Cults, Yoga, and #YouToo

R. John Williams considers what the HBO docuseries “Breath of Fire” reveals about “new” religious experiences.

By R. John WilliamsDecember 5, 2024

• Television

• Cultural Studies

THE MOST COMPELLING religious exposés and cult documentaries, like the best true crime and horror films, do not merely frighten or scandalize—they also intimate, however subtly, that this could happen to you. They chill the bones by suggesting that none of us is completely immune to the siren calls of the Leader, the Work, the Path, the Family (or whatever else a given guru calls their devotional system). Who among us can state with total certainty that they are too intelligent to fall for the seductive power of absolute direction, transcendence, belonging, or purpose? We want to say: “What a ridiculous human being! How could anyone believe this?” But the best accounts of cults crack open the door to self-doubt.

Given the massive popularity of yoga in the United States, HBO’s new “cult” docuseries Breath of Fire (directed by Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens) shows how easily something as presumably benign as yoga can be turned into something dark and controlling. Over four hour-long episodes, we encounter the world of Guru Jagat (a.k.a. Katie Griggs), who died, probably, in 2021, while at the helm of one of the most influential organizations devoted to Kundalini yoga.

Probably? As with many cult leaders, Griggs’s death of cardiac arrest at the age of 41 seemed, for many adherents, incredible (she must have ascended!). More sober skeptics speculated that she may have simply fled, faking her death, no longer confident in the role of spiritual leader (probably sipping mai tais on an island somewhere).

Who was this woman? And who were her followers?

Hayley Phelan’s 2021 Vanity Fair article that inspired the docuseries opens with some of these speculations, along with the possibilities that Griggs died of “drugs, suicide, [or] complications from COVID-19—a disease she had publicly questioned the existence of and refused to be vaccinated for”). This flurry of scuttlebutt is fitting for a charismatic figure who, at her height, was teaching yoga to hundreds of celebrities, streaming her lessons in meditation to practitioners all over the world, overseeing several million-dollar companies, and speaking at Harvard Divinity School.

Griggs’s story works nicely as the grounding narrative of Breath of Fire in no small part because she was, at different moments, both a magnetic cult leader and a naive follower—the series refuses the temptation to simply condemn her in either role. There is, of course, plenty to condemn. At various points, she seems to have bilked followers out of thousands of dollars, berated employees, lied about her qualifications, played fast and loose with both Eastern cultural traditions and investors’ money, downplayed victims’ stories of sexual and physical abuse, and promoted seemingly every recent “conspirituality” theory on the internet (flat Earth, anti-vax, Holocaust denial, QAnon, and so on). But it took years for her authoritarian persona to develop, and the more compelling story in Breath of Fire has to do with the particular religious tradition Griggs got sucked into in the early 2010s, a tradition she arrived at, initially, as a classic American seeker: the Kundalini yoga system as taught by Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004), now referred to in this docuseries as a “cult.”

But what exactly is a cult? When pressed on the question in an interview, Griggs scoffs, “Well, look up the definition of cult. […] You could say that [about] your hiking club […] I mean, it could be anything.” She is not wrong. The parameters of a “cult” are notoriously hard to articulate when systems of established religion (or politics) can be so all-encompassing. Scholars of religious studies are sometimes accused of sidestepping the issue, referring to cults, generally, as “New Religious Movements” (NRMs)—as though all that separated Catholicism from Scientology were a couple thousand years.

And yet, the “new” in NRM does clarify something. The point, as I see it, is not to euphemize what are often abusive and exploitative structures of total control (or to suggest that all religions are cults). Rather, the word spotlights the lack of safeguards in NRMs that might otherwise be present in institutional and canonical traditions that are far less new.

Framed this way, cults become religions when they’ve accumulated a body of myths, scriptures, and dogmas, and have conservators whose job it is to preserve and interpret the words of an originary teacher. Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that “the medium is the message” rings true: the cult leader speaks the Word, the religious leader reads the Word. Jesus, according to this definition, was the quintessential cult leader (“it is written, but I say unto you”).

“New” can be exciting. “New” can be dangerous. “New” can be revolutionary. However, as is the case with almost all NRMs, what is “new” is often portrayed as something ancient. In episode one of Breath of Fire, we learn that “Yogi Bhajan was a Punjabi Sikh who is largely credited with bringing Kundalini yoga to the West,”—implying, as the guru himself frequently asserted, that the tradition being “brought” had been lost for thousands of years, only to be “restored” by Yogi Bhajan.

