Criminal - The Guru

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

In the late 1960s, a yogi named Swami Rama came to the United States. His followers believed he could read their minds, visit them in their dreams, and manipulate reality. Shruti Swamy was one of them. Shruti Swamy wrote a version of this story for the June 12th issue of The Believer. You can find it at https://www.thebeliever.net/. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Snacks? Delivered. Fresh fruit? Delivered. Grocery delivery? On repeat for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at pcexpress.ca. Tell me about the relationship between a guru and a disciple. When you go to a guru and you say, I'm ready to be your disciple, this is like a lifelong commitment. This is Shruti Swamy.

As a kid, she lived in Palo Alto, California, where her parents are part of a spiritual community that practice yoga and meditation under the guidance of a guru. The disciple really has to trust the guru. They have to surrender to the guru and to the guru's teachings. That guru can be both this parent figure and sort of a trickster figure, right? The idea is that the world is illusory. The sensory world is illusory. That's Maya.

In Hindu philosophy, Maya is the idea that we all have a kind of veil in front of our eyes that keeps us from seeing the world as it truly is. And the guru's job is to disturb that until it breaks and until you see the true nature of the universe. And then you are enlightened, just like the Guru. So until you get to that point, the Guru might do things that are uncomfortable, that feel damaging, that feel scary. And that's for your spiritual betterment. for your spiritual betterment.

Knowing everything I know now, I would never enter into a relationship where I gave somebody that much power over me. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal. Tell me about your parents. Tell me about your parents. Where are they from and how did they get to the U.S.? My parents have a really unique story, actually. They both grew up in Bombay, but they're from different communities in India. My mom's Gujarati and my dad's Tamilian.

They came from different class backgrounds also. And my mom was one of the first few women who were enrolled in IIT Bombay. The Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay is considered one of the best universities in India. Shruti's parents met there and eventually moved to Silicon Valley for jobs. Shruti's mother was an aerospace engineer and her father designed computer chips. And then in the spring of 1989, Shruti's father went to a lecture in the Santa Cruz Mountains by a man named Dr. Ushar Brute Arya. Dr. Arya taught Sanskrit and South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota and wrote several books on yogic philosophy.

And my dad had this really beautiful encounter with him where after the talk was over, he went up and met Dr. Arya and just encountered him. He felt this deep sense of knowing immediately and just this profound connection with him and knew immediately then that he wanted to take Dr. Arya as his guru. What was happening in your father's life? I mean, what had brought your father there? I think that there were a lot of pressures on my parents' marriage. You know, they moved really far away from their families. My dad's also talked to me about, like, there's a huge influx of Indian engineers coming into Silicon Valley, and there was a lot of racial tension in Silicon Valley at this time.

My dad tells me these stories of the Mercury News running these like pretty racist articles and somebody had like taped one of them to his door at work. So in some ways, you know, some of the pressures were internal and had to do with our family structure. And I think they were also facing like some classic immigrant problems also. Shruti told us that the Hindu temples where other Indian immigrants gathered tended to be too traditional for her parents. And the answers that they might get in a temple setting, for

example, didn't quite feel as satisfying to them as the answers that they were getting when they were studying the yogic scriptures. I find this really fascinating now that my parents had found this community of people and they were mostly white and they were learning the stuff that my parents weren't able to learn in the Indian communities in California. You know, they were getting it from this Indian guru and they were studying it alongside a lot of white people.

Shruti's family's new spiritual community didn't have its own building, so her family hosted gatherings in their home. There was a contingent of Bay Area devotees of Dr. Arya who would just come over to her house on Saturdays. They would, in the beginning of the day, do some meditation. They might listen to a recording of the day, do some meditation. They might like listen to a recording of Dr. Arya speaking. Dr. Arya spoke about yoga and meditation, and he often spoke about his own guru, a man

named Swami Rama. He had so much respect and devotion to him, and so we got that too. Who was Swami Rama? Swami Rama was a very accomplished yogi. He came to America in the late 60s and pretty soon after he arrived in America, made a connection with the Menagerie Foundation, who was at that time pioneering work in biofeedback. Biofeedback is this technology that makes a little bit visible the internal workings of your body that you might not be noticing so that you can see what you're doing and be in conscious control of it a little bit more.

A pair of scientists at the Meninger Foundation were interested in whether the mind could play a more active role in curing the ailments of the body. In a documentary they made about their work, Swami Rama seemed eager to demonstrate his mind-body connection. Scientists have begun to study the claims of people such as yogis who say that all of the body can be controlled by the mind. who say that all of the body can be controlled by the mind. Swami Rama had come from India with a very clear mandate from his Guru to have scientific verification of these yogic practices.

