Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Kundalini Yoga

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

There’s a chance you’ve brushed paths with this week’s cult in a West Coast farmers market or while scrolling through #yogainspiration, or as of late, your HBOMax recommended page. Kundalini yoga promises spiritual awakening, cosmic energy, and a path to your highest self. But behind the flowing white turbans and chanting in sat nam, there’s a darker story—one of control, secrecy, and not one but TWO gurus with highly questionable pasts. This week, we’re unraveling the culty underbelly of Kundalini, its infamous founder Yogi Bhajan, and his 20-teens girlbossified equivalent, Katie Griggs. From Instagram livestreams at millennial haven RaMa Studios to the militarized "3HO" organization (Healthy, Happy, Holy—or is it?), we’re asking: When does devotion cross the line into dogma? Strap in for a deep dive with Hayley Phelan (@hayleyphelan), journalist behind the article that powered HBO Max's Breath of Fire docuseries, and spiritual/sexual abuse lawyer Carol Merchasin, as Amanda and Reese discover why so many former followers say this spiritual practice left them anything but zen.     Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube! Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles.  Thank you to our sponsors! Start earning points on rent you’re already paying by going to https://joinbilt.com/CULT Find exactly what you’re booking for on https://Booking.com, Booking.YEAH! Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://Zocdoc.com/CULT to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Head to https://www.squarespace.com/CULT to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code CULT Please consider donating to those affected by the Los Angeles Fires. Some organizations that Team SLAC are donating to are:  https://mutualaidla.org/ https://give.pasadenahumane.org/give/654134/#!/donation/checkout https://shorturl.at/SGW9w Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Just a heads up, culties, this week's episode addresses topics of sexual assaults in addition to other forms of serious cult abuse, which may be disturbing to some listeners, so do listen with care. You might think that this is a spiritual organization, so do listen with care. You might think that this is a spiritual organization, but it doesn't matter what the content is. What matters is the structure, the control,

the abuse of power. A lot of exposés have come out about cultish abuse within yoga organizations in the United States. And they just created this environment where people were so vulnerable about cultish abuse within yoga organizations in the United States. And they just created this environment where people were so vulnerable that they would do anything to please these people. We need some help, y'all.

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host, Amanda Montel, author of the books Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. And I'm Reese Oliver, your co-host and Sounds like a cult's coordinator. Every week on the show, we discuss a different fanatical fringe group from the cultural zeitgeist,

from Potterheads to Shenyang, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our cult categories does it fall into? A live-your-life, a watch-your-back, or a get-the-fuck-out? After all, not every culty-looking group these days is equally destructive. Cultish influence falls along a spectrum. The point of this show is to analyze how fanaticism shows up in everyday life, to poke a little bit of fun at human search for meaning, and to critique how power abuse shows up in places

you might not think to look. Maybe even write in your evening cup of chamomile. Ooh, how scandalous. Today we are covering the empire of Kundalini Yoga, which may ring some bells to some because it was the subject of the recent HBO docu series Breath of Fire. If you are listening to and even enjoying this episode of the podcast and want to go deeper, I have a book recommendation for you. This is your host Amanda,

by the way, and the book is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, and I wrote it. I poured my heart into this book, and I really think you might like it. It's about delusion and obsession in the information age and how the ways in which our minds naturally work are clashing with our current culture. Every chapter explores some confounding irrationality from contemporary society, including extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement, mass embrace of Instagram manifestation gurus during times of crisis, and why our bodies sometimes enter literal fight or flight in response to something as objectively non-threatening as a curt email from a coworker. The book blends social science with pop-culture analysis and personal stories. And if you prefer audiobooks,

I recorded mine myself, so it's kind of like an extension of the podcast. Again, the book is called The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality, and it's available wherever books are sold. Your local indie bookstore, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, or even that one massive online book retailer run by a call leader. You know the one. So if you enjoy this podcast, I really hope you'll consider checking out the book. If you rent your home, I highly recommend you take advantage of built. There's no cost to join. And just by paying rent, you unlock flexible points that can be transferred to your favorite hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. When you pay through BILT, you unlock two powerful benefits.

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I am such a fan of Squarespace. I've been using it for years since the launch of Sounds Like a Cult, because soundslikeacult.com is a Squarespace website. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So over the past 10 or so years,

a lot of exposés have come out about cultish abuse within yoga organizations in the United States. There have been exposés about Bikram yoga, core power yoga, yoga to the people, and more. Kundalini is just one of those yoga cults that has been brought to light as a cultish organization, but it's maybe my favorite one, if it's even appropriate to put it that way, because it has enjoyed so very many eras. We've also both brushed up against Kundalini yoga in various ways because we live in LA where Kundalini has a special history. It is fascinating how many lives this cult has led and in order to do it justice today, we're going to need to go down a

few different rabbit holes. Amanda, you have some first-hand experience with this cult, having interviewed a former 3HO member for Koltish. What were your first impressions of Kundalini? Well, Kundalini Yoga and 3HO, or the Healthy Happy Holy organization that is kind of like the cult that is associated with Kundalini was the first fanatical fringe group that I covered when beginning to write cultish. That was like the first interview that I did. 3H0 was kind of the group that inspired the whole entire book because when I was thinking about writing a book about the language of cults,

that was just like a little germ of an idea. I was still working as a beauty editor at the time. And I went to this dinner that a brand had thrown and I sat next to this freelance beauty editor and she and I got to talking. She had like an absolutely savage sense of humor. And she was asking me what else I like to do and what I was working on, whatever.

And I was like, oh, I'm trying to write a book about the language of cults. And she was like, oh, I was in a cult. And I was like, oh, which one were you in? You know, trying to remain nonjudgmental. And she didn't look like the stereotypical cult survivor, whatever that means. She very much looked like an elite influencer. And she taught me about three H.O. and Kundalini and kind of made it seem like it was this 70s era yoga cult that went on to appeal

to sort of early 2010s wellness fanatics. And I was like, oh my God, I have to interview you formally. So she and I sat down in West Hollywood and she told me her entire 3HO story, how she came to the United States when she was really little and was really lacking a sense of belonging. And one day walked by a 3HO Kundalini studio where everybody was wearing all white and speaking these prayers in unison and just had this like incredible sense of solidarity that really appealed to her. And so when she was 18, she like gave her whole life to the group. And of course, because of my particular interests and brain, the most interesting thing about her story to me was how Kundalini yogis used language. Everybody has to shed their former name as an identity exchange ritual,

and they're assigned a new name using tantric numerology. All the men have the same middle name, and all the women share a middle name as well. And everyone has the same last name, which is Kalsa. And there are all these rules and rituals that you have to follow that are enforced using certain loaded language and thought terminating cliches. Like I was fascinated by the way they would twist some existing English words to give them these sort of like new agey meanings that were like sort of derived from the Sikh religious scripture, but also bastardized. And of course, we'll get into that later. But the most haunting one to me was when she described what the word old soul

meant in Kundalini yoga, old soul, like to us as a compliment, kind of means someone who's wise beyond their years. But in three HO, it meant someone who had reincarnated life after life after life and could never get it right. And it was used as a threat. If you broke one of the rules within 3HO, they might threaten that you would become an old soul and that you would not reach enlightenment. And then the other thing I'll say that really captured my attention about Kundalini Yoga was how effectively it weaponized celebrity members. Like the source of mine told me that

when she became a teacher, like a yoga teacher within 3HO, she taught Demi Moore and Adrienne Brody and Russell Brand and all these people. But you have firsthand experience with 3HO as a Southern California native too, don't you? I do. And it truly just goes to show how all of these cults overlap so damn much, especially in Southern California.

