Babies and Bathwater

can you separate the teacher from the teachings? A poetry of 4 am resolutions

Francesca Cervero invited me on to her beautiful podcast/community to talk about abuse within lineage. And how that isn’t the end of the story.

The tired old babies and bathwater, can you separate the teacher from the teachings agony.

I know that these are different metaphors. But whenever I hear the ‘separate the teacher from the teachings’ thing, my head starts sloshing around with babies and bathwater. I repeat and repeat the same phrases until I’m confused. Wait: who’s the baby? What is the bathwater? And what the fuck does ‘the teachings’ mean? Should we ‘stay connected to our practice’? If ‘the practice’ and all its accoutrements are a little funky? Why yes? Why no? Where for godsake is the soap? I had it and then I lost it.

I suspect I go there because yoga brushes so closely on vulnerability. There is something naked to it, and sometimes naked itself is a bliss. Or a nightmare. And bathing is a mundane thing, a private ordinary thing, that continues to brush up on restarting or rebirthing each time we step into the water. Water affects us on every level: mind, body, soul. Add in a little ceremony and water itself becomes a fluid liminal space, a metaphor you can immerse yourself in.

Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath 1893 Art Institute of Chicago

A Group of Women Bathing, 18th century, unknown artist, Mughal Dynasty, National Museum of Asian Art

Edgar Degas, A Woman in the Bathroom 1883

I find ‘teacher’ and ‘teachings’ harder to grapple.

This much we know: abuse of power happens in all the industries, in all the ways humanity has covened or convened itself in history. Yoga is not unique in it’s troubles. Except, perhaps, in it’s overboardness (you see, there’s no getting around this spinning water, thing. This drowning). Except, maybe, in the ways we wanted yoga to be different.

Avoid the cult! We say.

But it isn’t that easy, you see, because ‘cult’ can both mean a scary, closed door, whispered promises and veiled threats kinda scene but it can also mean just, you know, culture. Culture isn’t a thing you can flippantly throw out. Of course culture does have lots of bad stuff; any and every culture does (go check out what the culture publications are worried about today if you don’t believe me).

But my goodness, culture is also the very foundation of most of the things that make life worth living. I sympathize with the desire to cut ties, retreat, cancel. But in an age that is already splintered and alienating, at a time when we’ve been given very good examples of how delusional and dangerous off grid prepper thoughts can be, I think we ought to be more careful. I wish we could be more honest. And while I know there ARE culty absurd guru reverent things out there in the world, the reality is most of us aren’t there. We’re just normal. We just go to normal studios. We haven’t signed our souls away. Or we don’t think that we have. Have we? But wait! Wait! How could this happen here?!