![]() ![]() During the late-Sixties, talk of his abuse and misconduct spread by word-of-mouth among former students. By the time of his death in 2004, the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization or 3HO that he founded 35 years earlier had become an umbrella over a vast and unique empire of New Age spirituality and yoga, Sikhism, and capitalist enterprises that included companies like Yogi Tea and Akal Security.Ĭontroversy and criticism shadowed Yogi Bhajan from his arrival in the United States. His students spread his yoga throughout the United States and Europe, lived communally in ashrams, founded businesses, and started converting to Sikhism. He found an eager audience of young spiritual seekers and began teaching them a form of yoga he called Kundalini Yoga that he claimed was ancient and previously secret. Born Harbhajan Singh Puri in modern-day Pakistan, Yogi Bhajan was a former customs officer at New Delhi’s Palim Airport before coming to Los Angeles via Canada in late-1968. Within this ignoble list is the late Yogi Bhajan (1929-2004). The question of which prominent yoga teachers have been involved in scandals of abuse and misconduct seems to have given way to a new question that is both hyperbolic and yet all too realistic: which prominent yoga teacher has not been involved in scandals of abuse and misconduct? Revelations of sexual abuse have emerged in a wide range of religious communities-Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist-but seem to be especially rife within the yoga world which has seen scandals involving sexual assault and misconduct involving leading figures including, but not limited to, Krishna Pattabhi Jois, Amrit Desai, Kausthub Desikachar, Swami Rama, Swami Satchidananda, Bikram Choudhury, and Swami Vishnudevananda. To learn that a religious or spiritual authority abused those under their care is an acute violation of trust with few parallels. If someone was sincere in their devotion, they argued, does it really matter if the object of that devotion was not exactly what it was supposed to be? A much more serious and profound shift occurs in the wake of revelations of abuse within a spiritual community. ![]() Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.īoth of these stories went viral as humorous and harmless cases of misplaced devotion, and many online commentators offered responses to them that were both kind and non-dogmatic. Nine months later, a Brazilian grandmother learned that the statue of Saint Anthony of Padua that she prayed to every night for years was actually of the elvish Lord Elrond from a movie adaptation of J. In April 2016, an elderly woman in China was photographed kneeling and burning incense before a statue that she assumed was the deified third-century general Guan Yu, but was actually of Garen, a character from the video game League of Legends being used to promote a local internet café. ![]()
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