Don Juan Short Pants

Don Juan Short Pants

By Ed Staskus

   There’s nothing new about scandals, be they personal, political, academic, corporate, celebrity, religious, or financial. They are a dime a dozen. The reason they are so cheap is because there are so many of them. Crack a newspaper, turn on a TV, open a browser, and there they are, today and every day. They take all shapes and sizes, not just nowadays, but way back when, too.

   Back when the Olympics were the Greek Olympics, an Athenian pentathlete bribed his opponents to secure victory. He was found out and both he and his hometown were fined. He paid his fine, but the hometown of Athens refused. It took the Delphic Oracle threatening in no uncertain terms that there would be no more oracles for them to pay up.

   Five hundred years ago the Borgia’s, two of whom ruled the Holy City as Popes, were conniving entrepreneurs who bought their way to the top, and poisoned friend, foe, and family alike. They didn’t suffer competition. At the Banquet of Chesnuts in the Vatican in 1501 they encouraged their guests to enjoy the “fifty honest prostitutes” they had procured for dessert.

   More recently, during the Gilded Age, there were more corporate shenanigans than you could shake a stick at. Somebody should have read James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk the Ten Commandments, but instead he became entangled in blackmail and was shot to death by his business partner in broad daylight in the lobby of New York City’s Grand Central Hotel.

   Everyone’s always got their reasons for falling into the tar pit. Even the ever bad have their good reasons. More often than not it’s not anybody’s fault, either, especially in our own exculpatory day and age.

   “It’s because as a child Cinderella got home after midnight, Pinocchio told lies, Aladdin was a thief, Snow White lived in a house with seven men, I saw Tarzan practically naked, Batman drove 200 MPH without a license, and Shaggy was a mystery solving hippie who always had the munchies,” we explain in song and dance about how we became good-time Charlies.

   Sex scandals are nothing if not ever new. They are the bedrock of dirty linen. Many a man has fallen into the hamper. Grover Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock and during the 1884 presidential campaign was dogged by Republican chants of, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” After he won, Democrats answered, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”

   Bill Clinton had sex out of wedlock on top of the father of our country’s desk in the Oval Office, was almost impeached for it, but shrugged it off as though the disapproval was a misunderstanding. When Donald Trump lays down with w****s, it’s not a skeleton in the wedlock closet, for several reasons. First, he’s done it many times before, so there isn’t anything scandalous about him doing it again. Second, he’s a consummate philanderer, so there’s nothing unusual about it. Lastly, no one cares, not his evangelical brain-addled base, nor the country’s liberals, for whom it’s the least of his foibles, nor the rest of the world, for whom it’s just a punchline. No one holds him to any kind of standard, anyway, high or low.

   When yoga gurus, masters, and teachers, on the other hand, go sex crazy, it is a scandal, for many reasons, not the least of which is they are held to a higher standard. They are expected to hold firm to the ethical high ground, not rut around in the trough. Stand above reproach. Steer clear of the web of corruption. Practice what you preach, for goodness sake.

   It isn’t necessarily what everybody calls you, but what you answer to. Rules guide the everyday. Right conduct guides the better man. Nevertheless, stick to what it says in the job description. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut observed. If you can’t trust an honest-to-God yoga teacher, who can you trust?

   It is a long list of bad boys who have practiced a common vice, amounting to antics in the back room, inducement and seduction, and sometimes something darker. It can be a crime punishable by law or at other times simply an offense that outrages the public conscience. It ain’t the Hall of Fame. It’s more along the lines of the Wall of Shame.

   It includes Kriyananda and Rodney Yee. Akhandananda Sarswati was charged with 35 counts of sexual abuse in 1987, convicted, and sent to prison. It also includes Osel Tendzin, Dechen Thurman, known as the “yoga gigolo,” and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi �" whose relationship with the Beatles came to a sudden end over allegations he tried to rape the actress Mia Farrow. The “Giggling Guru” got away with it, expanded his TM empire, and ended up living in his own 200-room mansion, where he could transcendentalize whatever he wanted in whatever bedroom he wanted to.