One of the unusual people we had a chance to study was Swami Rama from Rishikesh, India. We had heard that he could do some unusual things and we asked him to perform. He demonstrated blood flow control in his hand and then one day he said, tomorrow I'll stop my heart. In his most astonishing demonstration, his heart stopped pumping blood because he did something called an arterial flutter. But he was able to do that consciously and then be okay afterwards. This got a lot of coverage in the US. The New York Times covered it, Playboy covered it, Esquire covered it.

In the wake of his media success, Swami Rama founded the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in 1971. By 1977, the institute was able to buy an old Catholic seminary in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They transformed it into an ashram where people could go for weekend meditation workshops. They also had longer-term programs in which students lived and worked on the property. Shruti's family began visiting Swami Rama when she was around five years old. You know, there were so many stories about his magical abilities that he was somewhere, in my mind, he was somewhere between a real human person and a divine person, like a divine being.

Swami Rama's followers believed he could read their minds. They believed he visited them in their dreams. They believed he could manipulate reality, that he could cause them to heal from sickness. When Swami Rama told people to do things, they did them. He told some of his disciples to get married or break up or have a child. My brother was born because Swami Rama requested that my parents have a child and they did. And he was very, very ill for the first few years of his life. Shruti's mother, Asha, told us she once yelled at Swami Rama in her mind for sending her

such a challenging child. The next day a friend called and said she knew of a woman looking for work as a nanny. Asha felt Swami Rama had sent the nanny to help. What do you remember thinking about Swami Rama as a kid? I just loved him so much. I just loved him. I was just an extremely attention-hungry child. I loved being paid attention to. And to get attention from this person who everybody wants attention from is like, it was so delicious. And he was very playful with me.

He was very affectionate with me. There would be times when he would be holding court and talking and answering questions with all the grownups. And I would just come and crawl into his lap and sit in his lap. And I could just sit there while he answered all these questions. In 1994, when Shruti was nine years old, Swami Rama became her guru. In the ceremony at his ashram in India, she promised to be obedient to him, to follow his teachings, and trust him with the care of her soul. I understood that being initiated by Swami Rama was just a profound honour, and it was an honour not even my parents got. My parents' guru had that honour.

So I understood what was being offered to me was really, really special, and it was a specialness I took with me. It wasn't just in that context, but I could take that specialness with me everywhere. But truth be would only see Swami Rama one more time after he became her guru. About a year later, in 1996, he became ill and died. Her parents gathered with friends to remember and honor Swami Rama, and Truthy says she thinks she felt some sense of relief. Now she wouldn't have to live up to her guru's high expectations.

In the years after his death, Shruti drifted toward normal teenage stuff, thinking about boys and where she would go to college, escaping into fantasy novels. And then, sometime in this period, her father told her there had been an accusation against Swami Rama, that he'd done something inappropriate with a woman. The way I understood it was, there had been this accusation, it might be true, This might have actually happened. But there's something else happening because we're on a lower spiritual plane than him. And the idea of a guru means that you have to trust them absolutely, that even if he's

doing something you don't understand, you have to trust it. I had this confusing piece of information. I didn't make any more meaning of it. After college, Shruti went to India, where she lived and volunteered in a hospital built by Swami Rama. One of her jobs there was to compile stories of Swami Rama's miracles. But as she went through the letters people had sent, their stories seemed more like coincidences than anything else. Shruti returned from India, and years passed.

She started graduate school and did yoga only occasionally. And then sometime around 2011, she thought about those abuse allegations again. I just Googled it and there it was all along. A long form investigative journalism piece detailing decades of allegations of abuse against Swami Rama. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Quince. Quince is known for their classic lightweight clothes that feel and look like they're from luxury brands, but come at an affordable price. It's a great place to look for clothes you'll be excited to wear in the heat this summer.

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Ritual's Essential for Women 18 Plus is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 25% off your first month only at ritual.com slash criminal. The article Shruti Swami found was called, The Case Against Swami Rama of the Himalayas. It had appeared in a December 1990 issue of Yoga Journal and was written by a reporter named Catherine Webster. I don't remember how I first heard the rumors that Swami Rama was having sex with women, but it was probably something somebody said to me when I said I was taking yoga there. This is Catherine Webster. Back in the early 80s, she was just out of college, living in

New York City, and taking a few classes at a yoga studio run by the Himalayan Institute. The rumors about Swami Rama were particularly troubling to her because a close friend from high school was living at the ashram in Pennsylvania. And it was easy to take a bus from New York City. It was about three hours by Greyhound. And so I went there and she had arranged for somebody to pick me up or borrowed a car or something because the Institute was very isolated.

