The Force Field.

On power, broken people, and why the answers were never his to give. Issue No. 6

Somewhere on the drive between Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles, the night before Bikram Choudhury’s Spring 2011 teacher training began, I had a dream.

I was on a train moving fast through a lush green jungle — the kind of green that doesn’t exist in waking life, saturated and electric, like the world had been turned all the way up. Somewhere on that train was Bikram. His car was extraordinary — flowers and elephants and rich neon patterns, shining gold, the most alive and beautiful chaos imaginable. It looked like the best party that had ever existed. I wanted to be near it. I was drawn to it the way you are drawn to light when you’ve been sitting in the dark.

But I couldn’t get there. Something was between me and that car — not a wall, not a door, but a force. A field. Something that held me at exactly the right distance without my choosing it. I could see in. I could hear the music. I could smell the incense. I could not enter. And somewhere beneath the wanting, some ancient and quiet part of me understood that this was not a deprivation.

This was protection.

I woke up and finished the drive to Los Angeles with money on the line, the worst imposter syndrome of my life, and a vivid dream I could not shake. I had been practicing yoga for just over a year. I had spent the previous winter in South Lake Tahoe during the heaviest snowfall in fifty years — snowed in, isolated, away from any studio, away from any community. I arrived at that training raw and open and hungry in the way that people are when they are standing at the precipice of something that will change their life. I could not yet see over that cliff of change, but I was hurtling towards it. I want to talk about what I found in that room. And what it taught me about power, and seeking, and the oldest trap in the human story.

THE SEDUCTION OF THE TEACHER

There is nothing wrong with seeking. Let me say that clearly before anything else. The hunger that drives a person toward a teacher — toward wisdom, toward practice, toward someone who seems to hold the map when you cannot find the trail — that hunger is not weakness. It is one of the most human and most holy impulses there is.

We are meaning-seeking creatures. We arrive in these bodies confused and tender and full of questions that the ordinary world does not have the patience to answer. Why am I here? What does it mean to live well? How do I carry the weight of being alive without being crushed by it? These are not small questions. They require our time and contemplation. They deserve a whole life.

A great teacher understands this. A great teacher receives that hunger with reverence and directs it — always, unfailingly — to the heart of the matter: the student. Not toward themselves. The greatest teachers I have known in my life have one thing in common: they are consistently trying to make themselves unnecessary. They teach toward your liberation, not your devotion. They know that the most sacred thing they can do is turn you toward yourself.

And then there are the others. The ones who receive that hunger and use it. Who understand — consciously or not — that a person who is seeking is a person who can be led. Who mistake the devotion of their students for evidence of their own divinity. Who take the power the practice carries and claim it as their own.

This is the oldest trap in the human story. And the yoga world has fallen into it more than once.

THE ROOM

Bikram Choudhury is charismatic in a way that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been in that room. He was funny. He was outrageous. He said the thing that most people would never say — racist comments, sexist comments, observations about bodies and appearance delivered without apology to a room full of people who had paid thousands of dollars and traveled thousands of miles to be there. We were told to trust the process. That this was his way of testing us. Of toughening us. The sleep deprivation was framed as discipline. The long nights and the impossible hours were presented as initiation.

The first class — the very first class — he objectified me. Made a joke about hoping my top would come undone. Boom. Boobs. Delivered to a room of almost 500 people, at my expense, on day one.

I want to be honest about my response because I think it matters: that first time I choked back humiliation tears. Over time, some of it became funny. He was, in certain moments, genuinely charming and silly. And that is exactly how charm works. The humor disarms you. The charisma pulls you in. The moments of genuine insight — and there were some — make you question your own discomfort. You think: maybe I am being too sensitive. Maybe this is the test. Maybe my resistance is exactly what I need to push through.

I kept my distance. My dream had given me that. Something in me had been briefed before I arrived — had been shown the force field and told to stay inside it. I was not invisible. Bikram called me out regularly, and I gave it right back — yelling something ridiculous during a long lecture, landing a joke at just the right moment, getting enough of a laugh from the room to make the endless nights a little more bearable. I matched the energy without losing myself in it. Most of the time. Because I want to be honest — I was not above it. I felt the pull too. The charisma was real. The unveiling of the method was real. The practice itself was real. I handed over pieces of my discernment just like everyone else in that room. The difference, if there was one, was that something kept calling me back to myself. I watched from my particular vantage point — absorbed and grounded simultaneously — as a room full of intelligent, devoted, searching people — many of whom would later name what happened there as harm — slowly finding their trust eroded by a man who had long since abandoned deserving it.

I stayed for all the reasons people stay. I was seeking. I was in transition. The money was gone whether I walked out or not. And if I am completely real with you — there was something there for me, something beneath all the noise, and I needed to know what it was.

But I also stayed because some part of me understood, even then, even young, that I was witnessing something important. Something I would need to understand in order to teach with integrity myself. You cannot offer your students a light you have never had the courage to shine on yourself.

The full truth of what Bikram did to the women in those rooms came out years later — documented in lawsuits, in testimony, in a Netflix documentary. What I witnessed was the culture that made those things possible. The unquestioning devotion. The reframing of abuse as teaching. The communal silence of people who loved the practice so deeply they were willing to fracture themselves to protect it.

THE PATTERN

I wish this were a Bikram problem.

It is not just a Bikram problem.

K. Pattabhi Jois — the founder of Ashtanga yoga, revered by millions, credited with bringing one of the most physically demanding and spiritually rich practices in the world to the West — sexually abused students for decades. The accounts are documented. The photographs exist. The survivors spoke and were not believed for years because the practice was too beloved and the man too iconic and the community too invested in the story it had built around him.