If you're in a theater cult, chances are you're in some kind of wellness cult as well. Or you know someone who is, as the listeners may know, a piece of lore about me is that I went to an arts high school and as such I was able to evade the legal corporal punishment known as PE in favor of yoga my sophomore year, which is a great time. My teacher was very big on showing us videos. And when I was watching Breath of Fire, the docu-series that came out last year on HBO Max about Kundalini, I recognized one of the teachers in one of the videos that they were showing. And I remembered that we had been shown a lot of this leader named Hari Jiwon's videos

in my yoga class. I just started to remember her essentially telling us, like, I'm not going to show you too much of this now because it's just part of the larger curriculum I'm showing you. But the breath of fire we learned. So it definitely has its little fingies in the high schools of the youths. It's everywhere. Yeah. No, it really is. I mean, 3HO is sort of representative of how so many different cults are structured, not just in the way that it preyed on dreamers in the arts like you or your teacher, but also how the leaders in a very, you know, classic cult 70s style position themselves as these like Eastern spiritual teachers, even though they had absolutely no respect or accreditation or acknowledgement by those

actual institutions at all. And also speaking of having fingers in so many different pies, 3HO owns many different brands and businesses that we all patronize. You mentioned chamomile tea in the intro there. Kundalini Yoga 3HO owns Yogi Tea, the like grocery store tea brand. And they own a security business, a call security that funds immigrant detention centers, which is so beyond fucked up and culti in a way that you would never think had anything to do with Kundalini Yoga or 3HO. And yet on the surface, if you were just to walk by a Kundalini Yoga studio, you wouldn't necessarily know the difference between that and like motoo Yoga or Core Power Yoga, which is culty in its own way, or the Mom and Pop Yoga Studio down the street. It just looks normal and innocent. And it's honestly a long time coming to discuss on this podcast. And I am so excited for

our listeners to hear from our two guests later. One is Haaley Phelan, who is a journalist and really blew the lid off of the so-called second coming of Kundalini Yoga with a piece that she wrote for Vanity Fair that served as the basis for this Breath of Fire HBO documentary that we will continue returning to. And then later, we also have a very, very special interview with a lawyer who specializes in prosecuting yoga cults or yoga cult ish groups, spiritual groups who commit various abuses against their members, which is a very specific field of study. In between those two interviews, we'll also be spilling some piping hot tea about some of the harrowing and very culty crimes that

Kundalini's higher-ups have been exposed for over the years. So super unique episode of Sounds Like a Cult. Now the language that we're gonna be using throughout today's episode is delicate. I mean, this is just true throughout this podcast in general, because when it comes to 3-H-O and Kundalini Yoga, there was a lot of bastardization and Frankensteining of ancient Eastern practices that were transformed to be palatable for these primarily white, ex-Christian seekers,

that was kind of the target demo follower. So Yagi Bajin used a lot of terminology in a way that was convenient and opportunistic for him that would have been considered ill-defined and even offensive or blasphemous elsewhere. And that is just par for the course when it comes to these like new age cultish groups. That is what the new age is. This belief and behavior that co-ops

ancient indigenous and eastern practices, capitalizes upon them and uses them to convince Western followers that they are on the brink of a paradigm shift in consciousness and society. So keep that in mind as we're discussing today's subject matter because it is not for the faint of heart. We're going to do our best. Before we get into all that though, we should probably give a little background on the complex web that is the cult of Kundalini Yoga. So in dissecting this cult today, we are going to be covering a lot of intentionally ambiguous practices and bodies and organizations.

So just to kind of contextualize today's discussion, we are going to be talking about A, Kundalini as a spiritual practice, which differs from B, Kundalini Yoga, which was invented by Yogi Bhajan and spread through C, 3HO, the Happy Healthy Holy Organization, which is the name on the tin of today's cult, you could say, I think. Yeah, exactly. It's like you've got 3HO, the business, you've got Kundalini Yoga, Yogi Budgen's brand that powers the engine that is 3HO, and then you've got Kundalini,

which was the much more ancient practice that Yogi Budgen bastardized for his own purposes. It is confusing and convoluted on purpose. On purpose. Yeah. So in our list of significant identities within 3HO and Kundalini, we begin with Yogi Vajan and 3HO and the invention of Kundalini Yoga. He then teaches Hari Jiwan, who then teaches Kati, aka Guru Jagat, who begins Rama Institute, which is 3HO's current most prominent iteration. Kundalini exists in a variety of forms.

Kundalini, as a concept, originally appeared in the 9th century in Hindu spiritual practices as a divine feminine energy that could be accessed via Tantric and other forms of yoga, along with other various spiritual practices. Kundalini yoga, as it exists in the Western world today, is a combination of various spiritual practices from Sikhi, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths invented in 1969. That's kind of a generous definition, I would say. The basic idea is that the yogi practicing the kundalini performs a variety of kriyas, which are sets of movement, chanting, and breath work that are specifically tailored for individual purposes. So there's a saying within kundalini that if you have any

kind of ailment or problem, there's a kriya for that. Then pre or post these exercises, depending on the style of your particular guru, you will hear a roughly 45 minute, what I'm going to call sermon. Just kind of a very, as we've seen it, televangelist style preachy, yeah, I guess sermon about your life and whatever tenets you were supposed to be embodying in the yoga for that day, wellness, all that jazz. Something really unique about Kundalini that draws a lot of people to the experience

and that makes them wanna come back is the really intense breath work involved that can often simulate what one of the Kundalini practitioners in Breath of Fire described as a popper's-like head rush, and it'll make you feel real nice and loopy. So hearing that sermon about your personal wellness while feeling real nice and loopy is a really good sermon about your personal wellness while feeling real nice and loopy is a really good tingly brain combination for a lot of people.

And that, to my understanding, is really a big draw of Kundalini. Yes. And if anyone listening to this episode is feeling confused at this juncture about what Kundalini is, don't worry. You're supposed to, as I'm gathering, and we will work through that confusion together over the course of this episode. But at this point, I'll just say this. Kundalini in a nutshell is this divine energy, but it's also so much more than that, right? And similarly, 3-H-O is more than just yoga. It is this all-consuming belief system, lifestyle, organization, cornucopia

of businesses that demand a lot more of its loyalist members than just going to yoga class. Reese, could you articulate some of the beliefs and behaviors that 3HO participants are supposed to engage with? I would love to. A lot of the practices involved with Kundalini Yoga really drew members to them because they aligned with a lot of the more leftist new age practices of the 60s and 70s, which is when Kundalini Yoga was brought to the US and invented. So everyone is vegetarian. Women and leadership, which we will get to later, is actually quite a big thing in Kundalini. Gender equality, men and women were equal. An abolishment of the caste system. Obviously, as we've been hinting at,

there is a lot of elements of the Sikhi faith incorporated, which are bastardized. Portions like this might be like the turban you might have seen Kundalini practitioners wearing and practices which were typically aligned with religions like the Sikhi faith, Hinduism, Buddhism were legitimized in Kundalini yoga through Sikh Dharma Incorporated, which is the official religion that yogi bhajan established to practice within the 3HO. So the establishment of Sikh Dharma Incorporated legitimized Kundalini and did a lot to legitimize yogi bhajan in the eyes of the mainstream public. Kundalini was even being done at Woodstock y'all ask one of your grandparents I'm sure they have a story. Parents, I don't know how old you are. I

don't know how old you are. Yeah, my grandparents are born in the 20s. I mean, Kundalini like exploded onto the scene. It had a very positive reputation, especially among new age curious left leaning types who are kind of like rejecting the buttoned up religions of their childhoods and were hoping to engage with something a little more spiritual but not religious, that they could do with their friends, their age. And Yogi Bhajan, who we will analyze later with our guest, was kind of the figure that Westerners wanted to see at the helm of the organization. In their eyes, he had the beard for it, I'll put it that way. So just a few more of those beautiful cultish ways in which 3HO members exercised their

cultishness were living in ashrams, which were these beautiful little communes of lovely white tents that popped up all over the world. And as we were talking about, there was also a capitalist empire created by 3HO. Yogi Tea, a call security. Someone in the documentary mentioned Kettle Chips. Golden Temple Restaurant is one that if you're an LA local, you might recognize. Just truly the consumerism knows no bounds, which is really ironic if you know anything about the Seeky phase. It should also be said that it is possible to go to a Kundalini class without fully joining, almost in the way that it's possible to like go to a Memorial Day barbecue on the Church of Scientology's campus without fully getting set off on the bridge to total freedom, you

know? Yeah, it's an open cult meeting. Exactly, exactly. And that's what allows this cult to hide in plain sight because there are people who do engage with it fairly casually. Well, and another thing is they're not necessarily trying to recruit. Someone said at one point that even if they only got 2% of the world to engage with them, they would be satisfied because that would be enough to shift the world's energy in

the direction they want. Okay. So before we get into our first interview of the day to kind of preview this whole tale so that we're nicely set up, we have our early yoga budget era of Kundalini yoga, right? It's the late sixties, it's the seventies. We're shifting the world's consciousness, doing yoga at Woodstock. We're setting up a new religious movement, we're getting into a host of business endeavors, we're gaining power. I'm going to switch from the pronoun we at this point. Yogi Bhajan is also committing abuses, horrendous ones, including sexual assault. We will get into the crimes that he was exposed for in a bit, but Yogi Bhajan doesn't live forever. He passes away in the early 2000s

and yet the cult did not die with him. Yogi Bhajan's legacy is carried on by a kind of surprising character. And this is where the focus of Hailey Phelan's article and the Breath of Fire documentary really start. Because after Yogi Bhajan dies, Kundalini Yoga kind of undergoes this 21st century rebrand for the girlies, so to speak, under the helm of this woman who ends up taking Kundalini

Yoga in a very early 2000s girl boss direction, let's say, only to very unfortunately go down this cult-y yoga to QAnon rabbit hole during the pandemic. And her story ends in kind of a shocking and tragic way, doesn't it? Yeah. And just to kind of tease a little bit of what we'll be talking about later, later, 3H0 had its second coming, if you will, in the 2010s and 2020s via a woman by one of the names, Guru Jagat. Yeah, real name Katie. So, Katie Griggs. Katie Griggs turned Guru Jagat, started her own offshoot Kundalini studio called Rama. And if that is not the canonical 3-H-O transformation story. I don't know what is.

