I Don’t Take Spiritual Advice from Men

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 malesThe private conversation that costs nothing and changes nothingWhy the performance of safety functions as a perceptual weapon against women's own discernmentWhy submissive males are structurally incapable of doing accountability workAbout 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 itselfThe bipartisan history of mass detention: from Clinton-Bush-Biden-TrumpHow Israeli military tactics and surveillance technology were imported to use on immigrant, Black, Brown, and Muslim communitiesThe difference between performative protests and disruptive actionWhat liberal proximity panic looks like and why it matters Concrete organizing steps you can take right nowResources for Albuquerque:Text ABQMIGRA or ABQICE to 58910 to report raidsNew Mexico Immigrant Law Center: 505-247-1023 | nmilc.orgSanta Fe Dreamers Project: 505-490-2789Mexican Consulate: 505-270-7009Find detained adults: locator.ice.gov/odlsFind detained children: 1-800-203-7001If 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=6598367About 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 platitudeshttps://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo?app=desktopAbout 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, CABerkeley, 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 #1Content 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 #yogacommunityredflagsNext Episode: Record #2: Cult #2, Mysore, IndiaAbout 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

We’re told that the goal of a “good life” is balance. Balance between work and family, activism and self-care, health and relationships. But what if balance isn’t real? What if the myth of the balanced woman is actually a trap designed to keep us exhausted, ashamed, and profitable to a system that was never built to support us?In this episode of Spiritual Autopsy, I unpack how “balance” has been sold as control: eat perfectly, work out perfectly, manage your stress, stay calm, never tip too far. Through the lens of Ayurveda, I explore why balance isn’t a static state but a living relationship with change. Change that moves with seasons, hormones, emotions, and cycles.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

In this opening episode of Spiritual Autopsy, I lay down the foundation: why I no longer takes spiritual advice from men. Drawing from decades of experience as a Clinical Ayurvedic Practitioner and long time yoga teacher, I unpack how systems of “truth” often erase women’s bodies, needs, and realities in the name of transcendence.I weave personal story with scientific research, challenging the male-defined standards of healing, discipline, and surrender that have dominated spiritual and medical frameworks.This is the beginning of a different kind of spiritual path.The title and the core premise of this show came from watching one video by Britt Hartley, who observed that men and women come to spirituality from fundamentally different places...men seeking transcendence, women finding their way to themselves. While she focuses on religious trauma and deconstructing, i applied this to yoga and wellness. This podcast is what happened when I took that observation into thirty years of yoga cultureAbout 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