The Second Coming of Guru Jagat

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“It’s like a cult within a cult.” Guru Jagat wanted to spread kundalini yoga to the masses—but now her former followers are working to expose her reputation for abuse and fraud.

It was golden hour at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, final resting place of Burt Reynolds, Cecil B. DeMille, and Estelle Getty, just around the corner from Paramount Studios. Five hundred mourners had taken their seats among carefully ordered rows as the sun dipped below the picture-postcard palms. They were dressed almost entirely in white; as followers of the esoteric yoga practice known as kundalini, they believed the color could stretch one’s aura to a very specific nine feet.

Jagat saw things differently. After promoting a video that sought to discredit Dyson and defend Bhajan, she wrote in an Instagram post, “This tale is no truer than any other tale—the Truth as always lies in the eye of the Beholder.” “Truth” was something she had spoken about often; only for her it meant something subjective, mutable, and relative . Her stance triggered a backlash that opened the floodgates.

and on Vogue.com. Jagat was loved for her irreverence: The way she talked—frankly and conspiratorially, like she was letting you in on some inside joke—was more the kind of thing you’d expect in the ladies’ at a bar at 2 a.m. She swore. She told long-winded stories that verged on TMI. She liked to wear her leonine blond hair long and loose, or piled up and pouring out of a headscarf, in defiance of the traditional turban worn by women in the kundalini world.

But kundalini was also shaky ground to build your spiritual salvation on. It wasn’t just that Bhajan had invented most of it out of thin air, but that he had baked into it many troubling aspects of what detractors call his sociopathic and narcissistic personality. If traditional religion left fate up to God, kundalini, like many New Age belief systems, teaches that a person’s lot in life could be almost solely attributed to their spiritual well-being and discipline.

“Can you separate the teacher from the teachings?” Dyson wonders now. Bhajan touted kundalini as a “powerful technology,” and in a sense he wasn’t wrong: Scientific studies have shown the benefit of chanting mantras, and the highs experienced from the intensive breath work in kundalini are thought to be useful tools for recovering addicts.

 

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