It was the week of my fiftieth birthday, in January 2020, when a client sent me a link to a private Facebook group which was called “Beyond the Cage | The 3HO | Yogi Bhajan | Kundalini Yoga Aftermath”.

Of course, as a kundalini yoga teacher I had sometimes come across negativity around the practice and predominantly Yogi Bhajan, the master, and upon first glance I assumed that this group was another one of those.

However, as the week progressed I began to see more and more and more women, and some men, coming forward with vivid stories of all kinds of abuse: sexual, mental and spiritual and as the days went on I simply couldn’t ignore this and everything it was bringing up for me.

I subsequently bought the book ¨Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage¨ which had just come out and which really had kicked off this huge wave of ¨me too¨ allegations.  As I read the pages documenting twenty years of abuse and observed via the Facebook group pretty much round the clock rolling accusations and allegations exposing Yogi Bhajan as a sexual predator, as a master manipulator and a bully I felt my heart break into a million tiny pieces.

¨Premka¨ is written by the former head secretary of Haribajan, the given name of Yogi Bhajan, and within these pages are so many tales of a man who was clearly not living by the truths he professed.

The bottomless feeling of grief mixed with a cocktail of shame and anger and the incredibly powerful impression of being duped was almost overwhelming in these early days in February for me personally.

And now here we are six months later, the kundalini yoga world is in crisis and the division between the people who believe the 200 plus people who have come forward to an independent investigation and the people who have defended the honour of “the master” is really rather enormous.

A long report has come out which basically states that sexual assault allegations against Yogi Bhajan, originally named Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, are likely true.

The report was conducted by An Olive Branch, an organisation formed in 2011 to respond to ethical misconduct in spiritual communities.

The report details rape, physical injury during sex, instances of unwanted touching in intimate areas and forced exposure to pornography and also describes the ability which many of the reporters described that Yogi Bhajan had to intimidate and control.

It has been a dark night of the soul for me as my belief and energetic alignment with the teachings of the master were strong and as I had approached the soul-seeking months before my milestone fiftieth birthday I had the absolute trust in the foundations of my faith and a rock solid trust in that person and those teachings.

Of course, having visited the original ashram of 3HO in 2014 I had seen first-hand that all was not quite as it seemed.  The shiny images in the website were not quite so shiny in real life where a lot of the community lived in mobile homes with barbed wire and the early morning sadhanas were attended by only a few.

This is where the cult of thought began to expose itself to me, but you see it’s such a strange exchange when you hand over some of your freedom of thought because these cults of thought actually have quite a strong hold, albeit unknowingly.

Directions like tuning in, the teacher’s oath that I pledge not to be a woman, not to be a man, not to be a person, not to be myself but to be a teacher.  I mean, in hindsight what on earth possessed me to fall for all this?

But you see on the other side of these directions something super powerful was happening to me and my soul and my connection to myself and the depths of the experience I was having with kundalini yoga were so rich these little rules, these little directions seemed such a small price to pay for the delivery of bliss I was receiving.

The encouragement to have a spiritual name, the encouragement to do weird diets, the encouragement to get up at 3am and pray for three and a half hours every day, the encouragement to look at Yogi Bhajan’s face for hours on end to achieve enlightenment, and the encouragement to always cover my head.  In hindsight, all a huge cult of thought but at the time as I say one I found to be worth the exchange.

I guess I slid so easily into some of the practices, others thankfully I resisted.

I remember vividly seeing so many photos in the press in Ireland as a child of mass marriage ceremonies for the Moonies because my Nana harboured such a strong fear that I might end up in one of those lines to be married.

Cults seemed to be such a big thing back then in the 70s.

I remember being in the amazing huge marble auditorium at the Osho ashram in Pune, India in 2005 and having the feeling of being in a cult then and also the clique of the residents, the long-termers, the people who actually lived there as opposed to “spiritual holiday makers” which I guess is what I was.

As a teenager I was hugely involved with Cumann Na Gael, a national Irish movement whose main agenda was to reinstate the native tongue as the national language

At the end of the 80s when I moved to London, I was part of the early days of dance music when we really truly believed that dance music would change the world

I also remember being in Ayia Napa in the late 90s for early days of UK garage when there was the same feeling, the feeling that there was a movement, a collective connection, a group of people who were part of a sound, part of a scene, part of a community and that community  was about the change the world.

I mean isn’t that what we all want, deep down, don’t we all want that connection to be part of a collective that is changing the world?

That reality is what I felt when I discovered kundalini yoga. I discovered there was a lifestyle, there were potent pillars and instructions for a life that could have meaning and there was a collective that was changing the world person by person.

And for the past seven years that’s what I have been doing.  I have been teaching kundalini yoga and I have seen with my very own eyes, day in and day out what the power of kundalini yoga could achieve,

Kundalini yoga can heal, kundalini yoga can elevate, kundalini yoga can gift people the ability to regulate, the ability to change how they feel and kundalini yoga can empower people to take hold of their lives and make this life the best and the happiest that it can be.