Why not? So we've got a lot of branches stemming from the tree of the cult of Kundalini Yoga. We've got a lot of characters and to help us orient ourselves around this cult, I think it's time to introduce our guest. As we mentioned, today we'll be talking to the journalist behind the article that catalyzed the whole Breath of Fire documentary. And so with that, we

would love to introduce you to our conversation with Hailey Phelan. Hailey Phelan, thank you so much for joining this episode of Sounds Like a Cult. We're so glad you're here. Yeah, thank you for having me joining this episode of Sounds Like a Cult. We're so glad you're here. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be a part of it. I was wondering if you could introduce yourself, your reporting, how you ended up coming across this Kundalini yoga story that served as the basis for the Breath of Fire documentary and what inspired you to do your investigating.

Yeah, sure. So I've been a journalist for 15 years now, covering a wide array of topics. And I've always been interested in wellness, in young female culture, identity making. I've written for Vanity Fair, for the New York Times, for Elle. So I first learned about Kundalini

because I actually had two family members that were really interested in it. But the first was my cousin was really interested in Kundalini and she told me about it. She was living in Montreal at the time, but she was coming to visit so that she could go to the opening of Rama's Lower East Side new studio. And I was like, oh sounds cool. She was talking all about it and at a certain point said, but wait, what is Kundalini? And she goes, hold on. I'm going to ask my teacher. I don't really know how to describe it. And I was like, okay.

Then she texted me later on in the day, like, okay, so what it is is that it's an ancient technology developed to enhance human enlightenment. And I was like, okay, I wasn't expecting that as a response. So I went to a class, it was led by Katie, Guru Juggett, and I was just immediately struck by the whole scene. Everyone's dressed in white. People are wearing some form of like turban. People have sheep skins. There was this whole like weird kind of quiet. So it immediately was like, Hmm. But that was 10 years ago. And I was like,

I'm going to follow this and just watch this for a while. So during the pandemic, when there was that whole reckoning around Yogi Bhajan, I thought, yeah, I want to write about this. Like, this is the time. And there was already so much written about Yogi Bhajan. And I was very intrigued to see how Rama responded to that whole scandal. I also think I was at that time thinking a lot about legacies and the legacies that we inherit and what we do with it because I think that's a really important thing that we do nowadays and me as a white person, the legacy that I'm

inheriting in America and how I decide to move through the world with that thoughtfully. And so I was thinking about how Rama was handling that. And I was very, very surprised to see Guru Jagat double down on this idea of Yogi Bhajan being this amazing feminist and this amazing person and continuing to very much preach his words specifically. Right. So there are so many moving pieces and timelines to this Kundalini Yoga story and our listeners have like the tiniest little amuse-bouche of information so far. So we'll need to do a little bit of defining. We will get to Rama, we will get to Guru Jagat and Katie and her background. But your piece that you published in 2021 in Vanity Theory

is titled The Second Coming of Guru Jagat. But in order to articulate what the second coming was, we have to explore the first coming. And that was Yogi Bhajan's coming to the United States with this technology in the late 60s. You write in your piece that Yogi Bhajan had taken elements of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, dressed them up with a new age aesthetic and sprinkled in techno-futurist jargon. That is such an elegant way of putting this cult. And to just give a little bit of a foundation of who Yogi Bhajan really, really was compared to who he said he was. Yogi Bhajan is 3HO's creator, the Kundalini Yoga brand master, I guess I'll say. And this was his claim that Kundalini Yoga

was this ancient secret forum of technology, yoga, transcendence that he brought single-handedly to the people. The truth though is that Yogi Bhajan started out as a customs agent in India, not a guru, but what is the US for? Starting anew, transforming, living whatever flavor of the American dream you can find. And indeed that's what he did. He came to the US in 1969, fleeing a pregnancy that he didn't want to take responsibility

for actually, and was just immediately assumed to be a yoga master because according to the average white onlooker, he appeared as one. He had a salt and pepper beard. He was from India and he really rolled with that and sort of rechristened himself Habarjan Singh Khalsa or Yogi Bhajan. And he founded the Happy Healthy Holy organization in 69 here in LA. And it continues to have a presence here to this day. Yogi Bhajan came to the US and sort of offered Kundalini as a spiritual alternative, not only to sort of like old school Christianity in the United States,

but to the rampant drug use that was occurring at the time. And he really took advantage of those people who were looking for answers in a tumultuous time, people who were disillusioned by war and by the death of MLK and the rapidly changing social values and standards at the time. 3HO was its most active between the 70s and 90s. Yogi Budgen died in 2004, But there are still active members today. We've already mentioned the celebrity presence in 3HL. The Grammy winner, White Sun, is still out here doing Kundalini yoga.

That's from Rama. That's Rama's music arm. Could you explain that? How we got from Yogi Bhajan, this like origin story, to Rama, could you explain what that is? Like how did this retro late 60s 3-H-O movement not only survive but become something that wellness-minded celebrity fixated people living today might wanna get involved with? That's a big question.

I mean, I think that Rama is very much the millennial take on 3-H-O. And Rama came up at a time where the wellness trend that just exploded with new age and crystals and tarot cards and that becoming so much more mainstream. Again, it was a millennial spin on something that happened in the 70s, but in the 70s was much more fringe and remained pretty fringe. But something happened in kind of the aughts and the 2010s probably to do with the recession. I mean, there's so many things that we could talk about that drove that trend. And I think Katie Gregg's Guru Juggett, who started Rama with Hari Jeevan, She found Kundalini like a lot of young people

because she was seeking for answers and for community. She at the time was struggling with drug addiction and she found Kundalini and it really helped her. So she went with it. And I think what's interesting is Yogi Bhajan was so ahead of his time in terms of personal branding and just being kind of a branding whiz and Guru Jagat really shared that same talent. So she takes a lot of

Kundalini and repackages it for the millennial generation of you know going online being on Instagram We talked about it that originally her name was Kundalini Katie and then she decides to start going by Guru Jagat, which again, yeah, I think is a genius branding move. I don't know if this is getting too in depth. I mean, she claims that she got the name Guru Jagat directly from Yogi Bhajan. I think there's a lot of reasons why that timeline doesn't make sense. And she probably didn't get it directly from him. Even the class that I went to, she spoke like, Oh, last night I talked to Yogi

Bajin. It was like they talked on the phone kind of thing. You know, afterwards I Googled Yogi Bajin and was like, Oh, he died. I didn't know, you know, because the way she was talking about it was as if he was still here. And I really think there was part of her that really genuinely believed that she was in contact with him. Yeah. Okay, so Reese, could you help us wrap our heads around some more details regarding how Kundalini was able to enter its girl boss era? The girl bossification of Kundalini yoga all began in 1979 in Fort Collins, Colorado

with the birth of one Katie Griggs who grew up with her single mom who taught and studied dance psychotherapy, which is so freaking cool. She very much had a new agey upbringing. She was no stranger to spirituality in her youth. She finds Kundalini and starts creating online content under the pseudonym Kundalini Katie in the early 2000s. I guess my question for you at this junction is, what do you think Kundalini offered to Katie, or people like Katie, that she couldn't find anywhere else in any of the other spiritual

practices she might have been shown throughout her childhood? Kite It makes me think of, I don't know if this is too off topic, but Gaber Mate, he says that when he worked with heroin addicts, he always says, congratulations, you found heroin because if you didn't, you would have killed yourself. And now it's like how to get off of it because it doesn't serve you anymore. But the point being is that people don't join cults or start becoming addicts because it's not doing anything for them. It did something for her. And I think what it did for her is one, it does give you a really good natural high. I think the breath work and the meditation practices are beautiful and really useful.

