Look past the white saviourism of the journey, the conflation of a virus for institutional abuse, the bypassing. In my choice I choose to teach Kundalini Yoga throughout the world, God willing, until my last breath.” “Between the flu and the allegations, from the center of my being I choose Joy. Many have noted this quote in particular: I’m familiar with these themes from studying cult leaders.īut the possibility that they are baked into the very content and method of Kundalini yoga itself was made much more clear by Gurmukh’s post yesterday. It would feel like a mortal threat.ĭominate in order to control, and do it completely, passionately, sleeplessly - or else you will die.
His erudite psychoanalytic appraisal of the Bhajan-like figure - in his case Gurumayi of SYDA - shows a person who is terrified of anyone around them asserting their own agency, for then the world and and others in it would no longer be theirs to control. Daniel Shaw details the granular level of how this might work in his masterful work Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. One of the hardest parts of Dyson’s book for me to read was where she quotes Bhajan repeatedly saying things like: “You must be like me,” followed by pages on pages of Dyson discovering that her own identity had been suppressed, supplanted, negated, and that she had to find it again.ĭomination was the root of the religion. “Dominated” in the sense that no one else had time or space to have their own life, their own reality, their own feelings.
This thought began to form in response to reading Dyson’s book and some testimonies on the Premka page about how Bhajan dominated everyone’s lives through a grandiose ideology that required constant material attention: a thousand different tasks, rituals, protocols, attitudes, gestures. Maybe Kundalini Yoga Works Because It Carries the Domination Affect of Yogi Bhajan | a note on Gurmukh’s Abuse Crisis Statement And who knows? Practicing euphoria from a place of real freedom may well be possible. But I believe that everyone deserves to practice without the additional burden of cognitive dissonance. This is definitely not to say that the practices if they are still felt to be beneficial, should be abandoned.