“No sex, no students.”
“It’s my charm versus your boundaries.”
“I’ll flirt with all these women & win them over- they’re probably bored anyway. Their husbands probably are too.”
I never imagined I would be writing an article that begins with those words.
Words that were actually said. Words I heard with my own ears, from someone I had welcomed into my professional & personal world. Someone I considered a colleague. Someone I had mentored. Someone whose success I had genuinely, wholeheartedly wanted to see.
I never imagined I would spend years piecing together how someone I trusted so completely had been carefully, patiently, systematically building something – not from the shadows, but from inside my own professional circle, my own community, my own carefully built world.
And I certainly never imagined that after twenty years of teaching, after building studios, after training hundreds of teachers and holding space for thousands of students – the thing I would eventually have to write about most urgently would not be alignment. Would not be philosophy. Would not be sequencing.
It would be this.
But here we are.
I am writing this because I have to. Because the silence that surrounds this in our (Indian) communities is not neutral. It is not peaceful. It is not non-harmful. Silence, in these situations, is protective cover – and it always protects the same person.
Before We Begin
This article is not about one person. It is about a pattern – one that repeats itself in yoga studios, dance schools, wellness spaces, churches, coaching businesses, and healing communities around the world. I will weave my own story through it because I believe women learn most when they are not alone in what they recognize. But my story is the thread. The education is the backbone. Because what happened to me has happened to too many of us, and the reason it keeps happening is that we don’t have the language for it until it’s already over. And I wish another woman stood up and told me the web I was entering into.
This is not a story I tell for pity. It is not shock value. I tell it because I have spent three years doing deep, rigorous, sometimes brutal work to understand how a person of intelligence, grit and discernment – a person who teaches mindfulness, awareness, empathy and self-inquiry for a living – got caught in this web. What I found on the other side of that question changed everything I thought I knew about trust, manipulation, and what it means to be preyed upon.
What I Lost and How It Was Taken
He said there was no non-compete. That he wouldn’t remember signing it anyway. I should have just lied and said he signed one.
He contacted every single student I had built relationships with over years – methodically, through social media, text, through charm, through the image of someone warm and generous and safe. And most of them went. Without a second look. Without a single question. Even the ones who had seen me build this from scratch. Because that is what a well-constructed predatory persona does. It doesn’t ask for your trust. It earns it – carefully, over time so that by the time there is reason to question it, the loyalty has already been transferred and the work of years has already walked out the door.
If I listed every red flag, every moment where something felt wrong and I explained it away, every instance where I should have acted – this would read like a Bollywood screenplay. Long, dramatic, unbelievable to anyone who wasn’t there. Except it happened. It happened in real time, in broad daylight, in a professional context that should have been safe.
The reason I didn’t act on those moments is not because I was naive (a little bit too trusting to be honest). It is because I had been taught – through Indian culture, through yoga philosophy, through professional generosity – to extend grace. To assume the best. To not cause difficulty. To give people the benefit of the doubt, and then to give it again. And most importantly, think that because I wouldn’t do that to someone else – that they wouldn’t do it to me. Despite their promises to protect at any cost.
I am an Indian woman. And that matters here more than I initially wanted to admit. There is a particular layer of conditioning that sits underneath everything else for women like me — a deep, early, thorough training into silence. Good girls don’t make accusations. Good girls don’t cause problems. Good girls extend forgiveness and do not embarrass people publicly. These are not personal failings. They are cultural architectures, passed down through generations, absorbed so early they feel like personality. And predators – whether they understand this consciously or not – benefit from them enormously.
Here is the specific irony that I have had to sit with: I teach people to trust their inner knowing. I have built a career on helping students develop discernment – the yogic faculty of viveka, of clear seeing. And my own was compromised. Not because it failed me. Because it was systematically undermined by someone who understood exactly how to make me doubt it.
That particular grief — the grief of a teacher who could not protect herself with her own teachings — is one I have not seen written about. I am writing about it now because I think it is the most common grief in this conversation, and the least named.
What a Predator Actually Looks Like
Stop picturing a stranger.
The predator in your community is not lurking at the edges. He is at the center. He is the one everyone speaks well of. He is magnetic, funny, warm, socially intelligent. He knows everyone’s name. He remembers details. He stays late, he volunteers, he helps carry things, he praises people publicly and loudly.
He is the one everyone says would never.
The image is not incidental. The image is the strategy. A carefully maintained public persona is the most effective protection a predator has, because when someone finally raises a concern, the community’s first instinct is to defend the image rather than hear the concern.
“He’s always been so kind to me.” “He’s a family man.” “He has children.” “There must be a misunderstanding.”
The persona becomes the shield. The more beloved the persona, the thicker the shield. And the more time he has spent building it – in your community, with your students, with the people you introduced him to — the more impenetrable it becomes.
