Katie Griggs. Katie Day. Kundalini Katie. Guru Jagat. We hardly knew you.
The late "Queen of Conspiracy Theories" is now memorialized on NPR through Emily Guerin's LAist podcast "Imperfect Paradise."
Matthew sits down with Emily to explore how we cover figures like Griggs, what it was like to interview her family, and what we can ultimately say about the compromised feminist empowerment she offered her followers—and whether she could have taken another route.
Show Notes
She was a popular yoga guru. Then she embraced QAnon conspiracy theories — NPR, LAist
36: Guru Jagat’s Pandemic Brandwash (w/Philip Deslippe & Stacie Stukin)
37: Guru Jagat Cultjacks Kundalini Yoga (w/Philip Deslippe & Stacie Stukin)
(PDF) From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga — Philip Deslippe
Yogi Bhajan Turned an L.A. Yoga Studio into a Juggernaut, and Left Two Generations of Followers Reeling from Alleged Abuse — Stacie Stukin
Inside the Dubious World of RA MA Yoga, and Its Girl Boss Guru to the Stars — Cassidy George, VICE
Guru Jagat Dies. A Saint Is Born. | by Matthew Remski | Aug, 2021 | Medium
Guru Jagat Mourned in Person with Breathing Exercises, No Masks — Matthew Remski
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Hey everybody, I'm Matthew Remsky, here with a conspirituality brief called Long Live Guru Jagat.
I'm joined by Emily Guerin of Elayist Studios.
Welcome, Emily.
Hi, thanks Matthew.
Emily was the lead journalist on the recently released Imperfect Paradise, Yoga's Queen of Conspiracy Theories podcast, which detailed the joys and troubles of the late Guru Jagat, born Katie Griggs.
Content note, We'll be talking about sexual violence and cult dynamics in this episode.
And just a reminder that you can catch us on Apple Podcast subscription service on Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon, and you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
Emily, we have covered Guru Jagat fairly extensively on the podcast, featuring extended interviews with yoga scholar Philip Deeslip and LA journalist Stacey Stukin, episodes 36-37.
What I found admirable about your approach in Imperfect Paradise is that you really limited the nerdery,
and you opted for accessibility.
So, in that spirit, what is your two-minute elevator pitch
on the significance of the late Guru Jagat?
Who was she, and why should we care?
Well, I think she is a really interesting case study of the phenomenon that you all talk about
so eloquently on your show, which is radicalization in the wellness industry,
in particular during the pandemic.
And just from a narrative perspective, I like to try to tell small stories that illustrate bigger themes, and she was kind of a perfect vehicle to do that because everything she said was on tape.
She recorded every class.
I mean, as you know, she was kind of a micro-influencer, and all of her classes were broadcast on her subscription site, Rama TV, as well as frequently on YouTube and Instagram, so you could really hear her radicalize on tape.
And so from an audio journalist perspective, that was pretty ideal.
Even like separate from what happened in yoga and wellness during the pandemic, I just felt like she illustrated what happened to so many families during that time, which was that conspiracy theories became really divisive.
She certainly did.
And it was amazing that you were able to get some family members on tape.
And we'll get to that in a moment.
I just want to point out that you have that incredible audio and video archive available to you because that was at the heart of her monetization project.
Right.
I mean, what's ironic is that her forebear, Yogi Bhajan, also has an incredible audiovisual library that's still extant on the internet through a library system that the Kundalini Yoga groups have maintained.
But that was about the preservation of almost like a scriptural accumulation of teachings that they believed
were coming from him. But with Katie Griggs, we really have an archive that's about
how she promoted her particular business in a very sort of forward sense through the internet.
Yeah, and I think she was really at the forefront of kind of pushing the limits of like,
what could even be considered content in the way that so many kind of millennial influencers
discovered where like, everything was recorded.
You know, small moments, big moments, small moments were made grand with the addition of music and like clever editing and I found that part of her video archive pretty interesting too.
Now, you explicitly did not lean into the allegations that Guru Jagat abused her underlings.
You said that it had been well enough reported and that actually those issues weren't that surprising.
Can you say more about that?
