Ashtanga Conversations with Kino MacGregor, Greg Nardi, Peg Mulqueen, & Sarah Nelson, moderated by Melissa Matt

The October 28 “Ashtanga Conversations” panel marks the first in a series of community-led conversations about accountability, ethics, and the future of Ashtanga Yoga. We aim to discuss the systemic patterns that allowed harm to occur and explore how to collectively build a safer, more inclusive, and more resilient Ashtanga community. This discussion is about truth-telling, responsibility, and re-envisioning. The goal is to begin to shift the Ashtanga culture from silence and hierarchy toward openness, repair, and shared leadership. We invite panelists to discuss the system of Ashtanga Yoga, lessons from insufficient responses to past experiences of harm and abuse, and connections between past and ongoing allegations of harm and abuse. We feel this discussion of unresolved and ongoing concerns about the system can help the audience understand the importance of a continued conversation, listening to survivors, and a willingness for systemic examination. We hope these initial discussions will create a foundation for future panels that will platform community leaders, experts, and survivors to continue sharing their ideas and experiences. Specifically, the panel discussions operate to: - Acknowledge reality: Naming harm and systemic breakdowns publicly, thus legitimizing experiences that have been denied or minimized. - Reorient values: Shifting the moral center from an emphasis on loyalty to tradition and hierarchy to the prioritization of care, transparency, and shared responsibility. - Model discourse ethics: Demonstrating what honest, non-hierarchical, trauma-informed dialogue looks like. - Invite participation: Opening a pathway for practitioners and independent community leaders, not only senior/authorized teachers, to engage in the co-creation of reform and future systems of accountability.