Behind Every Abusive Guru, a Fan Club of Women
As predictable as spiritual gaslighting in response to systemic injustice, you can always count on this: when a male guru or yoga teacher is accused of abuse, women will appear to defend him. It happened in the past, it’s happening now, and it will likely continue as long as yoga communities keep worshipping human beings as if they were gods with exceptionally bendy bodies.
If you haven’t yet realized that many yoga communities operate like cults—shutting down doubt, silencing critique, and punishing dissent—you haven’t really understood yoga communities. The devotion is often indistinguishable from dogma. The minute someone questions the teacher’s purity, a small army of disciples shows up, ready to protect their king and tell you “that’s yoga.”
In my experience, these loyal defenders are most often women who will not allow a single shadow to fall on their beloved teachers. They cover, protect, and glorify men who abuse power—emotionally, physically, and sexually. The irony is bitter: women, in the name of “feminine devotion,” propping up patriarchal power structures that harm them and others.
The defense strategies are always the same, as if drawn from a sacred script: “this adjustment is part of the practice,” “we can’t judge the past,” “you don’t understand yoga,” “he wasn’t turned on doing this,” “his intentions are pure,” or the classic “when you are a Yogi you understand.” Each phrase is a weapon of deflection, designed to preserve the guru’s untouchable image and redirect blame onto the very people harmed. Often it escalates to: “these women were throwing themselves at him,” or “women just need to learn to set boundaries,” and so on and so on… victim-blaming at its finest.
And this isn’t unique to yoga. Women have always played a role in protecting patriarchy—whether by excusing male violence, silencing others, or defending “good men” who just happen to be abusers. It is one of patriarchy’s most perverse tricks: convincing women that their loyalty should lie with men rather than with everyone else. In doing so, they become gatekeepers of the very system that harms them, complicit in sustaining the conditions of their own oppression.
What makes this even more disturbing is how closely yoga communities mirror sectarian practices. The silencing of dissent, the glorification of a leader, the rebranding of abuse as “teaching,” the pressure to stay loyal, the promise of transcendence—it’s textbook cult behavior. I know this not only from observation but from experience. I was brought up in a cult. I know firsthand how deeply indoctrination works, how it distorts your perception until abuse feels like devotion and violence looks like discipline. Getting out is brutally hard, not only because of the psychological hold, but because leaving means losing your entire community, your sense of belonging, your spiritual identity. Many people never make it out, and those who do often carry years of unraveling. When I see yoga students defending their gurus today, I recognize the same patterns of denial, the same chains disguised as yogic paths.
I often wonder: how do you not see? How much compartmentalizing does it take to dismiss allegations, to silence survivors, to perform verbal gymnastics more complicated than Chakorasana, all in service of maintaining the illusion that “your” teacher is different, special, incapable of harm? The refusal to see is not exclusive to yoga, it’s everywhere in society, but it’s particularly grotesque in communities that claim to stand for truth and liberation.
And then there’s the victim blaming. Always the victim blaming. Survivors are painted as unstable, manipulative, vindictive, or simply “not spiritual enough” to understand the teacher’s methods. Those tired excuses get repeated until abuse itself is normalized. The amount of bullshit packed into these arguments is staggering.
At the heart of this lies the refusal to give up comfort. Because if the guru isn’t divine, then perhaps the whole practice is cracked. Perhaps the years of devotion, the money spent, the trips to India, the thousands of hours in teacher training, the spiritual identity carefully curated, the lifestyle—all of it might have been built on sand. To admit harm would mean admitting complicity, even gullibility. And so, denial becomes survival practice.
However, a practice that cannot withstand doubt, accountability, and clear-eyed questioning isn’t spiritual… it smells of indoctrination. The longer we refuse to name what’s happening, the longer abuse thrives in the shadows, with gurus, teachers and mentors who misuse their power and students ready to protect them at all costs.
Repeat after me: the guru is not God, the community is not holy, and devotion without discernment is just brainwashing.
Let’s make this an affirmation.
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