Yeah, and I guess when I say they're not surprising, it doesn't mean that I want to—I'm not trying to, like, minimize the allegations, you know, which are that she was kind of a tyrannical boss, emotionally, verbally abusive, withheld wages, things like that.
It was more, you know, what you said, that there had been two, I thought, pretty well-done, long-form pieces of journalism, in Vice and Vanity Fair, about that, about the sort of, you know, girl boss gone bad angle.
And I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, but I just didn't think it was that surprising for somebody to sort of turn that way after they became famous.
I mean, I don't think it's that unique to yoga or wellness.
Like, this is what happens when you suddenly get really full of yourself.
You get a lot of attention, you make a name for yourself.
Sometimes in the long arc, people come back and they realize they've lost their humanity.
And, you know, with Guru Jagat, she died very suddenly.
So that didn't happen.
I was more interested in her as the example of radicalization.
And so I decided to focus really narrowly on that period of 2020 and 2021 and focus on what it was about her and the type of yoga she practiced that led her to embrace conspiracies.
You know, the side effect of you having this L.A.
background and therefore the sort of bad boss situation is just not unique is that it also means you kind of lean out of the cult discourse with regard to describing her group.
And I actually think there's some benefit to that because often the cult lens allows us to look at situations like the Rama Institute and sort of separate them off from other parts of the culture or make us believe that somehow they're unique when actually, you know, most organizations in late capitalism run with a certain amount of exploitation and dominance hierarchy.
Well, and I think, and I'm sure you found this too, but that word cult, like as soon as you introduced that, I feel like people think that they know what to expect.
Like it's a very predictive concept.
And I, I don't know, I was just wary of bringing that in unless people I interviewed brought it up.
And I think because I was focusing on Her pandemic radicalization, that really wasn't a part of the story as much.
I think that that comes across, certainly.
Like, when you listen to the show, it's like, oh, yes, she had a cult-like personality.
And the main follower character, who I talked to, certainly sort of worships her in that way.
But it definitely wasn't an explicit part of the story.
Well, I think it poses a problem for journalists because, as you say, it is a predictive concept.
I'd also say that it's an over-determined concept.
And additionally, I'd say that it's ill-defined.
It's becoming more and more sort of thrown around in many different situations that may or may not be helpful.
And I think that it's very difficult for the journalist to use that language and then get an adequate sense of what people who knew the person are saying on the ground.
And it becomes a real like marketing term, which I find sort of gross.
You know, like you can imagine someone writing a headline for SEO optimization and being like, oh, let's put cult dynamics in there.
And that kind of stuff just I find distasteful.
Right, well you could add sex cult dynamics.
Oh yeah, there you go.
And then, yeah, it goes through the roof.
Okay, so let's talk about how there's something extremely recognizable about Guru Jagat, extremely accessible.
I mean, not only through her Pop culture, kind of immersion, her fashion pathways, but also through her, you know, sort of workaday, plain spoken, but also intimate communications, her low voice, her jokes.
You know, and by contrast, the men who come before her, Yogi Bhajan and Hari Jiwan, are Really unapproachable, comparatively.
And I think this allows a lot of opportunity for journalists to humanize her as a person in the world.
And so I wanted to ask, what stood out to you or resonated with you most about her very human qualities?
First, I felt like they hadn't really been explored by other journalists.
I mean, I think she's a really easy person to sort of caricature or be sarcastic about or be dismissive of because she is so over the top.
I mean, the way she dressed, the way she spoke, she has that Elizabeth Holmes-like deep gravelly voice.
Right.
And her name, too.
I mean, her name is really like you know, punches you in the face.
And so I felt like kind of, you know, peering behind that curtain, she was a pretty vulnerable,
self-conscious person.
And I think a lot of this came through to me and talking to her mother and her stepfather,
watching her memorial service where there were some longtime friends who spoke very
frankly about her and then and then talking to some of them.
And yeah, I mean, she just, you know, not to like play armchair psychologist, although I guess that's what journalists do a little bit.
She just struck me as someone who from a young age really craved attention.
Her mom told me that her father left when she was still a baby.
She always sort of was seeking a strong male father figure in her life.
She was perhaps drawn to powerful men who misled her because of that.
