhi Jois
Here are brief excerpts from an interview I did with the late Maty Ezraty on July 5, 2016. The stories she told provided valuable background information for my research into the crimes of Pattabhi Jois.
Maty had requested some of the following details remain off-record, which is why they didn't make it into my book. But now, statements from Eddie Stern reported in the New York Times that suggest he didn't see Jois abusing students warrant publishing these minutes out of a ninety-minute discussion.
Ezraty had important insights to contribute about the misogynistic culture surrounding Jois. Her premature death precluded her from being able to share them widely. But, as you can see, she felt very passionately about this story. In our email correspondence she was supportive of my investigation.
Below the clips, I'll fill out some context and provide transcription.
The first clip opens with Ezraty talking about how she and Stern disagreed about Jois's crimes. In the second, she describes a series of assaults that "we all saw."
After years of zealous lauding, promoting, and hosting his yoga guru, Pattabhi Jois, Eddie Stern recently removed all mention of Jois from his bio. To date, he has said nothing in print to acknowledge Jois's crimes.
But Katie Rosman of the NYT did manage to interview him. Here's the copy:
Eddie Stern is considered the ambassador of the New York Ashtanga community and is an author of a hagiographic biography of Mr. Jois. He too has been disinclined to take part in a public discussion. After three months of background conversations, however, he agreed in late October to an interview.
"I was in Mysore when Karen was there. I didn't see Guruji" — their preferred title for Mr. Jois — "doing the things she described, but I believe her when she says that was her experience."
He said he traveled to India annually from 1991 to 2009 to study with Mr. Jois and sometimes spent three months at a time practicing with him there. He said he never saw Mr. Jois treat any student differently from another.
Mr. Stern wants to help the community move forward. "I'm trying to get educated about these things myself," he said.
When pressed to discuss photographs posted online that show Mr. Jois touching students in ways that many consider inappropriate, Mr. Stern said he regretted agreeing to speak and ended the phone call. "I don't trust you, and I don't trust The New York Times," he said.
The data from Stern here does not line up with what Ezraty says. Here's the transcript of the above clips:
Ezraty:
I've had arguments with Eddie about this, you know, in India, Eddie has definitely rationalized all this and there's no rationalizing to it. It, it so happened. Yeah. It was so blatantly obvious and as a community it's really pathetic that we all put up with it. I mean, we, we stopped having him [Jois] at Yogaworks in 1993 or 94 due this issue. Yeah. We decided consciously that we could not have him at our school for this reason.
Remski:
Had you had students complain about him?
Not me, but, you know, off the record, I can't speak for Chuck. But Chuck had a woman, a very, very, very dear student to him, come to him and tell him the same thing. This was probably in 1991 or 90, something like that and Chuck did similar what Eddie did.
[Note: previously in the interview I had shared reports about Stern's response to Anneke Lucas when she discussed with Stern that Jois assaulted her at a NYC event in 2001. Lucas told me that Stern's responses were a mixture of acknowledgement and rationalization.]
And at that time it was more low key. Yeah, it was really low, it really was low key then. I mean, nothing like in the later years. And she stopped coming and um, mind you, this was a student he really liked, like she was a really good student. She stopped coming. And then in 1993 I think our last trip to India, I think that was our last trip. It had gotten worse, or 94, I can't remember. Chuck would know the years much better than me. I'm not so good with years. It was so blatantly obvious in India. I mean it was just like, it wasn't no more like "kind of happening, but no one saw it." It was so… it had gone to another level, like you could not ignore it anymore. And I remember we had a meeting, me and Chuck and Eddie and Nikki and Eddie was there and we were all, and I'm like, we were all like, what is going on here?
And they were, they deflected it and, Chuck and I couldn't, and it was at that point we made a real decision that we were no longer we just couldn't. You know, we love the system and we still had a lot of room in our heart for him, but it had gone to a level that we just, we couldn't deal with.
Pattabhi Jois was humping, humping one particular girl in class every single day. Humping!
In Mysore…
In Mysore, the room was small. It was in Lakshmipuram. We were 12 people in the room. It was impossible to miss it. We're talking in supta padagushthasana, being on top of her and hump-ing her. You had to be blind. Blind to not see. In downward dog. He would just go like this to her. There was no misunderstanding of what the heck was going on. There was no misunderstanding. There was nothing to misunderstand. It was happening. We all saw it. It was very disturbing.
There's one more part that's relevant here. In 2016, Stern admitted via email that he was one of the people who'd had the infamous video of Jois assaulting students flagged for inappropriate content on Vimeo. The video is now preserved here: content warning.
I brought this issue up with Ezraty for comment. This is our exchange:
UPDATE: 11.13.2019 05:30 ET
In response to criticism on my Facebook author's page that it was unethical for me to publish these statements, Jois survivor Jubilee Cooke (also interviewed for the NYT article) has written the following:
In my view, it is far more unethical for Maty to ask Matthew to conspire in the secrecy of Jois's crimes and their cover-up by senior AY teachers. Matthew and Maty did not have the same kind of formal, confidential, and binding privilege as an attorney and client would have. The value of this recording is not that it provides further proof that Jois is guilty. Rather, it is valuable in that, for the first time, we hear recorded testimony that Eddie, Maty, Chuck and Nicki gathered and made a conscious decision as to how they would handle Jois's sexual abuse — some decided to continue their studies with him and to host him in the U.S. without warning students away; some did not. Many chose to lie publicly about their knowledge, and none of them reported Jois to the authorities in India or the United States (as far as I know), nor did they stop him by other means.
I would love for someone with expertise in United States law, preferably in sex crimes, to weigh in on this. Sure the statute of limitations has run out, at least in terms of criminal law, and probably for civil as well, but I'm still keen to know: Could Eddie, Maty, Chuck and other senior AY teachers have been charged as accessories or accomplices before or after the fact when they hosted Jois locally in the United States? Even after they stopped hosting Jois, were Maty and Chuck duty bound to report Jois to (let's say) the FBI given that they had prior knowledge of Jois's crimes (based on this recording) and probably knew that he would likely offend in multiple states while on tour in the United States? (Even back in the 1990s, it was pretty common knowledge that the rehabilitation of sex offenders had a high failure rate. There's a reason why sex offenders must register even after they've completed their sentence.)
I can't help but wonder if people would be as offended if this recording had revealed the intention to cover up murder or a child prostitution ring — would people would feel differently about Matthew going public in these instances?
Activism, Articles, Blog, Buddhism, Climate Change, Collapse, Self-help, social justice, Yoga, Yoga culture November 2, 2019 November 2, 2019