   It includes Satchidananda, Muktananda, and Rama, founder of the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy, whose estate had to pay almost $2 million in 1996 to a woman who claimed she was forced to have sex with him. Easy come, easy go, seems to have been the institute’s corporate philosophy.

   It includes Sathya Sai Baba, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Amrit Desai, who founded the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts, and was compelled to resign after confessing to several affairs in 1994. Kripalu took a low profile on the whole sordid business, stating blandly for the record, “Yogi Desai resigned as spiritual director of Kripalu.” It’s like saying he had other things besides the spirit on his mind, or loins, as the case may be.

   The royal family of yoga got caught up in the fun. In 2012 allegations of emotional and sexual abuse were made against Kausthub Desikachar, the grandson of the godfather of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya. Evasions rang forth. The next year Desikachar finally  confessed.

   “I realize that some of the decisions that I have made in the past have not been consistent with the high standards that I usually set for myself. I also fully understand and acknowledge that these have had far reaching effects, way beyond myself. There is no way of changing the past. I wholeheartedly repent for what has happened.” There’s nothing like slapping yourself on the wrist.

   The list includes Osho, John Friend, and Bikram Choudhury.

   During his lifetime, Osho, a self-proclaimed spiritual guru, was otherwise known as the sex guru. He made no secret of it. Osho was always on the pull, day and night. He did make a secret of everything else, however, including allegations of drug-running and a prostitution racket. He was deported from the United States in 1985 as the result of complicity in a murder plot, among other things. He was arrested on board a Learjet in North Carolina with $1 million in cash and valuables on board, trying to escape to Bermuda. Although 21 other countries denied him entry, India finally took him back.

   He was welcomed by his disciples with a clap on the back. “We must put the monster America in its place,” he declared. He complained of being the victim of “evil magic.” He died five years later of a heart attack, the victim of clogged arteries. Amazingly enough, he is more popular today than he ever was back then.

   John Friend, who studied long and hard with B. K. S. Iyengar, and who labored long and hard to create and establish Anusara Yoga, a new kind of heart-centered practice, stepped down from his leadership role in 2012. Two years earlier The New York Times had proclaimed him the “Yoga Mogul.” Thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of people around the world practiced his style of yoga.

   A year later it was all gone, gone up in smoke. The yoga gear supplier Manduka got stuck with a warehouse full of John Friend-branded mats.

   Besides smoking a boatload of pot, which was illegal at the time, and slyly dipping into pension funds that weren’t his, which is still illegal, he slept his way through his closest female acolytes, married and otherwise. He dreamed up a Wiccan coven, calling it Blazing Star Flames, to keep things on the up and up, at least in his own mind. It was a kind of tantric dodge to explain himself.

   Tantric sexual expression is said to be a God-like weaving and expansion of energy creating a mind-body connection leading to powerful orgasms. If only we could be gods is the idea behind the idea.

   “On a chilly New Year’s Eve in 2009, John Friend�"the popular and charismatic founder of Anusara Yoga�"lay naked on a bearskin rug in front of a blazing fire at his home in Texas while three underwear-clad women hovered over him, massaging his body with sweetly scented oil,” Lizzie Crocker wrote in the Daily Beast. “One rubbed his head, neck, and shoulders, another worked on his hands, while a third rubbed his inner thighs and pelvic region, her whole body writhing sinuously to the new-age sitar melodies playing in the background.”

   The man himself didn’t see that what he did with his friend mates was anybody’s business. “The Anusara scandal to me was focused on my sex life,” John Friend said. “My sexual relationships with women were private and consensual in my eyes, but the community considered my private life as something that they should judge. So, it was like a 21st century social media witch trial, which judged me as being unfit to teach yoga.”

