I Don’t Take Spiritual Advice from Men

A video went viral this week. A woman said: if I handed you a dozen donuts and told you one was full of shit, you would avoid all of them. She's right. And I want to go further.

This episode is about Cornell University, where a 20 year old woman was assaulted by seven fraternity members and some of them were offered the option to write an essay as punishment. It's about Jivamukti Paris, where a survivor trained for over 800 hours and was asked to stay silent to protect the studio. It's about the word misandry — what it actually means, why it's a trap, and why I'm stepping out of it.

Women are not angry enough. This is the case for why wariness is not hatred. It is pattern recognition. It is what happens when a system fails you so completely that caution becomes wisdom.

This is also the first episode of a new chapter. I Don't Take Spiritual Advice From Men is moving to Substack. The podcast will always be free. But if this episode landed for you, here is what paid subscribers get every month:

The full Clinician's Corner — peer reviewed research and clinical analysis on the wellness trends, myths, and cultural narratives that affect your body and your practice. This month: cortisol washing, why you cannot supplement your way out of a nervous system problem, and what Ayurveda actually says about stress that the supplement industry doesn't want you to know.

20% off all courses — currently The Inner Ecosystem, a two hour workshop on your gut, nervous system, and microbiome, and Good Intentions Are Not Enough, a 38 minute ethical literacy class for yoga teachers and students.

First access to new workshops before they open to the public.

The newsletter in full — The Feature, Clinician's Corner, and What's Going On, every month.

Ten dollars a month. One hundred a year. First issue October 6th.

magnoliazuniga.substack.com

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Last week the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Monsanto. A Missouri farmer named John Durnell developed cancer after decades of exposure to Roundup. A jury gave him over a million dollars. The Supreme Court took it back. The Trump administration filed a brief on Monsanto's side.

MAHA protesters were outside the court in April opposing this exact ruling. The administration they put in power was inside arguing the other way.

This episode is about that. But it is also about something older and more specific, about where the language Make America Healthy Again is using actually comes from, what the tradition it has borrowed from actually says, and why that tradition would have nothing to do with the politics it has been attached to.

Make America Healthy Again gets some things right. Ultra-processed food is killing people. The relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory bodies is compromised. Chronic illness in children is rising and the standard medical response has been inadequate. These are legitimate concerns. Ayurveda has been naming them for thousands of years.

Ayurveda survived colonization. It survived suppression. It survived centuries of being dismissed by the same Western medical establishment that MAHA now claims to be disrupting. It does not need a political movement to legitimize it. And it does not belong to one. Those of us who work within this tradition have a responsibility to say that clearly, not as a political statement, but as a matter of accuracy. This is not their language to borrow. A full transcript is available below.

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

I grew up watching my grandmother feed nine kids. Frantic, funny, explosive, beautiful, and tired. All of it at once, all day long. I watched her and made a vow: I am never being that woman.

By thirty that vow had become embarrassing. I had a college education, a yoga practice, an Ayurvedic framework, and I could not feed myself. I learned to cook in India, from a woman who had zero patience for my relationship to the kitchen as a political statement. She just cooked. She knew what her body needed. She fed people from fullness, not obligation. Something cracked open watching her.

That crack is what this month is about.

In my practice I see women doing everything right (supplements organized, meal prep done, macros or prana tracked with extraordinary precision) who are profoundly disconnected from their bodies. Meal prep is not a relationship with food. It is food administration. It is logistics. And I am not saying it is bad. I am saying it is not the same thing as nourishment, and we have gotten very comfortable confusing the two.

To the woman for whom meal prep is infrastructure, not aesthetic (the mother up at five, working by seven, forty five minutes between school pickup and bedtime) I see you. I am not asking you to dismantle the one system keeping you functional. But I am asking you one question: when you are prepping on Sunday, are you present? Is there any pleasure in it? Or is it a second job? Logistics with a cutting board?

Because those are two completely different experiences happening in the same kitchen.

Your exhaustion is not an accident. It is a managed condition. And calling the coping strategy the cure is not the answer.

