With this already complex backdrop in place, consider the position of the yoga teacher. The sheer scope of the profession makes navigating the waters of propriety especially demanding. Spiritual guide, fitness trainer, therapist, healer—at different times, instructors may feel they play all of these roles. They also face the challenge of presenting an ancient Eastern ascetic tradition to modern Western students in a way that maintains its integrity while making it accessible to them.
And then there is the “pedestal problem”—our tendency to see leaders as all-knowing and perfect. As Jack Kornfield, the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center noted in his book A Path with Heart (Bantam, 1993), this perception is called transference. “Transference, as it is called in Western psychology, is the unconscious and very powerful process in which we transfer or project onto some authority figure… the attributes of someone significant in our past, often our parents. In spiritual romanticism, we imagine that our teachers are what we want them to be instead of seeing their humanness. This sets the teacher up to impossibly high standards, complicating an already knotty ethical landscape.
In light of all of this, ethical infractions are almost understandable. For some teachers, being an object of transference invokes a sense of invincibility, is often accompanied by an Icarus-like failing. Just as that mythological boy could not resist flying to the sun with his new wax wings, some yoga teachers—their egos buoyed by the stature accorded them by their students—succumb to the temptations of sex, money and emotional control.
Ref: Stuart Bradford