It was up this long, long, winding driveway and there was nobody really around, no houses, nothing else. I went out there and we spent a weekend together. So at the end of the weekend, I really hated to bring it up, but I did. And I asked her and she said, oh no, thank you for asking. I've heard that, but no, I'm fine. And she said, you know, these famous men, people put them up on pedestals and then they want to knock them off those pedestals, etc. I mean, I was tremendously relieved. I couldn't detect any sign that she was lying.

She didn't blush. She didn't appear taken by surprise. So Catherine dropped it and moved on with her own life. But a few years later, her friend admitted to her that something had happened between her and Swami Rama. Her friend told her that Swami Rama had promised to make her his secretary, a position that would include travel and close access to her guru. According to Catherine, over a couple of months, he gave her friends special attention and

told her they would become very close, their bodies would come together, and then they would part. And then finally, he had her meet him in New York City at the Gramercy Park Hotel, if I remember correctly, or near there. And she went there, he had sex with her, dismissed her, and then she had to walk around for hours waiting for her bus back. Catherine says the sexual relationship between her friend and Swami Rama continued on and off for years.

She was such an open, trusting person. She was pretty suggestible and she just decided maybe this was something he needed. She also felt special and singled out for this attention. When they actually had sex, it was awful for her. It hurt. He made no attempts to give her pleasure. He just used her and then dismissed her pretty much. Lylea C. Cotter, Author, The New York Times Catherine decided to investigate further. She started talking to other women and eventually

published a 10,000-word story in Yoga Journal. What were some of the other allegations you wrote about in the piece? Oh gosh, there were a lot. And there were a lot more that I couldn't write about because the victims were way too scared. But the one that was most brutal, I thought, was the woman I referred to as Rose, who was going through a very difficult time in her life. So her family members at the institute suggested she come there and be treated in the combined

therapy program. So she came, stayed, somehow caught his attention, and there were no locks on the doors. You could not lock a door in that place. He came into her room in the middle of the night, got on top of her, raped her, and told her if she told anyone she would not be believed. She was just absolutely terrified, fled at the crack of dawn, and literally left her home, left her home state,

and went and hid out because she was so afraid of what he would do to her. afraid of what he would do to her. The woman, identified as Rose in Catherine's story, had friends in leadership at the Institute. One of them confronted Swami Rama. He said that Swami Rama told him Rose had actually seduced him, but Rose's friend didn't believe the guru. He took the information to the other members of the board who he said were initially concerned, but ultimately took Swami Rama's side. There were other people who tried to speak out. One woman, identified as Megan in the Yoga Journal story, said she'd witnessed Swami

Rama humiliating women in front of other disciples. Megan said she saw someone being led around by the guru with a dog collar and leash as he bragged that he could make her do whatever he wanted. Another time, she said, she saw women being told to weed poison ivy with their bare hands. Before leaving the institute, Megan talked to as many people as she could about Swami Rama's behavior. Catherine says that the institute dealt with Megan and other people who spoke up by questioning their reputations.

Catherine Hicks A lot of them were called psychologically unbalanced. So they were just bad-mouthed in whatever way possible so that people wouldn't believe what they were saying. When your article came out, what was the reaction by people at the institute? Not just in leadership, but by those that were devotees of Swami Rama and considered him to be their guru? Well, of course, I don't know exactly, but I did hear that the article circulated. A lot of people there would come for a month's retreat and then they'd leave and they'd read the article and they'd go, oh my God, and they might tell somebody else they'd

met there and somehow or other, copies of the article did circulate. And of course, some people just accepted the Institute's rationalization for why it was false, especially if they couldn't confirm what had happened with anybody they knew. For her story in Yoga Journal, journalist Catherine Webster also spoke to Dr. Arya, Shruti's parents' guru. She says he was disturbed by the allegations, but ultimately stood by Swami Rama. He could not disbelieve his guru.

You're hearing all this stuff and there is evidence of it. And people you know are telling you it happened to them and at the same time, your whole belief system, your whole community, your whole future is tied up with this person who you believe cannot do wrong and is a spiritual being. And most people can't live with that kind of cognitive dissonance. Shruti says she was feeling something similar when she read the article 20 years later. That's the thing that I think feels the weirdest to me about this story, which was like, okay, I read it and I didn't, again, I didn't disbelieve it. I could picture, like I could picture that side of him, that side that was just pure power.