I mean, you could do it at home. You don't need to have this whole fancy thing around it. You could just do breath work at home and it can help you relieve anxiety, relieve cravings, all of these things that I think she was looking for at that time. I think she was also very much looking for an identity and I think Kundalini offered her that. And I think that's why it was appealing as opposed to doing just like breath work or yoga that was less intense. It's not just a physical practice or a class that you go to. It becomes and it is, and it's meant to be a lifestyle that gives you rules to follow, not just when you're in the classroom, gives you what to eat, what to wear, all of these guidelines to how to live your life.

And I think that that was very appealing to her at a time when she was searching for who she was and how to live her life. I also think Katie originally was very drawn to performance. She wanted to be a singer or an actor. And those who knew her when she was younger talk about that side to her. And so I think that there was an element of performance in Kundalini that I think really drew her that was attractive. And when she started becoming more that person in front of the class, more of a teacher, she liked that. It wasn't just the teachings, it was also being up

in front of a group and performing this role. Part of her appeal as a teacher was that she was so unfiltered. She just said the craziest shit that came into her mind. It was very compelling. I laughed in her classes. She just said the craziest shit that came into her mind. It was very compelling. I laughed in her classes. She was funny. Yes. It reminds me in a very different way of David Berg, the leader of the children of God who people were attracted to in the seventies because he was making Christianity

sexy. He would curse. It was not that like King James Bible English. It was very much like I'm going to speak chaotically. I'm gonna talk the way you've never heard a religious leader talk before. And there's something that seems to appeal to people about an unfiltered manner of speech that some confuse with speaking truth. Totally, and I think exactly what you're talking about

is what was actually also very compelling about Yogi Bhajan too, in that one of the things about Kundalini is that it wasn't aesthetic. It wasn't, you know, give up all of your worldly possessions and go live in the woods. It was like, no, no, no. Rama took this even more. You're going to pursue spiritual enlightenment and at the same time, material attainment. And that those things are connected and symbiotic. It's good to be rich. It's good to be attractive. It's good to dress well in all of these things

and to be famous. And these are all things that you wanna pursue almost as much as you're in peace with your spiritual enlightenment. So I think that that's also an appealing message for someone like Katie, who was spiritual and genuinely had that seeker inside her, but also had the part of her that was like, I don't just want wisdom, I want fame, I want

this. So Kundalini allowed her that option to sort of combine those two things so that she could pursue both of those sides of herself and marry them together. Yes. It's like the American dream with like an Eastern vibe. Yeah. Pros, prosperity gospel. And they were very committed to the idea of being practical in a sense, which I think also is interesting and appealing to a lot of people

because it's just, if you have a family and a job, you can't go move into the woods and like give up all of your worldly possessions or you're not gonna do that. So this was much more of a practical, in a sense, spirituality. And Rama took that to the nth degree with like the Rama Business School. And they were all about like crypto and holding real estate and understanding that side of it. And that being part of your

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Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So Reese, could you help us understand a little bit more about Katie's rise to her identity as Guru Jagat. Karly Yes, okay. So in the 2000s, Katie is now living in LA. She starts going to Golden Bridge and taking classes from Hari Jeevan, a disciple of Yogi Bhajan, who becomes Katie's teacher, her mentor, seemingly kind of a father figure for Katie.

And he sees that he can use her, like you've been saying, Hailey, essentially as this instrument to connect with the millennial women of the world, seeing as Yogi Bajen had at that point fallen from grace and Hari Jeevan had fallen from grace himself after some punishment for engaging in some scams, which we will get into later. So under Hari Jeevan's leadership, Katie opens the Rama Institute in Los Angeles where she begins teaching classes herself. Katie in 2004 gives herself the name of Guru Jagat or according to her is given the name Guru Jagat by Yogi Bhajan as he touched on Haley. That to this day is still kind of under contention. Haley, you're doing a great job of distilling Katie's appeal. So could you articulate what was Rama and how did Katie go from having this wrapped audience

to descending into the sort of QAnon conspiracy theories hinted at earlier? Well, I think the question of what is Rama is interesting in itself because I mean, really Rama is just a yoga studio. But the thing is that was what was so genius about Guru Jagat and Rama in general is that they created this aura as if they weren't just a yoga studio. They were a global company with their hands in all these different pots. And Katie's Instagram, her bio was always like CEO of seven different companies. She always

styled herself as CEO of Rama and reached to your point of wanting the exact name. It was very pointedly called the Rama Institute. So what was Rama on the surface? It was just a place for people to go do yoga, but it became so much more than that. And it became a community. And then it became a big money generator or a wannabe money generator. How much money they were actually generating, I'm not sure. But you know, they launched Rama TV, she launched clothing lines, she had a book out, had her own podcast. And I think she said at one point, like she wanted to be like the Kardashians of the spiritual world.

I think it's sad because I think Katie genuinely was a seeker. I know you've done other stories on it and it's been reported on, but the kind of like new age to QAnon pipeline as they've called it. And I don't think there's one thing that happened. I think she personified a much bigger trend of people who were interested in new age and wellness that started during the pandemic going in the direction of more conspiracy theories and QAnon. I think it probably did begin with the pandemic because it was a confusing time for everyone and it was frustrating to not be able to do the things that we wanted to do and not really understand totally why. So I think people got confused

and I think some people just started to consume misinformation online and think that that sounded more compelling than what was true. I also think Katie was someone who was a rebel and she was a contrarian, you know? So I think to get Fauci saying da da-da-da-da-da, just her teenage rebel inside of her was like, no, this is bullshit. This isn't true.

Yeah. So to kind of just get a more tangible look at how Katie functioned within the world of 3HO, how does she contribute to Kundalini's Renaissance? Katie was not directly employed by 3HO. So she definitely set up her own separate business with Hari Jeevan, who came from the Yogi Bhajan era. So maybe this will make it more clear. Katie Griggs, seeker, wanting to find answers, discovers Kundalini and starts going to classes.

And she meets this teacher, Hari Jeevan, who was part of the Yogi Bhajan era. He's 20 or 30 years older than Katie Griggs. How closely he worked with Yogi Bhajan, it's a little unclear, but he definitely was in Yogi Bhajan's circle. And Hari Jeevan took Guru Jagat under his wing. And as you said, you were going to get into later because Hari Jeevan had gone to prison and still owed money, owed a restitution to his victims. This is conjecture, but potentially he did not want to start a company in his name because he did not want that company to then be at risk for seizure if something went wrong or if he didn't pay his restitution. He didn't want to make Martha

Stewart's mistakes, branding-wise. Right, exactly. And I also think that 3HO had a little bit cut him loose and there was some distance. Like Harijeev, he was still a Yogi Bhajan follower through and through, but he did distance himself a bit from 3HO and decided that he was going to start his own thing with Rama. And he, again, different tellings, but even at Dhrurajagat's funeral, Harijeevan spoke about how Katie had said that she had gotten a message from Yogi Bhajan saying to start Rama for Harijeevan. She always considered him her teacher and that she did everything for her teacher who

was Harijeevan. So I think that it goes back a lot to Harijiven and that Katie probably never met Yogi Bhajan, was probably never in direct contact with him, but felt that she got her connection to him through Harijiven, who had been definitely more part of Yogi Bhajans in her circle back in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. And this is something that is like so hard to convey, but that I've learned through talking about 3HO and Kundalini Yoga with people who've been involved with it or have reported on it, that like a lot of people felt deeply, deeply connected to Yogi Bhajan who never met him.

You're like engaging in this deeply spiritual practice of yoga day in and day out, dressed in all white like everyone else in the room, his portrait is on the wall, and you're living your life by his teachings. Doesn't matter that he was a freaking customs agent. Who cares? He is guru. He is sky daddy. Even if you were born freaking 10 years after he died, I found that 3HO members who were all in felt deeply, deeply tied to him spiritually. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it also makes me think part of what people also were attracted to or what found so compelling about having him as the spiritual mentor is that he sort of seemed like a secret

in a way. Like it was so inner circle to Kundalini and feeling like you're in the know, like, you know, Yogi Bhajan, you have this kind of inside track to like true enlightenment. And I think that that psychological profile does sort of prime you to conspiracies wanting to be the people in the know that everyone else are sheep and everyone else don't understand the real thing. And you are getting kind of like the inside track to it. Like I think people who are attracted to Kundalini and attracted to Yogi Bhajan don't want to like do normal spirituality or whatever. They want to be the type of people that are doing something different.