This, we all know, is true as kundalini yoga students and teachers.

I experienced kundalini yoga for the first time in 2008, in an exposed brick building in Hollywood and those 90 minutes changed my life forever.

I had never been in a collective space that felt more potent and my senses were so soothed by everything in that moment, the practice, the smells, the soft sheepskins, the energy in the room was so incredibly potent and the feeling afterwards stopped my life in its tracks

I bought a lot of the shop afterwards!

I arrived on the yoga mat that day as a shamanic healer, six years deep into my journey with shamanism and for sure the essence of the feeling I had after that first kundalini yoga and meditation class was indeed the very same feeling I have after a shamanic healing.

The space is the same, the interior landscape is the same, the feeling is the same and life has never been the same for me since that moment.

Shortly after that first class a new centre opened in London and kundalini yoga was the main offering.  Over the coming four years kundalini yoga changed my life; kundalini yoga changed my life more than anything else had ever impacted me before and everything began to feel so, so right.

One evening on my yoga mat mid-class I heard the message loud and clear. My destiny to train to be a kundalini yoga teacher was so loud that of course it felt like the most natural next progression that I would answer the calling and train to be a kundalini yoga teacher so that I could also help people to attain the feelings I was having, that I could share the tools to help people to heal themselves

As so I did.

I learned so much, not just the asanas, the exercises, but I learned so much of the humanology that underpins this practice, and I absorbed these teachings like my life depended on it, and In some ways I guess it did because life was unfolding in such a powerful way and I was feeling so incredibly connected to something so incredibly powerful and I was feeling so, so fulfilled. I had found the key.

Yes, there were a LOT of rules and yes I am not a lover of rules but it all made sense somehow as I began to increasingly feel the potency of these practices and in order to contain the teachings I understood the necessity to honour their power and essentially I am a believer so probably I was the perfect student to submerge myself into this system.

I became absolutely invested in the wisdom of the master and the reverence I felt for the potency of the teachings was something I had never experienced before.

And I believe it’s here in the big trade off that we make when the cult of thought becomes insidious and for sure this is clearly where people who continue to deny, who continue to not believe ALL of these people who have come forth with their truths.

And so, the interesting difference we see between the cult of Yogi Bhajan is that some people are clearly STILL deep in that chamber of fear, but they absolutely don’t know it.

And so, the cover up continues, and so new students are trained to be teachers, and so some teachers deny, actually deny that there is any truth in what has now been accepted to be true.

And so, it was back in early February this year when I was in the depths of the confusion that I took all my Yogi Bhajan adorations off my altar and I burned them.

The synchronicity here in my personal journey is quite amazing …  In the summer of 2019 I had signed up to retrain to be a Kundalini Global teacher.

One of my original teachers in London, Carolyn Cowan, was setting up a new school, a school which would teach kundalini yoga from a radically inclusive perspective, which would teach kundalini yoga without the dogma, a new way to understand what is happening in terms of the hormones, the nervous systems, the esoterics, looking at the fascia as we now know exists and looking at kundalini yoga as I have been doing for so long now as a way to heal on many levels.

The new school is called Kundalini Global and it operates as an antidote to the cult, not bowing down to a man, not trading in the soul for the promise of happiness but rather looking at what actually happens when we get on the yoga mat and the effects of a practice that is so potent and powerful when we get off the mat and out into our lives.

I have learned so much this year and at some point, in the past month I had the big ¨aha¨ moment when I suddenly realized how FREE I felt again, how relaxed I felt again and how incredibly exciting this time is for me personally as I weave a new future.

This new way of feeling, this new way of being is what is absolutely informing my new way of teaching and it’s truly wonderful to feel so free as I step into my own power fully, absolutely and completely, especially considering how incredibly powerful the timing is in all of this.

Yogi Bhajan joins a long list of patriarchs who have been exposed as abusers of power, who have been exposed by the wave of ¨me too¨ and the long list including Pattabhi Joyce, Bikram Choudhury and John of God in Brazil and we see the pillars of the patriarchy are falling down day by day.

Isn’t it amazing that all of these men are being relieved of their authority and surely there is a huge space now for strong and amazing women to take over and for us all to return to equality and freedom.

In these days of huge change, in these days of the turning of the age when we really have nothing to hold onto but our own souls, and the knowledge that we decided to be here at this time, I hope we can all continue to bring down old and outdated ways of being.

I absolutely acknowledge the findings of the report and I absolutely stand by and believe the women who have come forward to finally air their truths and begin their healing.

And I still believe in the truth and I hope that we all continue to wake up and we continue to deprogramme old outdated patriarchal systems of belief and cults of thought that keep us locked up into small versions of ourselves.

And so I ask myself isn’t THIS amazing powerful and liberated sense of freedom what I have always wanted? The answer is simply a full body yes and that my friends is the main reason I’m not looking back in anger but rather looking forward in hope that this freedom is available to us all.

Written by Trish Whelan

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