But I think at that point, somehow, I was still able to hold onto the old way of thinking about it, which was like, there's probably something in here that I'm not understanding. There must be some other explanation for this, a warp in the cosmos, that there's some trick, some illusion or something, some maybe lesson that the guru was trying to impart or something that is just not available to us,

not visible to us, that would both enable, on the one hand, these women telling the truth that these women were being accurate about their experiences, and on the other hand, that Swami Rama had done nothing wrong. Shruti told us she put aside the article, but occasionally she would turn back to it. For years it went like this, picking up the article and setting it aside. And then one day, she allowed herself to go a little deeper. She found records from a lawsuit against the Himalayan Institute, accusing Swami Rama of sexual misconduct and accusing the institute of being negligent and allowing Swami Rama

to quote, be a sexual predator for a number of years. The plaintiff in the lawsuit said Swami Rama had sexually assaulted her 30 times while she was a 19-year-old student at the Institute. This was after Catherine Webster's article had been published in Yoga Journal and after the board at the Himalayan Institute had been made aware of multiple allegations against Swami Rama. This person had been brought in as a child, just like me.

I was a disciple just like me. There were a lot of differences between our stories, but the similarities between them suddenly somatically did something that all of these accounts I could hold kind of at a distance at an intellectual remove. After reading about this I felt a weird cold all through my body. Something finally clicked into place in my body and I understood it in a different way. Swami Rama had died by the time the case went to trial. A lawyer for the Himalayan Institute said at the time that the sexual relationship

between Swami Rama and his 19-year-old student had been consensual. But the jury decided to award the student $1.9 million in damages. We'll be right back. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in

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Shruti Swami was clear that she had never been abused by Swami Rama. But the Yoga Journal article had come out during the time her family was most involved with the guru, and she said her parents had actually known about some of the accusations at the time. It's a little bit hard to piece together to me how much they knew and when they knew it, but they were definitely aware of some allegations when we were most active in this community and when I was placed in Swami Rama's spiritual care.

Shruti told us her mother, in particular, is horrified thinking about it in retrospect. But at the time, she says they trusted their guru, Dr. Arya, who trusted Swami Rama. They'd made the decision to follow Dr. Arya, Shruti told us, who led them to Swami Rama, who led them to have a child, and by the time they heard about the accusations, they had a whole new community of people who loved and supported them. And my brother was sick. For the first two years of my parents' life, they didn't sleep for more than two hours a night. So they were also in that state, right, when they might have needed to make a decision. So there's a lot of reasons why somebody

would stay in a situation even with that at the back of their mind. Do you feel like you were harmed by Swami Rama? I mean, not physically. Yeah. What is the nature of the harm? It's really confusing. What happened to me was I was groomed. I had an actual initiation ceremony with my guru, who I promised to be obedient to, who I promised who I believed could do no wrong and that the fault would only be with me and will never know, you know, what would have happened.

It's like weird for me to say that something would have happened. I'm so certain of it. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the structures that enabled the abuse, the belief structures that enabled abuse were put into me as a child. I was accountable to him, but who was he accountable to? The Himalayan Institute still exists, and it lists Swami Rama as its founder. The website says he is, quote, one of the greatest adepts, teachers, writers, and humanitarians

of the 20th century. A spokesperson for the Institute says that while they acknowledge the deep impact of the allegations against Swami Rama, His teachings remain an important part of the Himalayan tradition. The Institute's current leader, Pandit Rajamani Tignight, was interviewed in the Yoga Journal article in 1990. When asked about the numerous women who had come forward with stories of sexual exploitation by Swami Rama, he said, quote,

Believing such stories means disbelieving in myself, because that's my whole life. My relationship with Swami Rama is purely divine and spiritual. There cannot be impurity in it, and there is no room for such thoughts." He added, even if it happened, what's the big deal? A spokesperson for the institute says that this quote was taken out of context in the original article and does not reflect his views or those of the organization. How do you think about Swami Rama now? Well, it's really confusing to me. I do believe that he was a really dangerous person who

harmed a lot of people. I think his teachings were really beautiful. They were from a millennia of tradition from my culture. I have been deeply influenced by these teachings and by these practices. I do practice yoga and meditation still. In some ways, I had to break all of my beliefs, but then there's some orientation there that I got very young that I still practice and still hold in a different form that originated from these years. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sejico, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, Megan Kineane,

and Katie Mingle. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. Shruti Swamy wrote a version of this story for the June 12th issue of The Believer Magazine. You can find it at thebeliever.net. There's also an audio version of The Believer magazine. You can find it at thebeliever.net. There's also an audio version of The Believer story available on the New York Times audio

app. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal Co-creator Lauren Spohr talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying

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