Budokon creator and celebrity yoga teacher Cameron Shayne made headlines this weekend when he penned a piece for RebelleSociety on why he thinks it’s okay for you to have sex with your yoga teacher. Shayne admits to sleeping with his students in the past and needless to say, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal.

“As a single male yoga teacher, I have had on more than one occasion engaged in deep and meaningful intimate relationships with a woman I have met either in my class, workshops or in the yoga community,” he says. He also notes that he doesn’t regret any of these sexual relationships, even the ones that ended badly.

Well, some don’t agree with Shayne, stating that because many turn to yoga as a way to heal from a traumatic experience or to find themselves, when a teacher engages in that kind of behavior with students in a vulnerable place, it’s predatory and malicious. 

According to Shayne, the kind of teachers who suddenly find themselves elevated on a platform and surrounded by beautiful people have probably always been nerds and therefore, not sure how to deal with that kind of attention appropriately.

“The majority of all yoga sex scandals involve one or more desperate devotees and a teacher who figures out, maybe for the first time in his or her hopelessly hip-less life, that they can get laid. After all, most of these men and women are conventionally unattractive, socially uncool, religious-oriented geeks, and always have been.”

But he doesn’t just blame the teachers. He says that as students, we need to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.

“The guru/students manipulation — like cocaine — is the symptom of a larger problem; the student’s lack of self worth, identify and voice. Clearly the corrupted guru is a problem, but the student, like the user, is the real disease. This desperate effort to replace an absent father, or experience a feeling of wholeness, or fill some void are the root cause, not the guru. And sadly these women were going to fall prey to some man whether he showed up as the out-of-work freeloading boyfriend, the white-bearded chanting sage, the manipulating boss, or the latest yoga celebrity. This projection of responsibility onto the teaching community to think for their students is only dumbing down the students and furthering them from being self-realized. I will not further dull-down the already diminishing intellectual reputation of the yoga community by suggesting that we need to be regulated.”

You can read Cameron Shayne’s blog at RebelleSociety here. If you want the CliffNotes version, check out this piece from The Frisky.

And we’re dying to know what you think, is it ever okay to get busy with your yoga teacher?