Breath of Fire: a practice of purification caught up in a yoga scandal
The HBO documentary about Kundalini Yoga, Guru Jagat and Yogi Bhajan is devastating and bleak. Is anything in the practice worth salvaging?
The “latest” yoga scandal may be the worst
I just watched the final episode of the heartbreaking four-part series Breath of Fire on HBO Max with my partner Lisa. It is a documentary about Kundalini Yoga told through the lives of its founder Yogi Bhajan (Harbhajan Singh Puri), and the charismatic heirs to his throne, Guru Jagat (Katie Griggs) and Hari Jiwan Singh.
Spoiler alert… Yogi Bhajan was a monster. Like the disgraced Bikram yoga founder, Bikram Choudhury, he used his reputation as a spiritual teacher to sexually assault his students and employees. Like the fallen guru Rajneesh (Osho), he grew a large cult following and manipulated the members for his own gains.*
Guru Jagat, a female Kundalini teacher, was poised to become the heir to Bhajan’s empire (thanks in part to the behind-the-scenes coaching from Bhajan’s right-hand man, Hari Jiwan Singh). She was younger than Bhajan and Jiwan, and became an influencer in the yoga world by harnessing social media and celebrity associations.
In 2020, sixteen years after his death, one of Bhajan’s top students named Pamela Dyer released a memoir, “Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan,” and it began a cascade of revelations about the sexual abuses and manipulations of Bhajan. An Olive Branch, an independant Buddhist-inspired group, was hired by the umbrella group overseeing Bhajan’s legacy corporations and nonprofits, was hired to conduct an investigation and file a report. The resulting 76-page report laid it all out:
The details of the extremely brutal acts of sexual abuse that came forward need a trigger warning for survivors. Reading the report can be retraumatizing.
Around 300 people were contacted by the team of An Olive Branch, half supporters of YB and half reporters of harm.
The report divided the community. Some teachers and trainers distantiated themselves from the community and the organizations. Either they stopped practicing or teaching Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, or they chose to go their own way.
While he did not live to see his legacy destroyed, Yoga Bhajan died in terrible health. He had not been practicing the yoga he taught, he was overweight and diabetic. Parts of his foot were amputated. No amount of wealth and fame can protect us from karma.
Guru Jagat doubled down on Bhajan’s innocence, rolling out a karmic yoga mat to practice her own undoing.
While Guru Jagat may not have been aware of the sexual abuse during Bhajan’s lifetime, she herself claimed to come to Kundalini for healing because she was sexually assaulted. Much of her popularity was due to her promotion of female empowerment woven into prosperity theology. When the book and the report came out, she had a chance to denounce Bhajan and stay true to brand.
Instead, she took the advice of Jiwan Singh, the Dick Cheney of the Kundalini administration. He was the living parallel to the deceased Bhajan, a bearded old white man with a dark past playing the role of guru. He was also the power and money behind Ra Ma, Jagat’s yoga brand, community, and studio. He certainly had secrets to keep, and Jagat had become a money-obsessed shadow of her former self. She doubled down on Bhajan’s innocence, and in doing so rolled out a karmic yoga mat to practice her own undoing.
Throughout the documentary we watch Jagat become increasingly paranoid and susceptible to conspiracy theories (along with a large swath of the wellness industry during the pandemic years). She gained a lot of weight, and in 2021 broke her ankle in Germany. Choosing to fly back to the US before having it treated may have been her final undoing. Shortly after getting surgery on her ankle, she died of a pulmonary embolism.
*There are many yoga scandals in recent history. Wikipedia has a Sexual abuse by yoga gurus page listing some of them. Check out the Netflix documentaries Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator and Wild Wild Country (about Rajneesh) to find out more about two of the most prominent ones.
Full disclosure: my Kundalini connections
My partner Lisa completed the Kundalini Yoga teacher training in 2011, the same year I did the Jivamukti Yoga teacher training. While I was working at the Jivamukti Yoga headquarters in NYC, I noticed there was a significant number of students who practiced both.
Jivamukti is one of the original vinyasa styles in the US. The founders Sharon Gannon and David Life studied Ashtanga Yoga with K. Pattabhi Jois, who invented the vinyasa that permeates much of the yoga world today. Vinyasa means “to place in a special way,” and was developed to link movement and breath in order to bring awareness to the connection between body, mind, and spirit.
Unfortunately K. Patabhi Jois had a posthumous sex scandal of his own. Ashtanga Yoga (and Jivamukti) is known for its yoga adjustments, which are hands-on movement of a student’s body by a teacher to help the student find correct alignment, or get deeper into a pose. There are multiple photographs and videos of Jois touching students improperly, with his hands on their genitals, man and woman alike.
While it seems obvious in a post #MeToo environment, asking consent to give yoga adjustments wasn’t the norm before then. I gravitated to Jivamukti in part because I loved receiving adjustments. As a teacher I loved to give them. I still do, but now I am very careful to get consent and use the techniques appropriately.