I'm not like other devotees. Yeah, exactly. Like this is cool. And again, Yogi Bhajan was just like Guru Jagat, like super forthright, like unfiltered, just saying things like people felt that they could relate to him and relate to her too. Like she was so relatable. There were people like that. I think you're exactly right that that desire for exclusivity, that feeling that you are a part of something special really made the abuses that followed totally justifiable because, and this is a huge cult red flag, when you abuse someone but are able to frame it as this is special treatment only for those on the inside, you can get away with anything.

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously there are like so, so many cultish aspects to Yogi Budgen's Kundalini, to Guru Jagat's interpretation of Kundalini that have nothing to do with yoga itself, not only cultural appropriation, but also financial abuse and labor exploitation, all kinds of hypocrisy, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Could you talk about some of the cultier crimes that both Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat aka Katie committed in different ways just to give listeners who are new to this story the scope of how unethical this umbrella cult really was. Yeah, I mean, followers of both Katie and Yogi Bhajan describe how they felt that their lives were really in their hands

and that if they didn't listen to what their guru said, that their entire spiritual enlightenment was in jeopardy. And essentially the community, the meanings of their life were really in jeopardy. So placing themselves in that position of power is very dangerous and problematic. Of course, with Yogi Bhajan, that led to horrible sexual abuse. He would employ the secretaries and he would put these women in place of power, supposedly. He would coerce them into sex. He would force them to perform sex acts on him.

And in some cases too, he would present the sexual assault as if it were a benefit to the person, as if he was doing something to help them. This goes back to what I think is also problematic about prosperity, gospel, and also the kind of like pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that's so American, which is this idea that you are responsible for what happens to you. If you're a victim, like it's your fault. You created that. Famously, Yogi Budhajan said in a lecture that

women who are raped, they invited that experience just because energetically you invite every experience that happens to you. So that I think is a really pernicious, toxic idea, philosophy. And again, too, something that is problematic in both with Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat, like just ignoring systemic forces of racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality that are not the person's doing that the person is not welcoming in. So by placing themselves in this position of power, which by the way is exactly against principles, for instance, where you're never supposed to call yourself a guru and it's all about submitting to, you know, a higher power, not putting yourself in this place of power.

By doing that, I mean, they also separated their followers from their families. Katie would say, like, don't go home for more than a day because that's gonna spiritually set you back. Yogi Bhajan, of course, very much siloed his followers, sent the young children to India to live in horrible conditions away from their family. Yogi Bhajan believed that the children should only spend time with their family until they were four

and then they were the communities and they were not even part of the family. They belonged to like the community. So again, they were just created this environment where people were so vulnerable that they would do anything to please these people. Financially, of course, the followers were expected to give their money to their guru, to Tithe basically, and to perform labor for no money as a spiritual offering. And so again, in the same thing, Guru Jagat and Yogi Bhajan were simply taking their followers' money to personally enrich themselves.

And that's where it gets obviously very problematic and abusive. Absolutely. So I think it might be time to talk about what happened with Guru Jagat. Where Katie, Guru Jagat, is concerned, the plot really thickens in 2021. At that time, we have entered the pandemic years,

and Katie has girlbossed all the way into wellness conspiracy theory land. Once COVID-19 hits, she, like many sort of new agey white wellness gurus, starts getting involved with pastel QAnon ideas and also just full blown big tent conspiracy theories. She starts publicly endorsing theories like that the government enforced lockdown

because of reasons other than COVID, that the virus was being sprayed in airplane chem trails. She takes an anti-mask stance. She cozies up to COVID 5G conspiracy theorists and infamous anti-Semites. Katie is podcasting hard about all of this stuff. And some of her followers are actually getting kind of weirded out.

Many are hoping that she snaps out of it at some point or turns over a new leaf, but then something totally unexpected and tragic happens. Yeah, so it is at this point that Katie unfortunately breaks her ankle. And following the recovery process for that has a pulmonary embolism that takes her life at the very young age of 41. And her sudden and very young death caused a lot of upset in the community, obviously. Their leader died, and there was a lot of mysticism

and uprest around if she even actually died. Because let's be honest, faking your own death is a pretty cult leader-y thing to do. Yeah, and this went down in 2021 when Katie was at the height of her conspiritualist QAnon-style wellness conspiracy theories. So it was just such a freak, freak turn of events. Yeah, she was not embodying wellness, mentally or physically at all. Haley, I'm just like super curious to hear your take on like the state of Kundalini yoga now. Like there have been so many scandals,

New York Times, exposés, documentaries, Reese and I are going to articulate the specifics even more in a bit, but what's the status of Kundalini at the moment? And like, what do you make of it? I think it's interesting to see how many people are still going forward with it and still very interested in it.

And that 3HO is alive and well, they own a lot of businesses. I think those people who are diehard 3HO, I don't think that they're engaging with even any of these exposés. I don't think that they're engaging with even any of these exposés. I don't think that they're even looking. I don't think it's gonna shake them at all. I'm curious how it will impact people joining.

And I wouldn't be surprised if someone just rebands it and calls it something else, and it's just kind of evolves into something else. Again, to say like, it's not to say that there aren't good things to come out of it, because there are, and that's why people do it. Who knows? Maybe it will have a new evolution that's really great and actually sticks to helping people use these tools to achieve some sort of peace in their life. And that's not impossible. This is what

I think is also very interesting with wellness in general and with Kundalini and something that I found very interesting when I was interviewing people is that people turns out are not very thoughtful about how they're consuming wellness trends a lot of the time. People who were like really into Kundalini, I would ask them questions. I asked like, why do you wear white? And they were like, I don't really know. It's just something to do with our auras or so it's, it's really surprising. I think that's something that I took away from this that I think a lot of people who went through it on the other side took away from it. It's not that engaging in spiritual practices is bad or that new age things are bad, but you need to be thoughtful about it. And some things that came out in my reporting

were, you know, it turned out that one class, they chanted this chance and no one knows what these chances are saying. No one has any idea what these chants are saying and it came out afterwards that it was a chant to like bring harm upon a specific person. And so you know, you have to believe that that does anything for it to be scary, but it's still nefarious and totally opposed to what it's supposed to be doing. But I think that kind of a thing. I hope that people are more thoughtful about engaging in these communities and just in any community and anything that they do to not just take things at face value, but go, Oh, that's interesting.

Like why? If there is a community that's like, if you ask, well, why do we wear white and your teacher doesn't have an answer or is weird about it, like that's a red flag. So I don't know where it's going, but it just has to be engaged within a really considerate and thoughtful way. That is such cogent advice. Thank you so much for that. It's so important for people to hear because obviously the like extreme group think and group rituals in Kundalini are unique, but the lack of in-depth scrutiny when it comes to one-size-fits-all wellness these days is something that I think a lot of us can relate to.

Totally. Hayley, thank you so much for coming on the show and chatting with us. Where can the listeners find you in your work if they would like to? Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. You can find me on my Instagram at Hayley Phelan. Okay question for you culties. Have you ever woken up with a strange symptom and you immediately go down a rabbit hole googling your way to mostly anxiety?

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this cult really was and is. Yes, okay. So to begin, Yogi Bhajan obviously loved a business. We know that Yogi Bhajan and 3HO had many. Yogi-T, Akal Security, the yogic version of the prosperity gospel is what we have come to know Kundalini as at this point. And the most infamous 3HO scams took place in the early 2000s when the DEA raided an

ashram outside DC after finding 20 tons of weed, where they promptly discovered a trafficking operation from Thailand being operated by 3HO. Second most famous was Hari Jiwon's printer toner scandal or stationary scandal, which is so bizarre. This was a telemarketing scandal where he and other 3HO members would call you up to sell you toner at a hugely inflated price and then just not sell you the toner. Apparently, Yogi Bajin's motto and the motto of 3HO was, there is no karma over the phone. Harujo went to prison for two years for this and it was seen as like the ultimate

commitment and devotion to YB and to the organization. And Guru Jaga, obviously as a student of Hari Jeevan, is no different. She continued this tradition within 3HO of scamming people. We see this really prevalently in the MLM structuring of her online classes, which she called the Aquarian Women's Leadership Society. There are varying tiers in this society through which you can take virtual Rama classes from the lowest one being $4,000 a year and the highest one being $25,000 a year. And that one is you have Gurjagat herself as your mentor. And Hari Jiwan's a presence at exclusive retreats. So don't worry, you're