He will also, and this is important, present himself as someone who has been wronged. He will have stories. Stories of people who misunderstood him, who treated him unfairly, who couldn’t see his value. He collects sympathy the way other people collect credentials. And in a yoga community — where we are trained to hold space for pain, to assume that difficult behavior comes from deeper hurt — he will find no shortage of people willing to extend exactly that sympathy. He is counting on it.
What Grooming Actually Is
Most people hear the word grooming and think of children. Or strangers. Or something that happens online to teenagers. They don’t think of a professional colleague. They don’t think of someone inside their own studio. They certainly don’t think of themselves.
That is exactly why the definition matters.
Grooming is the process by which a person systematically builds trust, access, and emotional dependency in another person — in order to exploit them. It is not a single act. It is a campaign. It unfolds over weeks, months, sometimes years, through accumulated small moments that each look innocent on their own.
Grooming can be sexual in intent. It can also be financial, professional, or psychological — or all of these at once. What defines it is not the category of harm but the method: the deliberate, patient construction of a relationship designed to serve the perpetrator, disguised as one that serves you.
The legal and psychological community defines grooming as a pattern of behavior used to gain trust and lower resistance – in the target, and often in the people around them. The community gets groomed too. The workplace gets groomed. The spouse gets groomed. The friends get groomed. Everyone who might otherwise intervene is slowly, quietly brought inside the image.
This is why it is so hard to name in the moment. Grooming doesn’t feel like manipulation while it’s happening. It feels like being chosen. It feels like finally being seen. It feels, in many cases, like the most genuine connection you have ever experienced.
That feeling is the mechanism. Not the side effect — the mechanism.
How Grooming Actually Works
Grooming does not begin with anything sexual or overtly inappropriate. This is the single most important thing to understand, and it is the reason so many of us don’t recognize it until we are already deep inside it.
It begins with significance.
He notices you. Really notices you. He says things that make you feel deeply seen — your talent, your potential, the specific and particular ways you are exceptional. He encourages your dreams. He champions you in rooms where you need championing. He cheers you on with what looks, completely, like pure generosity.
He confides in you. Shares personal struggles, tells you things he says he doesn’t tell just anyone, makes you feel not just trusted but trusted with something precious. The confidence creates closeness. The closeness creates loyalty. The loyalty creates obligation.
He is building something. Not a friendship. An attachment. One that, by the time it becomes visible for what it is, feels indistinguishable from one.
The thousand small moments accumulate. A comment here. A confidence there. A favor. A compliment that lands exactly right. A moment of being championed when you needed it most. And slowly, without a single dramatic event, your perception of this person has been shaped by his hands, not your own observation. You are emotionally invested before you have ever asked whether the investment is healthy. You feel loyal before you have examined what you are loyal to.
And when something finally shifts — when the boundary is tested, when the ask comes, when something feels undeniably wrong — leaving doesn’t feel like protecting yourself. It feels like betraying someone who has always been there for you.
That is not an accident. That is the architecture.
Why He Said Those Things to Me
Looking back, the statements he made – about charm versus boundaries, about using attraction to build a student base, about bored women and their bored husbands — were not slips. They were not careless. They were tests. Statements made to someone he had already assessed as unlikely to act on them. Someone he had already cultivated enough loyalty in that even hearing those words, I found a way to explain them away.
He was joking. He didn’t mean it like that. He says things he doesn’t mean.
This is called minimization. It is one of the most consistent responses to early disclosure – not just from bystanders, but from the people directly inside the situation. We minimize because the alternative — that someone we have trusted completely is exactly who they just revealed themselves to be — is too destabilizing to accept all at once. The mind protects the attachment because the attachment has come to feel necessary.
I minimized. I am not ashamed of that anymore. I understand now that minimization is not stupidity. It is a psychological response to cognitive dissonance, and it happens to intelligent, perceptive, professionally accomplished women all the time. The shame I used to feel about it has been replaced by something else: a very clear understanding of how deliberately it was engineered.
Why Yoga Women Are the Perfect Target
This is not an accident of demographics. It is a function of what yoga teaches and what yoga communities select for.
Yoga attracts people who are trying to heal. People rebuilding after grief, after divorce, stuck in an unhappy marriage, after illness, after losing themselves somewhere along the way. People who are actively cultivating compassion, openness, forgiveness, presence and connection. These are genuinely beautiful qualities. They are also, in the hands of someone who understands how to exploit them, vulnerabilities.
We are taught non-judgment. We are taught to extend grace. We are taught to examine our own reactions before questioning someone else’s behavior — to ask whether our discomfort is our projection before we consider that it might be a valid response to something real. We are taught to turn the lens inward, reflexively, before we turn it outward.