She also grew up very spiritual and I think, you know, defined that loosely as being around people who had kind of alternate beliefs to like mainstream American Christian culture.
I think she was also a seeker and I think her mother was kind of a seeker who dabbled in a lot of different religions and practices until she found something that both felt true but also allowed her to shine because I think the seeker and the attention seeking kind of went together for Katie.
And, sorry, Katie being Guru Jagat.
And I think, you know, just in terms of going back to your original question, like, what appealed to me about her is, I'm always drawn to people who it's not really clear if they're a victim or a perpetrator.
And I think she, that became very clear to me about her, the more I talked to people who knew her well, was that she was both.
Let me come back to that in a moment.
But before I do, what did you find out about her theater background and her training on stage?
You know, that didn't come up like in terms of formal training.
I mean, her a longtime friend of hers and her and her mom talked about her kind of always seeking the limelight and like putting on these little fashion shows for friends in high school and One of her friends when she was living in New York in her early 20s told me that she was the kind of person who would always tell the right story to captivate the group, you know, if they were out to dinner like she knew and it was like a good story.
I mean, it wasn't even a put-on like people actually wanted to listen to what she had to say.
And so it was more like that type of attention-seeking socially and less like a formal she wanted to be an actor.
How it was explained to me was she just wanted to be recognized and she wanted to be well-known and it kind of didn't She had to search until she found the right discipline where that clicked and that was kundalini yoga.
I guess we have to just always acknowledge that the people who wind up in these situations and wind up getting scrutinized in these ways were in high school once.
They had friends in high school.
They did things that were high school things, and we probably would recognize them from our own histories, from our own experiences.
And that's what is very easy to be lost, I think, as people like Guru Jagat become sort of, I don't know, iconic or made unique by circumstance.
Well, she also wanted to lose those things.
I mean, there came a point where she refused to go by her birth name, Katie, which I should say, like, plenty of people choose to abandon their birth names.
Like, there's nothing wrong or unusual about that.
But I think the manner in which she did it was to distance herself from that, you know, less distinguished, more like pedestrian past.
You know, she wanted to be Guru Jagat.
She didn't want to be Katie anymore.
You also said that you were interested in this ambivalence between whether or not she was a victim or a perpetrator.
Yeah.
And I think this is particularly crucial when we're talking about groups that have high demand qualities or where cultic dynamics are at play because I think the truth is that in order for like a high demand, high pressurized group to function, Everybody has to be participating at some level of agency or other.
And that means that, you know, if if a person comes into some kind of leadership position, it's generally because they have been influenced to do so by somebody else.
And that means that maybe they've given away some of their themselves.
And then if they in turn go on and participate in that sort of same power dynamic, then they end up And I think it's a very important dynamic to be aware of.
Well, and I just felt like the women I spoke to who were kind of devout followers of Kundalini Yoga all had a very similar origin story.
Like, I'm talking about both Pamela Dyson and the way she describes finding Kundalini Yoga in her memoir, Premka, Jacqueline Gelb, who was one of Guru Jagat's followers, and then Guru Jagat herself.
Feeling like you had been searching for ages and you finally found this thing that clicked and it was this particular teacher and now you were going to be devoted to this teacher and the teacher could be stern and difficult and rough but that was like part of the practice and doing the work and it just I mean the parallels in their stories I found really striking.
In the recent story from the NXIVM world, we have this very deep confusion between victim and perpetrator played out in legal but also in media terms where some of the strongest personalities that have emerged as survivors from the group Also happened to have been leaders within the organization who are now who now are in the position of turning around and saying, no, we were victimized at the same time that we were benefiting from this thing.
It's a very complicated situation.
Well, and you know more about this than me, Matthew, but I feel like you see that also in the Kundalini abuse kind of survivor perpetrator dynamics where the first generation, the older, you know, sort of baby boomer aged folks who actually practice with Yogi Bhajan, who now feel rightfully so victimized by him, you know, their children are saying, you know, but we didn't have a choice.
We were born into this and look what you did to us.
You put us through these schools.
You know, we suffered and how can you be the victims?
We're the victims.
And I didn't get into that in the podcast.
