36: Guru Jagat’s Pandemic Brandwash (w/Philip Deslippe & Stacie Stukin)
What happens when a charismatic yogalebrity rises to prominence in LA’s fashion and wellness scene, gets exposed as an inheritor of a notorious cult, and then gets sideswiped by a pandemic? Meet Katie Griggs, aka “Guru Jagat,” who, instead of reassessing her channelled “downloads” from the charlatan rapist Yogi Bhajan and lending a hand to public health, has chosen to boost her online game with COVID contrarianism and by platforming David Icke.Our guests this week are Philip Deslippe and journalist Stacie Stukin. Philip’s penetrating and bulletproof research into the dodgy history of Kundalini Yoga and its criminal founder Yogi Bhajan shook the modern yoga world in 2012. Stacie’s 2020 LA Magazine feature investigation into Kundalini corruption and abuse gathered decades of buried evidence. Together they paint a lucid, non-sensationalized picture of how a high-demand religious group navigates new opportunities for manipulation.The larger picture is that COVID has been a challenge for the brick-and-mortar assets of cults, which, like every other business, rely on pedestrian traffic and the “retail space” of ritual conversion. But in other ways, COVID is the best thing that could have happened to cults. Kundalini Yoga was built on promising perfect health, the conversion of fear into love, and a golden age free from atheistic biotech. For people like Griggs—and her ex-con mentor Harijiwan—COVID is an opportunity to hide dirty laundry and market the same empty promises with heightened panic and passion.Show Notes“From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga” for Sikh Formations by Philip Deslippe (2012)“Yogi Bhajan Turned an L.A. Yoga Studio into a Juggernaut, and Left Two Generations of Followers Reeling from Alleged Abuse” by Stacie Stukin for Los Angeles Magazine (2020)“Yogi Bhajan, yoga guru and founder of 3HO, ‘more likely than not’ sexually abused followers, says report” by Philip Deslippe and Stacie Stukin for Religion News Service (2020)Text of Katherine Felt’s 1986 lawsuit against Bhajan for assault, battery, false imprisonment and moreText of Pamela Dyson’s 1986 lawsuit against Bhajan for assault, battery, false imprisonment and more“Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan” archived hereBe Scofield’s
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Episode 36, Guru Jagat's Pandemic Brandwash What happens when a charismatic yoga-lebrity rises to prominence in LA's fashion and wellness scene, gets exposed as an inheritor of a notorious cult, and then gets sideswiped?
by a pandemic.
Meet Katie Griggs, aka Guru Jagat, who instead of reassessing her channeled downloads from the charlatan rapist Yogi Bhajan and lending a hand to public health, has chosen to boost her online game with COVID contrarianism and by platforming David Icke.
Our guests this week are Philip Deeslip, And journalist Stacy Stukin.
Philip's penetrating and bulletproof research into dodgy history of kundalini yoga and its criminal founder Yogi Bhajan shook the modern yoga world in 2012.
Stacy's 2020 LA Magazine feature investigation into kundalini corruption and abuse gathered decades of buried evidence.
Together, they paint a lucid, non-sensationalized picture of how a high-demand religious group navigates new opportunities for manipulation.
The larger picture is that COVID has been a challenge for the brick-and-mortar assets of cults, which, like every other business, rely on pedestrian traffic and the retail space of ritual conversion.
But in other ways, COVID is the best thing that could have happened to cults.
Kundalini Yoga was built on promising perfect health, the conversion of fear into love and a golden age free from atheistic biotech.
For people like Griggs and her ex-con mentor Hari Jiwan, COVID is an opportunity to hide dirty laundry and market the same empty promises with heightened panic and passion.
Shortly before moving to Los Angeles, a good friend of mine, who I had met during my freshman year of college, pulled me aside at my going away party.
Remember, he said, people in LA are used to taking directions.
It was one of those offhand sarcastic comments that we long shared, the kind of thought whose power resides in the fact that there's a bit of truth to it.
Now, of course, Los Angeles is not a monolith.
We are actually a very racially diverse city, 29% white, 10% black, 49% Latino, and 12% Asian, give or take.
So there's every occupation imaginable here.
But it is the city that houses Hollywood, and aspiring actors, comedians, and entertainers have long flocked to the city.
And it is also a place where the proverbial struggling actor is more likely to have a side hustle as a yoga instructor than a waiter.
Everywhere you turn, people are looking for direction.
They're looking for instruction.
And that sentiment has created a city filled with people ripe for exploitation by charismatic, and sometimes not even that charismatic, cult leaders.
Now I'm not sure anyone sets out to be a cult leader, but I'm certain that some people love adoration, and adoration is addictive.
It's easy to get high on your own supply.
And there are no greater means for getting high without substances than kundalini yoga.
Now, no yoga practice made me feel the way that Kundalini did.
I found it early in my own practice.
In fact, my friend who brought me to my first Kundalini class happened to teach at the studio I would eventually attend for my own yoga teacher training.
And years later, I taught workshops at Golden Bridge in New York City.
Personally, I like to flow much more than wave my arms in the air for an hour, and there aren't as many musical styles that I loathe as much as what I heard in Kundalini classes.
But I get the power of the practice, and that too can be addictive.
And so a few weeks ago, Matthew asked about Kundalini in Los Angeles, which has been a sort of mecca for this lifestyle.
And while I cannot profess to understand the culture deeply, a number of my friends teach it here, and I know even more people who practice it.
And two common threads are that a lot of actors and entertainers love the rigors of the practice, and it also appeals to former drug addicts.
Now, there's this idea that's been explored by scholars like Wendy Donninger that the Kriyas, those cleansing exercises that comprise the Kundalini Canon, were developed in India when supplies of Soma, or psychedelic mushroom tea, became scarce.
And I know that that's still up for debate, but it's pretty solid that there was some psychedelic juice going on in there.
So, when reading the literature, Soma devotees were flying through the universe, and when the Soma disappears in the texts, they continue to fly only through intense breathing exercises, using their physiology to provide the psychedelic experience that can no longer be achieved through external means.
Now again, it's only a theory, but there is something there, and we've seen it in other cultures outside of India as well.
So, it also makes sense that former drug addicts would seek out a practice that provides them with a similar form of euphoria.
And that is not a criticism at all.
My old friend, the deceased DJ Chubby Sabah, once told me while we were on tour together, everyone is addicted to something.
Better yoga than crack.
And he was being funny, but he's also, again, there's some truth there.
There are fine lines between habits, dependence, and addiction.
But the reality is we all create patterns and stick with them.
And as we know from studies on patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the only way to successfully stop addictive behavior is to replace the habit with another habit.
Now, I'm not claiming that all kundalini yogis begin their practice to overcome addiction, but compared to other forms of yoga, there's an outsized community there.
And so, as with any emergent phenomenon, a perfect storm of factors combine to create the conditions for an ancient technology, which is the nonsensical phrase that Guru Jagat painted on the window of her Venice studio, to penetrate and blossom in a culture.
Now, LA is really no different than other cities.
It's only supersized.
Everything Hollywood churns out is meant to reflect life, only an aspirational life that is impossible for all but a very few people.
The spiritual practices that root in such a culture are going to reflect the culture that already exists.
We like to pretend that spirituality transforms cultures, but at best it holds up a mirror.
And that mirror will reflect back different things depending on the individual.
So, and again, being completely honest, for some people, kundalini is a deeply personal practice that has transformed their lives, and their mirror reflects that.
But little in Los Angeles is done for the individual.
There's not a beach or mountaintop here that hasn't been exploited by thousands of yoga postures riddled with product placement and roomy quotes on Instagram.
And so a yoga that purports to be extraordinarily spiritual, as in 3HO's white tantric practice pulled straight from prosperity theology and their annual sub-summer solstice sadhana festival, it's a lot of S's, that includes conscious projection, and I'm sure we'll get into a little bit of that with our discussion.
It's wide open for spiritual abuse, as we're going to hear during this episode.
And a city like Los Angeles, filled with aspirational seekers looking for direction, makes for a perfect ground zero for such cults to grow.
Derek, what do you think specifically was so exhilarating about Kundalini Yoga for you when you first bumped into it?
The effects on my nervous system.
There was nothing that I did.
I mean, when you wave your hands for an hour while you're chanting in a group environment, it's the adrenaline rush.
I truly get it because for hours afterwards, I would feel like I was buzzing.
Do you think you're also putting yourself into a kind of trance-induced altered state through all of that repetitive movement and breath such that you're just in a different place than you were when you started?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I always thought of it as like the Gnawa rituals in Morocco where they play overnight and the music is going and it's for the dancer to facilitate trance and it's the repetition of the music combined with the consistent movement that creates the trance states where people completely lose control of identity and we can talk about what they're channeling as we've talked about before, but it is that physiological state of repetition that gets them focused and put into a flow state basically.
Yeah, and as you were saying last time, right, that what we know about psychedelics is it's actually the decrease in activity in certain brain regions that start to create that, for some people, right, people who are predisposed, I would include myself in that group, the wonderful sense of disorientation and losing boundaries on sense of self, on, you know, body maps, on, you know, where your mind would normally get fixated into this more sort of expansive trippy state.
Was there also, Derek, a sense of contact high that you were sort of making eye contact and emotional contact with the people around you and that there was a feedback loop in the room?
I wouldn't say eye contact.
I've done yoga practices where you've sat across from someone and stared into their eyes for long periods and I never liked that.
That was one mode that I just didn't get it.
It didn't hit me in that way.
But being around people, one example too is I used to DJ something called trance dances where everyone would be blindfolded.
And I've taken them, I've been in them, and I've also DJ'd them.
And there is something called, first of all, group flow, which I've mentioned before, which is people's, their brainwaves synchronize, and it usually has to do with music, and musicians performing together, this happens too, and it's a well-studied phenomenon.
And it also happens in groups, where everything syncs, and you feel a part of that.
So on that level, I definitely felt a a part of people.
And when you loosen the strictures of your ego and you're able to not worry about what you look like, what you're wearing, all of those things, it's a very moving experience.
Well, and this is what's so powerful about ecstatic dance.
And these are the moments I know you relate, where as a DJ, you really feel like something is clicking, right?
Where the whole room just goes into that entrained sort of place.
But I wanted to come back to what you said about the, you know, perhaps the origins in terms of the yogic history.
I've seen both in Feuerstein, and then is it Philip Ott who wrote Persephone's Quest?
Oh, okay.
I feel like there's several reference points for this idea that Soma was coming from the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, and that as the Aryan invaders came in, the people who were writing these yogic texts and engaging these practices had to sort of move further south, away from the areas where the mushroom grew, and so had to experiment with other ways of getting high.
Exactly.
They moved away from the areas and they also developed, this was the Harappan civilization, so they started moving into cities, whereas they were much more in the country.
