Guru Jagat, a so-called heir to the kundalini empire, was a decidedly millennial spiritual guide – Photo: Lisandra Vasquez / Vanity Fair
By Hayley Phelan | Vanity Fair | United States |
It was golden hour at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, final resting place of Burt Reynolds, Cecil B. DeMille, and Estelle Getty, just around the corner from Paramount Studios. Five hundred mourners had taken their seats among carefully ordered rows as the sun dipped below the picture-postcard palms. They were dressed almost entirely in white; as followers of the esoteric yoga practice known as kundalini, they believed the color could stretch one’s aura to a very specific nine feet. Behind the stage was projected a black-and-white image of a fair-haired young woman, smiling wistfully. Her name, at least to those gathered, was Guru Jagat, the controversial founder of Ra Ma Institute, a yoga studio dedicated to spreading kundalini to a new generation. But she had other names too. To start with, the one she was given at birth: Katie Griggs, a befittingly average name for a middle-class white girl born in the summer of 1979 on a Colorado farm. Depending on whom you ask, Jagat was a bona fide spiritual leader—or a fraud; a controversial thought leader; a bigot; a feminist; a rape apologist. Now, at the age of 41, she was dead. Maybe.
The official story, as per Ra Ma Institute, was that Jagat had died of a pulmonary embolism following ankle surgery, a chronology of unluck they painstakingly detailed to all who’d listen. But those outside Jagat’s circle of followers weren’t necessarily convinced. Wild theories abounded. Drugs, suicide, complications from COVID-19—a disease she had publicly questioned the existence of and refused to be vaccinated for—were all rumored culprits. Others believed she had merely faked her own death to avoid a cancel campaign that had been brewing against her.
That, and the growing unrest in her community, had prompted me to interview Jagat in April. I could not have imagined at the time that it would be our last interview.
“I’M NOT, LIKE, LOVE-AND-LIGHT SUZIE”
As a practice, kundalini is characterized by intense breath work, repetitive poses, and alternative lifestyle choices, such as wearing white and eating mostly vegetarian. Followers—the likes of which have included celebrities Christy Turlington, Russell Brand, and Alicia Keys—call it an “ancient technology.” In fact it was almost entirely made up by one guy sometime in the late 1960s. Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, a former customs agent, immigrated from India to the United States, where he would die a rich and beloved guru known as Yogi Bhajan. He’d taken elements of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, dressed them up with a New Age aesthetic, and sprinkled in techno-futurist jargon. And, in true American fashion, he’d parlayed this fiction into a multimillion-dollar empire that included a private security firm (one still contracted to do work by the not-so-yogic ICE) as well as the enormously popular, duly lucrative Yogi Tea brand.
Bhajan had been accused of rape, sexual misconduct, and financial malfeasance, both before and after he died in 2004, but in a pre-#MeToo era, few seemed to pay attention. That all changed when, in early 2020, his former employee, lover, and victim, Pamela Dyson, self-published her explosive memoir, Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life With Yogi Bhajan, sparking an onslaught of other accusations, including but not limited to sexual battery, rape, fraud, and child molestation. A report conducted by an independent third party, including interviews with hundreds of witnesses and victims, found that the abuse “more likely than not occurred.”
Jagat saw things differently. After promoting a video that sought to discredit Dyson and defend Bhajan, she wrote in an Instagram post, “This tale is no truer than any other tale—the Truth as always lies in the eye of the Beholder.” “Truth” was something she had spoken about often; only for her it meant something subjective, mutable, and relative (not the truth at all). Her stance triggered a backlash that opened the floodgates.
Read the full article, ‘The Second Coming of Guru Jagat’ (Vanity Fair, 1 Dec 2021), here.
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Yogi Bhajan ‘more likely than not’ raped his followers (Asia Samachar, 15 Aug 2020)
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