BRATTLEBORO — Peter Rizzo is 60 years old, a tall, imposing man, well-built but with a gentle style and charisma. He was born in the Bronx, grew up in New Rochelle, and lived in Manhattan for 27 years, where he had a yoga practice for more than a decade. About 14 years ago he relocated to Windham County and founded Bhava Yoga.
For more than an hour one December day in his Bhava Yoga center, a warm and inviting space at 21 Elliot St., he talked, in the presence of his lawyer and with two Commons reporters, sitting on mats in a circle around the floor.
Rizzo was aware of various recent multiple allegations, ranging from injuries to whether he had broken student-teacher boundaries in sexual or romantic ways.
The yoga teacher contextualized the complaints of injury as an unavoidable - and even desirable - outcome of yoga practice.
He also charged that his critics, perhaps motivated by complications with their personal family relationships, are deliberately making false accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior.
And Rizzo also pointed out that many of those students who have come forward to tell their own stories are themselves yoga teachers, and he suggested that they are motivated by professional jealousy or issues of business competition.
On loving yoga and the hating of haters
Rizzo said that a former student once asked him, “Peter, what is it with you? People either love you or hate you. Why is that?”
“I said, well, I think my teaching is about love,” Rizzo said. “I love my students, and I really do. I love people who practice yoga. I love the effort they put into it. I think it is the most beautiful thing in the world, and it makes me cry. And I love it. I don't think I do anything to make people hate me.”
Rizzo categorically and emphatically rejects any accusations of inappropriate sexual activity in his practice.
“There are teachers in this town who have taken my class many, many times - hundreds of times - and they have never seen an incidence of sexual assault,” Rizzo said. “They've not seen one, and yet they know that in this culture, teachers get in trouble for sexual impropriety and that's the main way they get in trouble.”
“And so that's how [accusers] finger somebody - if you are wanting to hurt somebody you would say, 'Oh, he did this,'” Rizzo said. “And it has to do with sexuality, and sex is very interesting in people. I mean, most people like sex.”
“Bring me a person who says I was fondling someone and I'll talk to them. I will be accountable to anybody - I really will be,” Rizzo said.
In the course of the hour-long interview, Rizzo often used the word “haters” and talked about “a coalition of 30 women” who were making allegations and attacking him. It was not clear whether he was referring to the Woman's Action Team, but that network has strongly supported Rizzo's accusers.
“I'm not doing anything to make somebody hate me,” Rizzo said. “If somebody hates me, my take on it is that they are haters.”
“What am I doing exactly? I'm teaching a yoga class,” he said. “You don't have to take it. You don't have to like it. I actually don't even care if someone doesn't like my class, because I have been teaching yoga for 25 years and I know there are so many different kinds of yoga out there. All these different kinds, for people who need different kinds of yoga. You can't make everyone happy.”
“One reason it is really strange to me that there are allegations against me or that I am abusing people in class is that I am always visible to the students - to somebody,” he said. “I am never invisible.”
“I think every human on this planet is carrying terrible pain - or some pain - I'll speak for myself, I have some terrible pain,” he said, laughing. “But you know ... pain processed through love becomes medicine, and that's my approach to teaching, we're taking our pain, we're going inside it.”
“I call it full-strength yoga,” he said. “It's very, very strong. If you have feelings inside your body, you're going to feel them when you take my classes. You might hate that. You might hate that guy who did that to you. You know, 'that guy who made me feel all this horrible shit I didn't want to feel.'”
“Maybe that's it,” he said, referring to the criticism of his practice. “I don't know. A lot of people take my class once and never come back, and that's fine. And other people - I have had steady students for 10 years or more.”
Energy and intensity - and inevitable injury
Despite the women's steadfast and multiple assertions of abuse in the yoga classroom, others suggest, some emphatically, that Rizzo is a gifted yoga teacher whose style and intensity may be too much for some people.
“People get injured practicing yoga,” said Rizzo. I don't feel that you can do any kind of energetic practice without eventually coming down with some kind of injury. Injuries happen.”
“These are people who are asking in a sense for immortality, or a result that they would never be unhappy about,” he said. “It's tremendously immature and unrealistic.”
“To expect to undertake any serious spiritual endeavor without having setbacks is tremendously immature,” said Rizzo. “Or to say that I will only accept outcomes that I prefer and I will not accept outcomes that I do not prefer - that is tremendously immature, because a large part of yoga is about getting beyond your preferences.”
“I don't like it when people get injured,” he said. “I don't ever try to injure anyone intentionally. I have never had a bad intent toward any student in my life. I can't even imagine what that would be like.”
“This is my thinking about it and this is what I have adopted: I believe injury is actually valuable, because it teaches you how not to be injured,” he said.
During the interview, Rizzo pointed out the Yoga tenets that are posted on the wall of his clinic, the first of which is Ahimsa - non-harm or non-violence. A number of women contend that they experienced harm in that space, mainly through his assists.
“An assist would typically be hands-on,” said Rizzo. “It could be feet-on. A yoga teacher will use what they have available to help you to perhaps have the full experience of the posture.”
“If a student were to ask me if injury is avoidable in this room, I would say maybe, maybe not,” he said. “It depends on your personality. But injuries happen. They do happen.”
“As far as the sex goes - I don't know if I really answered that with you,” he said, and then paused and breathed, before resuming. “That's how you get a yoga teacher in trouble.”
“If you want to get the guy in trouble - [who] is really dad - if you want to fuck dad over,” he said, “then just say he did something improper, and then he's fucking screwed, and what are you going to say about it?”
Rizzo was asked if he had any regrets.
“Yes,” he said. “Moving here.”
“I wish I didn't live in such a small town,” he said. “It's mean. It's really mean. I'm not being treated as a human being. I know I need to bring compassion to the people who hate me.
“But it's a project, and it's going to take some time.”