I mean, compared to our cities, it's much different, but yes, exactly.
They were away from those areas.
You know, I wanted to bring up this anecdotal relationship between Kundalini Yoga practice and communities and folks with addiction histories.
I find that pretty interesting.
The same thing is said about and within the Ashtanga Yoga community and sometimes it's said with a note of pride that, you know, I've Kind of, I've transitioned from an impure obsession to something that's, you know, quite functional and it's adaptive.
But I always wonder whether we are seeing a correlation between physical intensity in practice, the peak experiences that that intensity generates, and addiction cycles themselves.
That there seems to be like a wheel there that's rolling and rolling.
First off, my feeling on addiction is if you're addicted to something that is harming you and harming your family and community and you can move to something that's better, go for it.
I'm all for any sort of intervention that works.
That's why I'm big on psychedelic therapy, for example, that could help with that.
I'm huge on that.
I have noticed in some people who I know who have been addicted, exactly the momentum with which they embrace their new addiction can be equally debilitating in different ways.
And is there a way, Matthew, in which perhaps we can see practices that do put people into powerful altered states and that can mimic other kinds of addictive processes are then very fertile ground for cultish manipulation?
Well, you know, my years in studying Ashtanga Yoga and researching institutional abuse in it brought up this very common theme, which was that the intensity of the physical practice pretty much left everybody in pain all of the time.
And that the only thing that actually relieved the pain, especially if they had, you know, kind of a purity ideology around using painkillers, although painkillers were also used by many people, But if they didn't want to use painkillers, the thing that would take away the pain was the resumption of practice the next day.
And so the confusion between pain and pleasure receptors in people's neurology became really embedded.
Difficult to shake.
And then that, of course, brings up a whole kind of spiritual narration that begins to understand pain as a transitional process, something that you have to get through, and also something that fades away because you're doing more practice.
And so when we get to a book like Guruji, which is a series of interviews compiled by Eddie Stern and Guy Donaghey of senior students of Patabi Joyce, A question that Guy Donahue asks every single one of the 30-odd senior students is, how did you deal with the pain?
And most of them, and you know, this is a book that's kind of like a study Bible for people in this community.
And most of them, you know, give very metaphysical answers.
You know, the pain, you know, one guy says, the pain, you know, tore me from limb to limb.
It made me feel like I was reorganizing my entire identity and I just had to push through it.
And it's, It's a prerequisite for becoming a temple of God.
And so, yeah, there was a way of experiencing it, tolerating it, and then spiritualizing it.
Yes, sacralizing it.
It just strikes me that if you have this sacralized relationship to pain as a kind of initiatory purification ritual,
Then, when you first experience the pain of beginning to enter the familiar ritual of practice and the endorphins get released, then there's this period in which you feel like you've transcended the pain because you're in your kind of true abode and then later on when that fades and the cartilage that you're damaging, just to speculate, starts to really give your brain its messages, then you feel terrible again and the only answer is to go back to the mat.
Now, I do want to clarify that I haven't heard Kundalini Yoga practitioners discuss pain from practice, so much as I've heard them discuss exhaustion, debilitation from dietary changes, the fact that they are often getting up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning to do hours and hours of chanting, and so they're underslept for years at a time, and that eventually is very taxing.
And of course, I think that the same rhythm would probably apply, that the thing that makes you feel better from being radically underslept for years is getting up at four in the morning and chanting your ass off.
One word I would never associate with kundalini that I do always associate with when I practiced ashtanga was crank, because teachers would crank my body into positions in ashtanga, whereas kundalini, the teachers, I mean, I've never been in a class where they do adjustments at all, so it's not really about form in any capacity, but just to finish up on pain, I'm reading Rebuilding Milo, which is a physical therapy book right now by Aaron Hershock.
He runs the Squat University Instagram feed, which is one of my two favorite feeds.
And he brings up the point of that pain when you injure yourself, then you're just more susceptible to any insult or pain.
Your pain receptors are going to be on high, so you're even more ready to be what usually wouldn't hurt you could hurt you.
And he also, I mean, the whole book is about There's been studies showing that.
the reality is there's, you know, Joey mentioned brain receptors.
Pain is pain.
If you take Advil, you can actually help your emotional problems.
There's been studies showing that.
So pain is a condition that cuts across mental, emotional, and physical.
And what Hirshag keeps pointing out is that there are all these things we do to relieve pain at the moment.
But if you never address the root cause of what's called the poor movement patterns, or maybe the poor lifestyle patterns, if we're extrapolating from that.
And And address those, then the pain will never really go away.
And so, we have to wonder about some of these things when we talk about addiction or what we're trying to get away from.
Are we addressing the root cause, the addictive cycle that would cause you to chase out something or chase something to do it a lot of times repetitiously, or are you just managing it and kind of pushing the root cause to the back.
And I think that's something that can only be answered individual to individual, but it's an important question.
I'm only familiar with Guru Jagat in passing, which is kind of ironic because her Venice Beach headquarters are nestled right into the neighborhood I've lived in for the last 25 years.
We covered her a little bit a few episodes ago, but I wanted to go deeper.
And so I noticed she would be platforming David Icke for an online event after our last mention of her.
Seemed like a perfect opportunity to see where she sits on the conspirituality spectrum.
Now, the video is up on her YouTube channel, which features abundance spirituality titles like The Spirit of Profit and How to Expand Your Resources in Any Economy and The Magnetic Vacuum of Your Satisfied Desire.
Oh, wow.
There are others which perhaps represent a key part of her marketing angle toward women, which I want to put a little pin in that concept right here, like the entrepreneur and heroine's journey.
that Then there are topics almost too good not to be parody, like this one, time loops and the cosmic hologram of your DNA.
But onto David Icke, it's a 1 hour and 40 minute episode that's titled Perception and Perspective.
And mostly it's what we would expect.
Here's Guru Jagat, or Katie Griggs as she was born, nodding along with a countenance like a calm and wise therapist, appearing to cosign Icke's Signature history of the entire civilization, right?
As one giant conspiracy enacted by multiple sinister and secret groups and elite families like the Knights Templar, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, all of which, of course, Bill Gates has ties to somehow, and on and on.
And that these groups have, at the bidding of occult forces, shaped all of history and are behind the fake pandemic as a way to install the new order.
You know, that old chestnut.
All the while, Katie's placid face nods along and her sounds of monosyllabic utterances give the impression that she's either already familiar with this dizzying narrative or agrees that it is of deep significance.
Hmm.
Yes.
Unsurprisingly, I found that Ike is an AIDS denialist too, and Jughead appears completely unfazed.
This whole thing, guys, looks to me more, looks less like a meeting of the minds than a meeting of the email lists.
It's a sharing of audiences in a social media economy that relies on this kind of nodding along that we also see with people like Christiane Northrup seemingly co-signing Sasha Stone's claims that masks are cult programming involving Baphomet and basement satanic child sacrifice, as well as his medicine calls for violence against public health officials.
It's amazing what can be glossed over in these long-form marketing bonanzas in the name of joining mercantile services by tossing red meat to one another's base.
Jagat and Ike spend a good 15 minutes talking about what's wrong with woke identity politics through the lens of the illusion of identifying with labels Because we're all one consciousness, so political activism actually contributes to division and the billionaires support it while being fronts for the real evil cult.
This is why this spiritual or wellness scene as it stands has basically been hijacked and we've seen a lot of this in 2020 in the wellness industry.
It's been hijacked by all of this kind of woke agenda.
100%.
Round of applause.
Absolutely.
Identity politics is the work of the cult.
Why?
Because you have a perception that you're a man and a woman and you're this race or that race.
Okay.
That's kind of been constant through the period.
But now those original labels are being Broken down and subdivided into minutiae of detail.
Series of letters, LBGT blah blah blah blah, it's getting longer and longer and longer as people seek to self-define themselves with smaller and smaller more defined labels.
And the reason that they are confusing gender is because this is a process, a stepping stone, totalitarian tiptoe I call it, from confusing No gender human.
And you know if they're just from the kind of yogic science background, if you're messing around with people's hormones and biology and their genetic material, then I mean part of what creates a sovereign thought and pineal gland secretion and all the kind of biochemistry of being a sovereign human is your hormonal and neural
Yeah, and it's interesting, you mentioned the pineal gland.
make sense that the the the bioweapon is going after the natural cascade of the neural hormonal kind of um interplay yeah and it's interesting you mentioned there the pineal gland these people they know what the pineal gland does and the last thing they want us to do is to get out there in a way into the great beyond They want to isolate us in this five-sense reality, this five-sense prison.
You know, people have, and me included, have been pointing out the effects of fluoride in the drinking water.
Oh yeah, well, it's to protect teeth.
Well, it's not.
It's not.
Fluoride calcifies the pineal gland.
So, I just, I want to talk about perceptual, you know, battles, because that's basically what we're in.
And what's your thought on the parallel time kind of experience?
Because there's chronology and then there's quantum verticality.
Got to get some of that quantum verticality going, guys.
Oh, is that where we're ending?
Okay, thank God.
All right, so, um... Wow, I didn't listen to this clip before Julian gave it to me, and that was even more batshit than I expected.
Right, so, um...
There's such a gish gallop and flurry of stuff, but a couple of things that I just want to point out is that it's really convenient to talk about the hijacking of wellness and yoga through the woke agenda in the same year.
that this person's guru basically gets canceled by a Me Too movement.
So that's right there in the background.
It's hovering around.
Also, the anti-trans rhetoric around degendering or moving towards the non-gendered person gets right into the wheelhouse of Kundalini Yoga's gender essentialism. the anti-trans rhetoric around degendering or moving towards the non-gendered
And Bhajan's own absolute fascination with who men are and what they're supposed to do or what he's supposed to do and who women are and what women are supposed to do.
So there's like a super complex, Conservative, regressive, sexual politics that has laid the bedrock for David Icke just coming on and seeming to make sense on her show.
Yeah, and then the second layer of hijacking, which is what we cover on this podcast, right?
So she's saying it's been hijacked by woke, and actually she's an exemplar of how it's been hijacked by conspirituality.
I also didn't realize until you pointed this clip out, well this whole video, I didn't realize what a spiritualist part of the conspiratorialist, I don't know, icon Ike actually is.
I didn't realize that when I heard him say, you know, they, the Illuminati, the Cabal, want to prevent us from getting out into the great beyond.
I guess I hadn't really associated him with the same kind of metaphysical exaggerations that we would hear from somebody like Yogi Bhajan or another yoga leader.
Yeah, I mean, I was struck by how calm and sort of measured he is in, you know, talking such absolute far-fetched bullshit.
But, you know, if you're aware of David Icke, he came along in the 90s in England after having been a football player and did the whole talk show circuit, for some reason they decided to platform him back then, saying that he had realized that he was actually Jesus Christ.