Global Buddhism and Yoga Prepared Some of Us for Climate Collapsology as a Spiritual Path
I know there are lots of people out there who, like me, never really bought into Buddhism and yoga as wellness products. Though locked into consumerism, we wanted out of buying and selling. We could tell the difference between commodity and nourishment. For whatever reason, from whatever background, we came to this space for transformation, salvation, or whatever peak outcome we could articulate. For us it was never just about self-regulation, or self-care. Whether our jam was immanence or transcendence, we wanted something totalizing, for ourselves and for others and we dove in head-first.
I suspect that we, the head-first divers, are over-represented in the demographic of those who went on to professionalize in these industries. We invested everything, or at least a lot, because we believed the stakes were high. In my case, I couldn't think of more meaningful work, and I had the privilege to pursue it. Obsessed with meaning, I and many others then became super-invested in anxious questions over the authenticity of practice, the nature of spiritual authority, the scourge of spiritual abuse, the problem of the body in self-perception, and cultural appropriation.
It's a great tragedy that people who fall into competing camps on these issues often fail to recognize what they share: a steadfast faith that yoga and Buddhism are not merely wellness products, but pathways that (should) matter in ways that address ultimate human concerns. We don't seem to understand that conflict in these worlds is actually a sign of a shared faith that might be too intimate to disclose: we want reality, we want truth, we want to heal trauma, we want to integrate or purify or even erase the venal parts of ourselves. We see an opportunity in these wisdom traditions to step off the wheel of empty promises and into a fuller expression of being alive. We argue with each other like Talmudic scholars — minus the courtesy — about our future selves.
What of the stakes? I get the feeling that many of us believe that if we don't work this hard, if we stay asleep, then we miss our lives. We'll turn over and over in unconscious loops of consumption and dissatisfaction, eating to get hungry again and loving to be lonely again. When the old books describe samsara, it resonates with the drone of consumer capitalism, ever in our ears, and the loathsome veneer of optimism that occludes the heart, the Stepford wife who sticks a dummy in your mouth and tells you everything is fine. No wonder we're most outraged when we see yoga and Buddhism themselves appropriated by global capitalism, aka the Big Dream, that erases all urgency except for the need to create sleepier and sleepier drugs, because all drugs wear off.
Here's the thing.
If you're paying attention to the climate data — the fact that Arctic sea ice is barely forming this year, that correcting a geomapping error now shows Mumbai completely underwater by 2050 (and we know it'll be sooner), that crops have largely failed across the Midwest, that Australia is roasting, that millions are on the brink of starvation in Africa, and civil unrest is erupted around the globe as fast as brushfires spread in California — samsara is no longer theoretical, psychological, or even descriptive of a pattern.
The suffering of the world is no longer just a turning wheel. It is a turning wheel rolling towards a cliff of annihilation and oblivion. And it's not about individuals. My first Buddhist teacher's existential challenge to me — "You're dying, what are you going to do about it?" — carried a necessary urgency, but is now obsolete. "We're all dying," is the appropriate frame now: "What are we going to do about it?"
Part of me is angry and embarrassed at having spent more than two decades engaged in global Buddhism and yoga while so many people, most with way less privilege, have been on the front lines of ecological activism. I remember the moment I literally chose to meditate instead of join a resistance cell, and that moment feels like a stain I cannot clean.
But part of me forgives myself: at least I didn't go into the oil business, or social media development, or hedge funds, or selling weight loss products or porn. I could have done a lot more damage to the world in those gigs. Most of us could have done way worse.
Yet another part of me realizes that Global Buddhism and yoga were passively used by capitalism to lull huge numbers of us into hyperindividualistic concern and contemplation, and that's so gross.
But a fourth part of me knows that so many of us carried trauma that self-care seemed to antidote, and that makes sense.
And a fifth part knows that the promises make to the aspirational self are inextricable from the promises made to the neoliberal citizen: that everything can always grow and improve, regardless of structural oppression, that our hope for increased goodness should be audacious or grandiose instead of lateral and humble, that Global Buddhism and yoga became the spirituality of neoliberalism without us knowing it.
There are so many parts speaking! A last one for now says that:
None of it matters, because we had reproduced and baked ourselves into catastrophic climate change decades before Iyengar published Light on Yoga in 1966. So in many ways, we've always been practicing in a kind of civilizational afterlife. Yes, it sucks that Boomers just carried on with their business and now rub their savings and equity in our faces, but did they know any better?
We studied and practiced Ayurveda as though there still was a stable and resilient world. We saluted the sun as though we weren't simultaneously turning it into a dehydrating lamp. Maybe this was a good way to spend what would have otherwise been a hopeless time?
So here's my thought.
What if Global Buddhism and yoga gave us a model for waking up that we can now apply not to the suffering modern narcissistic self, but to empirical reality?
What if it really did effectively educate us about sleeping and dreaming, illusion and interdependence, but most of all, the urgent need to do something?
What if these pathways really were practice for what has now arrived?
What if they really were boats that brought us into presence, and that we should now step out onto the shore?
These days I find myself saying:
"Thank you Patanjali, not because you were right about the nature of consciousness. You're just as confused as everyone else. But you took the problem of existence seriously and urgently, and maybe you also saw the ticking time bomb of human reproduction combined with human avarice and wanted to warn us all. I don't buy into your answer of shrivelling up and disappearing into meditation, but we all have our ways of dealing, and yours is as good as any."
"Thank you, Gita-writers, not for providing spiritual justifications for war, nor for hazing the hero with divine terror, but for your examination of the need to act in uncertainty at what feels like the end of time."
"Thank you, Siddhartha, not because the churches inspired by your teaching were any better than the Christian ones in terms of ethics and political grift, but because you modeled a radical rejection of consensus values, and you pursued your goal until there was nothing left to pursue."
Clearly, the ancients intuited the crisis of life at its root.
But globalization domesticated and commodified their ideas, repurposing them for the glory of the aspirational self.
It did so while riding an enormous burning wave of oil that is now consuming the very ground that Siddhartha touched, saying, "As earth is my witness."
Globalization brought the world Buddhism, yoga, and the destruction of the living world itself. It's the paradox that keeps on giving.
At worst, our practices have kept us asleep to the animals and other people, thinking that inner peace was the most worthy goal.
At best, they have sensitized us to what is now scientifically absolute: that there is nothing to depend on but each other, and love.


