mbg: What did you do after the fall of Anusara in early 2012?
I was just practicing, studying, taking care of myself, and trying to learn from what happened.
Do you have regrets about the choices you made?
I feel the pain in my heart about the mistakes I made.
It was never my intention to hurt anyone or myself.
I’m using the pain I feel to step forward into the future in a positive way.
I’m certainly not going to repeat that path.
I take accountability for my own karmaI don’t know how regret really helps.
I want to remember what happened and then do things differently.
Did you feel like you had to go into hiding?
That time to self-reflect was critical.
There was a response by the [Anusara] community to ostracize instead of work together.
I didn’t have much of a choice.
It was my personal business, but some thought that I should be ostracized forever for this transgression.
If people could be open to giving me a new chance, I would appreciate that.
We have to have hope in each other that we can get better and make a positive shift.
Are you still in touch with anybody in the Anusara community?
At this point I am disassociated from the Anusara organization by our mutual choice.
As a yoga community, we haven’t had the best behavior in the last couple of years.
I believe that we can all improve, and that’s what I’m trying to do with myself.
If you don’t forgive, there is no change.
How did you start to take care of yourself physically after the scandal?
In the past, I thought I was being somewhat moderate with my habits.
I was 50 pounds heavier than I am today.
The imbalance in my life was more due to overworking than partying.
And when everything collapsed, I realized it wasn’t sustainable.
I had to take full ownership of the fact I had created that situation.
It was my own doing.
When you’re not feeling well it definitely affects your behavioryou’re not going to make good choices.
Do you have any larger take-aways from what you’ve learned?
I understand that I’m the one accountable for my own life.
There’s no one else to blame.
I can see now that I had set up a dysfunctional organization.
That was a giant wake-up call for me.
I just stick more to myself.
Aside from self-reflection, what have you been up to?
After the scandal I began studying a routine (of postures) that Desi wrote called The Roots.
It had so much power for transformation and health, and it totally revolutionized my approach to alignment.
This new alignment system eventually become Sridaiva, a new bang out of yoga I am practicing.
In Sridaiva, the tailbone doesn’t draw downward.
You don’t lengthen you spine by pulling the two ends of the spine apart.
You line the spine up so that your connective tissue can pull the spine apart.
That’s not to say poses in modern postural yoga are wrong.
We just focus more on the engagement on the back body.
After 42 years of teaching yoga, that’s a big change, in my view.
Where does the nameSridaiva, which means “divine destiny” in Sanskrit, come from?
For Desi and I, divine destiny refers to fate.
It seems like coincidence, but there is something really powerful in that.
It was an unbelievable, fated meeting with Desi.
Would you say all of this happened for a reason?
All of it was gone.
It was almost a near-death experience, and I finally woke up and realized I needed to be different.