I mean, and that's like a whole other story, like the long problematic history of Kundalini Yoga.
But I think you're totally right that that gets really complicated, especially as there's children of the original followers involved.
Yeah, and it's something that perhaps only a very broad and well-funded and safe Truth and Reconciliation Commission can sort out because it becomes an intergenerational issue that's extremely complex.
Speaking of the generations, how did you gain the trust of Katie Griggs' mother and stepfather and what was it like to speak with them?
I think it was a matter of time and me having time to wait for Katie's mom to be ready to do an interview.
She had spoken to the reporter from Vanity Fair, and then by the time I talked to her, she seemed, you know, totally understandably so, like just uninterested in doing other interviews.
And we went back and forth a few times.
I just felt like there was something else going on.
And so I, we ended up, because the show I was making got delayed, it ended up giving me the time to reach out to her again six months later.
And she, I mean, she totally didn't have to do this, but she sort of apologized and said that she had been angry and she was grieving and that now she felt more ready to talk.
And I think that they also liked that I worked for NPR.
I mean, not that, not that we.
Yeah, I guess I'll just leave it at that.
She liked that I worked for an NPR station.
That's actually important because that is a huge cultural marker in the States.
Yeah.
And it says a lot about people's... It's like the CBC or the BBC.
Yeah, it says a lot about people's politics, just for non-American listeners.
You know, to want to be or to be sort of happy that it's NPR on the phone really says something about what you've been listening to and the kinds of stories that you come to expect and the kind of reporting sensitivity that you think might be coming your way.
Well, and interestingly, along those lines, one of the stories that Katie's stepfather told me was that their media diet became divisive within their family because they watched CNN, which is certainly the definition of mainstream media.
And Katie used to lecture them on how CNN was, you know, in cahoots with George Soros and the Deep State.
And she would joke in class, you know, my mom has an IV of CNN in her arm.
And that in particular was pretty divisive for the family.
So yeah, it's wild now how as a journalist, like the place that you work is this sort of marker of like, you know, are people going to dismiss you?
Are people going to take you seriously?
Are you fake news?
Are you not?
In any case, I found her parents to be Quite lovely and really able to engage in the complexities of their daughter in ways that a lot of people could not with her.
I think that was the best thing about talking to them is for so many people in Guru Jagat's life, she was black or white.
She was the victim.
She was the perpetrator.
And they were really able to see her as both.
And they were able to speak about somebody who dies suddenly in their 40s, who they cared for and who one of them gave birth to.
I mean, it's an incredible feat to be able to speak at all, I think.
Yeah, I think so, too.
And I think Katie's mom also.
She, I think she just wants her daughter to be remembered in all of her complexity.
And I think the idealization of her daughter really bothered her and sort of weirded her out.
But she also did not want to engage at all.
And that was maybe the other reason I didn't go into the kind of bad boss stuff is she did not want to engage in that at all.
And so I think she wanted to live in the more gray area, the sadness of how she had lost Katie in the last few years of her life due to conspiracy theories.
And that's what I felt like was the more universal story to take it even beyond the sort of conspirituality theme was the loss of a family member to radicalization period.
I have the sense that if the idealization bothered her, it might have been based in the notion that it actually was a contributing factor to the complications that actually led to her fame and death.
Yeah, I mean, she certainly the cause of death is a pulmonary embolism.
She had had surgery a few weeks before she died and then and then flown back from Germany to the United States.
And so that's their theory is that she, you know, refused to stay put in Germany.
She was determined to come back to Los Angeles.
She wanted to keep teaching on stage.
Yes, and under the guise of loving her.
Right.
Under the guise of praising her or holding her up or respecting her.
really betrayed. I know her stepfather told me he felt very betrayed by her inner circle
that they weren't looking out for her and they weren't giving her good medical advice.
Yes, and under the guise of loving her, under the guise of praising her or holding her up
or respecting her like that is a very difficult situation for a family member I think to behold
is that you know your child is being cared for in a way that is really serving the project
of the community more than the person themselves.
