On Lifestyle and Autonomy

Many Kundalini Yoga students came across Yogi Bhajan during the last years of his life when he was very infirm and didn't speak in public as much. Most of his teaching was remote, via pre-recorded, and pretty old, videotape. For the Kundalini Yoga students who never had the pleasure to meet Yogi Bhajan, I can only imagine they have canonized him, but I do find it difficult to see how anyone could sit through his cryptic and nonsensical lectures, where most of the time there was nary a complete sentence uttered.

Not long ago, but before he died in 2004, I was in Española, attending a friend's wedding. My mother wanted me to say hello to him so I reluctantly went up to him. He said "I know you". Well, that was sort of the way it always was - people would tell me how much he cared about each and every child in 3HO, but half the time, we were treated as total strangers, and I'm not even sure him or his wife, or his staff, knew our names! But he also said it as if he was still exerting some form of control, as if he was saying that although I've removed the turban, my "disguise" hadn't really worked (he often called normal attire and cut hair a disguise).

That's when I witnessed someone approach him and literally BOW to him and kiss his feet. We were always instructed as kids to touch his feet when he passed - but never to "worship" - well what I saw that day was pure worship, and he did not refuse. For the majority of my life, he was more royalty than what he claimed to be as "one of us". He wore a white robe, often of ostentatious fabrics like damask silk or ornately quilted silks and he wore huge jewels. Sometimes he even wore fur, which was puzzling to me as a kid who was being raised, under his edict, to be a vegetarian. When I asked my mom why he wore fur, she told me he had blessed the animal who sacrificed its life and granted its soul liberation.

although the educated side of me knows how the system for recruiting new members into a cult works, it's still beyond me how anyone could fall for it - when the hypocrisy is right in front of our faces. The less rational side (or maybe the more rational side) remains baffled, probably because I've developed a high level of skepticism.

Bottom line, is Kundalini Yoga (the 3HO stuff) is just this: heavy breathing, calisthenics and modified asanas and chanting. There's nothing to disprove that breath and movement make one feel better, so I think new recruits are willing to take the chanting as sort of a package deal. But what they may not see is that it's the package deal that's the biggest hoax on the practitioner. It's reeling them in, forcing edicts and dogmas as lifestyle.

Lifestyle is what you make of your own life. How can a set of prescribed dogmas be likened at all as lifestyle! Autonomy cannot be underscored more here!

Letter to Siri Akal

The following is an excerpt from an email I sent to Siri Akal, who was headmaster of GRD Academy, the first of a series of 3HO led boarding schools in India, est. 1989. It's been a few months now, and he has yet to reply. I figured, since he probably doesn't care, why not just publish it for everyone to see? He is now headmaster of Chapel Hill Chauncey Hall Boarding School

..."You may feel like it's ancient history, as you've moved on and are now headmaster at another boarding school (big surprise!), but you need to know what it was like for us as children. First off, all children in 3HO were considered public property, therefore any adult stranger felt they had the right to discipline any child, for any reason. I know that this was a system set in place by Yogi Bhajan - and I do know the coercive tactics that were used by him and his inner circle. That being said, EVERY adult who was put in charge of children had a responsibility to protect those children and to comfort them and show them love and affection - all qualities that were severely lacking while at both GNFC and GRD. Us children were placed thousands of miles away from their parents, in a foreign and institutionally abusive environment. The American "guides" should have been there to protect us - yet is was the American "guides" that I loathed and feared the most. If it wasn't physical assault or battery upon one of us, it was the condoning of corporal punishment and public humiliation, and on top of that almost daily emotional abuse. When I was a teenager, at GRD, had a little more autonomy and was therefore less susceptible to your methods, I'd observe YOU ridiculing and harassing 7 and 8 years-olds, publicly humiliating them and tormenting them. These were little children!!

"I have clear memories of many a "lecture" from either yourself or Hari Kaur. As an adult, I now know those lectures were pointless exercises in emotional abuse upon a child. There was no productive purpose. But what it felt like as a child was someone "reaming" me emotionally, telling me I was no good, that I was ugly, that I was fat, and that I was a slut.

"I think that by far the worst treatment by yourself and Hari Kaur was in your attitude towards the girls - The whole school was told, by you during breakfast, that NONE of us deserved to have food because we were all "too fat", meanwhile the boys were given more food. We were told by both of you that we were "ungraceful" sluts if we were seen even so much as holding hands with a boy. The ones of us who showed the highest in scholastic achievement were told we weren't "smart enough", and were often ridiculed in class if our answers were wrong, meanwhile half a dozen boys were being allowed to skip a grade (not that it was a great service to any of them today). If there is any one common memory of all the 2nd generation women raised in 3HO, it's that we were systematically and repeatedly told that "if we didn't behave like shaktis" we would wind up as prostitutes, drug addicts, the list goes on. The emotional impact that these kinds of messages send to young girls is devastating to say the least, and 3HO should consider itself very lucky that the majority of us as grown women are strong, independent, self sufficient feminists - IN SPITE of this treatment. However the hurdles that many of us have had to overcome as a clear result of institutionalized and repeated neglect, abuse, trauma and chaos are not to be overlooked or diminished.

"I hope this letter helps to send the message that all is not well, and shan't be until the adults responsible take some accountability for their very poor behavior while in India."