In September 2025, the Ashtanga community faced a new reckoning. Senior teacher Taylor Hunt was accused by multiple women of violating professional boundaries and initiating sexual relationships with students. The global response was outrage — and also, painfully, a familiar pattern of community members struggling to reconcile the teacher they knew with the alleged harm he caused. Kino MacGregor, one of the most respected voices in the Ashtanga world, wrote publicly about accountability and the sacred trust between teacher and student that had been broken.

Three men. Two traditions. Decades of harm. The same silence. The same communal instinct to protect the brand over the people. The same dynamic at the root of all of it: a person in a position of spiritual authority who mistook the devotion of their students for consent.

And I want to say this clearly because I think it is the most important concept to grasp: this is not a yoga problem. This is a power problem.

And it is everywhere.

Look at politics. Look at entertainment. Look at the boardrooms and the pulpits and the stages where we have placed our most charismatic and our most broken and called it leadership. The harm that follows is never just one kind — it is financial, sexual, spiritual, cultural — because a person who has lost their moral center does not abuse selectively. They abuse with whatever currency the room affords them.

There is something in our collective psychology — something unexamined and urgent — that keeps handing the highest positions of power to the people who are least equipped to hold them wisely. The ones who need it most. The ones for whom power is not a responsibility but a salve for wounds that should have been treated, not elevated.

Hurt people hurt people. We know this. What we have not fully reckoned with is how reliably we put hurt people in charge and then act surprised when our crumbling culture seems inverted and sick.

THE YAMAS AND NIYAMAS

Yoga gave us the framework for this a very long time ago.

The Yamas and Niyamas — the first two limbs of the eight-limbed path — are not esoteric Eastern philosophy. They are simple, elegant, and devastatingly practical guidelines for a good life. Non-harm. Truthfulness. Non-stealing. Non-excess. Non-possessiveness. Cleanliness. Contentment. Discipline. Self-study. Surrender to something greater than yourself.

Run any of the men I have named in this piece through that framework and you will find the same answer every time: they stopped somewhere around non-excess and never made it to self-study. They accumulated — power, devotion, bodies, money, silence — and called it enlightenment.

We do not need new values. We need to return to the ones we already have. The ones that yoga — at its purest, before any particular teacher got their hands on it — has always pointed toward. They are foundational. And they challenge the practitioner to do the hard things. The hardest one, I think, is this: non-possessiveness. Aparigraha. The willingness to hold lightly. To lead without grasping. To teach without needing to own the practice or the student’s transformation.

The greatest teachers I have known practice aparigraha with their students’ growth. They celebrate your progress without being attached to the results. They point you toward your own center, your own knowing, your own unmediated relationship with Source. They are not threatened by your independence. They know that liberation is the whole point.

THE TRUTH

Here is what I want every person who has ever sat in a yoga room — or a church, or a lecture hall, or a political rally, or anywhere that a magnetic personality stood at the front and seemed to hold the answers — to know:

The answers are not in their train car.

They never were.

Your sacred quest in this life is the seeking — because those questions are what make life a worthwhile journey. They give meaning to the human experience. The answers live in you — in your breath, your stillness, your body, your accumulated wisdom, your relationship with God or the universe or whatever you call the thing that is larger than all of us. No teacher can give you that. None can take it away. The most a great teacher can do — the most any of us can do for each other — is be the living reflection of our moral center and model the journey with as much grace and compassion and empathy and love as we can muster moment to moment. Point toward the heart and say: it’s in there. Keep going.

To my fellow teachers: what we have been given is a privilege so profound it should make us humble every single time we get the opportunity to teach. The people who show up on the mat are trusting us with their time, their bodies, their breath, their vulnerability. That is sacred. Handle it with care. The moment you begin to need their devotion more than you want their freedom — stop. Go back to your own mat. Do your own work. You have lost the thread and you need to find it quickly before you teach another class.

To students — to seekers of every kind: choose your teachers with open eyes. Look for the ones who point toward the sacred and step out of the way. Look for the ones who celebrate your independence. Look for the ones who are still students themselves — who sit with their own questions, who practice humility, who have not confused their position at the front of the room with proximity to God.

And trust the force field. That quiet internal knowing that keeps you at the right distance from things that are not meant for you — that is not fear, and it is not closed-mindedness, and it is not failure of devotion. That is wisdom. That is your own divine intelligence doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Listen to it. It will keep you on the right track.

I drove to Los Angeles in the spring of 2011 with a dream I could not shake and $11,000 I could not lose and a hunger for something I could not yet name. I found a room full of people just like me — searching, brave, willing — and a man at the front of it who had abdicated his role as a teacher, confusing power for purpose and passion for permission.

I kept my distance. The force field held.

I have been teaching for fifteen years. I have stood at the front of the room a thousand times. And the thing I want most — every single class, every single time — is for the people on those mats to find the next small milestone on their own path toward peace.

That is the whole job. To point you back to yourself — the only teacher who knows your whole story.

The answers were never his to give because they are never outside you. Trust your force field. Trust your gut. They know the way. Every system we have built — yoga, religion, government, finance — is innocent of itself. The harm enters with the humans who forget their purpose inside it. The good news is that choosing to live more consciously — however imperfectly, however gradually — bings the necessary healing to our systems and to ourselves.

— Maggie

Centeredish | Hot yoga teacher. Single in DC. Ish.