And maybe this is just because I think about this because I have a two-year-old son and it's hard for me to imagine what he'll be like as an adult, but just the idea of this is this person that you created and they came out of you and now you have So little influence on their life and they're doing things that seem so dangerous to you and you really can't do much about it and that seems very difficult for any parent to go through.
Now in the third episode, you tangle with this difficult question of Guru Jagat's confused and I would say compromised feminism.
Yeah.
Specifically about how at this critical moment with her entire subculture in the throes of an abuse crisis, she throws her elder sister in Kundalini Yoga, Pamela Dyson, under the rape culture bus when Pamela came forward with her book about Yogi Bhajan abusing her for over a decade in the 1970s.
Now, you interviewed journalist Cassidy George about why Guru Jagat made this choice instead of taking the obviously correct historical position and empowering path of breaking ties with a patriarchy and believing and denouncing the abuse.
So, what are your thoughts on that particular issue now?
Yeah, and first of all, Pamela just told me she wasn't up for talking.
I think she probably was talked out about this topic.
But, you know, I did read her memoir and I talked to, like you mentioned, a journalist for Vice as well as some other folks for whom Pamela's memoir had really affected them.
And I think the theory that Cassidy, the vice journalist, floated was that Katie Gurujagat had kind of felt threatened by Pamela's memoir, that there was this other woman coming out of the past to threaten Gurujagat's status as a feminist because, you know, Gurujagat had really, and this I think is kind of key, she had marketed herself as a feminist.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, like all of her literature is like, I'm building the new feminine matriarchal archetype.
I'm speaking at the California Women's Conference.
I mean, she just talked endlessly about the role of women in society as having power and money and that that was a good thing.
And so to then be saying, on the other hand, that, you know, I get my authority from Yogi Bhajan.
She talked about Yogi Bhajan endlessly in class, quoted him.
And Philip Deeslip, who you've had on the show, he talks about sort of the golden chain in Kundalini and how Your only authority comes from your association with Yogi Bhajan, how much time you spent with him.
And Katie talked about this a lot, too.
She said he gave her her name.
He told her to move to L.A.
And so I think there was just a conflict there.
And how could she, you know, if she no longer associated with Yogi Bhajan, what was she?
What authority did she have?
And so I think she felt like she maybe had no choice but to double down and defend her teacher.
It's so interesting because according to the adulation that she received, she might have underestimated her own authority, actually.
Because I think it would have been very possible for her to say, you know, I've discovered, I've listened to the women who have talked about Yogi Bhajan's abuses.
I've discovered that there are inconsistencies in the way in which this community tells its own history.
I'm not willing to put up with that anymore.
Just give me the truth, she might sing along with John Lennon.
And she could have said, actually, I'm instituting not only 5D Femme, but Kundalini 2.0.
And it really is going to be based on women's leadership.
And, you know, we're grateful for these historical artifacts that we've received from this patriarchal culture, but we're going to go forward in a new direction.
Like, she could have done that.
If anybody could have done that, she could have done that.
Yeah, and that is really fascinating.
And I think like the best I could come up with was just a number of theories that might explain her response.
And I think one of them is about the, I mean, sort of the relativism of truth in Kundalini Yoga, also kind of in yoga wellness more broadly.
And this really became clear to me when I was watching this reaction video that Hari Jeevan made to Pamela Dyson's memoir.
Hari Jeevan is another teacher at Rama and he's kind of Guru Jagat's mentor.
And he made this video where he just sort of talks about how, you know, Pamela Dyson's
story is just that it's a story.
You can decide whether or not you want to believe the story.
And then later on in the video, he starts talking about her story as a virus and he
starts linking the pandemic to her story.
And both of them to him are just things happening in the world that you can choose to believe
And if you don't want to, you can make your own reality that better suits you.
And I felt like that is a way to explain it.
I mean, the allegations against Yogi Bhajan challenged her worldview.
And she was in a community where you can disregard things that challenge your worldview and make your own reality.
And that's what she chose to do.
On the public's response to your work on this story, there's a really NPR-style Facebook post and then discussion on the NPR Facebook page in response to the print article and to the podcast.
There's a criticism of both your reporting and my analysis, because you quote me in the print article, that I'd like to look at.
I've got it here.