text:
Crosby couple celebrate arrival of 'miracle' baby
A MERSEYSIDE couple are celebrating their "miracle" baby – born nine months after they were told they could not conceive naturally.
The Lloyd family
Jenny and Stephen Lloyd, from Crosby, suffered three years of torment, including a miscarriage and failed IVF treatment.
Doctors told them they had practically no chance of naturally conceiving a child, but nine months later, Alexis arrived.
The couple began trying to start a family in 2008 but were encouraged by experts to pursue IVF treatment after a year of failed attempts.
Jenny, 31, said: "It was a big shock because it seems like a last resort, but I was prepared to do whatever it took."
In November 2009, Jenny became pregnant with twins, only to suffer a miscarriage just before Christmas.
More IVF treatment failed in May last year but after Stephen had unsuccessful fertility-boosting surgery, doctors told the couple they should pursue IVF because natural conception was highly unlikely.
Two weeks later, Jenny fell pregnant with Alexis.
She said: "I just sat there crying. I felt overjoyed and in disbelief. On my way into work, I stopped and bought a further three tests – all were positive."
Jenny said the couple wonder how they managed to make something as perfect as Alexis, who was born four weeks premature.
Proud dad Stephen said: "She is amazing – life just seems complete now.
"I'm getting two hours sleep but it feels like about 12 hours because of the adrenaline."
The Chase'Unbelievable' The Chase scenes in Anne Hegerty's 'worst defeat ever'The Governess had a nightmare in the final Chase
SeftonDramatic images show flooded fields and roads closed due to water levelsIn Maghull people were told they would need to leave home last night

