DISMANTLING CULT CULTURE: Supporting a Kriya Practice Rooted in Tradition

A documentary was recently released on HBO MAX detailing a history of decades of abuse and cult community in the western practice of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, called Breath of Fire. I encourage you to watch it. I recently watched it myself. I am very familiar with the two Los Angeles teachers who are the focus of this documentary and found them in my own experience to be a negative influence on the yoga community due to their exploitive behaviors and practices. As a result I did not practice with those teachers, instead I found teachers that reflected back to me the integrity and honesty I was seeking to nurture within myself.

I started practicing Kundalini Yoga during a time in my life when I was going through profound change and transformation spiritually. The exercises known as kriyas, breathwork and mantras offered me a great deal of clarity and healing in a way that nothing else had before. I was changing, transforming and healing.

As I started to deepen my practice I became acutely aware of an underbelly of toxic community that was surrounding this very healing practice. Efforts to control a person’s behavior and lifestyle, suggestions to students and aspiring teachers to change their name in order to fully start “living out their spiritual dharma”. Suggestions to women from other established women in the community that they must present a more “demure” way in public to “reinstate their dignity”. These aspects were repulsive to me and I came to realize yoga, just like religion, or anything else for that matter can lose its pure and helpful intention when put in the hands charismatic individuals seeking to gain fame, power and control.

I was in a dilemma. I found such powerful healing and transformation through the practice of Kundalini Yoga Kriyas and energy work of the practices that included mantra, breathwork and sound healing, but the practices and teachings I was often surrounded by were steeped in a toxic culture of control and rigid insistence toward blind conformity.

As a student of this work in 2016, an aspiring teacher at the time and a person who has a pretty healthy problem with tyrannical authority figures, I was compelled to dive deeper into the practice beyond the culture established here in the US started by Yogi Bhajan and 3HO community. Becoming educated in Tantric and Vedic yogic practices and philosophy expanded my understanding on the benefits of kriya work and the cultivation of Kundalini energy, I was relieved to discover there is a deep body of work related to the science, technology and power of Kriya and the cultivation of Kundalini energy that dates back thousands of years in to Vedic scriptures and other eastern bodies of work. From this point I started becoming more focused on embracing the more traditional aspects of Kriya and the cultivation of kundalini energy that is devoid of the Yogi Bhajan and 3HO influence.

Although I find this documentary about Guru Jagat, her background, Harijiwan and Yogi Bhajan to be wonderfully illuminating to dismantle the abusive cult culture often present in yoga and spiritual communities; and it is most certainly validating and healing for their victims to have a widely broadcast documentary to bring this toxicity to light, I also feel that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater as it pertains to the bastardization of the practice of Kriya yoga and the cultivation of kundalini energy. I didn’t get a sense that any of the experts they consulted with in this film were also experts in yoga. If they were, there would’ve been a intentional distinction established between the Kundalini yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, and the continuation of that education through 3HO, Harijiwan and Guru Jagat and the Kundalini Kriya work that has been practiced for thousands of years throughout the world to assist in the nurturing and cultivation of one’s consciousness. For example, The practice of shaking one’s body as a means through which to dislodge blocked energy is a true and legitimate practice to restabilize the nervous system form chronic activation. This technique is referenced in many older eastern kriya teachings. However this technique was criticized it the documentary as a made up exercise by Yogi Bhajan. This is not the case. Much research exists to support intentional shaking as a means to dislodge trauma form the body.

I encourage you to watch this documentary, AND please consider that there is ALSO a lack of understanding, consideration and honor within it for a deeply rooted, sacred and ancient practice of kriya yoga aimed at assisting a person in finding their true authentic nature and personal sovereignty through the cultivation of pranic life force energy and kundalini energy.

Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you have about this and please know that my intentions as a teacher of Kundalini Kriya Yoga is to assist my community in accessing personal freedom, sovereignty, healing, joy and identification with spirit in a way that is self sustaining and self illuminating.