not paying for nothing. You're paying for classes. And if you join that tier, you get to be called one of the graces, which is just lovely. One of the people who spoke in Breath of Fire, the former digital marketing manager for Ramla, said that she the people who spoke in Breath of Fire, the former digital marketing manager for Rama, said that she knows people who have maxed out credit cards to speak to Katie. So yeah, I mean, Kundalini Yoga and 3HO were born of a scam. So it only makes sense that like every generation of this would embody scammery. And what makes this extra culty from my point of view is the use of Eastern spiritual terminology and aesthetics, I guess you could say, to excuse what is really just like good old fashioned American grifting. Employees of both Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat were underpaid, overworked. Both Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat were underpaid, overworked. Both Yogi Bhajan and Guru Jagat

shared a sense of hypocrisy in how much they loved and exploited the material world while claiming that wellness and transcendence could only be found within. They exploited the Sikhi tenet and practice of Siva or service, which within Rama was taken to mean free labor in service of Katie herself, not the community. Guru Jagat encouraged not only members and followers, but employees to tithe 11%. She said, quote, if you want to be a player, you have to give more. You should feel the burn. Guru Jagat even overworked herself. In Breath of Fire, one Rama employee reported making only six to eight hundred dollars a month. One made only three hundred dollars a month for three months. Rama's former bookkeeper

started at eight dollars an hour and only worked her way up to 15 by the end of her tenure. And amid all of this, the bookkeeper was processing outstanding company invoices for thousands of dollars, all the while juggling the consequences of Rama's tax evasion, which is just cultiness in a nutshell to be burying bodies for $8 an hour, allegedly. No, she spoke about working herself unpaid, essentially booking out checks that she knows will not be fulfilled because the company can't pay their employees and having to tell all of these people, like, hey, yeah, like, you're not getting paid. I'm not getting paid to tell you you're not

getting paid. Like, none of us are getting paid. So those are just some particulars regarding the financial exploitation, which fucked up as that is, doesn't even hold a candle to the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that Kundalini yoga members had to endure. Not even a little bit. So just to kind of ease our way into some of the ways in which 3HO controlled every aspect of their members' lives, we're going to start with pointless discipline. Very Scientology-esque. There's a rule for how to do just about everything the correct way in Kundalini, from like pooping to like brushing your hair, anything you can imagine. There's a clip of Yogi Bhajan going, oh, if you have a headache, you need to brush

your hair back and forth four times and then put water up one nostril. To me, it's so obvious that this man is making this up as he is speaking, but this was to be taken as law by these people and it was. And harmless little aspects like this, which is, I mean, kind of the point of our show, extends very quickly into much more sinister forms of control like arranged marriages. Very Allah, Warren Jeffs, Yogi Bhajan loved to arrange a good marriage. He even broke up a marriage he arranged to then marry the follower that he had arranged the marriage to. Messy man that man was. Continuing even further on, control over adults is not where the abuse stopped in 3-H-O. Child abuse was also rampant as Haley touched on.

Children in 3-H-O, especially during its heyday in the 70s and 80s, were sent to a terribly abusive school in India. And even if you weren't sent to a school in India, just life as a child in 3HO was not fun. One of the people interviewed in the documentary who had been raised in 3HO said that her morning routine as a child was two hours of strenuous yoga followed by two hours of meditation and chanting. And if she did all of that, then she earned five raisins because that was the sweetest, sugaryest treat you were allowed in Kundalini, which is truly just horrifying. And yet nothing is truly as horrifying as the sexual abuse that Yogi Bhajan was exposed as having committed. In her memoir titled, Premka, White Bird in a Golden Cage,

My Life with Yogi Bhajan, the former secretary for Yogi Bhajan, named Pamela Dyson, revealed some of the abuse that she endured at his hands. She claimed in the memoir that Yogi Bhajan impregnated her, forced her into an unsafe abortion and abandoned her in her recovery. The book was released in 2020 and sparked allegations from others of sexual misconduct, child molestation, fraud and more. And there was a New York Times expose of this that we can link in our show notes. 3HO has since implemented a reparations program for those affected by Yogi Bhajan's abuse and other forms of mistreatment. Some interpret this as a behavioral correction

and some just see it as optics damage control. So this is kind of a nutshell portrait of the scope of Kundalini Yoga, 3HO, the Yogi Bhajan era, the Guru Jagat era and everything in between. Like it is just amazing how the group has been able to rebrand and rebrand and rebrand and rebrand and survive. And I think that says so much about what Americans in particular have been seeking since the late 1960s and 70s. And yet you'd think that holding a group like 3HO and the higher ups

at Kundalini Yoga accountable would be possible in a court of law. You'd think. You'd think that they would have been shut down by now, and yet they haven't. It's just one of those things that feels like the wrong parts of it have survived. It's a really strange dissonance because it feels like it's of such a bygone era, but at the same time Guru Jagat feels gone so soon. Totally. So we're doing something a little different on this episode of Sounds Like a Cult. Questions have been asked of us for like years and years and years about how cults this destructive continue to survive. And we have our sort of like psychological breakdowns, our cultural commentary breakdowns, but in order to really understand how groups like this continue to thrive, we're going

to kick it to a legal expert. We need some help, y'all. Yes, we need some fucking help. And in order to get it, we're gonna be talking to someone very special. Her name is Carol Murchison, and she is a lawyer who came out of retirement to help survivors of cult-specific sexual assault, many of which were involved in yoga-based cults,

pursue legal action against their abusers. So if you've ever wondered how the fuck a group like 3HO could get away with the shit that it gets away with, you're gonna wanna tune in. So just to start us off, could you introduce yourself to the listeners and explain what motivated you to get into your specific line of litigation? My name is Carol Murchison and I'm a lawyer. Actually I was a retired lawyer, but I worked in the area of employment law.

I did a lot of investigations around the era of the sexual harassment and those kinds of things. I retired, I moved to Mexico, and in 2018, I met a woman who said, my Buddhist organization that I am a member of in Canada has been sexually assaulting women for decades. And I said to her, well, because I'd worked in corporate America, if you were to tell them about that, then they would do an investigation. And she said, I've already told them about that, and they aren't going to do anything. In fact, they're not even speaking to me. And so in just a moment of weakness, I would say, I agreed to do an investigation for her. I found out that

in fact she was right. And all of my kind of misconceptions about certain kinds of groups like yoga, like Buddhism, I found out they were cults. And then other people came forward and talked to me and said it happened to me. And so now I'm unretired and I'm working for a firm that's based in London named McAllister Olivarius. And we have a whole practice group that does nothing but litigate on behalf of survivors of sexual abuse in cults, spiritual organizations and religions.

I am so curious if your firm even attempts to distinguish semantically between those three things. No, it is only, I would say, to kind of give a heads up to people that there are different things that you might think they are. You might think that this is a spiritual organization or the people around you might think that. But as you all know, it doesn't matter what the content is. What matters is the structure, the control, the abuse of power, all of those things.

So we might as well just say, you know, if you've been in some place where there's been an authoritarian, charismatic leader who abuses their power by sexually assaulting people. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but it is important to get specific because you're absolutely right. This is all so subjective and there is no legal definition of the word cult.

No, there isn't. And so in fact, what we often say is high demand group. And then we look at the ways in which there are demands made on you. And so I think that it's a kind of sliding scale, isn't it? It is truly such a spectrum. And I think to try to use the word cult even, I think the reason why some people might find it reductive is because it is just so vast. It is and hard to define. And from a legal perspective, as you said, there is no definition. And so lacking that, of course, as in any legal case, we have to go with what the law provides for us as a tool.

