How a #MeToo Facebook Post Toppled a Yoga Icon
An ex-disciple of Swami Vishnudevananda reveals a decade of abuse, sparking a crisis in Sivananda yoga that is still unfolding
Early on December 10, 2019, in the dark of her modest redbrick apartment, Julie Salter, 63, sat at a spartan desk before a glowing blue screen. The dialogue box displayed nine paragraphs that had incubated over the two decades since she left her position at Sivananda yoga — a global network of ashrams and retreat spas once rooted in hippie yoga evangelism, but now famous for yoga tourism and professional training. At 5:15 a.m., she clicked “post” on a testimony of sexual and psychological abuse committed by the group’s founding saint.
“With all the hagiography around Swami Vishnudevananda and his legacy,” she wrote, “with all the wistful wishes, beliefs, and projections, and looking at the ‘good’ done, let’s also face into at least a little of the hidden, the dark… ” Salter wrote that the 11 sleep-deprived and overworked years during which she worked as the personal assistant of Vishnudevananda until his death in 1993 left her sick and dependent. She disclosed that the supposedly celibate guru had “use[d]/abuse[d]” her sexually for three of those years — and that shame, secrecy, fear, and her sense of duty as he became chronically…