There is a feminist argument that the kitchen is a cage, and that argument has roots. But when second-wave feminism said get out of the kitchen, it accepted the patriarchal premise that the kitchen is a low place. And who stepped into that vacuum? The food industry. The supplement industry. The wellness complex. A woman with no relationship to her own food is a perfect consumer. The feminist rejection of cooking was, structurally, a gift to the market.

Tradwives look like the opposite move. But a tradwife in 2025 has brand deals, a Substack, a following, and more autonomy than most of the women watching her. She is not submitting to anything except the content calendar. She is selling a fantasy of the kitchen to women who will live that reality without the lighting, the income, or the exit option.

Both moves are still letting the assignment set the terms.

Sovereignty looks different. It looks like: I decide what my relationship to my own nourishment is. No performance. No rejection. No brand deal required.

You cannot supplement your way out of dissociation. You cannot meal prep your way back into your body.

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Some of the most submissive males I've ever met are yoga males. But they are only submissive to other males.

In March 2026, CNN published a months long investigation into a hidden network of men coordinating online to drug their wives to sleep, rape them, and film it. A French lawmaker called these networks online rape academies.

I made a short video on Instagram saying yoga bros and those men are the same. In this episode I explain exactly what I mean by that.

We cover:

• Why the performance of softness is not safety 
• What yoga males actually do with other males
• The private conversation that costs nothing and changes nothing
• Why the performance of safety functions as a perceptual weapon against women's own discernment
• Why submissive males are structurally incapable of doing accountability work

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

"Not All Yoga!" "I'm not lineage-based." "I never studied with a guru."

I keep hearing this. And every time, I think...this is "Not All Men!"

In this episode, I break down how all modern Western yoga (whether you were ever in a lineage or not) was built through exploitation/survivors. 

-The cultural legitimacy. 

-The lack of regulation. 

-The wellness industrial complex. 

-The devotional residue. 

And what it means that everyone teaching today inherited that structure.

This isn't just about yoga. It's about how structural complicity works everywhere, and whether we're willing to acknowledge what we inherited.

**In the episode I say 'Ancient wisdom,' in quotes because what's being transmitted in most yoga teacher trainings has very little to do with actual wisdom traditions and a lot to do with branding.

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

What if the wellness industry's most beloved and famous names can't actually help you? In this episode, Mags breaks down why universal appeal and real transformation are structurally incompatible...and why that's not just a business problem. 

From Oprah, Joe Dispenza, etc to your popular neighborhood yoga studio, she examines how scaling inspiration requires silence on the things that matter most: power, abuse, systemic harm, genocide, geopolitics. 

If nobody's ever upset with you, or confused/challenged by what you're saying, you're not saying anything real. 

This episode is for the people who are ready to stop being "almost healed".

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

I've been off social media for a while. I came back after seeing what's been happening in Minneapolis and around the country. I've been watching yoga and spiritual spaces scramble for certainty through slogans.

"Yoga is my resistance." "Yoga is not resistance." "Rest is my resistance." "If your spirituality doesn't include anger, you're bypassing."

This episode isn't about picking the right slogan. It's about what gets lost when slogans replace thinking and what we actually need to be doing right now.

In this episode:

• Why regulation is infrastructure for resistance, not resistance itself
• The bipartisan history of mass detention: from Clinton-Bush-Biden-Trump
• How Israeli military tactics and surveillance technology were imported to use on immigrant, Black, Brown, and Muslim communities
• The difference between performative protests and disruptive action
• What liberal proximity panic looks like and why it matters 
• Concrete organizing steps you can take right now

Resources for Albuquerque:

• Text ABQMIGRA or ABQICE to 58910 to report raids
• New Mexico Immigrant Law Center: 505-247-1023 | nmilc.org
• Santa Fe Dreamers Project: 505-490-2789
• Mexican Consulate: 505-270-7009
• Find detained adults: locator.ice.gov/odls
• Find detained children: 1-800-203-7001

If we want to resist what's happening, actually resist, we need less certainty and more capacity. Less performance and more discernment. Less sloganizing and more thinking together.

And we need to act. Not eventually. Now.