Yes. Okay. So getting into the nitty-gritty of your legal work, what are some examples, if we can ask, of the worst-case-cult scenarios you've witnessed in yoga spaces or that you've confronted in your work? Well, here's the thing. Because the law doesn't give us all that many tools in order to address some of the issues that happen to people, some of the harm that happens to people in cults, we have to focus on where there are tools. And where there are tools are on things like sexual abuse or sexual assault or sexual assault of children, which in a lot of ways is the worst case. But it's really hard because worst is so subjective depending on the harm that people feel. Many people have been in

an organization and they are harmed and they are forced to leave because they've tried to address the harm within the organization, which is of course impossible to do and they lose their community. They lose sometimes their parents, their friends, their families who are left back in the organization. They lose their faith. They lose so many things. It's all psychologically so damaging to the people who've been in these situations. Yeah. And I think the sort of physical abuse in combination with the false promises and the love bombing that these members experienced in the beginning, that spiritual collateral that is involved here and those sort of intangible rewards and punishments that defined their life. All of that is so manipulative

and that is kind of defining of these organizations, but spiritual abuse all on its own is hard to prosecute, you know? It is so tricky. And speaking of legal gaps or finding tools where they exist within the legal system. We're conducting this interview for an episode of our show on the Happy Healthy Holy Organization or 3HO. And I'm wondering from your perspective as a lawyer who's confronting these atrocities, what legal gaps exist in our system that make cases like the ones related to 3-H-O so tricky. Oh my goodness. There are so many things. The law has so many gaps. Let's start with the big one. Statute of limitations. So the statute of limitations is the time within

which you can bring a claim. So if you think about a person who has been sexually assaulted in their religious or spiritual organization within a community by a trusted person, I can tell you it takes a heck of a long time to figure out what happened to you to come to grips with it, to heal enough to even try to pursue a legal avenue. And the law has short statutes of limitations. As an example, a couple of years, I have clients who do not know that they've been raped. Now, that's a very odd statement to make in a certain way. But one of my clients said to me, you know, if I'd been walking down a dark alley and someone had attacked me and held a knife at my throat, I would know that I'd been

raped. But what was framed to me was that of spiritual practice or the guru or the Swami knows what's best for you and everything that the Swami does for you is a blessing or it's a teaching. And when you are indoctrinated into that, it takes a long time. In the case of one of my clients, seven years, seven years. The statute of limitations is six years in Oregon. And so this is the very first thing is trying to get to the door of the courthouse and have it open for you. Now we've been using as a tool, the Federal Human Trafficking Act, which is really very interesting because it doesn't really require trafficking. It focuses on coercion, which of course, that's one of the biggest things that we see in these

organizations. You said manipulated. Yes, people are manipulated. They are coerced. And so the second thing, the Amistadjit of Limitations is in sexual cases, the issue of a definition of consent. So what does it mean to consent? So if you are raped in a dark alley, you were raped by force. You were, in other words, coerced physically. But we don't have in this country a really good idea

of being coerced psychologically. And so what isn't coerced physically looks sometimes to juries and to judges like consent. And so we need more work there to help people understand that when there is an imbalance of power that there cannot be consent. When there is coercion that it negates consent. So we need that for sure. The other thing is that we don't really have any laws that outline coercion well enough. So when I am talking about the cases that I have because they are sexual assault cases, it's not because there isn't any

other harm that's done, right? There's psychological harm, there's a lot of financial harm. But what does it look like? It's a little bit like the consent thing. What does it look like? You gave your life savings to these people. Well, you consented. You did it of your free will, right? I think of ourselves as a society in which we kind of grew up as a country going out and conquering things and relying on our free will. And so we don't have a good understanding of coercion and how it works. And so that's another thing that I think that we need more laws that recognize that coercion can lead to emotional abuse and psychological abuse, as well as sexual abuse. That would make such an incredible difference

because I sometimes prefer the term coercion to a term like brainwashing. That's just a little bit more specific and it's very easy to say like, oh, you're a brainwash, no, you're a brainwash. You know, I wasn't brainwashed. Yes, you were. You know, it can get like a little semantically murky.

So yes, if there was a more specific legal definition of coercion, then maybe people would take it more seriously. Yeah, absolutely. We use a checklist, we give it to clients and we say, you know, check off the ways in which you were coerced. And for them, it's a very interesting experience to see that, for example, to your area of interest of linguistics, of how much language is used to coerce people. Not just physical coercion, there is all kinds of influence coercion. It's very helpful to us in the legal system because we can go into a courtroom and we

don't just have to say coerced or brainwashing, which as you said, is kind of falling out of favor. We don't even have to say the word coerced. We can just show the examples of them and then wrap them all up. So we have to dress the same. We have to think the same. We have to behave the same. We have to use the same language. All of those are examples of coercion. Okay. So we've spoken a lot about kind of how the semantics can make persecuting groups like these difficult and finding out exactly what is a prosecutable offense is an area that can be murky. So if you could define

for us a little more clearly what exactly a prosecutable offense is, that would be really helpful. Mary Katz Absolutely. So let me start first by saying, you know, this kind of sounds like remedial law 101, but here it is. We have two paths to get to the courthouse door. One is the criminal justice system. One is the civil justice system. And so when we're talking about them, they both have very different kinds of things that they offer. So the criminal justice system is a path that has many, many obstacles. You have to go over an enormous number of hurdles.

You do not have your own lawyer. You have the state's lawyer whose interests sometimes correspond with yours and overlap, but sometimes they're different. And you have to first go to the police. And a lot of people don't wanna go to the police. They don't believe the police will help them. As we know, rape is under-reported by a huge percentage

in this country. So at the end of it, if you win, somebody goes to jail, or at least that's the hope for the people who bring the claim. That's hard. They're all hard. But for me, that's harder because you don't really have any control.

Now the civil justice system, which is where I practice, has one thing at the end of it, actually few more than one, but primarily one, and that's money. And so that has its pluses and its minuses. It has fewer obstacles in the sense that you have your own lawyer representing you who goes out there and does battle for you. And so in a certain way, I think our clients feel that that is therapeutic. It's empowering because someone else who has some power knows the system at least is speaking for them, is defending them, is having their back in a way. But the civil justice system,

because it has only money, means that if there isn't any money, there isn't any case. So that's really a stunning reality of our system. Now, there are other reasons that there is no case. One is that there's no evidence, there's no kind of claim. I have people come to me and say I was psychologically abused. You know the kind of love bombing and the punitive thing that whiplashes people back and forth. It creates psychological damage. But we don't have any kind of legal tool that we can use to get to the courthouse door. And so those are the kinds of things that are problematic. If the organization has no money, here's the reason for that is that lawyers, like the kind of law that I practice, we almost 100% take our cases on a contingency fee, which means that we

don't make our fees unless you win. And so to put someone through as a plaintiff the rigors of litigation and not get anything at the end of it, it's two things. It's very, very damaging to a person who's looking for justice and lawyers can't keep their lights on and pay their rent by taking those kinds of cases. So there are a lot of cases that we take where we think, well, we're going to take a chance on this. We may not make any money on this, but you can only do that a certain amount of the time, right? And then you have to take the cases where you feel that you not only have a good case, but that there's money that the plaintiff is going to get something at the end of it. Carol, I cannot even tell you how aggravating, that's not even the right word, how exasperating

I find it that if you are being psychologically tortured by someone, manipulated, et cetera, there is literally nothing to be done about it unless you can prove that they committed a financial crime. That is so twisted. Yeah. Well, it's not that there isn't anything because the law is constantly evolving from people being extraordinarily creative. We love a loophole.

We do. I can remember that we were looking at a case and we were saying, well, you know, this plaintiff is out of time in the state. She's outside of the statute of limitations. And then we started talking about Harvey Weinstein. He was charged in the civil courts under the Human Trafficking Act. And we were like, how did that work even? Because to my knowledge, this is what I was saying to myself,

I don't think Harvey rented a truck and brought women across the border from Mexico or Guatemala or wherever into another state. But when we looked into it, what we found out is that's not really the case. What Harvey Weinstein did that applies to a lot of these cop cases is this, he coerced people into doing something that there was a quid pro quo for.

In other words, he said, if you do this for me, if you do this sex for me, I'm going to get you an interview with a big producer and I'm going to do that by fraud or coercion. And then the tiny little part of it that is about trafficking is about, and somehow or another, I'm going to be involved in interstate commerce, which everybody is involved in interstate commerce. We're involved in interstate commerce right now because we're using the internet to have an interview, right? So we looked at that and we thought, wait a minute, you know, now let's look at some cases and see. So the wonderful thing about the Trafficking Act is because there is coercion, the coercion or fraud, either one, negates consent. That's big time. That's good. And it also has a