Oh, okay.
And that's how he started.
And so he was, it was immediately a laughingstock, but also gained a whole bunch of followers.
And since then he's released, I think a total of eight or nine books, uh, you know, step-by-step unfolding this big conspiracy narrative.
But at the heart of it is this idea that the, uh, the dark cabal wants to stop you from realizing your true spiritual nature for sure.
Why is it always Jesus?
Can't they pick someone else?
Across the board, it's always Jesus.
I want to point out, though, in this thread, too, with the same LGBTQ comments, though, I did watch part of the video, not what you sampled, because I couldn't.
Thank you for doing an hour and 40 minutes.
I would never.
But I happened to scrub to a part where he was talking the same bullshit about Black Lives Matter.
And the whole like, you know, we are only in this body for a short period and this and bullshit nonsense.
And that BLM was funded by billionaires without any proof, of course.
I don't know where that came from.
It's funded to purposely divide us and the level of privilege that it takes to be able to say such things and be serious about it.
And I'm watching and I came across somewhere where Guru Jagat said in her conversations, it's not always an endorsement, it's conversation, she doesn't agree with everything.
But the problem with that is she's just sitting there shaking her head and you're like, yes, as he's saying this about BLM and it just blows my mind.
Oh yeah, she's affirming and validating everything.
And during that BLM discussion that you're pointing out, he also has this moment to your point where he says, people act like it's such a big deal, it's going to take so much work to overcome things like racism, but it's not a big deal.
You can just overcome it by shifting your consciousness in an instant and realizing that it doesn't matter if you're black or if you're white.
It's like, dude.
Yes.
And you only need Jared Kushner to come in and tell it.
That's all we really need.
So let me just continue here a little bit guys because what I noticed is that right after the clip that I played you edited directly into the video.
So this is not a random ad that just is running per the YouTube algorithm.
This is edited into the video.
There's an ad then from Guru Jagat about something that's happening right now called Camp Grace.
And then the subtitle is Women, spelled with an X, so feminist intersectionalist kind of reference point there, Women, Sound, and Time.
That's happening Wednesday through Saturday this week.
As I looked into that more deeply, I found it's an in-person group event.
Happening in quarantine lax Florida.
The blurb is go deep into the esoteric and practical applications of sound with a supreme intention of heightened balance healing and dream weaving.
Now that sounds a lot to me like chanting a lot of chanting and I see no mention of masks.
Plenty of implication in the promo materials that people will be traveling to attend like here's the nearest airport for you.
This should not be a surprise though because Ms.
Griggs nods along with David Icke's claim in the video as well, there's too much to include if we were to take clips out of every part of the video, that the virus is actually not real and the PCR test is a hoax.
Now remember I said put a pin in In the idea earlier that she's marketing to women from a particular angle.
So that's the cognitive dissonance, right?
After all that critique of identity politics labels as perpetuating a delusional identification with social indoctrination that makes us forget our true transcendent nature, Camp Grace, women, sound, and time is listed as being open to anyone female identifying And assures that they are a diverse and LGBTQ friendly community.
Nonetheless, she's nodding along with David Icke's transphobia.
So as it turns out, the progressive woke messaging and event naming is fine when it's financially expedient, even though I guess it's divisive and delusional from some higher perspective, right?
So let's pivot now on Derek's new calling card instruction.
Watch what they say, and then watch what they sell.
So of course, Ike has eight books for sale on his website that chronicle the unfolding of this morphing grand conspiracy narrative of humankind.
It would be mean-spirited to complain about that.
He's entitled to sell his own books, right?
But he also sells a line of quite pricey and dodgy-looking supplements.
Surprise, surprise.
For example, a $60 bottle of supplements touted as the most important supplement in the world.
Is that the name of it?
Like on the bottle?
No, that's part of the descriptive text.
Okay, that's not actually the title of the supplement.
Like Dr. Bronner's Famous Soap or something.
That's not open to the world.
And then given his emphasis on 5G and AI paranoia, of course, I'm not surprised to see he also sells a super high-tech sticker for the back of your phone that protects you from electromagnetic frequencies.
Now, as for Guru Jagat, she has two clothing lines, a gift shop, and lots of events and courses.
It seems to me she's trying to copy Yogi Bhajan's model of diversified products and services associated with her brand, but I just wanted to list here my favorite workshop title, Twin Flame, Angelic and Ascended Master-Sacred Relationship Technologies.
Oh, cool.
What's the twin there?
Is this combining two technologies?
So there's angelic sacred relationship technologies and then ascended masters and they're twinning and flaming together?
That's fun, but I think it's more a partner, you know, a soulmate kind of workshop.
Lots of staring, lots of gazing.
Oh yes.
Ancient technology is one of those things that people make it seem like it sounds smart and you're just a douchebag.
No, no, no.
Wait a minute.
It's this is sacred.
There's no ancient there.
This is this is angelic.
But as I mentioned in an early episode, I used to go to this vegan ice cream shop that was next to almost a part of her.
Studio there and it was just in bright letters was ancient technology spray-painted outside and I didn't know who she was then I just remember it and I was like this this makes no sense It's not a technology if it's ancient like I get yeah, it's just it's it's such a stupid branding technique
You know, Derek mentioned this, Julian, but Griggs was actually quoted and wired just today in an article that dropped and she says, My job is to help people to find freedom of thought.
I have a talk show and I interview people.
It doesn't mean I agree with them.
Yeah.
What do you think?
Is this the typical walk back of the social media age where I don't necessarily endorse what I'm posting?
I'm not actually a publishing platform.
I just facilitate space.
It just sounds to me like a dodge, some kind of plausible deniability.
It's not a talk show.
If you look through the list of her videos, it's You know, it's people that she's aligned with.
I think of it much more, as I said, of a kind of meeting of the email lists where we're sharing audiences and we're co-signing one another's ideas.
She doesn't necessarily have to take him to task and challenge everything he says, but if it was a talk show, there'd be a little more discussion and a little less profound kind of calm-faced nodding, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, she's not an investigative journalist like Mickey Willis, so what do we expect?
Well, that's true, yeah.
Okay, Derek and Julian, I brought some material. I brought some material.
Of course you did!
So I'll just start a little bit personally.
In the early 90s, I actually lived on the same Toronto street where in 1967 Yogi Bhajan set up his first North American ashram type house.
So, it all started on the beautiful tree-lined Palmerston Avenue on the western edge of University of Toronto's rental stock.
So, he installed himself in a mansion there and he ran his, you know, hyperventilation heavy yoga classes that started at 4 a.m.
and it was quite a community gathering place from what I hear.
But he got a woman pregnant that year and fled to LA to dodge responsibility.
Now it's a mystery as to who or where the child is, but Bhajan left behind an active enough community that my friend Diane Bruni went to her first ever yoga class there in the mid-1980s.
Now, side note, for those of you who know Diane's name, maybe you heard that she just died this past week, so I wanted to shout that out.
I'm told that she had her hand on her heart and she was with her family.
So, the Kundalini Yoga legacy in Toronto isn't really that strong.
I just think TO isn't as weird or as fashionable as LA.
There's one or two independent studios, there's a couple of businesses that hung around for the long haul.
There was one Kundalini Yoga Sikh guy, a white guy, long white beard, who ran the futon shop for about 20 years in that part of town.
I think that's closed down now.
So the next time I really heard about Yogi Bhajan or thought about Kundalini Yoga at all was when I came across a website called The Wacky World of Yogi Bhajan, which must date back over about 10 years now.
The website seems to be down.
It's now on Web Archive, so we're linking to that.
And it was kind of amazing because it hosted stories of organizational corruption and abuse survivorship.
But there were also message boards that predated the Wacky World website that went all the way back to the 1990s.
And as Philip Deeslip points out in, I think, part two of the interview that I did with him and Stacey Stokin, these online forums were actually key for organizing exiles, but also for allowing current members to kind of peek over the fence at what it would be like to leave.
The next thing that I came across were two, the texts of two 1986 civil lawsuits filed against Bhajan and Kundalini Yoga slash 3HO and these were brought by Pamela Dyson and Catherine Felt.
Now, they both alleged that Yogi Bhajan and 3HO had conspired in fraud and deceit, assault and battery, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of severe emotional distress, and violation of the Racketeer Act, and also Fair Labor Standards Act, and a bunch of other things as well, like really super serious charges, and actually the narratives laid out in those suits are extraordinary to read, they're harrowing.
And Catherine Felt, I read her lawsuit first, but Pamela Dyson's lawsuit actually factors into our present conversation because she's the former secretary of Yogi Bhajan.
For secretary, we might say indentured servant for several decades, who published her book, her memoir, in, I think, late 2019.
So, her story plays out a little bit further in my reporting.
Now, in 2012, DSLIP broke the entire mystique of Kundalini Yoga wide open, at least from a religious studies standpoint.
And this took him two to three years of primary source research, which is really difficult in relation to an organization like this.
And what he managed to do was to investigate and Pick apart, really, all of the claims that Bhajan and the senior students were making about the longevity, the provenance, and the authenticity of Kundalini Yoga and its largely tangential and probably fictitious relationship to Sikhism.
Now, he did this by tracking down early 3HO periodicals and combing through them.
He conducted a bunch of interviews with early members of 3HO, so lots of fieldwork.
And he also did side-by-side comparisons of Yogi Bachchan's Kundalini Yoga and Swami Durendra's yoga teachings as a compare and contrast exercise.
And yeah, we're going to link to the article and it is an amazing historical
I would really say like dissection of a modern myth and it is so bulletproof, it is so even-keeled, it's so respectful as well of the people who are engaged with it that I think it did an amazing kind of opening the door towards understanding the culture in other ways as well, understanding the interpersonal nature of Kundalini culture.
I just want to say that his essay came out two years after Mark Singleton's book, Yoga Body, came out, which did the same type of work on demystifying the origins of modern postural yoga in general.
So, what Singleton showed was that far from being a continuous or coherent spiritual practice dating back to the middle ages, which is how the early modernizers of modern yoga came out of India, speaking about it as that really what became global was a kind of amalgam of, speaking about it as that really what became global was a kind of amalgam of, you know, remembered medieval ideas around postural health
and exercise, influenced remembered medieval ideas around postural health and exercise, influenced very heavily by the national physical culture programs of the And,
And, you know, Mark did not focus on the fact that Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is one of the main characters in his narrative, was also, at least in his initial training period, when he was working at what was known as the Mysore Yoga Palace, he wasn't
Mark didn't focus on the fact that Krishnamacharya was actually a brutal teacher, and his students recall him administering corporal punishment while they were learning yoga.
He didn't go into that material.