Kundalini and Jivamukti both have gatherings where most of the participants wear white. Yogi Bhajan built the Kundalini brand to be associated with Sikhism, appropriating the turbans and mantras of the religion without placing them in proper context. Wearing white at our gatherings was the part of Jivamukti that felt most culty to me, but in day-to-day practice and work we did not dress that way, and never wore turbans.
Jivamukti had its own scandals, but Gannon and Life have never been accused of sexual impropriety and as far as I can tell, the scandals involving other teachers were really about scorned lovers seeking retribution. Of course, being a Jivamukti Yoga teacher who worked as their web editor during those times, I have some bias.
In 2018 I volunteered to photograph the Sat Nam Kundalini Festival in Western MA. My friends were working in the kitchen and it was a chance to escape NYC and connect with them. Being in that environment, surrounded by people wearing white clothing and turbans, with mystical musical performances and strange movement classes, was fun. The people were all very sweet and kind. No one tried to recruit me or manipulate me.
Here’s a funny story. I did not know anything about Bhajan at the time, but I wanted some memorabilia from the fest and bought a tee-shirt with a cartoon drawing of him with the letters WWBD above it. The letters stood for “What Would Bhajan Do?”, a riff on the “What Would Jesus Do” meme. The shirt really tickled my fancy. I wore it at the festival, as seen in the photo above. It mysteriously disappeared after that, and for some time I was vexed that I had lost it. Now I know that there was a higher power looking over me.
Spiritual communities attract predators
There is a larger pattern in regards to spiritual teachers, and it goes beyond yoga. We all know about the scandals of the Catholic church and altar boys. A 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News report named 220 Baptist pastors, ministers, deacons, volunteers, Sunday school teachers and others who were found guilty of sexually abusing churchgoers over 20 years.
This year in Malaysia, police rescued 402 children after sex abuse allegations at Islamic welfare homes. From the Orthodox Jewish tradition, we have the case of a Brooklyn yeshiva teacher named Yehuda Kolko (David Framowitz), who sexually molested children for decades. New York City changed its laws so that he could be convicted for crimes that were previously sheltered by the state’s statute of limitations.
Even the peaceful Buddhists have their scandals. In 2017 Sogyal Rinpoche, an influential Tibetan Buddhist lama, author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was accused of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.
Spiritual beliefs open us to predators. We are vulnerable because we have an innate longing to connect with the divine. The divine is mysterious and unknowable. A psychopath who pretends to have a deeper understanding of the divine can manipulate people who are seeking to know the unknowable.
Bhajan was able to seperate children from their parents and send them to India, where they were starved and abused. The parents believed they were doing the best for their children. They did not perceive that Bhajan was a pedophile, rapist, and child abusing monster.
What comes first, the predator or the cult?
Cults tend to form with a charismatic leader, who may be a predator. Cults that grow large enough eventually become categorized as religions. Religions attract predators to positions of power, giving them access to the bodies and minds of their communities. There are certainly leaders who start out with good intentions and then get corrupted by their power over devotees.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s rise to power can be compared to cultish behaviors. He is a sexual predator, and seems to be surrounding himself by other predators. His followers don’t seem to mind. Many see him as a holy man, fulfilling prophecy. To people like me, who see something else, it is disheartening and strange.
The baby and the bathwater
An interesting question that many of us have grappled with lately is whether it is OK to enjoy the works of a person who has done terrible things. Is it OK to listen to Michael Jackson? Can we practice Kundalini, Ashtanga, Anusara, Kripalu, Bikram, or any other yoga whose founders were problematic? Is it OK to teach from these traditions?
What brings many of us to yoga is the possibility that we can connect in a deeper way to our spiritual nature. And many of us do. Modern yoga practice has evolved from thousands of years of spiritual seeking. It contains multitudes, including Hinduism, Tantra, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the influence of Buddhism, Ayurvedic lifestyle, capitalist influence, New Age dilution, and on and on.
I am the bucket, not the water
I was recently listening to an interview with yoga innovator Judith Hanson Lasater on the Let’s Talk Yoga Podcast (episode here). She was talking about her first time teaching yoga and something she said really stuck with me. It was over 50 years ago and she hadn’t taken a teacher training, back then you taught when your teacher told you to. She found herself frozen in front of a room full of students, but then had a vision of her teacher being part of a lineage going back into the past. Each teacher stood behind the next, passing a bucket of water from one to the next.
…they were handing a bucket of water forward to me. And in a blinding flash of the obvious I realized, “Ah, I am the bucket! I’m not the water.” And it gives me chills. Every time I tell that story, it just gives me those chills up and down my back. Because I took from that, that it’s not me.
It was like an initiation. It was, that I’m now part of this lineage, this sacred lineage, and I want to hand the lineage forward. I don’t want to put myself forward. I am the bucket, not the water.
Understanding our place in the world is a lifelong journey. I admit that many of my actions in the past came out of ego. I often mistook myself for the water. I feel blessed that I never became a super popular teacher at a young age, I may have fallen into darkness. Especially since I was abusing alcohol in those days, and longing for connection and admiration.