But the series rather quickly debunks the claim, suggesting that although Bhajan was born into a Punjabi Sikh family—and thus raised in an Indian religion that developed during the 15th century CE—nothing in that background would have afforded him the training or lineage he claimed for the yogic philosophy he began teaching when he arrived in the United States in the late 1960s. Sikhism has nothing to do with yoga, and it appears that Bhajan was merely one of the hundreds of opportunistic gurus who emerged in the late sixties and cultivated followings among American hippies eager to turn eastward in their search for self-realization. Sporting a turban didn’t hurt, and he was tall and charismatic, so it was not all that hard to find followers. By the early 1980s, Bhajan had cobbled together a hodgepodge of yogic practices and esoteric philosophies, placing himself at the head of a religious organization and a number of (often fraudulent) businesses devoted to “wellness” and self-realization.

One of the soberest voices in the series belongs to the historian Philip Deslippe, who has in the last decade established himself as a preeminent authority in the history of yoga and other esoteric religions in the US. The series does not say as much, but Deslippe was himself a practitioner of Kundalini yoga at one time and speaks with a light in his eyes that I recognize as the wily sparkle of the deconverted. (Full disclosure: I was raised a Mormon myself and left the church in my late twenties). Deslippe is especially offended that Bhajan was allowed to claim affiliation with Sikhism, and thus “differentiate himself by being a religious leader, not just a spiritual teacher.”

By setting himself apart from other NRMs, in other words, and claiming to represent a large world religion, Bhajan managed to deflect a great deal of criticism that he might have otherwise encountered. Sundeep Morrison, a Canadian filmmaker born to Indian immigrant parents (and the one Sikh interviewed in Breath of Fire), is similarly scandalized, arguing that Sikhism and Kundalini yoga are entirely different worlds. “I wouldn’t even […] put them in the same sentence,” they say with a laugh. “I think the conflation of the two is deeply problematic.” Bhajan’s system, Morrison adds, is instead best understood as a kind of “pseudo-religion.”

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Whatever its origins, the alluring power of this new-and-ancient belief system made it possible for Bhajan to exercise enormous control over his followers. As we learn in Breath of Fire, Bhajan’s followers were given strict instructions on when to wake up in the morning, how to shower, who to marry, what work to do, and even how and when to go to the toilet. “If you go to the bathroom,” Bhajan pontificates from his stage, “and your bowel does not come like a one cannon fire, you have five days of depression to follow.” (Later in the series, we learn that Bhajan’s favorite food was Taco Bell, and that he would often “take leftovers and […] have someone mush it all together for him”—no wonder). They were also told how and with whom to have sex, and for an unfortunate group of women known as “the Secretariat” who worked closely with Bhajan, that meant enduring years of physical and sexual assault.

Apparently, very few people in the organization knew of Bhajan’s abuses and misconduct until very recently, long after the leader’s death in 2004. When Katie Griggs began showing up at Kundalini yoga classes in Los Angeles in the early 2010s, she seemed to have had no idea of the horrific revelations that were to follow. Within a few years, she was recruited by Bhajan’s successor, Harijiwan (a.k.a. Stephen Hartzell), who comes across as a conniving fellow looking for a way to capitalize on the predominantly female population of yoga devotees. Harijiwan tells Griggs to assume the name of Guru Jagat, which she says was given to her by Yogi Bhajan himself—a claim the series insists is not plausible. When asked about the name, Griggs dances cleverly around the question: “I only briefly was with Yogi Bhajan in the several years before he died.” (Note the curious tension between “only briefly” and “several years.”) Later, she will claim that Bhajan has continued communicating to her via spiritual “downloads” and “mandates.”

With Harijiwan pulling the strings, Griggs established a number of RA MA Institutes for Kundalini yoga in cities throughout the world. By the late 2010s, she was promoting herself as the “It girl” of wellness and yoga, showing up to lectures in white flowing robes and grungy band T-shirts, with thick golden hair spilling out over the top of her turban. “She’s like the Kim Kardashian of the spiritual world,” says one of her former followers. She was “like a badass bitch who was not gonna take any shit,” says another. “[T]hat was the vibe.”

Unfortunately, as Breath of Fire makes painfully clear, Griggs was also now on a collision course with the spiritual lineage she was claiming. Pamela Saharah Dyson’s exposé Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage; My Life with Yogi Bhajan (2019) broke the dam on a flood of new allegations and lawsuits with dozens of women coming forward who had suffered Bhajan’s abuse. Harijiwan dismissed these claims, insisting that the women were merely jealous or lying. He crafted an inelegant video defending the guru and telling Griggs to post it to her accounts, which she did.