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


On February 4 -6, 2017, Tel Aviv will be buzzing with energy as an accomplished collection of scholars will explore new horizons in chemistry. This symposium is jointly convened by NYU and Tel Aviv University and speakers will include professors from NYU, Tel Aviv University, NYU Tel Aviv, and other institutions. NYU President Andy Hamilton will also speak. It promises to be an exciting program.
The symposium is also sponsored by NYU Global Research Initiatives, the Office of the Provost, the Department of Chemistry, NYU Tel Aviv, and NYU MRSEC.
This entry was posted in Tel Aviv. Bookmark the permalink.


Hello Cos a G. I would like to know what your rims and tires setup is. Would you mind giving me the specs. Thank you. BADDAZG.
I see you log on driver almost everyday... but yet to get a response from you on your wheels... whats up with that man... LMK.. need some wheels!!
Hey Sup Man.... Get in contact with me... I have sent you some PM's regards to your wheels... I can pick up today before dark..
Hey were you wanting to sell your wheels??
seen you around CSULB VA hospital area car looks clean!
hey i saw your pics on the stretched out tires thread... it kind of looked like you had blacked your roof on your white g coupe. i couldn't really tell because the pictures where meant to show the wheels not the roof so it wasn't the best angle, but have you done that? im thinking of doing it with a black vinyl sticker, if you did like it looks how did you do it - painted or vinyl?


