Premka: On Kundalini yoga, sexual assault, and spiritual bypassing

Note to reader. I have been a practitioner of Kundalini yoga since 2013 and completed the IKYTA/KRI teacher training over a two-year period, from 2013 to 2015. While there have been lawsuits, stirrings, rumors, and speculation around whether Yogi Bhajan, the founder of Kundalini Yoga, abused his followers and members of the 3HO community for years, the release of the book Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan, a memoir of Pamela Dyson’s nearly two decade account of working for and serving as Yogi Bhajan’s private secretary, in which she was abused psychologically and sexually, definitively broke open the conversation, forcing a reckoning within the Kundalini community similar to what has happened in other communities and professions in the #MeToo era. This is my response to that as a student and teacher of this yoga. This is not meant to be an eloquent post; it’s meant to add clarity around where I stand, and how I, and my organization, Tempest, which uses Kundalini yoga, will be responding.

---

I read Premka, the story of Pamela Dyson and the sexual and psychological violence and abuse she suffered at both the hands of Yogi Bhajan (the founder of Kundalini Yoga) and 3HO, (the organization founded by Yogi Bhajan that oversees IKYTA, the International Kundalini Yoga Teachers Association) in early March (2020). 

Let me not mince words: I believe Pamela as I believe all those on the short end of the power stick who at the cost of so much dare to tell the truth; who suffer abuse first at the hands of their abuser, and then at the hands of enablers, the criminal justice system, and our deeply misogynistic society at large. I believe her story and her truth, I believe that Yogi Bhajan was a sexual predator, I believe that the organization he founded and people within that organization enabled that and/or were complicit in that predation.  

Yogi Bhajan’s image should be held in the same light that we now hold other predators who used power and privilege to abuse and silence vulnerable individuals. His image is one that I now mentally line up right next to Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bikram Choudhury, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the seemingly endless list of men who operated with impunity for years, decades, across centuries and millennia, who used positions of power to take what was never theirs.

Make no mistake: This is not different because Yogi Bhajan founded a service-oriented organization, or because he accumulated some type of merit that other men who also took themselves down through their own very avoidable, very violent and predatory actions did not. This is not a special case of rape that deserves a different weighing of consequence. He does not get a pass because he was a “spiritual teacher” or a “guru”.  He does not get to keep a legacy of good deeds and a slap for his transgressions. We do not get to spiritually bypass the pain and scars of abuse inflicted because he had some valuable contributions, the same way Matt Lauer doesn’t get those things because he was a good dad and fair reporter, the same way Bill Cosby doesn’t because he made us laugh. It’s 2020: No one gets that pass anymore.

This does not mean I am a human who doesn’t believe in forgiveness, or humanity, or redemption. It means I am a human who is sick of our incessant need to forgive immediately, explain away, plea for our collective understanding of men who abused for years. I am exhausted by the way we automatically respond to protect the abuser—to protect their ego, their legacy, the lost potential of a human who voluntarily abused, the futures that could have been—instead of us automatically responding to the cost the victims already endured, their lost potential, the futures already stolen. I am sick from existing within a rape culture that puts not only the burden of prevention on victims and survivors (and potential victims and survivors), but also the burden of reconciling and forgiving the abuse.

Here is a thought: stop raping, stop abusing your power, understand the consequences of what happens when you violate a human, understand we will not be sad for you when you are caught. 

---

There are a number of articles, such as this one, that allude to our need to grow up, to not throw out our books and practices or throw out the men who abused, to not be so black and white in our reactions, to understand: those who abuse suffer, too. In fact, that story is all I’ve seen in the wake of this, from people with a vested interest in Kundalini and Yogi Bhajan. I would like to suggest we don’t use rape as the starting point for our collective shadow work, or collective growth; I would suggest we don’t use someone or many people’s pain as our spiritual lesson, but perhaps start this suggested process of mercy—of understanding humans are both good and bad and that’s a beautiful thing and that humans are redeemable—in other real corners of the world where we have some reckoning to do, such as the Criminal Justice System.

Perhaps we don’t start this process of leniency and empathy with the population who has always had that leniency and empathy, but the populations who have never. Start there. Maybe give the oppressed a minute to be pissed instead of expecting them to be the bigger person; maybe stop asking the victims to skip their “fuck you” and get right on to the forgiveness while they are still at the bottom of the power imbalance, still being crushed under the hierarchy of whose stories are heard, whose stories are believed, and whose stories are not. Our anger is righteous, it is valid, and it is not spiritual or grown up to discount it or bypass it, it is not profoundly wise to start with rapists and sexual predators as those in need of our mercy instead of, say, the Black and brown folks stacked in our prison system for non-violent crimes.