A person who understands how yogic communities function knows exactly how to use this. They know the community’s first response to a complaint will be to wonder what the complainant is carrying. They know the language of non-judgment can be quietly weaponized into a culture of silence. They know that compassion, without discernment, becomes self-abandonment – and that a community full of people practicing compassion without discernment is a community that will protect him far longer than it will protect you.
For Indian women, there is an additional layer that most articles like this one do not address, and I am not willing to leave it out. We are raised inside a culture that equates silence with grace. That treats accusation as immodesty. That tells us, implicitly and repeatedly, that our discomfort matters less than other people’s comfort, that our voice is less important than the peace of the room. We do not just have yoga philosophy to push against. We have generations of conditioning to push against. Most of us were never given clear permission to name what we saw, let alone to act on it. Most of us had women who didn’t believe us or told us to put up with it.
And here is the specific wound for those of us who teach: we spend our professional lives helping students develop viveka — discernment, clear seeing, the ability to distinguish what is real from what is constructed. We teach people to trust themselves. And when our own discernment is compromised, when we find ourselves looking back at years of clear signals we did not act on, the question that follows is devastating.
How did I not know?
You did know. You felt it. Multiple times, probably. What you didn’t have was permission — cultural, professional, spiritual – to trust what you felt more than you trusted him.
That is the thing that was taken from you. Not your intelligence. Your permission.
The Checklist: Signs You May Be in a Grooming Dynamic
No single behavior is conclusive. Patterns are what matter. Read this slowly and honestly.
He made you feel uniquely seen and understood very early — faster than trust could have naturally developed. The closeness felt accelerated.
He shared deeply personal information to create special closeness — confiding things that made you feel chosen, set apart from others.
He consistently positions himself as a victim — of past relationships, people who misunderstood him, circumstances beyond his control. He is always the one who was wronged. He collects your sympathy and your protective instinct.
He asks probing questions about your life, your marriage, your loneliness, your dreams — not from simple curiosity. He is mapping where your needs are. Information becomes strategy.
He alternates between intense attention and sudden distance — leaving you working to recover his approval without understanding why you lost it. The uncertainty keeps you oriented toward him.
He encourages secrecy or special conversations — things just between you two, that others don’t need to know about. The secrecy feels intimate. That is the point.
He tests your limits in small ways and minimizes when you notice — calling you sensitive, uptight, joking. He is measuring where the edges are and how much you will tolerate.
He speaks differently about people depending on who is present — different versions of himself, different accounts of the same people, depending on the audience.
He becomes your biggest champion while subtly discouraging other perspectives — creating a dependence that feels like being deeply supported. You don’t notice the other relationships quietly narrowing. The “you can do it” strategy and I will support you along the way – is a game you don’t even know you are playing.
He makes you feel guilty for saying no — through withdrawal, disappointment, a shift in warmth you feel immediately but cannot quite name. The no always costs something.
He responds to your boundaries with consequences that don’t announce themselves as consequences — distance, coldness, a comment that lands wrong, a sudden unavailability. He never argues with your boundary. He just makes you feel it.
His public image feels impervious to question — and when you have raised concerns, even gently, it has somehow resulted in you being the problem.
If you are reading this list and something is recognizing itself — trust that recognition. Trust it before your mind finds the explanation that makes it untrue.
Why Women Don’t Come Forward
Because they won’t be believed.
Because he is too liked, too established, too generous in everyone else’s experience.
Because they don’t have proof — only a feeling, lived experience, only a pattern, only a thousand small moments that each sound like nothing when said aloud.
Because they are ashamed. Not of what he did, but of the fact that they didn’t see it sooner. Of the fact that they cared about him. Of the fact that they defended him to other people. Of the time it took. Of the loyalty that now makes no sense. Shame is extraordinarily effective at producing silence, and it is part of the design.
Because in yoga communities, the culture of non-judgment and forgiveness often quietly functions as a culture of silence. Raising a concern about someone is read as ego, as an inability to extend compassion, as failing to hold space. The woman who comes forward does not just face disbelief. She faces spiritual judgment. She is failing her practice, apparently, by naming what happened to her. But the tides have been changing inside the yoga communuity in the recent years.
And because other women didn’t believe them. This is one of the most painful truths in this conversation, and I want to say it plainly: the women he charmed did not come back. They did not look back. They did not, for the most part, ask a single question. And the shield that protected him in community spaces was held up significantly by women who had experienced him differently — who could not reconcile what they heard with who they knew, and who chose what they knew.
I understand that now in a way I couldn’t for a long time. The predatory persona is built across multiple relationships, presenting differently to each person, so that no single woman has the full picture. Each woman has a different him. The full picture only becomes visible when women talk to each other honestly — which is precisely what he has worked, quietly and effectively, to prevent.
This is why women not supporting women in these moments is not a simple personal failing. It is a structural outcome of how these dynamics are built. And it is why, when a woman you know tells you something feels wrong, the most important thing you can do is listen before you defend.