Eglantine Stitchery: A Maple Leaf for a Canadian Traveler!
A Maple Leaf for a Canadian Traveler!
Although she's always generously supportive of everything I make, it's been a while since she so obviously fell in love with one of my projects. She mentioned it would make a nice bag - a tote, or a purse - and after some thought, I decided to stitch a "bag brooch".
She's not one for wearing pins or brooches on a shirt or coat, so I wanted a larger motif she could pin to any of the canvas messanger bags she usually carries. The pins make it removable, for when the Autumn season is over. She's also a globetrotter who loves to travel, and Canadians like ourselves often wear badges or pins with the Maple Leaf to find fellow explorers, so this colourful little brooch can also serve that purpose!
Here's the brooch in comparison with the original project! For the hoop, I enlarged the pattern slightly; for the brooch, I used the original Maple Leaf sizing. The colours and technique are the same. If you would like to stitch your own, the pattern, stitch guide and incredibly helpful video tutorials are all still available on the Lolli & Grace site, and you can find all the direct links in my project post.
The brand is Pellon, but I'm not sure which type. It is very firm. I bought it off the bolt at my local craft shop. It did require a little extra strength to sew through it, but it made sure the felt didn't stretch (which was extra likely since I was stitching in hand without a hoop!) and it really helped to make sure the felt didn't pucker under the weight of all that thread painting. All the different colours result in quite a few layers of thread!
The main problem with finishing an oversize brooch is making it stiff enough to stand on its own and keep its shape. Although I don't have any pictures of the process, what I did was cut the top of a clean plastic salad container - the kind you get from the deli - to shape. This type of plastic is clear and somewhat flexible. I did not want a thick plastic that might get brittle, and so be more likely to break.
I cut the plastic circle about 1/4 inch smaller than the felt, to give me room for my Blanket Stitch Edging. I punched four holes in the middle of the plastic with a hole punch. Then I cut a circle of polyester quilt backing, and sewed that to the plastic, tacking through the circles. This gave me a stiff insert with batting on one side.
For the back, I cut out a matching circle of felt, and sewed two pinbacks on either side of the middle. I used two because the brooch is oversize, and I wanted some extra security. To assemble, I put the insert batting side up - to cushion to the back of the stitches - and sandwiched it between the embroidery (right side up) and the backing circle of felt. Then I sewed the edges with blanket stitch.
What a lovely gift! So thoughtful, and I'm sure she will treasure having a little piece of home with her on her travels.
How beautiful and what a special treasure for your friend. I bet she will love it!!
What a beautiful leaf, what a beautiful thought, what a beautiful gift... I am sure it will be loved and admired as much as the original project.
This is a really pretty project, from the start I like the chosen colours including the turquoise felt background and how you have adjusted the size and added stabilizer and plastic to add stiffness and support to the bag brooch. A wonderful gift to be treasured. Thank you for the link.
Thank you all so much for your lovely, thoughtful comments!
Lovely design for this brooch, beautiful colours.
I know I saw this on your Instagram feed, but just have to say again how lovely it is. I REALLY like how you blended the threads. And such a perfect finish! Great idea to sew the plastic to the batting to hold it in place! The best part for me, is that it is a perfect circle! That is so hard for me to achieve. A fabulous gift that is sure to be loved.


text:
use std::io::{self, BufRead, Read};
use std::net::{IpAddr, Ipv4Addr, SocketAddr};
use std::os::unix::process::ExitStatusExt;
use std::path::{Path, PathBuf};
use std::process::Stdio;
use std::sync::Arc;
use std::time::{Duration, Instant};

use async_lock::{Mutex, MutexGuardArc};
use hashing::Fingerprint;
use lazy_static::lazy_static;
use log::{debug, info};
use regex::Regex;
use store::Store;
use task_executor::Executor;
use tempfile::TempDir;

use crate::local::prepare_workdir;
use crate::{Context, MultiPlatformProcess, NamedCaches, Process, ProcessMetadata};

lazy_static! {
  static ref NAILGUN_PORT_REGEX: Regex = Regex::new(r".*\s+port\s+(\d+)\.$").unwrap();
}

struct PoolEntry {
  fingerprint: NailgunProcessFingerprint,
  last_used: Instant,
  process: Arc<Mutex<NailgunProcess>>,
}

pub type Port = u16;

///
/// A NailgunPool contains a small Vec of running NailgunProcess instances, fingerprinted with the
/// request used to start them.
///
/// Mutations of the Vec are protected by a Mutex, but each NailgunProcess is also protected by its
/// own Mutex, which is used to track when the process is in use.
///
/// NB: This pool expects to be used under a semaphore with size equal to the pool size. Because of
/// this, it never actually waits for a pool entry to complete, and can instead assume that at
/// least one pool slot is always idle when `acquire` is entered.
///
#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct NailgunPool {
  workdir_base: PathBuf,
  size: usize,
  store: Store,
  executor: Executor,
  named_caches: NamedCaches,
  processes: Arc<Mutex<Vec<PoolEntry>>>,
}

impl NailgunPool {
  pub fn new(
    workdir_base: PathBuf,
    size: usize,
    store: Store,
    executor: Executor,
    named_caches: NamedCaches,
  ) -> Self {
    NailgunPool {
      workdir_base,
      size,
      store,
      executor,
      named_caches,
      processes: Arc::default(),
    }
  }

  ///
  /// Given a name and a `Process` configuration, return a port of a nailgun server running
  /// under that name and configuration.
  ///
  /// If the server is not running, or if it's running with a different configuration,
  /// this code will start a new server as a side effect.
  ///
  pub async fn acquire(
    &self,
    server_process: Process,
    context: Context,
  ) -> Result<BorrowedNailgunProcess, String> {
    let name = server_process.description.clone();
    let requested_fingerprint = NailgunProcessFingerprint::new(name.clone(), &server_process)?;
    let mut processes = self.processes.lock().await;