I am entirely for making spiritual lessons, or just lessons, out of suffering. The world is my material, my growth has been only because I have suffered magnificently, because I have made sense of the terrible things that have happened to me, including my own sexual assault. But “we” are not at the collective point yet to make spiritual lessons out of rape and sexual assault on behalf of victims and survivors. That is not healing, that is spiritual bypassing; that is violence on top of violence. Victims and survivors get to draw their own conclusions, get to make of their own experience what they will; that is your right as a survivor. But making spiritual lessons out of other people’s trauma is not the collective’s right yet; not until the collective works as hard to end rape as it does to forgive it and downplay it.

---

I have been practicing yoga since I was 22 and became a regular practitioner in 2003. I was agoraphobic, bulimic, struggling with severe panic attacks after a miscarriage. I found Bikram yoga, and found that after a class I could drive my car without thinking I might accidentally-on-purpose steer myself into oncoming traffic; after a month of practicing, I found that I could stop vomiting up my anxiety-foam, that I might not be going insane, that I might not have to consider a future of continued spiraling into madness, which was all I could consider before finding yoga. 

That physical practice of yoga was my way into a spiritual practice of yoga, a practice that continued to save my life as it evolved. I found Stephanie Snyder and Vinyasa yoga and eventually ditched Bikram altogether on account of the fact that Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, was accused of raping one of my teachers. 

 Still, yoga was not enough for me. Or at least, what we have boiled yoga down to in this country—a wardrobe of LuluLemon, an athletic practice stripped of its meaning and roots—was not enough. Kundalini gave me more; it fed the hunger I had, it filled the gaping holes in me. I found it in January 2013, at the bottom of my drinking problem and eating disorder and pot addiction. I began to practice it at home, daily, online and using manuals. Without Kundalini yoga, my recovery would not be what it was or is. After six months of practicing, and three months of sobriety, I signed up for teacher training.

As with many beginners, and without the understanding of cultural appropriation I have today, I drank Kundalini up. I drank up the spiritual name I took as part of my IKYTA training; I drank up the chants, the ritual, the white clothes and white carpets, the insularity of the practice, the home it created for me, the people I met, the teachers that nurtured me. Kundalini gave me in early recovery something I could not find anywhere else: a place in the world. It literally saved me, or rather gave me the means to save myself.

Kundalini also came with a heaping dose of Yogi Bhajan. I practiced in an ashram, where life size posters of him lined the walls; pictures of him meditating, holding a kitten, holding a mala, smiling, an omnipresence. We read his transcribed lectures and watched tapes of him speaking, a distinct 1980s aesthetic and video quality that could both make you feel like you were living out a real life Lost situation, forever stuck in a decade the rest of the world had moved on from, and like you wished you could have been there, felt what all those students on the other side of the tape must have felt, which was mesmerized. Yogi Bhajan became a man I felt I knew because everyone that taught me this yoga thought they knew him, too. We talked about him as if he were there, and I put a picture of him up at home, above my desk.

The technical part of the practice—the breath work, the immense challenge of, say, keeping my hands up above my head for 30 minutes, the four A.M. practices, the discipline, the odd postures that broke down the parts of me that were so rigid—opened me up. Transformed me. If I could do Breath of Fire for eleven minutes, I could ride out a craving. If I could chant long Ek Ong Kars for two-and-a-half hours, I could do anything. 

The technical part of the practice has remained a staple of my life. The more spiritual part of the practice—the part tied in with Yogi Bhajan and Sikhism—hooked me at first, in those early days of sobriety where I needed to be hooked; then it wore thin, became tired. The turning point for me was a Kundalini for addiction recovery training at an Ashram (the Ashram) in New Mexico in 2014 called “Superhealth” (retroactively, a terrifying name). I went to learn how to teach Kundalini for recovery, and instead I was given an incessant string of videos of Yogi Bhajan lecturing, an unrelenting parade of speakers attesting to his greatness. When one of those speakers told the story of how Yogi Bhajan had her eat bananas for a year—her very obvious trauma broadcast to us as a blessing, as a testament to his brilliance—I saw the crack. I packed my bags and left the retreat. I ran from that shit. 

After that retreat I stopped using my spiritual name, crossed it out on my book, struck through it like I’d struck through the many labels I’d tried on and taken off. I also left my teacher training, went to Italy instead, where I looked for God inside me, and where I found God inside me. The following year I returned to the San Francisco ashram to finish the training, with a different relationship to it, a different version of me who still needed the practice, who could navigate the parts that didn’t fit without compromising herself. 