And I think this criticism summarizes so many of the cultural assumptions that challenge the reporting of stories like this.
So it comes from a listener who says, I've been a yogi since 1977 and I'm usually a fan of both NPR and Matthew Rebski, but this is just lazy.
Quote, themes like everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, and nothing is what it seems are central to both yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking.
Yes, yoga actually means yoke in Sanskrit, but that refers to the connection of each individual's mind, body, soul, and nowhere have I ever practiced or studied promotes any of these three gross generalizations.
I have been devastated by the infiltration of QAnon into formerly safe spaces, and I'm equally disappointed by the lack of nuance with which the intersection of these spaces and conspiracy rabbit holes is being addressed.
So very understandable kind of You know, queasiness around the association being made between the yoga and wellness space and its vulnerability to QAnon.
Also, we should say, Matthew, that comment got 467 likes.
Incredible.
Yeah, I love it, actually.
And so I responded because, you know, the person named me and I pointed out that, you know, I don't think that the reporting was lazy.
I think that it was abbreviated because those three themes, Everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, nothing is what it seems, are actually the themes that are identified by Michael Barkun, the political scientist, as being central to conspiracy theorizing.
But, as pointed out by scholars of conspirituality, they are also basic premises within yoga, wellness, and New Age culture.
You know, everything is connected is kind of like the sense that the world is interdependent.
That nothing happens without a purpose is the principle of karma, and that nothing is what it seems is that things are illusory, i.e.
Guru Jagat is able to say, you know, Pamela Dyson's book might be the truth, it might not be.
It's really up for you to decide.
The response was really interesting and I also got a bunch of emails that weren't, you know, on this public NPR Facebook post and they ranged from people telling me their own stories with people they loved who did yoga, who had gotten into conspiracy theories and how upsetting that was for them.
To more of this kind of critique of, this hasn't been my yoga experience and, you know, you're generalizing.
And I will say, in retrospect, I do think I wish I had interviewed a few more people who have studied yoga philosophy.
So that's fair.
Like I will, I acknowledge that.
But I felt like a lot of the comments were coming from a place of my worldview is like I'm being challenged in some way and it makes me uncomfortable.
And I understand that.
But I also think that it's subtle, right?
And I guess, Matthew, what I started noticing is I went to some yoga classes after starting this podcast and doing the reporting and I started, once you know what to listen for, it's kind of everywhere.
Yeah.
And I didn't hear it before.
Like I went to a class and the woman was talking about this particular pose would help, you know, release trauma.
And I was just like, that doesn't make any sense.
And then, you know, she went on to talk about something that felt vaguely like, you know, disregard anything you don't agree with.
It was sort of a, your thoughts are illusory, your thoughts aren't real, which I used to, I used to meditate weekly in this sort of secular Mindfulness-based stress reduction tradition, and that's a big part of it, is sort of acknowledging that your thoughts don't have power.
You can let them go.
And I see now how that can become, you know, reject a worldview or a set of facts you don't agree with.
Or question the nature or fabric of reality itself, actually.
Yeah.
Right.
So I guess I see now how these things that sound innocuous can, as you said, curdle.
And I do think it has to do with your own personality.
Like Guru Jagat, as far as I can tell, had a sort of penchant for conspiracies before the pandemic.
And so perhaps it is not surprising that someone who already felt this way would then radicalize further.
And if you don't feel that way, maybe you wouldn't have radicalized during the pandemic.
But yeah, I think these sort of yoga themes certainly are a way for one who already thinks that way to go further.
And I think kundalini yoga in particular seems more paranoid than other types of yoga in that Yogi Bhajan, you know, throughout his life would warn people that there would come a time when his enemies would try to take him down and they would have to defend him.
And he also spoke at length about, you know, alternative medicine, alternative cures, distrusting the medical establishment, which are obviously things that many modern QAnon followers also feel.
I think that particular branch of yoga seems more likely to influence someone towards radicalization than perhaps like your vinyasa class that you might take at the climbing gym.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And I would say that the incredible complexity, the baroqueness of the system that he cobbled together, all of the levels, all of the sort of divisions of practice, all of the ways in which you separate out the day and do different things.