One of the internal documents apparently written by Griggs that circulated in the wake of these revelations, as shown in Breath of Fire, included the claim that “These stories [of sexual abuse] have come up in so SO many spiritual communities in recent times—we shouldn’t even be surprised.” Every religion has a sketchy history, the argument goes, so what’s the big deal? Such a claim is, of course, grotesque when offered as a response to the suffering of so many victims of abuse. But it is also not entirely wrong. The abuse of religious and spiritual authority often takes the form of sexual, psychological, and economic coercion. There is, in short, nothing “new” in the abuse perpetrated by the leaders of NRMs.

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Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga is dismissed at various moments in Breath of Fire as only so much Orientalist hogwash. But the basic idea—that there is a “self” inside you that needs cultivating, that you can “change the world” by turning inward, that there are “insider secrets” you can deploy as a way of “raising consciousness”—all of that has been a staple of yogic philosophy (and Western religions) since ancient times. It’s a missed opportunity that the docuseries never articulates just how banal and ubiquitous the fundamental tenets of Kundalini yoga actually are. The term “Kundalini” may sound exotic—referring, in ancient yogic texts, to the divine energy that rises along the spine while meditating and chanting—but as a program for self-mastery, it is not that different from many of the prosperity gospels circulating in the United States today. After all, doesn’t the neoliberal insistence on the privatization of emotional well-being invoke precisely this ideal? We are told that if we are unhappy or anxious, we need only adopt some kind of contemplative practice.

To this point, it is difficult to find a major institution today that does not have some sort of training program or space devoted to meditating or achieving “presence.” The recent fiasco surrounding Amazon’s ZenBooths is only one of the more glaring manifestations of a cultural practice that has permeated American corporations, universities, hospitals, grade schools, churches, and self-help shelves. Amazon’s warehouse workers, in this case, were encouraged to enter one of its “Mindful Practice” kiosks, where they found a plant, a small fan, and a digital skylight designed to look like blue sky, as well as a screen providing “a library of mental health and mindful practices,” all designed to “recharge the internal battery.” Critics jumped on the hypocrisy of the company’s simultaneous exploitation of workers who often report having to work excessive hours and being denied time to use the bathroom.

But the assumption underlying Amazon’s endeavor—that meditation will help “recharge the internal battery”—is everywhere. To be sure, the supposed benefits of mindfulness meditation can be as numerous, and its advocates as impassioned, as that of any (new) religion. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness “helps us wake up […] making it possible for us to live our lives with access to the full spectrum of our conscious and unconscious possibilities.” Without it, we are at the mercy of our “deep-seated fears and insecurities.” Others claim that it will help you “live longer,” “enhance your performance at work,” “stay focused in the age of distraction,” “move your organization, or you personally, across a threshold you haven’t crossed before,” “heal from trauma,” “increase your compassion,” “counter depression,” “manag[e] the stresses of student life,” “recapture the American spirit,” experience “freedom from […] racial warfare,” and make possible a “viable alternative to capitalism”—a “mindful economy […] firmly situated in the core values of environmental sustainability, economic justice, and stability.”

Often, the anxieties that motivate these promises are portrayed as the direct result of our conflicted relationship with digital technology. Many of the people who download apps like Calm or Headspace do so precisely because they are worried about the effects of their phones on their attention, empathy, and peace of mind. It’s a Sisyphean loop masquerading as a quick sprint to self-actualization, and our digital overlords profit at every turn.

Breath of Fire, like most documentaries today, is edited in line with these contradictory impulses. Much of each episode resembles a frenetic stream of TikTok-like images, with few shots lingering for more than four or five seconds. If someone mentions “revisiting trauma through meditation,” the show immediately cuts to a flash montage of spooky rooms and contorting bodies; when a follower describes the angst of modern life, we next see a smartphone with a finger doomscrolling past images of burning buildings, hurricanes, wars, starvation, and so on. Warm synth tones tell us when to be sad; funky plucked strings tell us when to feel suspicious. The intended effect is to pull us into the drama, holding our attention, which would otherwise, presumably, wander away.

And yet there are also a few genuinely powerful scenes where the camera lingers: on the tearful testimony of one of Bhajan’s victims, or the heartbreaking shots of Griggs’s mother describing how it felt when she learned that her daughter had died. Why isn’t more of the documentary like this, slow and contemplative?

Or, more to the point, what does Breath of Fire’s slick adherence to the conventions of the genre tell us about the modes of attention required to perceive that this could happen to you? Perhaps the most compelling lesson in Breath of Fire is unintentional, gleaned by watching, as we often do, with all the dazed attention of the “binge”: namely, that the structures of our experience are never fully in our control; that we live and think, much more so than we might want to admit, outside the self.