Dear Will Dana,

I would first like to express my long time admiration of Rolling Stone Magazine. I feel the work you all do at Rolling Stone is so rich in preserving a part of our culture and history.  I can remember being a child and always seeing that magazine sticking out of my sisters’ beach bag and yearning for the day I could acquire the reading skills to read it myself.

Well, I am 27 years old now and am certainly capable of doing that. However, I am sorry that I am not writing to Rolling Stone Magazine only in admiration. I have read a story on the recent lawsuit filed against Dahn Yoga and its affiliates. I found it very biased and I am disappointed by Rolling Stone’s decision to publish such an article.

I, myself have been an employee of Dahn Yoga in Boston, MA since April 2007. Two months after beginning practicing I also read negative articles about Dahn Yoga online.  I was so shocked to see these and almost stopped practicing.  However, the benefits I was gaining for my health were so profound that I had to trust my own experience and not that of disgruntled ex-employees and former members.  I had been an athlete at the collegiate level and graduated from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, high honors, with a BS in Community Health Education.  During the time I began Dahn Yoga I was working at the Children’s Hospital in Boston and also researching the countless careers available in my line of study. However, I had yet to find one that really incorporated ‘practicing what you preach’.  What I saw from the instructors at Dahn Yoga (and what I am doing in my current life now) is that being an instructor is not just teaching others to be healthy but it is constantly improving and finding new ways to improve your own health as well.

What I saw from many of the plaintiffs while they were instructors here in Boston is that they simply just didn’t do that.  From my experience with them I was shocked to see how unstable they were.  I saw how Liza and Nina Miller were manipulated by Lucie Vogel. Hearing stories from Nina that Lucie would pressure her to make more money in order to do better than her sister Liza. She spoke to me for countless hours about how much Lucie had hurt her and how she doesn’t know if she could ever recover from that.

To me this lawsuit is just Lucie’s continued manipulation. She will manipulate people whether she works for Dahn Yoga or tries to sue Dahn Yoga. In my opinion, these plaintiffs are suing Dahn Yoga for the things they did while they were here.

The people I work with currently are wonderful, kind hearted people. I can assure you that we are not a cult or simply out for money.  In fact, we really are just hoping that the next media report will be a fair one so that the public can hear our side to and make their own decision.  The plaintiffs claim the Dahn Yoga brainwashed them. This is not the case; but isn’t biased reporting essentially brainwashing the general public. Feeding them only one side and making them think this is the truth is not truly informing the public.

I am sorry that Rolling Stone Magazine did not take a stand here and give the general public a chance to really make their own decisions.  In eight pages you had plenty of room to provide balance and fairness. You have wasted an opportunity to tell a full story, to differentiate yourselves from other publications.  You have even stooped below the level of thatextremely poor article by Glamour.  Unfortunately, Rolling Stone will always mean something different to me now.

Sincerely,

Marielle Christofi,
Assistant Manager
Andover Dahn Yoga Center