I think it's why it was like a no-brainer for Guru Jagat to interview Champ Parinya on her podcast before she died.
Who was the creator of one of the famous QAnon maps.
The Great Awakening map.
Yes, exactly.
An incredible mandala of everything is connected.
I think that Kundalini Yoga was particularly vulnerable to the brain worm of QAnon for sure.
Yeah, and just on that note, the QAnon map that Matthew you're talking about, that was like a moment in my reporting where I was like, oh my god, these things are way more connected than I thought.
Like I saw this photo of this Great Awakening map hanging on the wall of Guru Jagat's studio not long after she died.
And I kind of zoomed in and I started realizing that there were these things I had heard her say in class that I always thought were like kundalini yoga words, but here they were on this QAnon catchphrase map, and that really blew my mind.
Can we just pause for a moment?
Did you just say that the QAnon map is hanging in the studio?
Yeah, she hung the Great Awakening map, I don't know if it was her, but the Great Awakening map was hanging on the wall of Rama.
Amazing.
Of her studio in Venice.
Did not know that.
Yeah, and it was in this like, you know, millennial pink.
It's a beautiful map.
It is a beautiful map, yeah.
If you don't look, if you don't really look at it, it just looks like, like I think I said it, you know, it looks like it could be on the wall of a third wave coffee shop next to like a ficus tree.
It's really attractive.
Well, it also has that sort of like Tibetan sand painting quality to it as well, right?
Where very, very intricate patterns and geometries going on if you don't zoom in and realize that it's an incredibly paranoid rant.
Yeah, I mean, and there's phrases on there like the attitude of gratitude is the highest way of living and like love over fear and, you know, pineal gland, which Guru Jagat was obsessed with her with the pineal gland.
And I was just like, oh, my God, I didn't know when she said this stuff.
I was just like, OK, this is like obscure Kundalini jargon.
But no, here it is on the QAnon map.
Any last thoughts, Emily?
I guess I just wanted to ask you this point that some of the NPR commenters brought up about Was she just someone who was kind of into conspiracies and would have radicalized anyway?
Or did the yoga really radicalize her?
How much do you think of what you talk about in conspirituality could be explained by that?
I think that she was ideally situated for conspirituality content and for QAnon keywords to become new material during a time of social stress.
There was enough of content overlap between Her kundalini yoga discourse and what was coming down the pipe through people like David Icke
That when she needed new content to be able to maintain this position of giving kind of relief to her followers in a time of social crisis, that worked very well for her.
And also, as you point out in the third episode, it also allowed her to distract from the abuse crisis within the broader Kundalini world.
So, did her Social context make her vulnerable to QAnon material?
I think, yes, it did.
Did her ideological context and epistemological context make her more vulnerable?
I think, yeah, for sure it did.
And it also meant that she had a ready-made monetization pipeline that always needed new content, especially as the online marketing of the pandemic had to take off because all of the studios were closing.
So, a lot of factors there coming together in a perfect storm.
I think I would say to the NPR listener who's now scared somehow that going to their YMCA yoga class is going to radicalize them.
I would say the chances of that, if you have become aware of this story, have probably gone down quite a bit.
Do you still do yoga?
Like, are you able to go and enjoy the physical, you know, meditative benefits of it without being in your head about, you know, the stuff?
Because I feel like it's been hard for me since starting this reporting to enjoy yoga.
Yeah, join the club.
I am able to meditate and practice at home because even with, you know, the most friendly, benign and, you know, even people that I know and have known for a long time who teach classes, I think that the social environment, the space itself is just I don't know.
It has this echo of trouble within it for me that is not only about all of the sort of cultic dynamics that I've covered and the abuse stories that I've done journalism on, but it also has to do with, you know, this was the kind of space that created social vulnerability during a very difficult time.
And that means that, yeah, my practice is pretty much personal.
It's pretty much solitary now.
Okay.
Thank you so much for your time, Emily.
Yeah, thanks for being willing to talk to me and be on my show.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
And here's Guru Jagat to sing us out.
All I want is the truth.
Just give me some truth.
All I want is truth.
I'm sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics.
All I want is the truth.
Just gimme some truth.
I've had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians.