---

In early recovery, I started going to an evangelical Christian church. I needed it; I needed the sermon, I needed the crowds of people, the Bible, the music. I needed to take communion, I needed to be blessed, I needed to pray and pray and pray. I was raised liberal Methodist; hell and sin weren’t really our things, we didn’t dig the devil talk, no one had ever asked me in all my years at church about my relationship with Jesus. At dinner one night with a new friend from that evangelical church, she asked me point blank if I would accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I tried not to laugh. “No.”

 The guru aspect of Yogi Bhajan never made sense to me. It didn’t destroy me, it didn’t scare me, it just didn’t make sense, the same way accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, as my God, never made sense. Jesus was, by all historical record, by all accounts, a human, and humans aren’t Gods or Lords. Humans are humans. It took me a long time to make peace with Jesus, to understand that he didn’t have anything I didn’t have, “he just didn’t have anything else”— he’d transcended it all—a brother leading the way, an example to follow. I never made that kind of peace with Yogi Bhajan. 

Still: The practice of Kundalini yoga remained my lifeblood. That is, the practice of Kundalini yoga, not the concept of Yogi Bhajan, not the specific type of Sikhism he employed, not the idea that he is the Mahan Tantric or the Siri Singh Sahib, not the guru shit. I found peace through the practice, I found myself through the practice. It is one of many parts that have made up my recovery, still make up my recovery.

In 2015, I completed my training, and I began teaching Kundalini for recovery. I felt, and continue to feel, that the meditations and kriyas (sets of asanas (movement), mudras (hand position), pranayama (breath), and drishti (eye gaze) combined to evoke a specific outcome) are extremely practical and useful for anxiety, depression, and addiction. In other words, I found a way through. I found I could love something deeply, be served by it, and leave the parts that did not serve me at the door.

 A slogan in recovery: Take what works, leave the rest.

---

I incorporated Kundalini yoga into the curriculum at Tempest* (*now Monument x Tempest), a facet of the myriad offerings, but nonetheless, a notable presence. For instance:

• We have used, since the inception of the course in 2015, weekly meditations, many of which are Kundalini. 

• During our Breath, Meditation, and Yoga week, we, or rather I, use Kundalini as a way to describe what yoga is, the vastness of the practice of yoga: that yoga isn’t just asanas and postures; that yoga means union, to yolk oneself, to bridge humanity with divinity. Because Kundalini uses so many different elements of yoga, it was a template, a way to explain the fullness of a practice most people in the West misunderstand. 

• We refer to Yogi Bhajan as the originator of Kundalini Yoga.

• We have used quotes of Yogi Bhajan.

• We have encouraged students to try a live Kundalini class or a Kundalini class on the web. 

As a result, people have tried this yoga, either at home, sometimes by going to a class; some students have become teachers, immersed themselves in the Kundalini community.

I’ve been clear that there is some weird shit; that it’s tied in with religion, that it can be seen as cultish or actually cultish. From one slide in our materials, “I don’t submit to another human as greater than another, this gets blurred in Kundalini sometimes, as in everything, I take what I take and leave the rest.” 

I’ve disclaimed.

I’ve been pushy about keeping it as part of the curriculum. 

I’ve tried to draw on the technical parts of the practice, while trying to preserve the lineage so often severed in the West—I have made a semi-passable attempt to strip Kundalini to its utilitarian purposes while trying to honor where it comes from. 

I’ve been worried about the cultural appropriation of yoga, not sexual assault. 

---

In 2018 it was brought to my attention that there were lawsuits against Yogi Bhajan for sexual assault. I dismissed it. Thinking back on that, I have tried to put myself in the shoes of a 2018 me, who reasoned: What system isn’t filled with rapists? Who reasoned: A lawsuit is part and parcel of any organization that elevates a human. Who reasoned: her responsibility was to disclose the allegations when introducing Kundalini, to footnote it instead of raging about it. I am embarrassed by what I reasoned, by my complicity.

I don’t know why it took this book to break that complicity; perhaps it’s because I’ve now lived through Christine Blasey-Ford, read Chanel Miller; perhaps because now I know more about power imbalances, silencing, what it takes for a story like Premka’s to be told, published, laid bare before us.

In December 2019 I wrote a piece for the New York Times, an Op-Ed titled “The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous”. I was speaking not of Bill W.’s well known sexual predation within the fellowship that we write off as his “unhealed sex addiction”, or the thirteenth stepping that occurs still today—but of a system, created of the same system that has for millennia kept women silenced, abused, oppressed. I wrote to call out the complex we so mindlessly and relentlessly herd our most vulnerable, traumatized, sick and desperate humans to, and that this mindless unchecked herding runs the very real risk of landing certain folks smack in the middle of a lions den of abuse, of re-traumatizing them, of keeping them subject to the same power structure that made them sick in the first place. 

In response to that article, a number of comments I received read: 

• “I’m a feminist, and I’ve never had a problem in the rooms.”