He knew of it, and I know that he knew of it because we discussed it a little bit in person, but he really kept it to the level of, you know, what are people saying about these practices versus what can we actually substantiate.
And I would just like to suggest that DSLIP did something of the same thing, where it was a lot easier to break the mythologization of the practice open before the hagiography of the personalities involved could also then be further examined and deconstructed.
So, you know, understanding that Yogi Bhajan was actually some kind of bricoleur who put together a bunch of things in a pastiche that worked, you know, for his consumers, that that was easier to swallow as a first step of demystification than, well, actually he was also, you know, a rapist and a chronic abuser.
Then in 2019, we have the publication of Premka, White Bird in a Golden Cage, My Life with Yogi Bhajan by Pamela Sahara Dyson.
This is an astounding personal memoir of her decades as Bhajan's secretary, or as I said, indentured servant and victim of chronic clerical sexual abuse.
She's now 73, impeccable credibility, and she struck in her book a respectful and accessible tone, but also didn't spare any details about her experiences, and she also left open important questions about enabling and complicity, which are still being answered.
Now, where our worlds begin to collide between kundalini yoga and conspirituality, at least in my radar, happens when Kelly Brogan reviews Premka.
On her blog, and this caught my attention way back in February of 2020.
Now, if you could diagnose a book review with narcissistic personality disorder, it might look like what Kelly Brogan published in February of 2020.
This is about two months before she made her first big COVID denialism post, April 23rd or something like that.
So, Brogan pretends to review the book, but what her blog really does is to use Dyson's book to market her own self-help work, and it's right there in the blog title.
So, Kelly Brogan's blog is called Yogi Bhajan and the Kundalini Community, colon, Premka's Own Yourself Journey.
Now, Own Yourself is the title of Brogan's book.
And so her review leverages Premka's abuse testimony and an institutional abuse crisis that's actually tearing a global community apart to wave her own self-help book in the reader's face.
And it does so with this I would say almost perfect iteration of a popular blog-sploitation formula, which is to open with a personal detail to create intimacy.
So she tells a little bit of her personal story.
And then to make broad-brush statements to clearly establish brand messaging.
And then build it all on the back of a prominent story in order to game the algorithm.
And here's what we learned from Brogan's review.
That Dyson's book is a, quote, scandalous expose, unquote.
Not that it's a disclosure of abuse, but something kind of contrived that might make us clutch our pearls or something.
We learned that Brogan, and this is what tipped me off to the connection here, that Brogan is a certified kundalini instructor.
And that if she was less mature, she says, Dyson's revelations would make her question her affiliation with the group in practice.
And maybe consider pulling back from monetizing it, right?
Of course she doesn't.
We also learned that it's okay for Brogan to psychoanalyze Dyson and the entire Me Too movement while spending almost zero space on what Dyson was actually writing about, which was Yogi Bhajan.
Also, you know, she uses her status as a psychiatrist to counsel Dyson and, by extension, other abuse survivors.
She also says that victim consciousness, I'm quoting here, is ultimately the driver of suffering, in my opinion.
Victim consciousness blames others for our pain and it fundamentally divests us of our power because the perpetrator is the one who did this to us.
Now here, Victimhood is presented as a psychological rather than a historical or legal identity.
Victimhood doesn't happen because people commit harm or crimes, but because those impacted by harm or crimes develop negative self-esteem.
We also learn from Brogan that the Me Too era often involves the lynching of the male transgressor, which is a really poor word choice here coming from a fellow white writer.
And then finally, you know, she links 17 times to her own website while reviewing somebody else's book, and she doesn't even link to Premko's book.
So anyway, that really caught my eye.
Can I just say, Matthew, I'm familiar with this, we've talked about it on the podcast before, it still makes me so angry.
Just listening to you give that rundown, it's enraging.
Yeah, and it seems to like, you know, how it started, how it's going kind of thing.
It's like, it gets worse.
It gets worse.
Yeah.
Especially because if you keep this all on record, you can kind of see how the building blocks are all in place for You know, a kind of endless escalation of, you know, abuse denialism, the denial of, you know, the need for social justice.
You know, the claim that asking for accountability from, you know, a cult leader and their followers is some example of cancel culture or wokeism run amok.
All of these things flow together.
And the thing that blows my mind about this is that these are the same kinds of people who will repeatedly accuse others of gaslighting them when, for example, you point out that their vaccine stuff is misinformation, right?
Right, yeah.
When they're gaslighting every step of the way in the most really, really damaging context.
So, with that as a little bit of background, and I just want to say that Phillip and Stacey do a lot more background in the interview that we're going to run next.
This is where we, you know, arrive when we encounter somebody like Guru Jagat.
So, born Katie Griggs, but she's also gone by the name Katie Day.
She's used the name Athena.
There's a number of names going on.
She's now 41.
She got her start as a yoga teacher more than a decade ago at Yoga West in LA, which made me want to ask both of you, did you ever take a class with her?
Nope.
No, I have not.
I've never been to Yoga West.
I've been in that general area mostly to visit chiropractors associated with Kundalini Yoga.
Okay now, she initiated her teaching at Yoga West and either implied or people said about her that she was authorized by Yogi Bhajan to teach yoga in person.
Now, we now know from DSLIP's research that this was highly unlikely given the timelines and his own terrible health.
And then she was just cited in a Business of Fashion article that dropped this week as actually coming out and saying that she never met him.
But she did meet Bhajan's student and ex-convict, convicted for fraud, Hari Jeevan, and by
2013 had struck out on her own from Yoga West to form the Rama Institute and then by 2015 she had gained enough of a following that Marissa Meltzer of Harper's Bazaar magazine comes and does a profile and the first paragraphs here are just so splendid.
So I'm just going to read them.
Actually it's a couple of graphs down.
Guru Jagat, the 37-year-old owner of the studio, author of the just-released Invincible Living by Harper Alexer, and Kundalini Yoga's first crossover star, Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, and Alicia Keys are all devotees who pop up on Guru Jagat's social media, makes her way to the front of the studio and takes her seat on a small stage.
Behind her is a 60-inch gong that she is fond of telling people was originally built for Van Halen.
She has an aggressively leonine appearance with long blonde wavy hair when she's not wearing a head wrap and is big boned, not as some kind of euphemism for fat, just more earth mama than ethereal fairy lady.
While we flip from cat pose into cow pose over and over until I feel motion sick, Guru Jagat sermonizes about various topics veering from the benefit of cold showers to her love of Drake with nuggets like Your mind is like a Rubik's Cube.
You're tinkering around in there.
I'm into long-term meditation relationships.
Make out with your meditation.
That's my advice.
We're already dead.
We're dust.
It's over.
And then we chant Aum Namo Gurudev Namo and breathe in and out through pursed lips.
Each of these kriyas, or movements set to breath, is supposed to stimulate something.
Prosperity, or tuning into our own intelligence.
It's hard to follow sometimes, and harder to keep up.
But she's smart and witty and magnetic.
Regardless of whether what she's saying makes any kind of sense to me, it does in the moment.
But then when I read over my notes, I have no idea what anyone is talking about.
I want to believe it all.
At the end of class, we lay on our backs while Guru Jagat plays the gong.
Unintentionally honest.
It's so fantastic.
Anyway, here's the thing that we uncovered this week.
The podcast gained access to some documents.
The same year as this profile is published, Griggs is being sued by Kundalini Yoga students and business associates in Boulder.
Now, this comes from a suit filed in the District Court of Boulder County, and it's against Griggs and Hari Jeevan.
Now, these are allegations.
The suit never made it to trial, never went to court, but it was settled, and so I'll just go through the allegations.
We see that Griggs jumps on an invite to come to Boulder in February of 2015 and she arrives less than a month later.
Specifically it says that there was a Facebook or a direct message communication on February 1st and by the end of February she's in Boulder teaching a workshop.
A little bit later after that, with the hosts, they are talking about a Rama-Boulder franchise or location.
And then within a month, they are also discussing incorporating.
So this is moving very, very fast.
Now, Griggs came to Boulder monthly from that point moving forward till about August.
Taking most or all of the revenue from the classes, while her Boulder hosts footed the bill for space rental, and this went on for about six months.
Now, within two months of that first contact, the Boulder plaintiffs had signed a lease, but Griggs wouldn't sign.
Now, Stukin says in one of our upcoming interview segments that that might have been because her credit was bad.
Rama Boulder opened a bank account with Griggs having withdrawal access.
And the Boulder hosts then found investors who over a few months poured $200,000 into Rama Boulder and in return for that they received minority ownership.
Griggs retained majority ownership While never putting any money in.
Rama Boulder opened their new space at the end of August and they inaugurated it with a workshop weekend led by Hari Jeevan.
Then in January, Hari Jeevan and Griggs both returned to lead a teacher training program and under... Now this is the big ticket item in Kundalini Yoga.
This is how most of the money is made.
It's not from, you know, regular classes.
And under the agreement with Rama Boulder, they were going to remit 40% of the revenue of the training to Rama Boulder.
The suit alleges that they did not, and that $15,000 was outstanding from that training.
Then, bizarrely, as if financial issues weren't enough, Griggs allegedly went on Rama TV back in LA and insulted the Boulder students, saying they were upper-class white moms, Waldorf moms, obsessive-compulsive, and angry yin moms.
These are all direct quotes from the suit.
Then, Griggs started using the Rama Boulder credit card for personal expenses, also wired money into her personal account and to her lawyer, and then made multiple payments to her own Venice studio.
And by February of 2016, just a year after all this began, the Boulder plaintiffs had enough and they served notice.
And after getting served, Griggs countersued the Boulder hosts for $38,000 in lost or unpaid wages.
And when the plaintiffs settled for $10,000, of course, that was thrown out.
And I would just like to say that, you know, it's really great when stuff like this makes into court filings because certain things become super, super clear when it's lawyers discussing them instead of new age people.
So hold on a second, when you say that they settled for $10,000, does that mean they gave her another $10,000 to make the case?
No, no, no, sorry.
They settled by being paid out $10,000.
Oh, by being paid out $10,000 from her, okay.
Exactly.
So the countersuing didn't go anywhere?
It did not.
No, it did not go anywhere.
Glad to hear it.
She's a gangster.
Yeah, according to the allegations, it does not look good.
And here's the thing, too, about like the Paradox of this profile appearing in Harper's and then this going on under the surface basically at the same time.
And it kind of reminds me of, I don't know Derek if you've seen things like this happen where, you know, somebody's obviously doing, you know, really good investigative and profiling work and then there's this whole other side of the story that they just have no access I think it happens all the time.
I mean, how many times do we see people that we fawn over?
A big one that we see right now is Elon Musk, where he's championed because he's now possibly the world's richest man.
And then you see who he is.
It comes out in certain ways, and you're like, this is the guy you're You're fawning over, really?