    // Start by seeing whether there are any idle processes with a matching fingerprint.
    if let Some((_idx, process)) = Self::find_usable(&mut *processes, &requested_fingerprint)? {
      return Ok(BorrowedNailgunProcess::new(process));
    }

    // There wasn't a matching, valid, available process. We need to start one.
    if processes.len() >= self.size {
      // Find the oldest idle non-matching process and remove it.
      let idx = Self::find_lru_idle(&mut *processes)?.ok_or_else(|| {
        // NB: See the method docs: the pool assumes that it is running under a semaphore, so this
        // should be impossible.
        "No idle slots in nailgun pool.".to_owned()
      })?;

      processes.swap_remove(idx);
    }

    // Start the new process.
    let process = Arc::new(Mutex::new(
      NailgunProcess::start_new(
        name.clone(),
        server_process,
        &self.workdir_base,
        context,
        &self.store,
        self.executor.clone(),
        &self.named_caches,
        requested_fingerprint.clone(),
      )
      .await?,
    ));
    processes.push(PoolEntry {
      fingerprint: requested_fingerprint,
      last_used: Instant::now(),
      process: process.clone(),
    });

    Ok(BorrowedNailgunProcess::new(process.lock_arc().await))
  }

  ///
  /// Find a usable process in the pool that matches the given fingerprint.
  ///
  fn find_usable(
    pool_entries: &mut Vec<PoolEntry>,
    fingerprint: &NailgunProcessFingerprint,
  ) -> Result<Option<(usize, MutexGuardArc<NailgunProcess>)>, String> {
    let mut dead_processes = Vec::new();
    for (idx, pool_entry) in pool_entries.iter_mut().enumerate() {
      if &pool_entry.fingerprint != fingerprint {
        continue;
      }

      match Self::try_use(pool_entry)? {
        TryUse::Usable(process) => return Ok(Some((idx, process))),
        TryUse::Dead => dead_processes.push(idx),
        TryUse::Busy => continue,
      }
    }
    // NB: We'll only prune dead processes if we don't find a live match, but that's fine.
    for dead_process_idx in dead_processes.into_iter().rev() {
      pool_entries.swap_remove(dead_process_idx);
    }
    Ok(None)
  }

  ///
  /// Find the least recently used idle (but not necessarily usable) process in the pool.
  ///
  fn find_lru_idle(pool_entries: &mut Vec<PoolEntry>) -> Result<Option<usize>, String> {
    // 24 hours of clock skew would be surprising?
    let mut lru_age = Instant::now() + Duration::from_secs(60 * 60 * 24);
    let mut lru = None;
    for (idx, pool_entry) in pool_entries.iter_mut().enumerate() {
      if pool_entry.process.try_lock_arc().is_some() && pool_entry.last_used < lru_age {
        lru = Some(idx);
        lru_age = pool_entry.last_used;
      }
    }
    Ok(lru)
  }

  fn try_use(pool_entry: &mut PoolEntry) -> Result<TryUse, String> {
    let mut process = if let Some(process) = pool_entry.process.try_lock_arc() {
      process
    } else {
      return Ok(TryUse::Busy);
    };

    pool_entry.last_used = Instant::now();

    debug!(
      "Checking if nailgun server {} is still alive at port {}...",
      process.name, process.port
    );

    // Check if it's alive using the handle.
    let status = process
      .handle
      .try_wait()
      .map_err(|e| format!("Error getting the process status! {}", e))?;
    match status {
      None => {
        // Process hasn't exited yet.
        debug!(
          "Found nailgun process {}, with fingerprint {:?}",
          process.name, process.fingerprint
        );
        Ok(TryUse::Usable(process))
      }
      Some(status) => {
        // The process has exited with some exit code: restart it.
        if status.signal() != Some(9) {
          // TODO: BorrowedNailgunProcess cancellation uses `kill` currently, so we avoid warning
          // for that. In future it would be nice to find a better cancellation strategy.
          log::warn!(
            "The nailgun server for {} exited with {}.",
            process.name,
            status
          );
        }
        Ok(TryUse::Dead)
      }
    }
  }
}

enum TryUse {
  Usable(MutexGuardArc<NailgunProcess>),
  Busy,
  Dead,
}

/// Representation of a running nailgun server.
pub struct NailgunProcess {
  pub name: String,
  fingerprint: NailgunProcessFingerprint,
  workdir: TempDir,
  port: Port,
  executor: task_executor::Executor,
  handle: std::process::Child,
}

fn read_port(child: &mut std::process::Child) -> Result<Port, String> {
  let stdout = child
    .stdout
    .as_mut()
    .ok_or_else(|| "No stdout found!".to_string());
  let port_line = stdout
    .and_then(|stdout| {
      let reader = io::BufReader::new(stdout);
      reader
        .lines()
        .next()
        .ok_or_else(|| "There is no line ready in the child's output".to_string())
    })
    .and_then(|res| res.map_err(|e| format!("Failed to read from stdout: {}", e)));

  // If we failed to read a port line and the child has exited, report that.
  if port_line.is_err() {
    if let Some(exit_status) = child.try_wait().map_err(|e| e.to_string())? {
      let mut stderr = String::new();
      child
        .stderr
        .take()
        .unwrap()
        .read_to_string(&mut stderr)
        .map_err(|e| e.to_string())?;
      return Err(format!(
        "Nailgun failed to start: exited with {}, stderr:\n{}",
        exit_status, stderr
      ));
    }
  }
  let port_line = port_line?;

  let port = &NAILGUN_PORT_REGEX
    .captures_iter(&port_line)
    .next()
    .ok_or_else(|| format!("Output for nailgun server was unexpected:\n{:?}", port_line))?[1];
  port
    .parse::<Port>()
    .map_err(|e| format!("Error parsing port {}! {}", &port, e))
}

impl NailgunProcess {
  async fn start_new(
    name: String,
    startup_options: Process,
    workdir_base: &Path,
    context: Context,
    store: &Store,
    executor: Executor,
    named_caches: &NamedCaches,
    nailgun_server_fingerprint: NailgunProcessFingerprint,
  ) -> Result<NailgunProcess, String> {
    let workdir = tempfile::Builder::new()
      .prefix("process-execution")
      .tempdir_in(workdir_base)
      .map_err(|err| format!("Error making tempdir for nailgun server: {:?}", err))?;

    prepare_workdir(
      workdir.path().to_owned(),
      &startup_options,
      context.clone(),
      store.clone(),
      executor.clone(),
      named_caches,
    )
    .await?;
    store
      .materialize_directory(workdir.path().to_owned(), startup_options.input_files)
      .await?;

    let cmd = startup_options.argv[0].clone();
    // TODO: This is an expensive operation, and thus we info! it.
    //       If it becomes annoying, we can downgrade the logging to just debug!
    info!(
      "Starting new nailgun server with cmd: {:?}, args {:?}, in cwd {:?}",
      cmd,
      &startup_options.argv[1..],
      workdir.path()
    );
    let mut child = std::process::Command::new(&cmd)
      .args(&startup_options.argv[1..])
      .stdout(Stdio::piped())
      .stderr(Stdio::piped())
      .current_dir(&workdir)
      .spawn()
      .map_err(|e| {
        format!(
          "Failed to create child handle with cmd: {} options {:#?}: {}",
          &cmd, &startup_options, e
        )
      })?;

    let port = read_port(&mut child)?;
    debug!(
      "Created nailgun server process with pid {} and port {}",
      child.id(),
      port
    );

    // Now that we've started it, clear its directory before the first client can access it.
    clear_workdir(workdir.path(), &executor).await?;

    Ok(NailgunProcess {
      port,
      fingerprint: nailgun_server_fingerprint,
      workdir,
      name,
      executor,
      handle: child,
    })
  }
}

impl Drop for NailgunProcess {
  fn drop(&mut self) {
    debug!("Exiting nailgun server process {:?}", self.name);
    if self.handle.kill().is_ok() {
      // NB: This is blocking, but should be a short wait in general.
      let _ = self.handle.wait();
    }
  }
}

/// The fingerprint of an nailgun server process.
///
/// This is calculated by hashing together:
///   - The jvm options and classpath used to create the server
///   - The path to the jdk
#[derive(Clone, Hash, PartialEq, Eq, Debug)]
struct NailgunProcessFingerprint {
  pub name: String,
  pub fingerprint: Fingerprint,
}

impl NailgunProcessFingerprint {
  pub fn new(name: String, nailgun_req: &Process) -> Result<Self, String> {
    let nailgun_req_digest = crate::digest(
      MultiPlatformProcess::from(nailgun_req.clone()),
      &ProcessMetadata::default(),
    );
    Ok(NailgunProcessFingerprint {
      name,
      fingerprint: nailgun_req_digest.hash,
    })
  }
}