• “I’m a feminist, and AA is/can be a haven for queer folks.”

• “I’m a feminist, and I’ve made AA work for me.”

When I read those comments—as a person outside the system, as a person critical of the system—it was clear. How the hell does being a feminist and using a system automatically mean that the system isn’t patriarchal? How does having some experience that is safe within a system mean everyone is safe? How does never having experienced the abuse yourself mean no one else has? How does using what works and leaving “the rest”—or having the privilege to do that without cost—mean “the rest” is above critical judgment? 

Easy to see when you’re not attached, when you’re not personally invested in the system.

That experience highlighted for me something, which is the error in my thinking around Kundalini. For one, that editing out the parts that work for me and remaining silent on the systematic issues isn’t really feminist or grown up. It’s privileged, and enabling, and oppressive. Two, that it’s not just systems that need to be held accountable—people need to be held accountable. Yogi Bhajan, 3HO, every single teacher anywhere who teaches Kundalini—self-included—we are accountable. 

---

So where does this leave me?

I think the first place it lands me is in the space of never wanting to go to a Kundalini class again or at the very least, step into any space where a rapist is held in reverence. To date, not one of the yoga studios I have frequented over the years has reacted from what I can see from their web or social media presence; all but one of my teachers have remained silent. Again: it is not spiritual or “above it” to remain silent; it’s complicity. Non-reaction has its virtue, so does speaking truth to power, letting go of what we cling to—including traditions and illusions—changing with evolving times, ensuring that the vulnerable—who turn to us for healing—know where we stand on violence, know that we encourage them to speak up, and they will be safe, and they will be believed.

I will no longer suggest people check out a live class, or go through a teacher training. 3HO, KRI, and IKYTA, to date, have not released a statement; most teachers haven’t either. One male teacher with a large following—who uses Kundalini to help people recover from addiction—texted me to ask what I thought about this whole Premka thing; I said “I think he’s a rapist.” Crickets. So yeah no, definitely no referring people in recovery—where the correlation between addiction, alcohol consumption, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault related PTSD is on par with the correlation between peanut butter and jelly—to an organization or a teacher who has not said the words “I believe her” and backed that up with action, like, taking down pictures of the rapist, or refusing to practice in spaces where his image lines a wall, or a pamphlet. An observation: The Bikram community reorganized themselves; people stopped teaching Bikram yoga en masse, his picture was taken down, substitute practices that used the same techniques he popularized were offered. Communities can reorganize; it’s not rocket science, it’s just work. (Note, if there are teachers who have made such strides, worked to ensure survivors of sexual assault aren’t asked to bow down before a predator, who make something more of this, my opinion may change over time; as of now I haven’t seen much of this. If you know of community reorganization, or teachers that have created healing spaces in response to this and in full acknowledgment of it, please drop a comment on my IG post.)

Tempest has instituted changes. We did an audit of our course material for any place Kundalini Yoga is taught, mentioned, or any place Yogi Bhajan is. We have removed quotes, we’ve removed our module on Kundalini yoga, and we’ve removed suggestions of taking a live course. We’ve left parts of my story that mention Kundalini yoga, because I don’t believe in re-writing my own past to edit out those parts. We’ve kept a few basic Kundalini practices, and we’re adding in other breath, meditation, and yoga practices led by other teachers, including Susanna Barkataki and Vimalasara Mason-John. We’ve added a statement about Yogi Bhajan and the legacy of Kundalini yoga to ensure everyone knows where we stand on the matter. In short, we’ve stripped everything but a few meditations we find to be valuable for recovery.

 My own practice is steeped in Kundalini, in both a spiritual respect and technical respect—it keeps my anxiety under control as much as it gives me connection to the deeper parts of me, that God within. I use it daily, and have used it daily for seven years, along with hatha yoga, transcendental meditation, vipassana meditation, and other mindfulness practices. My practice is my practice; that is a reckoning only I have to, and get to, face. It’s a reckoning I’m still picking my way through— what goes, what stays? As my friend Sarah recently remarked, what do you do with Michael Jackson’s music? Some don’t listen and some do. I don’t know the answer yet, all I know is I’m tired of rapists ruining things, and that I’ve been doing more vipassana.

My own social media, and this blog (now “this Substack” with fewer Kundalini resources), has numerous different references to Kundalini. I quote Yogi Bhajan multiple times in my published book. I’ve never been interested in going back over my life with a fine-tooth comb and erasing the evidence; you can still find me on Facebook doing keg stands and taking shots in 2010. I’ve got a track record as a clueless human; I also have a track record of doing better when I know better.  

Subscribe • Donate • Ask me a question • Manage your subscription

The Mantra Project, a 40-day email course to support quitting drinking, is available for purchase here.