It all gets confused when power is involved.
But one thing that really jumped out in that reporting is, I remember when I used to work in an emergency room, a lot of times as a patient monitor, I would sit outside of the room if the patients were dangerous, and you would see the doctor go in there and be sweet and caring and kind, and then come out of the room and make fun of them.
And I would see it actually, like in my view, looking at a room and then looking in the hallway when they would laugh at the person, and it's just gross.
I mean, you wanna be a spiritual leader and this is how you're acting?
Well, okay, here's the thing about allegedly mocking the bolder women while allegedly fleecing them for cash.
It reminds me actually of my own cult leaders because whenever Michael Roach and Charles Anderson pursued a new demographic or market, They always came back to the core followers and mocked the newbies, saying things like, oh, they're in rough shape, they're not sophisticated, they really need this stuff, but they're pretty thick.
Roach was polite about it.
You know, Anderson called everybody dummies.
But Roach, you know, talked very openly.
openly about figuring out how to appeal to and trick people from other cultures.
And he really infantilized folks.
You know, he would say that the Chinese and Russians were greedy, so his prosperity gospel stuff should go over well there.
So real sort of Trojan horse stuff.
And I think one of the things that this does is that it shores up the feelings of specialness in the inner core of the group.
And it also kind of allays fears that the leader is moving on or spreading themselves too thin or not gonna pay attention to them or that they're betraying them.
But here's the thing, like, the smart ones don't put that shit on YouTube.
Like, Roach and Anderson did not.
I mean, they would have if they'd had access to YouTube, because they were dumb too, but like, you don't like... Did you turn on the television on January 6th in America?
Right, exactly.
We're not sending our best people right now.
So the other thing, I mean, about what journalists know and don't know, I have no idea.
I don't know who Meltzer is and how much got into the story versus was left out, but there's this story that's kind of in, well, it is in my book about Ashtanga Yoga.
About how a journalist named Lawrence Gallagher went to Mysore, India for three months and did yoga classes with Patabi Joyce and he published this as kind of like a quirky travelogue in details in 1995.
And I heard through a source that, you know, he had asked some questions about the culture there and about Joyce's way of manhandling and apparently assaulting people.
And so I actually tracked him down.
And, you know, he was retired from journalism.
I think he's living in Japan or something like that.
And I said, so that stuff didn't get into your article.
And he said, no, no, it didn't.
And we had this long conversation about the fact that he knew that this was going on, and he wasn't contracted to do an investigative piece that possibly would involve criminal charges.
He didn't have the budget for it.
He would have had to go back to his editor at Details and, you know, ask for the funding to be embedded for another three months.
He would have had all kinds of legal complexities.
So close to home for this guy that he had an Australian girlfriend at the time who Joyce assaulted and and he didn't he didn't report on that either because he just didn't have the resources and and so you know he gave this great interview to me where he said yeah I this is this is a deep regret I have in my reporting and I just I don't know it's just a kind of an object lesson in
How we find out what we find out and what stands in people's way.
Yes, there's rape culture standing in the way of Ronan Farrow making his report.
And yes, there are cult dynamics that are pushing back against me when I'm trying to figure out what Patabi Joyce did for 30 years.
But then there's just, like, luck and resources and, you know, how much social capital you feel you can burn.
And how scared you are if you're in a position of knowing something.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to loop back around to something you said earlier because it just raised the question for me.
You were talking about Philip Deslip, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
Deslip, yeah.
Deslip, sorry.
Deslip.
And I was just curious about what you said from an ethical standpoint.
I understand this sort of...
The logic of talking first about all of the inaccurate claims about lineage and historical origins of the practice that he had largely just confabulated as a first step towards then maybe being able to expose the abusive culture.
Yeah, I want to be clear that I've spoken with Philip many, many times over the years and we've never He's never said that he had any kind of plan for this to be staged this way.
I think that what happened, and maybe I'll ask him or he'll respond when he hears this, I think that what happened was that he had a particular remit within the history of religions and a kind of discipline that he was going to apply to the primary sources and that the field work that would have gotten into
You know, were there criminal activities going on that that was not going to be part of the disciplinary, you know, scope?
You know, not that he wasn't aware of it, but I think there's also a process by which, you know, everybody comes to peel the onion bit by bit further and further.
And I think what I can say about D Slip's essay absolutely is that without it, there would be no I don't think that Pamela Dyson's memoir would have made the incredible, resounding thunderclap that it did.
Of course, her book also was ushered into the culture through the Me Too movement.
But really what happened was that once there was a strong and very visible first-person testimony, direct testimony, then DSLIP's work on the actual culture of Kundalini Yoga was absolutely foundational to understanding how many, many people had been deceived.
I know we're going to run the interview in a moment, and I want to ask both of you this question because I think it's an interesting one and I'm interested how you'll respond.
It's a question we've seen a lot, but especially since we've been prepping this episode on social media.
Thinking specifically about Kundalini, or it could be extrapolated and broadened out from there, Can you separate the teachings from the teacher?
I think it's so complicated.
I think it really depends on the specific cases that you're talking about.
And I think that the danger in that particular way of framing it is often that there's a there's an idealizing of quote-unquote the teachings as if they have some transcendent source and quality about them that is that that somehow is beyond whatever mere mortal human failings there might be there of the teacher and particularly of the guru and I think it often is a way of sidestepping truth.
Very often I hear it in concert with this notion that, oh no, it was just the students who projected some idea of perfection or superhuman abilities or super specialness onto the guru.
This is actually a good reminder not to do that and know that the teachings are primary or your own internal guru is primary or something like that.
I feel like it's usually a way of covering over the interconnectedness between those two things, especially in a tradition where the teacher is such a central figure in terms of being the originator of the practice. - Yes.
Well, yeah, and I mean every modern yoga group that we would ask this question about would have a kind of different presentation of this kind of problem.
What's, I think, foundational about DSLIP's work on the origins of Kundalini Yoga is that
He really shows that the claims that bhajan makes as to its ancientness or its authenticity were largely fabricated and what that means is that the incredible numbers and baroque quality of all of the kriyas and all of the complexities of the mantras and the lists of things that people have to do every day and
um you know when they're supposed to uh you know wake up and and and meditate at this phase of the moon and so on that all of those uh are really the artifacts of his maniacal creativity and manipulative creativity he was always giving people things to do uh and really overwhelming people think with people with things to do uh and you know his particular
version of tantric Sikhism, which Philip will go into detail in the second part of our interview, which will run next week, is also absolutely unique to him.
So if there was something universal about Yogi Bhajan's Sikhism, as Philip says, then why wouldn't, you know, Kundalini Yoga Sikhs or or converts, why wouldn't they be mingling with the rest of the Punjabi Sikh community?
Why would there be such a divide between them?
If it was so universal, why are they so isolated?
It's very similar actually to Michael Roach, isn't it?
It is, it is in a way.
But let's just go through a couple of other examples.
In Ashtanga Yoga, you You still cannot be authorized to teach it unless you are certified by a member of the Joyce family.
Now that used to be, before he died, Joyce himself.
Now it's his grandson.
What that actually means is that you have to go to Mysore and Indeterminate number of times.
It's never really clear.
There's kind of like a mystical lottery about it.
And you have to be adjusted by members of the family.
They have to lay their hands on you.
It's almost like a de facto Shaktipat.
There's a ritual transmission that's not really described that way, but that's the way in effect it works.
And so, you know, of course with Joyce, the irony there is that when he's putting his hands on people, he's also physically and sexually assaulting them.
So the way in which the person literally gets authorized is collapsed into the abuse of the system.
Now, if anybody wants to say that they want to separate the teacher from the teachings in that particular community, that's a lot of work.
That is an incredible amount of work.
If we think about the relationship between people who practice at a high level and teach Iyengar yoga with Mr. Iyengar himself and the incredible meticulousness and overwhelming numbers of instructions that he would give for simply standing on two feet.
And how those have to be parroted, but also expanded upon and also worked with in a way very, very difficult for people to see their way clear of Iyengar as the kind of internal voice.
And then even more embedded is the internal voice of Bikram Chowdhury in...
In Bikram Yoga, you cannot teach Bikram Yoga without memorizing his verbatim script for instructing the class.
You go to an eight-week, you know, hot training and hazing experience in which he verbally and perhaps sexually abuses you and the main thing that you have to do while doing practices and staying up all night watching Bollywood films with him is you have to memorize his practice script and then you have to and you're not teaching Bikram yoga unless you're saying his exact words which he wrote down or maybe recorded in 1977 or whatever it was and so
So who's going to separate Bikram Yoga from Bikram Choudhury?
I think the way out for people who are earnest And who have benefited from practices like this is to recognize that the goodness that they attained through them, the benefits, are as much a reflection of what they brought into those rooms as they are a reflection of what these leaders taught or what their communities maintained over the years.
And so I, my answer to people is that if they have derived benefit from cultures of abuse, maybe because they haven't been in contact with abusers within that culture, then that benefit is really, it's the reflection of their own creativity, their own their own working with a given set of postures or breathing techniques or visualizations that is reflective of their own growth.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But trying to preserve the brand, very, very difficult.
Yeah, it kind of goes to the heart of the matter for me of something I'm always interested in, which is the gap between the benefits or the positive experiences or you know the healing or whatever the things are that people really value about certain practices or modalities and and the claim or the or the assumption that that stuff
came from specific you know claims and and aspects of the practice or modality that have turned out not to be true if if one Once you start to see that, if you start to see that the group you were involved in was actually a toxic cult and its figurehead was an abuser, then
Separating out the benefits that you experienced from all of that now-revealed toxicity seems to, to me, it seems to entail owning and recognizing, as you just said so beautifully, that the benefits and the positive experiences that you had come from somewhere else, and therefore they're available, actually, in a non-corrupted form through something else that you can then explore.
Yeah, and what are those things?
They might be friendship, they might be novelty, they might be embarking on a project with like-minded individuals.
Those are all things that happen within cults, and they can happen outside of them as well.
And I think there's a real problem with misattribution, that people will say, oh, well, it was Kundalini and the Kriyas that changed my life.
And I'm like, you know, probably you also changed your, you know, I don't know, sleeping and waking cycle.
You probably also had a change of scene.
You might have moved.
You were hanging out with different people.
There were a lot of things that changed during that time.
And I don't think it's fair to say that, you know, Yogi Bhajan, who was fond of quoting Hitler while he was teaching yoga, is the source of goodness in your life.
That's just not fair to you, right?
It's you.
You did something interesting here, and you bought the cult's marketing that they sold it to you, that they were responsible for it.
And maybe you're responsible for it.
Okay, Okay, last bit here before Philip and Stacey help us close the loop on how a next generation kundalini charismatic goes full COVID denier.
