I Don’t Take Spiritual Advice from Men

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 medi...

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 ...

Record #1: Cult #1, Berkeley, CA Berkeley, 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 Bi...

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 par...

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 inst...

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 r...

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, ...