   Not everybody agreed. They wanted to say, save your breath to cool your soup. “Attending a yoga class where a teacher is generating bed-buddies while expounding on spiritual matters is like attending church only to find out the priest is bonking the altar boys,” said Kelly Morris, founder of Conquering Lion Yoga.

   Sometimes you have to change yoga teachers when they just rub you the wrong way. In the event, Anusara Yoga went by the boards. John Friend has since rebranded himself with another kind of alignment-based yoga called Sridaiva.

   Bikram Hot Yoga was the brainchild of Bikram Choudhury, born and bred in Kolkotta, and transplanted to Beverly Hills, where he founded the Yoga College of India. In time it became a big success. He claimed his one-size-fits-all system cured everything from arthritis to cancer, although the talk was largely snake oil. By 2006 there were 1,650 Bikram Yoga studios worldwide. He was training hundreds of teachers annually at $10,000 a pop for the privilege. There was no snake oil in his sign on the dotted line business model. He attempted to copyright the poses that constituted his modus operandi, but his claim was thrown out of court when the judge determined touching your toes wasn’t copyrightable.

   Bikram owned more than forty Bentley and Rolls Royce automobiles. He jet-setted with the beau monde. He toured Las Vegas, dressing like a gangster, and claiming to have testicles as big as “atomic bombs.” In 2013 it all started to unravel, when several women accused him of false imprisonment, sexual battery, and rape.

   In 2016 Bikram lost a civil lawsuit in California for sexual harassment and was fined $7.4 million. In response, he closed up shop, sold off everything he could, and went back to the sub-continent. The judge issued a warrant for the lothario, but to this day he’s going, going, gone. In an interview with ABC News Nightline’s David Wright, Bikram said, “I never hurt another spirit. I’m the most spiritual man you ever met in your life.”

   “You find out who your real friends are when you’re involved in a scandal,” said Elizabeth Taylor, who was involved in her fair share of them. During his reign of steam and sweat, many studio owners said they loved the 26-pose take-it-or-leave-it regimen, even though they were equivocal about the man on the platform, turning a blind eye and keeping the other eye on the bottom line.

   It was the king’s new clothes, outfitted in white silk suits and fedora. “If you look at his values and his lifestyle, there’s nothing spiritual about it. The cars and the watches and allowing people to fawn all over him, it’s disgusting,” said Stephanie Schestag, “He treated people like s**t. But the truth was, he was like the Wizard of Oz. It was all a smokescreen.”

   When push came to shove, Bikram Choudhury found out he had few real friends. Most of the world’s Bikram Hot Yoga studios have either closed or changed their names to something else not-so-hot. His wife divorced him. It has even been rumored his gold Rolex found another wrist to call home. Sometimes it seems like only our dogs will never betray us.

   It can take a scandal, or two, or even a dozen, to bring about reform. Maybe yoga will be practicing what it preaches from here on out. It’s not rocket science. The culture isn’t corrupt, even though some of the culture’s icons were and are. Trying to get it right isn’t like trying to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks. It’s about living for a principle, not always trying to make yourself the principal of the gimmies and swinishness.

   Love of men, women, and humanity in general may be part and parcel of yoga practice, but not necessarily “gimme your lovin’ you sweet lookin’ thang.”

   One thing all the sex-crazed yoga masters of our times have had in common is they all claimed they were someway somehow the best divines and what they were doing was divining the sacred word, intent, and  purpose for the way we live today, for your greater good, especially if you are a babe in the woods. The hand of the man will show you the way out of the woods and down the garden path. The path can get thorny, though. Hero worship isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be.

   “I’m breaking eggs to make an omelet because I see the big picture, and you don’t,” they all say, sly and sincere, straight-faced if not straight-laced, Tricky Dick’s to a man. It’s the classic refrain of self-styled masters of the universe, lady-killers one and all, but what can one say in the breach?

   All one can say is, don’t be a four-flusher. Don’t be a Donald. Stay in your lane bro’.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.