I'm just going to run through some of the internal WhatsApp direct messages that Conspirituality Podcast got access to.
So this fusion of spiritual fictions and pseudoscience is absolutely clear.
A A lot of this material has been posted on the Instagram site So you can check that out and we thank them for their archival efforts.
So here's the timeline.
These are from WhatsApp direct messages.
On April 2nd, we see Griggs asking an employee to, quote, share the research that virus are not real and deaf not contagious, all in caps, unquote.
On April 10th, Griggs posts a video from Dr. Shiva titled, We Are At War, hashtag Fire Fauci, end the shutdown.
On May 6th, of course, we know that Plandemic dropped on May 5th, and on the 6th, she posts it to the group with the all caps command, Everyone must watch this now, 6th.
SERIOUSLY NOW.
Then, a little bit later, complaining that the link got deleted while she watched it.
On May 14th, she shared some anti-lockdown civil disobedience nonsense instructions, and also on the 14th, she shared some posts that the L.A.
mask mandate is quote-unquote unconstitutional, and also a bunch of sovereign citizen-type links about sheriffs being the only law in town, so we've seen Christiane Northrup refer to that business as well.
On May 17th, oddly enough, there's a Rama employee, a mole we might say, who shares Derek's Big Think article on conspirituality.
Unfortunately, it looks like it was ignored.
Now, in or around that same time, there's one direct message that gives some insight into Griggs' workplace manners.
Quote, I'm really annoyed that you both seem to not be able to actually put photos in the fucking Dropbox, all caps, and, quote, all caps, I will ring your figurative necks if not every photo that you've ever taken up until now isn't in the Dropbox correctly named and organized by Tuesday, May 26th, unquote.
So, there you have it.
And lastly, a quote from the Business of Fashion article on the online income situation of Rama since the pandemic began.
This is an article by Lauren Sherman.
Little did the organizers behind Rama know that this meeting, at their Lower East Side location, would be one of their last major in-person events before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time, Guru Jagat, whose given name is Katie Day, according to reports, projected that the business would generate $5 million a year from in-person retreats and a live streaming service, but also from retail in the group centers and e-commerce site where it sells spiritual tchotchkes, as well as but also from retail in the group centers and e-commerce site where it sells spiritual tchotchkes, as well as multiple apparel lines, which range
Many of those plans went awry, but Rama's streaming service took off.
Its site now attracts 2 million unique visits a month, 20,000 of whom pay at least $19 a month to access a video library, not to mention additional fees for access to video of one-off sessions that took place throughout the year." Now, if the math is to be believed, if this is not self-reported income from Rama, I don't know exactly how Sherman got these numbers,
but they would suggest that Rama is pulling in a cool $380,000 per month in the but they would suggest that Rama is pulling in a cool $380,000 So here's my interview with Philip Deislip and Stacey Stuken.
I just want to say it was such a pleasure to speak with such seasoned and meticulous commentators, and I hope it sheds some valuable light on the Kundalini story as it hurdles into the COVID era.
Philip, Stacey and I met twice because our first hour felt like we were just getting going.
Next week we'll follow up with a longer segment with Philip and Stacey that digs even deeper into the culture of Kundalini and how it collided with L.A.
Philip Deeslip is an historian of American religion with a background in American studies and literature.
His research focuses on Asian, metaphysical, and marginal religions in modern America.
He's currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and writing his dissertation on the early history of yoga in the United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
He was a member of 3HO and he practiced and taught kundalini yoga for about 12 years before leaving.
Stacey Stukin is an arts and culture writer born and raised in LA.
She has written about travel, design, women's health, and food for publications like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Architectural Digest, W Magazine, Lucky Peach, and of course LA Magazine, and the article that we're going to be talking about was published there.
She's also co-written a book about hand sewing, quilting, and embroidery in Alabama, and an essay called The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learned to Eat, which paid homage to her mother and Jewish cooking.
And most recently, her essay Brentwood Notebook, which is a writer's coming-of-age story about growing up in LA, appeared in the collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles, Living and Writing in Joan Didion's Light.
Stacey has been covering and practicing yoga for a long time.
She was a contributing editor at Yoga Journal for about 12 years until about 2008 when, you know, they were really doing better journalism at that time.
And as for yoga, even before COVID, she describes herself as polyamorous and that she has her own home hybrid practice.
Philip, I was wondering if you could just set the scene a little bit with a brief introduction from your extensive research into the origin of Kundalini Yoga, the claims made by Yogi Bhajan, and the general shape of his legacy so far.
And also, how does the Punjabi Sikh community in general regard Bhajan, Kundalini Yoga, and 3HO?
If we go by 3HO's own accounting of its own history, Yogi Bhajan is someone who was declared a master of an ancient and previously secret form of yoga known as Kundalini Yoga when he was 16 and a half.
And in this stars aligning moment in history, he sees spiritual seekers traveling to India through his job as a customs agent at Palm Airport, and he goes to the West so that they can get a real technology, a real spiritual practice.
And he's seen as a catalyst to ushering in the Aquarian Age, turning hippies into Sikhs, of bringing this toolkit to a decadent, falling West that desperately needs it.
So according to this official history, he arrives in Los Angeles in late 1968.
He begins to teach this form of yoga and then quickly it spreads.
And then his students convert, many of them convert to Sikhism.
And then these smaller businesses that his students create, they become bigger businesses.
And in the words of 3HO, they create a spiritual nation.
3HO often views Yogi Bhajan and his teachings as outside of historical time.
He is delivering an ancient technology that will serve humanity for unknown centuries into the future, or their phrase, unto infinity.
What we now know and what has been revealed over the last several decades is that the reality was very different.
The yogi bhajan style of yoga is not ancient or secret.
or sick, but it's a crude mash-up of the various teachers that he studied with.
Swamis Dave Murthy, Durendra Brahmachari, and a Sikh saint outside of Delhi named Viras Singh.
Yogi Bhajan comes to the United States because he got a woman in Canada pregnant and he was fleeing her.
And underneath this official history, we now know that there is a whole other history of various forms of abuse, sexual abuse.
Psychological abuse, financial exploitation of students.
There were, in addition to the businesses, there were numerous criminal operations that were going on.
And so it really is, there's kind of two layers to it, the official history and then what we now know.
So if you asked people even two years ago what Yogi Bhajan's legacy would be, I think the standard refrain would be what the New York Times eulogized him as, you know, boss of worlds, spiritual and capitalistic.
Now, I think it's unavoidable that he has a very troubling and compromised legacy that it is not just businesses that were created in a style of yoga, but it is hundreds and hundreds of people who experienced severe trauma and abuse.
How does the Punjabi Sikh community regard Yogi Bhajan, Kundalini Yoga, and 3HO?
I think this is important in one sense because Yogi Bhajan was distinct from many of his contemporaries, the other Swamis and Yogis and Gurus who came to the West in the late 60s, because he made claims to being A religious leader, a sanctioned religious leader who is legitimate and had legitimate authority.
He kind of played both sides of the fence.
He told his students that they had a real form of Sikhism, they had a real technology that the Punjabis didn't really understand.
They lost the true history of what they were.
And he's telling the reverse to Punjabis, that these are just kind of dumb, naive Westerners who need a lot of help and guidance.
We also know through interviews that there's a lot of bribery and corruption for Yogi Bhajan to shore up these credentials.
Punjabi Sikhs always viewed 3HO as a strange anomaly.
You know, maybe you could compare them to an emerging, highly enthusiastic but bizarre Pentecostal sect, if you're a mainline Christian.
They're tolerated.
In some circles, they're celebrated as making Sikhism seem like a world religion.
And it's flattering that Western American children of privilege would adopt their faith, but so much of what they do, what 3HO Sikhs do, is bizarre when compared to 99% of Sikhs throughout the world.
It's also worth noting, and retired professor Van Dusenberry wrote about this extensively, there are often very antagonistic relationships between Punjabi Sikhs and 3HO Sikhs.
If you look at the pages of 3HO periodicals, they are endlessly calling Punjabi Sikhs horrible names.
Dogs, traitors, puttits or sinners.
So there is a history in 3HO of Having their cake and eating it too when it comes to Sikhism.
When they are called a cult, they defend themselves by saying, we are Sikhs, we are a world religion, and putting themselves in that larger fold.
But there's never a hesitation to also dismiss Punjabi Sikhs.
And be incredibly offensive and racist.
And there's a lot of unwitting offense.
So much of what they do, from the names that they take, the selling of spiritual names, the descriptions that they give of clothing, is so bizarre and bizarrely offensive to the vast majority of Punjabi Sikhs.
Now Stacey, Phillip mentioned the changing legacy of Yogi Bhajan and your own research has played somewhat of a role in that in your investigation for LA Magazine.
Can you tell us in broad strokes what your investigation uncovered?
Yes, for my piece in Los Angeles Magazine, what I really wanted to do was tie together a lot of these threads that had been kind of floating out there for a long time and it was certainly a challenge because there are so many levels to 3HO.
So you have the yoga, you have the businesses, you have the yoga businesses, and then you also have the legacy of
And, um, so some of the main things that I uncovered was, were that, you know, for years I had heard these rumors about misconduct, um, both the financial crimes and the sexual misconduct.
Um, so I was able to, um, Okay, let me pause and back up.
So I had written about 3HO over the years as a yoga journalist, right?
So I was aware of it from a wellness perspective but as I dug into it for this piece, you know, the irony was they called Kundalini the yoga of awareness but it's really a culture deeply in denial and it's been in denial for a long time and I think
One of the things that I discovered was that the first generation, sometimes unwittingly, you know, because of their mind control and their devotion to the yoga,
Covered up the corruption and the abuse because they didn't want to look at it, they didn't want to acknowledge it, they didn't want to acknowledge that their children had gone to these schools where they were horribly abused both
Sexual abuse, physical abuse, malnutrition, and that abuse was allowed to happen because the first generation built this institutional system of abuse that continued on.
And to me, that was one of the most significant revelations.
You know, hearing these second generation
young adults tell these stories and that was also a real turning point for the community because as these stories started to come out there were these series of zoom calls and the parents were forced to hear the children tell these stories and you know having spoken to some first generation you know some said you know i broke down in tears
I didn't know this.
Or they'd say, oh, I thought they were joking.
I didn't think it was that bad.
So there was this reckoning.
And I think that's the other thing that my piece explored was this reckoning in the community.
How do we, you know, maintain the teachings There's a phrase that they say, you know, don't love me, love the teaching.
So this is this kind of push and pull that's going on within the community.
And the other thing that I think that we need to point out is that Yogi Bhajan as the Saturn teacher, especially when it came to the second generation, was really You know, he had this philosophy, almost, of detachment parenting.
