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IYEA & The Fight For Yogas Freedom
July 4, 2009 by Ray Baskerville
Today aptly sees the launch of IYEA – Independent Yoga Educators of America. In the booming times of yoga asanas popularity the issue of standards in teaching is a contentious one. If there is to be a standard across the board, who sets it and how they set it is never going to be satisfactory and never going to guarantee the quality of yoga teachers.
This hasn’t been too much of a problem until now when the very success of yoga as an ‘industry’ of an estimated $6 billion has brought it into the focus of state regulators. They want a piece of the pie and they see see requiring yoga teacher training programs to obtain licenses to operate vocational training facilities as a way in. There is good reason to believe it won’t stop there.
There are many, myself included who already find it cringeworthy to constantly read about yoga as an exercise and fitness training. The road of regulation would certainly only lead further away from the true purpose of yoga as a spiritual practice. On a broader scale, in an ever more draconian world in which individual freedom is increasingly encumbered and restricted, where will it end?
Behind IYEA is Leslie Kaminoff who some will know as the co-author (with Amy Matthews) of the book Yoga Anatomy. Regulation in yoga is an issue that Leslie is passionate about and with equal measure articulates well. It is an issue that easily muddies the waters but his view of it has remained clear for over 16 years since the debate began in earnest.
"I’ve always believed that the whole notion of industry-wide standards is invalid, because it presupposes an entity that ENFORCES those standards on an entire industry. Yoga and force are incompatible because yoga is about freedom, and yoga is about relationship, and force destroys both. It is precisely that flawed way of thinking we are fighting against when we resist government attempts to control our profession."
So if you are a yoga teacher, teach yoga teachers, want to be a yoga teacher or for any other reason this issue is relevant to you, consider joining IYEA, at least visit the site and read more about the issue and Leslie’s position.
Proposed IYEA Statement of Principles:
I am an independent yoga educator.
I teach about the value of personal freedom on all levels of human experience.
I embrace my own standards for my education, and the training of my students – and am willing to be held accountable for living up to those standards.
I value my freedom to conduct my relationships without coercive interference by third parties.
I will resist to the best of my ability any entity that assumes the authority to license or regulate me as a yoga educator or to enforce its standards upon me.
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Thank You for posting this article on your website. I signed up and donated to Leslie’s much needed IYEA Saturday morning (the 4th) when it first hit the internet. … I have been very involved with — and done much studying — of such issues for alternative health care practitioners since the mid-1980s, especially the nutritional and massage industries. … The same basic dynamics are occurring. … But that’s a whole other bunch of articles in itself.
Right now, I respectfully wish to point out that getting a piece of the Yoga $$$ Action is probably not high on certain would-be regulator’s lists. That might be true at the state level, but 6 billion is not a lot of money compared to the drug and hi-tech medical companies’ budgets. Yes, the states need the money. Yet a much larger fight is being waged nationally and internationally, a fight that is so well documented — but so little publicized — it amazes me how few people know about it. … Or how much they do not want to believe it is happening when you tell them. Anyway …
Yoga is very likely now seen as big enough to be a health care alternative for enough Americans that it is feared that more of The People might turn away from the orthodox medical system, thereby diminishing profits from drugs, surgery, radiation, and other hi-tech, high-profit products and services. If you’ve been following what’s going on in Europe and the World Trade Organization, via the CODEX committees, the transnational corporate interests, driven by the various drug, medical and agricultural companies like Merck and Monsanto, are doing their best to make nutritional supplements by doctor’s prescription only. And they have made much progress in that direction. They are also reducing the potency of these supplements dramatically — BY INTERNATIONAL LAW! … WHY? Because nutrition is taking too much money away from the orthodox medical companies.
Now, along those lines, if too many people are getting relief from their health care challenges by way of Yoga, it will need to be controlled as best as possible by the anti-free enterprise corporate interests. (Those who believe these corporate giants, like our banking system, are examples of free-enterprise or free-markets are COMPLETELY out of touch with reality. They are PURE anti-free enterprise entities and bear NO resemblance to true free-enterprise. … There is another article!)
Making it too expensive to be a yoga teacher is a good start to reduce competition. Then, to maintain your license to teach, the restrictions on what you can say and do in a yoga class will be forthcoming. Just ask the many licensed medical doctors across America what happens to THEM when they try to use non-standard medical treatments like high purity vitamin B-12 or electro-homeopathic diagnostics in their practices. Some of them are threatened with loss of their medical licenses. (This IS happening right now.)
The point here is that contrary to what most people want to believe, our entire licensing and regulatory system was NOT set up primarily to protect The Public, nor to ensure that the best health care gets delivered to the most people, nor that practitioners were of the highest quality. … No, the system was originally set up in the early 19th century BY THE DOCTORS THEMSELVES to insulate themselves from competition, to keep their power and prestige at a higher level, and to keep their fees high. One of their primary aims was to eliminate osteopathy, herbology, and homeopathy. They did not fully succeed, but they came close. And this trend continues to this very day.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the newly powerful and wealthy corporate interests saw state licensing plus federal regulation (for instance, the FDA) as the best way to keep their business interests protected. They began buying off state and them federal legislators to get favorable laws passed, just like today. So drugs, which are mostly manufactured from OIL-based products, gave a reason for the Big Oil companies to get behind and finance the medical institutions as well as health insurance companies — to ensure that Americans keep using primarily drugs for their **health care** needs.
The Bottom Line here is that corporate control of the entire health care system is just one element of what is going on here, and regulating the Yoga Teacher Training industry is just One Step in that direction. … Unless the trends of history somehow reverse themselves — or WE take action to prevent it — there WILL be more steps toward centralized, hi-tech medicine. Yoga will become corporatized.
There are of course many other related issues such as the futility and unintended but inevitable negative consequences of national standards, or the fact that using The State to protect your job or qualify for insurance payments is a direct violation of Ahimsa, or that a national **health care** system will put even more control into the hands of the drug and hi-tech companies. … But this is too long already.
Thanks,
David Scott Lynn
David, what can I say, thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge here. Much of what you say is familiar to me and I appreciate the extensive detail you go into.
Blessings
Ray
[...] 13, 2009 by Ray Baskerville A week or so ago i wrote about efforts to regulate yoga teacher training and the launch of IYEA – Independent Yoga Educators of America.This is an issue that is already [...]