Now I understand, I am the bucket. As a yoga teacher and person trying to live with compassion and awareness, I find myself navigating many worlds. Is my love of, and connection to, the yoga tradition a form of cultural appropriation? How do cultures evolve and religions spread, if not for appropriation?
Part of my love of the Jivamukti Yoga method is that we try very hard to follow the teachings in the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. It is not just a workout, or series of poses. There are imperfections, and the yoga I teach now is not strictly the yoga I learned from my years with Jivamukti. But I do try my best to remember my bucket nature, and keep the water I share pure.
Practicing what we preach
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is the primary text most yoga teachers and studios reference, but it was written for seekers who would renounce material gains for spiritual attainment.
In the Sutras Patanjali laid out the yamas, five ways that we should treat others if we seek enlightenment. The very first yama is ahimsa, non-harming. The fourth yama is brahmacharya, which early commentaries tell us is abstaining from sex. Modern yogis change the interpretation to be about using our sexual energy wisely. In the Yoga Sutras, the lists that Patanjali makes put the most important concept first. If we do have sex, we should do it in a way that does not harm others.
Fortunately (or not) for modern practitioners, the yoga tradition has many other schools and texts. In 2020 I took my advanced teacher training with yoga innovator Amy Ippoliti, and she taught from a tradition of Tantra, as taught by Douglas Brooks. Instead of trying to escape the world and become enlightened, Tantra is the path to realizing the perfection of life in this moment, using the material world as a tool. It still has moral obligations, but sex and even eating flesh can be integrated. Tantra, is not all about sex though, that is a modern western misunderstanding. Some tantrikas will abstain from sex as part of their practice. Traditionally the teacher will prescribe practices that will help the student evolve spiritually.
What we do know is that yoga practice has helped many people in the west find ease and comfort in their lives. It has helped some people heal from PTSD. It has helped others heal their bodies. It gives us plenty to meditate on, and many technologies to improve our hearts, minds, and bodies.
What Bhajan did was certainly appropriation of the Sikh culture in a dark and inappropriate way. The documentary says he made everything up, but the mantras are from Sikhism. Some of the asana practice is legit, too. There are parts of Kundalini I have always thought strange, like lifting and lowering my arms for a very specific number of minutes and seconds. Kundalini teachers looking at their watches did not feel timely to me.
Interestingly, many of the asanas we practice today evolved from British gymnastic practices (thanks to the British colonization of India, which is also the reason Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras was recovered from obscurity). There has been an exchange of ideas and philosophies going back to prehistoric times. It is what humans do.
Breath of Fire: the practice
One example of a yoga baby we can seperate from Bhajan’s bathwater is the pranayama practice that is also the name of the documentary about him: Breath of Fire
Breath of Fire is the modern name of an ancient breathing technique called Kapalabhati, which translates to “skull shining”.
It is one of the classic kriyas or purification techniques of Hatha Yoga, and it is referenced in both the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Gheranda Samhita, the two texts that form the basis of most modern yoga practice. ~Siddhi Yoga
In Sanskrit, “kapala” means “skull,” and “bhati” means “to shine.” Kapalabhati is one of the six yogic cleansing techniques called “shatkarma kriyas” in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
Kapalabhati has been reported to improve cardiovascular, respiratory, mental, and physical health on different parameters.
To a casual viewer of the documentary, the "breath of fire” probably seems strange. The creators of the series give us the impression that Bhajan “made up everything,” but that is an exaggeration. He borrowed and appropriated many parts, and made up the rest.
In the end, it’s up to us to seperate the baby from the bathwater.
Final thoughts
Lisa and I moved to Asheville in August, and started practicing at our local studio. There was a Kundalini class which we took a couple times, and soon Lisa was subbing for the class. She is now the primary teacher.
After watching the documentary, we are shaken and wondering how to move forward. The studio owner thinks that the number of people who have benefited from Kundalini yoga over the years justifies keeping the name of the class, and a photo of Bhajan on the wall next to other influential teachers.
Lisa and I took the photo down in a moment of passion, without consulting the owner. We then explained, and returned the photo to them. The photo is now back on the wall. The photo of a smiling rapist who separated children from their families and then starved and abused them. Who groomed underage girls so that he could rape them once they became adults. K. Patthabi Joice is up there, too, with his groping hands. Luckily this wall is over a desk and not above an altar, but still… I don’t believe those men deserve to be honored.
The community at the yoga studio is beautiful. Great teachers, wonderful students. The owner is a good person, who probably didn’t watch the documentary. We are in discussion with them. We can ultimately do more good from within, than from without. Only light can dispel the darkness.
The mantra Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu reminds us to live in a way that honors all beings, everywhere. Spiritual practice is surrounded by pitfalls, and finding a path that is pure and true is part of the journey. Discernment is the key, and it is the biggest challenge. Our hearts our eager, and our minds can get carried away by our emotions, like bridges in a flood. Fortify yourself, keep asking questions, and don’t be afraid to cut your losses if something doesn’t feel right.