I spoke to first-generation women who told me that they literally had to kind of resist their nurturing, mothering instincts to, you know, be the CULSA woman and not be neurotic and not freak out.
This is the terminology that was used.
You know, and also the idea that some people just are double downing and saying, he never did this, you know, there and creating, you know, propaganda, videos, websites, denying that it happened.
And so those are some of the main things that I think I And we're gonna link to your excellent article, but just for our reader's benefit, the intergenerational story that you're referring to, just to underline it, we're talking about an organization that has had like a 30 or 40 year you know, lifespan to it so far.
And the children of the first generation were in many cases separated from their parents and they were sent to schools, to private schools, religious schools in India that themselves were run by devotees of Bhajan and Kundalini Yoga.
And that's where the stories are coming from.
Did I get that right?
Yes, you did.
Thank you for clarifying that.
I think it's worth pointing out that the boarding schools in India emerge in the 1980s, but the ground for them is laid out from the very beginning.
Yogi Bhajan, when you read his lectures, he is constantly undercutting and undermining People's faith in their ability to be parents to their children.
He constantly talks about how neurotic and screwed up his students are, how neurotic and screwed up America is, how special their children are, but how great the risk of parents ruining their children is.
So you have children being separated from families very early on, and in many ways the boarding schools are not an aberration or an experiment, but kind of a fulfillment of the dynamics that have been going on in 3HO.
And just to add a comment I know I'm interviewing you but I just for the for the listeners want to underline the point that in very many high demand groups a primary technique of
Concretizing the trauma bond with the leader is to precisely devalue the family relationships of those who are recruited into the group, and that can mean separating husbands and wives, or in this case, as it gets into the second generation, actually attacking the structure of the emergent new second generation family.
I mean, and the other thing is, is that Yogi Bhajan was the head of the family, right?
The organization is a family, and he is head of the family.
He's looked at like a grandfather or a father, and so then that makes the family dynamic even more You know, important and people more beholden.
Now, can either or both of you tell us a little bit about the network of businesses that have spun out from Bajon and their political leanings?
I mean, there's a really big diversity there.
In the beginning, in the early years of 3HO, there are small homespun businesses.
They're often referred to as family businesses.
you know, lawn care company, daycare, accounting services, and it's pretty clear that from early on members are sending 10% of their earnings back to the organization and to Bhajan.
I think it's worth making a brief aside, you know, one of the reasons why there has been tension between Punjabi Sikhs and 3HO Sikhs is Yogi Bhajan, in so many ways, took on the role of guru in Sikhism, which is kind of a big no-no.
So he is naming people, unlike the ceremonies that most Sikhs do to get names.
He's making major decisions for them, and 3HO uses this term dustbund And for most Sikhs, it's giving a percentage of your earnings to charity or to a Gurdwara.
But in 3HO, it's giving it to the organization itself, or bhajan.
These homespun businesses continue, but some of them start to grow.
And in the late 70s, Yogi Bhajan does what some ex-members call the Great Commonwealth Takeover.
Businesses are signed over to him, and he has, you know, loan control over them.
But we also start to see more and more in the late 70s, the emergence of lots of criminal operations, various forms of scams, smuggling, fraud, And in many ways it has kind of like a mafia-like structure of, you know, an inordinate amount of crime and fraud that's going on and the money is finding its way.
But simultaneously there are also businesses that are, you know, kind of public facing in the wellness culture.
You have Yogi Tea, which becomes a huge company.
You have You have Peace Cereal, you also have, you know, the yoga businesses, and you also have, there was one that, oh, in the 70s there was the Golden Temple Restaurant, right?
And so this is kind of what puts 3HO, you know, it starts to have this public presence around town that's not just the hippies, right?
They have this restaurant, they're serving vegetarian food, celebrities are going there, so they're creating this kind of, they're getting this popular culture following, and that starts to normalize them in the city.
You see 3HO Sikhs walking around in their white, looking all angelic, and they become part of Los Angeles' culture, and it's a seamless fit.
And I think the major outlier for 3HO businesses is a call security.
Which begins in the 1980s as a small local New Mexico security company.
You go to a call security to get, and it's related companies, if you need security guards for a concert in Albuquerque or You know, to patrol a storage unit at night.
And a call just grows exponentially.
And it goes to providing security for courthouses, to being one of the largest private security companies in the country.
Most notoriously and recently coming to public attention for being involved in ICE contracts to detain immigrants at the border.
Now, they've walked back from that participation after public pressure.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, there was some activists within the community, I think they were yoga teachers, who did push back.
Whether or not They continued the contracts to the end or stopped the contracts at that point.
I don't think anybody's been able to determine, but there was definitely pushback on that.
But that is probably their most profitable business.
It's reported to be, you know, billions of dollars.
And there's contracts with DOJ, with embassies, with courthouses.
So we're talking, you know, big government contracts.
Can we assume that that, that Accal Securities and its incredible affluence is tithing back to the religious organization?
I haven't done any reporting on that.
I've done a little digging, and from what I can tell, their charitable giving is not significant, but there's no way of really knowing.
what I can tell their charitable giving is not significant, but there's no way of really knowing.
I can't say for sure where that money is going.
Right.
Now, Stacey, maybe I can ask you one of the most significant events of 2020 as the abuse revelations sort of crest over 3HO, of course, is the publication of Pamela Dyson's book, bird in a cage.
Can you tell us a little bit about that book, who Pamela Dyson is, and what made that a breakthrough moment for the current reassessment of Kundalini Yoga?
Yes, I can talk about Pamela Sahara Dyson's book and in fact that was the impetus for me writing my piece for Los Angeles Magazine.
It was the way in.
So Pamela got involved with 3HO or yogi bhajan in the late 1960s.
She wrote a memoir as an older woman looking back at her life with her guru
It came out at the beginning of 2020, and it's a very well-written, relatable book about a woman longing for her own family, longing for a loving reciprocal relationship, and her love for her guru, right?
It's also a very difficult read because he gets her pregnant, he forces her to get an abortion, he They go to India, she has to sleep in the same room with him and his wife, and she also humanizes him in a way that I don't think we have seen before.
Of course, it's her perception of him.
So it's this very kind of relatable book and she's also a credible narrator in the sense that she was a prominent figure at 3HO and she helped build the institution.
She was essentially, she was called the Secretary General, but she was essentially kind of the CEO of the yoga businesses.
So she was in the inner circle, she knew what was going on.
So what this book does is it gives women permission to come forward and start telling their stories.
And we're in a time, we're in a pandemic, right?
So everyone's safe behind their computers.
These emails start going to 3HO officials.
I think there were, you know, over a dozen women who start reporting their experiences of sexual misconduct with Yogi Bhajan.
And as a result, the organization
initiates an investigation by this third party entity called an Olive Branch to look into the sexual misconduct which we can talk about now if you'd like which did conclude that more likely than not their interesting language that they use that Yogi Bhajan did commit these
These crimes, which included, you know, rape, sexual assault, battery, grooming of young women, and it didn't even get into any of the other kinds of abuse.
But the other thing it did, it gave the second generation permission to tell their stories as well.
So it was kind of this snowball effect.
The memoir comes out, everyone's chattering about it, a Facebook group starts, Zoom calls begin, and it just cracks open.
But But the other thing that happens is you have the people double downing and saying she's a liar just because the complaints are credible does not mean they're true.
If you look at the Olive Branch report itself, which I actually encourage you to link to it, it's an astounding document.
We will do that, yeah.
Um, if you look at the people, you know, because they speak to both defenders and detractors.
And if you speak to the people who are, you know, defending yogi vision, he's a, he's a god.
He could see auras.
He, there's no way he could do this.
He, you know, these women are traumatized.
They have epigenetic trauma.
They're Jewish.
They, you know, their ancestors were in the Holocaust.
You know, there's just... So, it just becomes an interesting kind of cognitive dissonance that continues.
I think that speaks to some of the most interesting dynamics of the last year, which is that these diehard supporters of Yogi Bhajan in many cases end up being the most powerful catalysts to inspire women to come forward with their accounts of abuse.
There are often those claims that Stacey just mentioned.
He was like a god.
He was like Jesus.
He could read auras.
Those are some of the most damning quotes next to the actual accounts of abuse.
And I think everything in some ways came together at the perfect time.
For decades, People had been speaking out about corruption and abuse by Yogi Bhajan.
Investigative journalists had been doing pieces since the 70s.
There were people who were speaking about Yogi Bhajan since the early 70s.
There were online forums starting in the late 1990s.
So I think by the time the memoir came out, it would be impossible to be connected in any way to 3HO without having already heard many of these claims and allegations against Yogi Bhajan.
So then turning now to those who double down, our episode is focusing on Guru Jagat and the Rama Institute.
And just for a background to its present content production, Philip, can you tell us a little bit about who Hari Juhan is and how close he was to Yogi Bhajan and a little bit about him?
So, Hari Jeevan Singh Jr.
claims a closeness to Yogi Bhajan and there's In 3HO, as in any spiritual community, there's all sorts of ways where you can claim proximity to the teacher.
Hari Jeevan Singh Jr.
and his then-wife, they travel following Yogi Bhajan doing a form of Yoga called White Tantric Yoga, where you're doing yoga with a partner in pairs and in long rows.
So that's one of the ways that Hari Jeevan Singh Jr.
claims to have been specially taught or trained or received transmission from Yogi Bhajan.
The other side of Hari Jeevan Singh Jr., maybe the other transmission that he receives through Yogi Bhajan and 3HO, is he does time in prison.
He is convicted in 2000 for a toner bandit operation.
And this is a kind of telemarketing scam where you're selling non-existent office products or office products at an inflated price.
So According to a report by the Associated Press, he's convicted in a scheme that, quote, defrauded companies with bogus invoices for copy machine toner.
He was ordered to pay 520 victims a total of over $155,000 in restitution during his sentencing hearing in a U.S.
district court.
So he does time in prison for that.
When you read the documents, it's really a rat's nest of Names and aliases and P.O.
boxes and incorporations and telephones and various states.
He gets out of prison and according to a former member of 3HO, he gets into the yoga business.
And so he starts teaching yoga and He is teaching at Guru Muk's studio, Golden Bridge, and then there's a series of schisms and openings that eventually see Hari Jeevan at the Rama Institute with Guru Jagat.
Yeah, and she's already founded that by that point.
Well, what happens is she's teaching at Yoga West, which is the flagship studio in LA that Yogi Bhajan used to teach at.
And she's teaching there for many years, and then when Hari Jivan She gets out of jail and starts teaching at Golden Bridge.
They bring her over there.
She has quite a big following at Yoga West, but they bring her over there and then they ask her to go teach at the new Golden Bridge in Santa Monica and she says, I can't because I'm opening my own studio.
So there was a bit of a How do I say it?
