Glimpses of the dark underbelly did not shake my faith
In the ashram I found meaning, I found joy, companionship, and a sense of belonging. I was doing something significant with my life. I was lit from within. I accepted the promise that meditation, chanting and surrender to the guru would grant me an experience of God in the here and now.
In the house that is my being, I discovered and lived in whole new rooms. I was filled with the raw energy of a powerful, all-encompassing path. Something available to only a handful of lucky people.
From where did my positive experiences originate? From being in the company of hundreds of others who believed as I believed; from the exotic, esoteric setting—the gardens, the incense, the peacock feathers and orange blossom oil; from hours of meditation and chanting; and from the belief that I had found a perfect master. That unshakeable belief was key; there was the initial “love bombing”, and later as a member of the core staff, I received from Gurumayi love, along with criticism and shaming. I saw ugly things happen to any person who did not tow the “party line” of submissive devotion. I came to fear that I would similarly be rejected—in retrospect I understand that the love and attention I received was conditional upon my unquestioning labor and my surrender. A love that was more cage than freedom.
Glimpses of the dark underbelly did not shake my faith. Perhaps I had too much to lose. Perhaps my native values and morals had been co-opted. I did not want it to be so, but disillusionment slowly crept up on me. I gave 25 years to the ashram and Siddha Yoga: my time, my single focus, my energy, my money, my trust, and my devotion. I was a manager in a number of areas. I was lit up, yet there was darkness along with the light. There was joy, purpose and meaning—but at the cost of my simple humanity.
How do I reconcile all that I gained and all the practical things that I learned in my twenty-five years in the ashram with what I now understand as a concealed darkness at the center of it all.
Is there some healing narrative to be found? It was terrible and it was valuable—how, then, should I understand it? Is my need to understand a help or a hindrance? Do you, sensitive reader, also struggle with these questions about Sidda Yoga—or any other cult? I have no neat and tidy explanation. Leaving Siddha Yoga has been a long process for me.
Conversations and meetings in recent years with Muktananda’s victims are the milestones that mark the final stage of my departure from that world. Sitting around a table listening to a few of the women who as girls were raped by him, the blood drains from my face. I witness the animal grief, the woundedness these brave women have carried across the years of their lives and I’m shaken. I listen to their stories of trauma, of identities torn apart by one old man’s narcissistic, transactional disregard for those he professed to love. One who holds himself up as God takes into his bedroom girls who yearn only for the divine. He instructs them to undress. He praises and fingers their vagina, demands a blow job or places a flaccid penis inside them. He then gives them gold jewelry, swearing them to secrecy. On her eighteenth birthday, after the rape, he tells one that she is now his wife. He threatens another girl with death if she tells anyone. A perpetrator who swears his victims to silence knows that what he is doing is deeply wrong. What outrageous spiritual, emotional, psychic and bodily harm! Is there any greater sin in human experience? And now these women are harmed anew as Gurmayi and SYDA deny that this happened.
In my late teens, I nursed a dream. My very being ached for this. I wanted, I needed, to be a part of a new future for mankind, a world where love outshone hatred. I believed Krishnamurti when he wrote that such a world must start with me; with me changing myself. That longing took me to India, and to Ganeshpuri. It took three decades for me to realize that my yearning had been co-opted, harnessed and abused by a guru presiding over a system that primarily benefited her. I witnessed, lived and became part of the dark heart that sits at the center of Siddha Yoga. This was betrayal of my sacred hunger. I stumble across a line in David Whyte’s poem, Santiago, and weep; my shoulders shake with grief:
You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach.
In the ashram it felt good to dissociate from inner difficulties, pain or anxiety through chanting and meditation, yet a quiet part of me sensed something was amiss. I feel ashamed to tell you that that I set aside my moral compass. The dark in my own heart was harnessed and rewarded as I broke laws on behalf of the ashram, took for granted and demeaned those I supervised, agreed when asked to shun a friend, and curried favor by reporting on those I was close to. I was ripe fodder for the ashram hierarchy. I enjoyed the power of lording it over those lower on the ladder. I felt special and better than most others around me, and certainly superior to the masses “out in the world”. I can only hang my head and sigh. I bypassed my innate humanity: my dark angels were welcomed while my better angels were sidelined. In this I was a willing participant. That’s a wound I carry.
The promise of a cult is: We have the answers. Work the practices we offer; give us your focus, your time, your energy (and your money) and you will gain the ultimate gift: a perfect master who bestows on you a perfect life. You now have something others can only yearn for. You have arrived. But I now understand that life is not about arriving; it is about becoming: becoming what’s next for me. Becoming a better, yet ordinary member of the human race. I’m working now to reclaim my humanity, to reclaim my identity.
The hardest for me was an anxiety that spanned twenty years after first moving out— that I had “lost God”. I was bereft. It was an extended dark night of the soul. It’s only in the past few years that this feeling has slowly, quietly dissolved. My belief in God as some unseen benevolent force has been replaced by that which I can touch, smell, and see: the huge tree in our yard with three parallel trunks: Grandfather Oak. The honeyed light of late afternoon. The community of people who know and care for me, as I care for them. No more nebulous concepts of Siddha Loka for me.
And departure dreams hounded me during that same period—and still occasionally today. I’d dream that I was back in Ganeshpuri, surprised to find myself back there. Trying to find a taxi to take me to Bombay airport, frantically locating and packing my things. Encountering Gurumayi and fearfully hiding my wish to leave. Nightmares that would wake me at 3 AM. Their persistence frightened me. But slowly I came to see them as evidence of a deep taproot being withdrawn from my being– the slow extraction of an alien object from my soul.
Having come from a deeply dysfunctional family, the ashram was my replacement; Gurumayi my father and mother (though I did not recognize any of that at the time). I had friendships that felt deep and solid. I now see that a component of authentic relationships was missing: a tradition, a forum, and a willingness to share and be vulnerable about the difficult things in life: darkness, depression, anxieties and disappointments. In the ashram, the discourse in talks, the discourse between people seated in the Amrit cafe was of reaching for the light: God this, grace that, guru’s love, this teaching, that tapasya. All couched in terms of love and light. But the other impulse—to reach for the things that are difficult in life—was absent. A meaningful relationship with oneself, with others, must embrace all that’s tough in life, as well as all that’s good.
How was I drawn into the ashram life? We modern creatures want comfort; we crave anesthesia from pain. We readily consume any approach that offers a shortcut, a leg up, to meaning, to success, to happiness. We even alleviate the suffering of death with opioids. So it’s not just me, it’s the time and the context in which I exist. The truth is that wisdom and answers come with time, with work, with hardship, with suffering, and in community with equals. A single touch and an awakened kundalini as a means to salvation? What foolishness.
150 years ago, Nietzsche cautioned, No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself.
If I’m a seeker of the truth, then follow the truth I must. That seeking has led me on, steadily away from the delusions of Siddha Yoga.
And what lies ahead? I grieve for what I lost; I shake with anger at the betrayal of my pure longing.
Yet somehow I am left washed clean. Energized by the simple hard work of learning to love my family as well as I am able. To seek the humility of a straightforward human life of joy and suffering, of pain and pleasure.
In the name of the Bee – And of the Butterfly – And of the Breeze – Amen! ~ Emily Dickinson
(I choose to remain anonymous because I still fear difficulties with my old ashram friends or reprisals from SYDA—old habits die hard. Sad, but true. Perhaps one day soon I’ll have a different view of things, and will add my name)