///
/// A wrapper around a NailgunProcess checked out from the pool. If `release` is not called, the
/// guard assumes cancellation, and kills the underlying process.
///
pub struct BorrowedNailgunProcess(Option<MutexGuardArc<NailgunProcess>>);

impl BorrowedNailgunProcess {
  fn new(process: MutexGuardArc<NailgunProcess>) -> Self {
    Self(Some(process))
  }

  pub fn name(&self) -> &str {
    &self.0.as_ref().unwrap().name
  }

  pub fn port(&self) -> u16 {
    self.0.as_ref().unwrap().port
  }

  pub fn address(&self) -> SocketAddr {
    SocketAddr::new(IpAddr::V4(Ipv4Addr::LOCALHOST), self.port())
  }

  pub fn workdir_path(&self) -> &Path {
    self.0.as_ref().unwrap().workdir.path()
  }

  ///
  /// Return the NailgunProcess to the pool.
  ///
  /// Clears the working directory for the process before returning it.
  ///
  pub async fn release(&mut self) -> Result<(), String> {
    let process = self.0.as_ref().expect("release may only be called once.");

    clear_workdir(process.workdir.path(), &process.executor).await?;

    // Once we've successfully cleaned up, remove the process.
    let _ = self.0.take();
    Ok(())
  }
}

impl Drop for BorrowedNailgunProcess {
  fn drop(&mut self) {
    if let Some(mut process) = self.0.take() {
      // Kill the process, but rely on the pool to notice that it is dead and restart it.
      debug!(
        "Killing nailgun process {:?} due to cancellation.",
        process.name
      );
      let _ = process.handle.kill();
    }
  }
}

async fn clear_workdir(workdir: &Path, executor: &Executor) -> Result<(), String> {
  // Move all content into a temporary directory.
  let garbage_dir = tempfile::Builder::new()
    .prefix("process-execution")
    .tempdir_in(workdir.parent().unwrap())
    .map_err(|err| {
      format!(
        "Error making garbage directory for nailgun cleanup: {:?}",
        err
      )
    })?;
  let mut dir_entries = tokio::fs::read_dir(workdir)
    .await
    .map_err(|e| format!("Failed to read nailgun process directory: {}", e))?;
  while let Some(dir_entry) = dir_entries
    .next_entry()
    .await
    .map_err(|e| format!("Failed to read entry in nailgun process directory: {}", e))?
  {
    tokio::fs::rename(
      dir_entry.path(),
      garbage_dir.path().join(dir_entry.file_name()),
    )
    .await
    .map_err(|e| {
      format!(
        "Failed to move {} to garbage: {}",
        dir_entry.path().display(),
        e
      )
    })?;
  }

  // And drop it in the background.
  let _ = executor.spawn_blocking(move || std::mem::drop(garbage_dir));

  Ok(())
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Henry Beston: A Year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.
The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.
We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature's sustaining and poetic spirit.
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach."
It may seem odd to contemporary readers to think of the natural year as a metaphor by which we live. As individuals, we have become far removed from direct participation in the patterns and particularities of the changing seasons. Insulated, air-conditioned, and jet-propelled, we have come to believe that we are largely independent of the earth's basic rhythms. If we think of the year metaphorically at all, it is as a source of sentimental song lyrics and greeting card verses, rather than as a vital, ongoing ritual that includes us.
Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.
Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
Public Domain. These quotations are from The Outermost House by Henry Beston.
Henry Beston (1888 – 1968) was an American writer and naturalist, best known as the author of The Outermost House published in 1928, now considered a classic of American literature. The book, a collection of meditations on nature, was written after Beston spent what he called "a year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod." Spiritually shaken by his experiences in World War I, Beston retreated to the outer beach at Eastham in search of peace and solitude.
In winter, Lighthouse Beach in Chatham, Mass. (photo: Erik Jacobs/The New York Times)
One comment on "Henry Beston: A Year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod"
Dena@shaldenandneatham
I enjoyed reading Beston's book–I believe the house/cabin he stayed in was destroyed/swept away durimg the blizzard of 1978, although a few/other cabin's did remain for lease.
This entry was posted on September 6, 2020 by Vox Populi in Environmentalism, Health and Nutrition, Opinion Leaders, Personal Essays, Poetry, spirituality and tagged Henry Beston, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Nature and the Poet, nature poetry, ocean, Rachel Carson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Siegfried Sassoon, The Outermost House, war poets, WWI.
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