They weren't transparent about their plans to open a studio in Venice, and so it causes a bit of a rift at Golden Bridge, which is the studio owned by Gurmukh and her husband, Guru Shabbat.
Right, right.
So they opened Rama Institute in 2013 in Venice, in kind of the hip part of Venice.
And what's the origin, or sorry, what's the influence and kind of client base been for Rama so far?
Rama definitely is kind of the modernization of 3HO.
You know, the first generation and older teachers have a kind of hippie charm, right?
When I actually, for full disclosure, I was a student of hers in 2008-ish, around that time.
You know, she was known as Kundalini Katie then.
And she had kind of a modern twist on Kundalini Yoga.
She was irreverent, she was funny, she was feminist, she talked about being an entrepreneur, being a boss, building a business, taking control of your You know, financial life as a woman, your sexual life as a woman, you know, so there was a there's certainly an appeal to a certain kind of student.
She also Really emphasize the idea that Kundalini Yoga is a householder yoga, right?
So we operate in the world.
We can be fashionable.
She opens a fashion.
She has a couple of fashion lines.
She gets an article on women's wear daily.
She publishes a book, she gets written up in a lot of magazines, and she's able to kind of use the millennial kind of sensibility of technology talking about, you know, downloading this technology, transmissions.
And she says at one point, I want to open for Lady Gaga.
Yogi Bhajan Kundalini Yoga opened Woodstock.
So it's kind of she's going in his footsteps.
She wants her book at Walmart.
She says this in an article several years ago.
And she starts expanding her studios and in that way She leaves at least one lawsuit and starts, the allegations are that she starts using the company credit card for personal expenses.
She doesn't They lead a series of teacher trainings and they do not pay the studio what they're due.
She writes herself checks.
These are all alleged in a lawsuit and within six months the studio blows up and along with it she is Reportedly very abusive to those who work for her.
Again in the footsteps of Yogi Bhajan as the Saturn teacher, this is good for you.
This will make you better.
Me telling you how terrible you are will make you better.
Now, at some point, as this is happening, or perhaps before, Kundalini Kedi becomes Guru Jagat.
Now, is that a name that Bhajan gives her?
Does Hari Jivan give it to her?
How does that happen?
So, when you read Kedi, Guru Jagat's own biography, her own spiritual biography, She makes claims to a kind of direct mission from Yogi Bhajan.
This is essential.
If you're going to be a spiritual teacher, you need a lineage.
You need someone to hand the baton over to you.
You need to be special in order for you to make other people special.
So she talks about Finding Kundalini Yoga right around the time of September 11th and really taking to it and going to New Mexico and doing White Tantric Yoga and then these kind of vague descriptions of being in the master's presence or receiving transmission.
We know from court records that at this time, 2003, Yogi Bhajan is incredibly sick.
He's on, he's so medicated that he needs to be tapered off pain medication to sign legal documents.
And the one tangible thing that Katie refers to is that Yogi Bhajan gives her a name and instructs her to teach at Yoga West.
And this sounds like...
You know, a fiat.
He gives her the name Guru Jagat, world teacher.
He tells her to teach at Yoga West.
You know, this makes sense of her rise and progression.
But if you interview Yogi Bhajan staff members from the 90s and the early 2000s, and you know of his medical history, he's clearly not writing a letter.
He clearly doesn't know who she is.
If you were in 3HO, it doesn't take much to get a very lofty name and that's a very kind of basic instruction.
Oh, you're in Los Angeles.
You want to teach yoga?
Teach yoga at the Los Angeles Kundalini Yoga Center.
Now is it possible that her language around downloading or direct transmission kind of puts that direction into the framework of maybe it's happening in meditation or maybe it's, does, does, does, is there a way in which the story is unliteralized?
Well I have heard from people I've spoken to that she will say things like, Yogi Bhajan told me that.
So she is perhaps downloading... Like face-to-face or he told me that yesterday in meditation?
I don't know the answer to that because I haven't heard her say it directly.
Right.
But I will say that like the link to in the Rama crew from my understanding of it from the reporting I have done is that Hari Jeevan is really kind of the son and they all You know, rotate around him.
And so he has the YB bona fides, right?
He is the part of the golden chain and he is transmitting it down.
So they have kind of elevated him to the position, to the yogi And also, you need to know that they have separated themselves from KRI, from the official 3HO.
So, they are not accountable to anybody any longer, except themselves.
This just speaks to something that I know that you've been interested for a while, Matthew, which is the various legacies of Kundalini Yoga.
The practices and the teachers, you know, extend far beyond the boundaries of 3HO.
I think one of the reasons why Rama was successful is after Yogi Bhajan's death, you no longer have the tall poppy syndrome where Yogi Bhajan would, you know, no one could be taller or bigger than Yogi Bhajan himself.
So You're able to flourish and they're using a lot of current marketing but also you're not under the restraints of the kind of the paradox of yogi bhajan.
I'm a yoga teacher but I'm also a religious authority.
You kind of can't get too wild in that framework.
You kind of have to keep it respectable.
You can't be Too much of anything that would offend those kind of sensibilities, but those restrictions are really off after his death.
And I think it's a very interesting move in the wake of the Olive Branch report and everything that comes out in the past year.
It feels like the vast majority of people affiliated with 3HO have done the same kind of move that disgraced politicians do.
Stand at the podium, sob with your pastor and your spouse, and they've made gestures of being apologetic, they've tried to rebrand.
It's the opposite move.
You can kind of think of Rama as the Berlusconi or the Trump.
You don't apologize, you double down.
We're twice as sure that they're slanderers and liars.
We are now twice as committed to our lineage. - And this sense of there being no guardrails for the breakaway group where, you know, nobody really has to keep it together in terms of their respectability.
I, maybe you weren't surprised, but I was kind of surprised to see that Jagat's co-op, COVID denialism, which is the focus of this episode, had escalated this past week to the point of her platforming David Icke in an interview on her YouTube channel.
And I'm wondering, does this fit into a pattern of Kundalini Yoga 3HO mythology or ways that Bhajan or any of the other networkers have teamed up with transgressors I think there was always a culture of paranoia and conspiracy within 3HO.
If you read Yogi Bhajan's lectures, he is forever talking about threats against his life, plots from the KGB, you know, the coming insanity, the collapse of American civilization.
So I think There was always that element in 3HO, but it's also, in a time of COVID, it's very practical.
You know, to use the hokey phrase, if it makes dollars, it makes cents.
You know, it's a worldview that also allows you to continue the essential money-making operation of any yoga studio, which is teacher trainings and retreats.
It dovetails nicely with that.
It's a worldview that also allows you to do retreats where people will pay thousands of dollars to join you.
And Stacey, with Katie's ascendancy, I'm wondering how you've seen her and other female kundalini yoga Celebrities square Yogi Bhajan's obvious misogyny and violence against women with the empowerment message that they present.
I mean, I just viewed one Instagram clip where Katie Griggs is talking about Yogi Bhajan as being an intersectional feminist before his time.
I mean, there's denial and just kind of rewriting of history, but do you think this is working out, and for whom?
I think it's working out to a degree because there are people, there's two things going on.
Philip and I talk about this a lot.
There's a lot of people that just don't do their research.
They just don't know.
Katie Guru Jagat is actually a good yoga teacher, right?
She can attract students.
She can attract students.
And I think that-- how do I put it?
With celebrities, you know, I've written about kind of the intersection of celebrity and spirituality.
And celebrities, you know, they have very privileged lives.
They also have a sense like, I'm not curing cancer.
Why am I so lucky?
So they tend to go on these spiritual kind of paths, whether it's to understand their luck or their privilege or to deal with their addictions.
So if it's working for them, they're okay with it.
I mean, honestly, I cannot speak for celebrities, but I will say that, you know, She's not the first.
Gurmukh also had a big celebrity following before her.
And she won't be the last.
I almost feel like it's, you know, consumers need to, yoga consumers need to, you know, do their due diligence, do their research.
But right now you go to the SiriusXM website and there's still a huge picture of Yogi Bhajan there.
So if the official organization isn't going to acknowledge the misconduct and the anti-feminist, anti-woman aspect of it, who's going to?
Well, I wanted to thank you both so much for your time.
And just my last question is that given what Kundalini Yoga and 3HO have weathered so far, you know, suppressing the news about the legal actions in the 1990s, the revelations from Pamela Dyson, the Olive Branch investigation, legal action from abuse survivors is now pending as well.
How do you predict, you know, they and Ramu will weather COVID?
Do you think Rama will become further marginalized from the main group or might they even emerge as a site of kundalini yoga authenticity?
I mean, I think that what we're dealing with is really an unknown multiplied by another unknown.
I don't think anyone is really sure what the yoga world is going to look like on the other side of COVID.
And it's also hard to tell, especially in the absence of large gatherings and in-person teacher trainings, what kundalini yoga is going to look like post-pandemic.
It's hard to tell.
I think in one sense, as I've said before, it's hard to imagine kundalini yoga and yogi bhajan Getting beyond the stain of all the abuse and all the misconduct.
There was a recent article about the death of a young woman in the UK done by the Mirror and it really showed that From this point forward, you can't mention Kundalini Yoga and Yogi Bhajan without also deferring to the scandals and abuse and the report by an olive branch.
At the same time, one of the things that has become clear to me during the past year is that, as Stacy mentioned, most people don't Google, most people don't do their due diligence.
The other side of that is the bar is actually Very low.
Studios and teachers and wellness influencers, they don't have to, most times, pass a level of believability or truth or honesty.
They just need to convince their customers.
And that's enough, in most cases, to keep them going.
So if that can happen, they or any other studio can keep going.
Yeah, I mean especially in COVID and especially with the the Rama crew, you know they really appeal to young millennial single people.
So you're in COVID, you're living alone, you're looking for community, you're looking to meditate, you're looking to feel better, You're, you know, you may not be working.
So there's definitely a place to go with Rama and, you know, I think that could help them in some ways.
And I've also noticed on the social media, like the frenetic pace of the post, I mean, I mean I look at it and I'm exhausted.
I mean and I'm thinking about you know all the work that goes into it.
So you know here's a group of people surrounded You know, who surround Hari Jeevan and Guru Jagat, who are working 24-7, also getting up to do sadhana, also creating a million posts, also, you know, creating, you know, Camp Grace.
They're going on a yatra.
Yatra, excuse me.
And also, you know, interestingly enough, with the COVID denialism, if you look at some of their posts, they'll say safety protocols and social distancing, you know.
will be adhered to, so that it's a cognitive dissonance.
She has David Icke.
The next post, she's wearing a Star of David.
So, you know, let's appeal to everybody.
It's all good.
It's going to work.
We're going to meditate.
We're going to, you know, have a creative culture.
And it appeals to... I think in that way, it is successful.