At one point I say "pregnancy" instead of "presidency" a Freudian slip about what the administration is birthing, maybe. Either way, it stays.

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Yoga spends a lot of time talking about intention, healing, and self-awareness, but very little time talking honestly about power.

In this episode, Magnolia Zuniga explores why harm in yoga spaces doesn’t usually come from “bad people,” but from unexamined hierarchy, compromised consent, and a lack of ethical training. She explains why good intentions aren’t enough, why ethics is a skill rather than a personality trait, and why so many students and teachers are taught to doubt themselves instead of evaluate structures clearly.

This is not an expose and it’s not a call out. It’s a conversation about ethical literacy, the ability to recognize power, consent, extraction, and exit safety in yoga education and teaching spaces.

If you’ve ever felt that something was off in a yoga environment but couldn’t quite name it, this episode offers language, clarity, and discernment, without telling you what to think.

Magnolia also briefly shares why she created her course Ethical Literacy for Yoga Teachers and Students for those who want to go deeper.

https://magnolia-zuniga-s-school.teachable.com/purchase?product_id=6598367

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains detailed, explicit accounts of sexual assault in a yoga context.

In this episode, I tell the story of my first trip to Mysore, India to study with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois—the founder of Ashtanga yoga and a man revered by thousands of practitioners worldwide.

What I witnessed in that shala wasn't hidden. It wasn't secret. It was normalized. Women were being sexually assaulted during "adjustments" while dozens of students watched. And the most devastating part? Some of them called it healing.

This is about what happens when you see abuse clearly and stay anyway. About how I convinced myself that confronting one man made me empowered, when really I'd just learned how to function inside a violent system. About the decades  that followed, and why it took decades to understand what I'd actually done.

This is Part Two of a longer project documenting the three high-control spiritual environments I've been part of over thirty years. I'm not here to reform these systems. I'm here to document how they work.

ABOUT MAGS: Clinical Ayurvedic Specialist, former certified Ashtanga teacher (one of only 20 women worldwide), and founder of ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I walked away from the Ashtanga community in 2017 on principle and now run a clinical Ayurveda practice and create content analyzing power structures in yoga and wellness communities.

FIND MY WORK: 

Website: https://magnoliazuniga.com/ 

YouTube: Subscribe for clinical guidance without wellness platitudes

https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo?app=desktop

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Record #1: Cult #1, Berkeley, CA

Berkeley, 2001. I was twenty-something, restless, and aching for spiritual direction when I drove eight hours through the night to knock on a tantric yoga teacher's door. He told me I needed to do something extraordinary to prove my devotion. So I showed up in the fog at midnight.

This is the record of a tantric yoga community in the Berkeley Hills led by a teacher who claimed lineage with Swami Satyananda Saraswati and Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati at the Bihar School of Yoga in India—gurus who had never heard of him.

It was a community where beautiful, devoted women enforced the hierarchy. Where silence was considered devotion. Where questioning was spiritual immaturity. Where sexual abuse was disguised as sacred tantric "practice."

I thought I was choosing spiritual freedom and transformation. I was choosing erasure.

This is my origin story—why I recognize cult patterns and manipulation in yoga communities so clearly now. Why I can't be gaslit by institutional yoga's accountability theater. Why I understood exactly what was happening when abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public. Why I left Ashtanga yoga when so many others couldn't.

Years later, the truth emerged: the teacher had been raping one of his students for years. There were lawsuits. Whispers of women drugged. A pregnant woman. He eventually fled to Thailand.

Had I pleased him with the fish dinner I cooked that night, I would have lived in that house. I would have shared her fate.

I walked in hungry. I left dangerous.

This is Record #1: Cult #1

Content Warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of sexual coercion, spiritual manipulation, and abuse within a tantric yoga community. Please take care of yourself while listening.

#yogacult #tantricyogaabuse #berkeleyyoga #spiritualabuse #cultrecovery #yogateachertraining #ashtangayoga #pattabhijois #yogaaccountability #guruabuse #sexualabuseinyoga #yogacommunityredflags

Next Episode: Record #2: Cult #2, Mysore, India

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo