8.20.26 I HATE DROVE COMMUNITY YOGA UNDERGROUND. SIX YEARS LATER, WE CHOOSE OPENNESS AGAIN.

In 2020, a racist and sexist online attack drove a community built around openness out of public view. Six years later, community yoga is choosing greater openness.

On the evening of April 22, 2020, people gathered in front of their computers for something the first weeks of the pandemic had made suddenly precious: community connection. That night, we came together to breathe, move, and feel some measure of togetherness in a time defined by uncertainty and isolation.

Then the haters arrived. Loud music shook our speakers. Racist and sexist slurs cut through the noise. Pornographic images flooded our screens. Hundreds of people stormed a gathering that, moments earlier, had offered refuge.

Then came the question.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

Again.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

Again.

And again.

The attackers synchronized the question with a rotating barrage of violent language and obscene images.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

Mrs. Varner was me. And I had no idea how they knew my name. I wasn't even teaching yoga that evening. My friend Andrea Brown was leading the movement and mindfulness practice. At the time, five of us rotated facilitating free Wednesday evening yoga sessions. Andrea and I happened to be in the same physical space that night. She guided the practice. I handled the technology.

I thought I had secured the meeting. A password was required. A waiting room was enabled. Mute controls were turned on.

None of it mattered.

As the abuse continued, I fought for control of the meeting. Clicking through commands, I tried to silence the haters, remove them, disable their access, shut everything down. They moved faster me. The music kept blasting. The slurs kept coming. Pornography kept filling the screens.

And over it all, the question:

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

Finally, after many attempts, the “End Meeting” command worked. The voices disappeared. The screen went dark. The repeating question stopped.

Andrea and I had a decision to make. We could call it a night. No one would have questioned that move. Or we could try again. We chose to try again.

I created a new meeting and sent the link privately to our family, friends, and regular practitioners who had just experienced the attack. We returned. We breathed. We moved. We recovered some of the connection the haters had ripped apart.

For about ten minutes, it worked. Then they found us again. This time, the attack was worse.

Violent sexual images and videos covered the screens. Masked faces appeared and disappeared. Noisy voices piled on top of one another in a torrent of racist abuse. The hate came rushing back into the room.

And so did the question.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

I went back to the controls. Mute. Remove. Disable. End Meeting. Nothing worked. The controls had frozen. No matter how many times I clicked, I could not end the meeting for everyone. Somehow, the attackers had followed us into the new space and seized control of it. And whoever was behind the masks knew I was trying to stop them and failing.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to stop the haters who had somehow taken control of the technology connecting us. I watched everyone in that meeting endure something I had invited them into, and I felt sick about it. I felt angry and painfully naive.

Until that night, I had thought of openness almost entirely as a virtue. Open the door. Invite people in. Remove the price of admission. Don't decide who belongs before they arrive. Trust that when you offer something freely, people will recognize the spirit of the offering and meet it with some measure of care.

That view wasn't incidental to community yoga. It was the point.

We offered yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices for free because we didn't want money deciding who could participate. We wanted people from different neighborhoods, generations, backgrounds and circumstances to enter without first having to prove they belonged. We kept the door open on purpose.

Then someone used the open door to hurt us. The people who targeted us didn't have to break in. They entered through an opening we had deliberately created. They took the quality I valued most about community - the invitation itself - and turned it into a weapon against us.

That broke my heart. And it left me with the question: “What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

For a long time afterward, I heard variations of this question everywhere.

What are you going to do when an open door admits hatred?

What are you going to do when welcome becomes a vulnerability?

What are you going to do when the very thing that makes community possible also makes it easier to harm?

I didn't have good answers.

I did what fear often pushes us to do. I made things smaller. I became careful about who could find us. I guarded invitations. I shared information selectively. I stopped announcing gatherings as freely. I paid attention to who knew what, when they knew it, and how they had found out.

We didn't stop practicing together. We didn't stop building relationships. But we did go underground.

For a while, retreat felt like wisdom. We had learned something brutal about vulnerability, and protecting the community seemed like the responsible response. But protection has consequences too. Over time, we had to confront another truth: protecting the community made it harder to find.

I see the cost of that decision now in the faces of people who walk through our doors for the first time. They learn that we have been offering yoga freely for over eight years, and disbelief often follows: “How did I not know this was here? You've been doing this all this time? Yoga is really free?”

Again and again, people express to me how they had no idea Community Yoga Center existed. They didn't know there was a place where they could learn and practice yoga without buying a membership, choosing a package, or determining whether they could afford to return next week. Those conversations stay with me. Because every “I wish I had known about this sooner” reveals both sides of the bargain we made six years ago.

Our smallness protected us from something. It also kept us from someone. Someone looking for community. Someone who couldn't afford typical yoga studio pricing. Someone who assumed yoga wasn't meant for them. Someone lonely. Someone curious. Someone who might have walked through our doors years earlier if only they had known the doors existed.

That is what I didn't fully understand in 2020. There is a cost to being cautious. The people inside pay it when their world grows smaller. And the people outside pay it too, because they never get the chance to discover that a welcoming place was waiting for them.

Six years later, Community Yoga Center is choosing greater openness again. That doesn't mean returning to who and how we were before April 22, 2020. We can't. We know something now that we didn't know then. Open doors carry risk. Trust creates vulnerability. Welcoming people means accepting the possibility that someone will abuse the welcome.

Openness cannot mean pretending danger doesn't exist. It cannot mean confusing accessibility with the absence of boundaries. It cannot require us to sacrifice the safety or dignity of the people already in the room. We know better now. But knowing better does not have to mean closing ourselves off. 

As a collective, we have shared agreements about how we share space and how we treat one another. We pay attention to who is in the room, who needs support, and who is responsible for responding when something doesn't feel right. These protections are not mine. They belong to the collective. They come from what we have learned together about what it takes to co-create a space where people can arrive as they are and also be part of a larger community.

“What are you going to do, Mrs. Varner?”

For six years, that question has followed me. But it doesn't haunt me in quite the same way anymore. The people who asked it that night meant it as a taunt. For years, I think I answered them by retreating. Now I hear the question differently answer.

What are we going to do?

WE are going to continue taking care of this place together - offering the practices freely - welcome people we haven't met yet. WE are going to continue safeguards without building walls.

Because closing ourselves off carries risks of its own. Close the circle tightly enough, and eventually the people who need it cannot get in. Close it tighter still, and eventually there is no meaningful circle left.

The doors are open.

Come on in.