10-year statute of limitations. That's also good. Also, and this is the part that I think you'll feel my own aggravation at these things when I tell you, I have a lot of schadenfreude when I call people human traffickers because nobody likes it. And lawyers are creative like that. We're always looking for something that we can twist a little bit out of side of the way that it might necessarily

have been used in the past and do it in a different way. Our next question is just, why do you think that cultish abuse so often flourishes in wellness spaces, yoga specifically? I think that's a very interesting question and tell you just what my take on it is. So I've had a couple of cases that are, again, back to the statute of limitations,

historical, meaning that they happened a long time ago, but the state of New York opened up what they called a revival window and they allowed these cases to come in. And so a lot of my cases in New York have been old cases in the yoga space, but they were not the wellness space. They were what I would call the spiritual space. So in an ashram with Seba and selfless service and you know all of that, yes it was yoga but it was much more religious and spiritual. But what we saw was that these were in the 60s and 70s when that's what people were seeking. So when all of these Eastern teachers came over from yoga and Buddhism particularly, they were bringing something that people wanted. They were bringing a spiritual approach that people were hungry for, and that's why they got involved with them. They

often were harmed. Not always, but in a lot of these cases, I think what we're seeing now is that people are interested in wellness. Then the people who were yoga slash spiritual are now yoga slash wellness. Because that's what the population wants. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously like cult leaders are opportunists. They meet people where they are. And in the 60s and 70s, there was a strong reaction against traditional Protestantism. And now that type of earnest engagement with the new age might be considered cringe, but it aligns much better with like contemporary American values to ascribe to the church of self-healing

and improving your digestion. Your aura. Yeah, your aura. And so yoga is sort of where that transcendent new agey type of spirituality and the kind of more palatable American self-improvement attitude combine. So it's ripe for cult distribution. I think that as you said, in the 70s, when we're coming out of the 60s,

we saw Muktananda, Satya Dhananda, we saw a lot of people, we saw Chokyam Trungpa Rinpoche come over from England by way of India and out of Tibet. We saw a lot of people coming from the East. And you're right, people are smart, and they go into a place and they see what is going to be needed. And I think that's a lot of what accounts for the kind of wellness thing now. Great. Our next question, is there anything specific about Kundalini yoga that differentiates it from the other yoga cults that you have gone up against? Well, I would be asking you that question. Here's what I see. I see a lot of similarities and not too many differences in the sense that there is this charismatic authoritarian.

All of those cult-ish characteristics are there. There is the no dissent, there's the high control, there's the high demand, there is the insularity. All of the things that once they are put in place make it very difficult for people to disengage from unless they have a huge wake-up call in one way or another. And so I see them as very much the same. All of my cases are sexual abuse cases. So I think that's the same. And the content of the message could be multi-level marketing, like Keith Renieri, or it could be yoga of a particular

brand, or Buddhism of a particular brand, it doesn't matter what the content is. It's about the high control, high demand structure. And so in that way, we can say that it's not that yoga is a cult, it's that certain groups within yoga are operating like a cult. Yes, that is such a good way of putting it and it kind of reinforces the little colloquial system that we've come up with on this show where we take a look at fanatical fringe groups in contemporary society, some of which are very lighthearted, like people who are obsessed with like dog shows, you know, it's like, whoa, that gets really ritualistic and even

hierarchical or whatever. And then we look at groups that are more like this, like Kundalini Yoga or Shenyang or certain educational institutions. And it's not enough just to say that's a cult. You have to get much more specific about the structure, who's at the helm, how much power do they have? What does the shape of the organization look like?

All of this stuff. And it is fascinating. and you're absolutely right, that all of these, what we would call, get the fuck out groups, have such a similar structure, and yet talking about them week after week after week never gets old because there is a group like that that could appeal to anyone, even if the content or flavor or whatever

is different in this particular time in society, this particular time of unrest and polarization and seeking and loneliness or whatever, there is a flavor of get the fuck out for everyone. And that's why this podcast continues. Yes, right. You'll never run out of business of people to talk about and take on. No, it's true. It reminds me of something, and I'm sure you've heard this before. Every once in a while, somebody will ask me what

I do and I tell them and they say, oh, that's terrible. People have this terrible thing happen to them, but it would never happen to me, right? People think I would never fall for that kind of thing. But it's not true, is it? I mean, any of us could be in a situation, in a position in our lives where we're vulnerable. And when people ask me, well, why do people even join? No less, how do they get out? And I think, you know, people, it's just like talking about wellness and spirituality as the spaces that people are looking for. People were looking for something. People are looking for community. People are seeking a better world, a better self.

I always think that the people who get involved in these things are actually much better than the rest of us in a lot of ways because they have trust, which is a very good thing for society and civilization. I'm a lawyer. I don't trust anything. You know, I'm not the kind of person that you want to be building the foundation of your civilization on probably. People who trust, who actually want something better, want to help the world, they're good people. And it could happen to any of us that we could be engaged by this because the content is different, right? So the content that engages us always can be something that we might fall for.

A hundred percent. We have just one more question for you, Carol, which is a question that's often posed to me and I'm not confident in my answers to it because my answers often have to do with what not to say. But my question for you is, do you have any advice for people who have loved ones who are caught up in a group like 3HO, Kundalini Yoga? Do you have any advice for how those family members or close friends can approach their loved ones and be of support to them?

Well, I've had so many people ask me, I've had so many parents come to me, and so I have asked others that I consider to be more expert than myself. And here's what they tell me. Do not try to argue the person out of the cult. Because it's like if you've ever had Thanksgiving with your uncle Sam, who's politically different than you are, you know that you are not going to argue people out of their politics, and you're not going to argue people out of cult. And so what people tell me is that you just keep maintaining connection. And so you don't

criticize it. You don't frown. You know, when you're talking about it, you're like, this is a lifestyle choice that this person has made. And I don't like it. And I see the harm in it, but the reality is if that person ever is going to get out, then you have to have maintained that connection. Yeah, you have to be a soft place to land or else they're not going to jump. No, that's right. And it can take a long time. So it's just about maintaining the connection. And that's, I think, hard to do, in fact, when everything in us wants to say, can't you see what I'm seeing? And we know that the people in the cult cannot see that because they've been coerced into another way of seeing.

Yes, so true. We want to thank you so much for your time. It's not often that we get to talk to a legal expert in this field. So this was really a treat. And usually we ask our guests where listeners can keep up with their work. Is there a place where people can do so? Absolutely. You can go to the website for McAllister Olivarius, And I have a whole group of lawyers there. And here's

the thing, people often reach out to us and say, do I have a claim? That's fine. We talk with everyone. You know, someone emails me almost every day and says, you know, this happened to me. Do I have a claim? And we set up a time and we talk and we try to find out whether there is. And if there isn't, we try to direct people to resources, you know, to try to help them out. So I'll give you the website and I'll give you my email address as well. People can email me directly.

Thank you so much. And I'm sure the listeners will greatly appreciate that. Thank you for having me. It's been delightful to be able to talk about this with you. Yeah. Thanks again. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, Reese, out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Which do you think the cult of Kundalini Yoga falls into? Kundalini Yoga is a cult I would fake my own death to get the fuck out of. And that's what I have to say. What about you? What about you? Kundalini Yoga is a cult I would fake my own death to get the fuck out of. Enough that I have to say, what about you? What about you? I mean, canonical GTFO. There's no other way.

I mean, it's not like it started out as something purely good. It started out as a grift and has continued that tradition through its whole existence, which is not to say that if you show up to a Kundalini yoga class, you're like signing your name in the devil's book. It's just to say that if you follow this cult to the end of the road, like that's a really bad place to be. It's just funny. Some cults are started from good intention or come from a really good place and

then have a lot of negative collateral damage that make them not worth the sum of their cultishness. But this is one of the ones where it's like bad idea originally, and it has enough good collateral that it has managed to sustain for as long as it has. And I think that's what I find really interesting. That is such an accurate summation. Maybe if we didn't colonize everyone, we would know more about their spiritual practices and not be able to be duped so easily because we literally handed

yogi bhaj in a cult. We saw an Indian man in a turban with a beard and said, hey, you look like a teacher. Well, of course, what's he going to do with that? This is our own fault. That's my thesis. Yeah, yeah. No, honestly. And if folks are curious about how so many yoga cults were able to emerge in the United States, I do write about it in Cultish. I interviewed so many really fascinating experts in the history of fitness, like Natalia Petruzzella, who is really brilliant. So anyway, I do recommend my own book. I'm just kidding. But- I recommend Amanda's book. I'll do it for you.

I recommend it. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, I don't know. This episode has been a journey. We've been pushed to our limits today. We have gone through the two hours of chanting and meditation. Literally, that's how I feel.

But what you get is our own fault. So with that, that is our show. Thank you so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Sounds Like a Cult was created by Amanda Montell and edited by Jordan Moore of the PodCabin. This episode was hosted by Amanda Montell and Reese Oliver. This episode was produced by Reese Oliver.

Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple podcasts. It really helps the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality,

and Wordslet, A Feminist's Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Thanks as well to our network, Studio71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult pod or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult. Have you ever woken up with a strange symptom and you immediately go down a rabbit hole,

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