What the Aftermath Actually Looks Like
Nobody talks about this part.
The public narrative, when it exists at all, tends to focus on the event — the disclosure, the confrontation, the moment of recognition. What comes after is quieter and longer and far less visible, and it is where most women actually live for years.
The aftermath looks like rebuilding a professional & personal world that was systematically dismantled. It looks like watching students you spent years genuinely caring for choose someone else without a second thought, and having to find a way to make peace with that. Not because they are bad people. Because they didn’t know what you knew, and because the image he had built was real to them.
It looks like not knowing who to tell, because the community you would have turned to has already heard his version. It looks like second-guessing your own account of events because you minimized them for so long that even you aren’t sure what was real. It looks like feeling furious and exhausted in the same moment, and sometimes feeling nothing at all because feeling something requires energy you no longer have.
The personal cost of rebuilding your own ability to trust will need a whole new blog as that’s a much harder journey than anything professional.
It looks like doing the work anyway. Therapy. Reading. Finding safe space with people who know how to be an ally. Sitting with questions you would have given anything not to have to ask. Understanding coercive control not because you wanted to, but because you needed to in order to understand yourself. Slowly, imperfectly, arriving at a place where the story makes sense — not because it was okay, but because you finally have a framework that is bigger than the shame.
The healing is not linear and it is not fast and it does not arrive with a clear ending point. What it does arrive with, eventually, is this: the ability to say clearly what happened, and to know that the clarity is the thing that matters, not the audience that receives it.
I am still building that. I imagine I will be for a while longer. But I am no longer doing it in silence, and that is not a small thing.
What Accountability Looks Like in Community
We like to think accountability requires a legal outcome. It rarely gets one. Grooming — the kind that happens inside professional relationships, inside communities, inside trust — is extraordinarily difficult to prosecute. The harm is real and documented in your body and your bank account and your sense of yourself, and the legal recourse is often nothing.
Community accountability is something different. It is the decision, made by individuals, about what they are willing to normalize. About whose stories they are willing to hear. About whether they will prioritize their own comfort over someone else’s safety.
It looks like this: when someone you trust tells you something is wrong, you listen before you defend. You ask questions before you minimize. You hold the discomfort of the possibility being true before you reach for the explanation that makes it false. You do not immediately offer twelve reasons why he would never. You sit with what you’ve just been told.
It also looks like this: you decide where you stand. Not abstractly. Specifically. Are you an ally to this woman or are you not? There is no neutral ground in these situations. Silence is a choice. It protects someone. Be clear about who.
And for studio owners, teachers, community leaders: accountability is also structural. It is having a non-compete that is enforceable and enforced. It is knowing the difference between generosity and access, and being discerning about who you give access to. It is understanding that the person you mentor has an extraordinary amount of reach into the community you have built, and that this is not a small thing to extend casually. It is trusting your instincts about people, even when — especially when — everyone else is charmed.
To the Woman Who Has a Quiet Feeling
You don’t need a dramatic event. You don’t need proof that would hold up in court. You don’t need to have experienced the worst version of what this person is capable of before you are allowed to trust what you are feeling.
The confusion is not evidence that nothing happened. Confusion is often the first signal that something is wrong — that the story you’ve been given and the reality you’re experiencing don’t quite align. Your nervous system knows. It has been trying to tell you.
The shame is not yours. It was never yours. A person who has been carefully cultivated to feel chosen, seen, and deeply valued does not easily accept that the cultivation was strategic. The shame of having been deceived – of having defended someone who did not deserve your defense, of having taken this long – is the heaviest and most unjust part of this. It is also not evidence of your failure. It is evidence of how sophisticated the manipulation was. Those are not the same thing.
You are not too sensitive or angry. You are not misreading. You are not failing your practice by naming what you see. The practice — the real one, the one this tradition was actually built on — has a word for what you are being asked to develop: viveka. Discernment. Clear seeing. The ability to distinguish what is real from what has been constructed for you to believe.
Use it. You are allowed to use it.
Your boundaries are not unkind. They are not unspiritual. They are not a failure of compassion. Compassion without discernment is not a virtue — it is a door left open. The most honest thing you can offer anyone, including yourself, is clear seeing followed by clear action.
You are allowed to name what you know.
You are allowed to believe yourself.
And if you have been carrying this quietly, for months or for years, in the particular silence that this kind of experience produces – you are not alone in it. I know that doesn’t fix it. But I want you to know it anyway. The world is moving in a new direction where there are safe people, safe spaces and accountability for actions that cause deep harm. You just have to find your safe spaces and find your voice.
Sending you so much love & a hug,
Aru
P.S. I did a beautiful episode about when trust is broken on the Let’s Talk Yoga podcast and shared sexual harrassment action steps on Instagram as well. Hope this helps.
