Before the sudden death of its leader, Ra Ma Yoga Institute was accused by some former members of being a cult. What happens now?
How a white woman in a turban captured a devoted following, spanning continents, for her yoga practice that some former members say was abusive and cultish
Insider/October 30, 2021
By Haven Orecchio-Egresitz
On August 1, Guru Jagat — the charismatic leader of the Ra Ma Yoga Institute in Venice, Los Angeles, whose following included celebrities like Alicia Keys and Russell Brand — was reported dead at the age of 41.
The news came at a tumultuous moment: Former devotees of Jagat's teaching were accusing her and her mentor of abusive and manipulative practices and of running a cult. She had also been accused of platforming a Holocaust denier and spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
According to the institute, Jagat died of pulmonary embolism after complications related to her ankle surgery.
The institute is looking to move ahead without its founder. Social accounts tied to Ra Ma and Jagat's inner circle remain active, and sales of its yoga events continue. Even now, it's not clear what kind of accountability exists within the organization.
But what is Ra Ma and who was Guru Jagat?
'How dare you not serve?'
Philipa Hughes thought her dream was coming true when she teamed up with the yoga celebrity Guru Jagat to open a studio on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 2016.
For years, Hughes had wanted her own space to teach Kundalini, a niche form of chant-heavy yoga. That was finally happening through a partnership with the turban-wearing guru named Jagat, whose legal name was Katie Griggs and who like Hughes was white.
For five months, Hughes and Jagat shared a yoga studio that Hughes had rented in the resort town of Palma de Mallorca in relative harmony, with Hughes and her 3-year-old son living in an apartment upstairs. But then, Hughes said, Jagat demanded that she have Hughes' bedroom for herself. Hughes refused.
According to Hughes, one day in August, seven men and women belonging to Jagat's inner circle surrounded Hughes in the studio, as they berated and screamed at her for refusing to give in to Jagat's demand.
"They went apeshit at me," Hughes said. "They literally rounded me up and they were attacking me, like, 'She's your teacher. How dare you not serve?'"
In that moment, Hughes started to piece together the clues — the around-the-clock working hours Jagat's staff kept, many of them unpaid; the expectation that followers treat Jagat like royalty; the verbal and financial abuse of teachers. Ra Ma Yoga Institute wasn't just a new-agey business with a remarkably devoted team, she thought to herself: It was more like a cult.
"It never dawned on me, that level of where they were at with serving Guru Jagat," Hughes said last year. "They would get calls from her at 3 o'clock in the morning saying, 'Where's my hairbrush?' I didn't get it because I don't do that. I don't serve."
Hughes said she lost more than $20,000 that she invested in the business, including the leases and unpaid time, and that she ended her business relationship with Ra Ma less than a year after it began.
Hughes would learn she was far from the first woman to be drawn in by Jagat's charisma.
More than a dozen of Jagat's former employees, students, and business partners spoke with Insider about what they characterized as a culture of abuse in the Ra Ma community.
The group, they say, allows for the verbal and mental abuse of its followers, has sketchy financial practices, and more recently, has circulated COVID-19 disinformation.
Messages sent to Ra Ma seeking comment for this story were not returned.
As Jagat's enterprise grew in the US and expanded into Europe, many of them said they suspected the problems would only get worse.
A woman doing yoga on a multi-colored background.
Kundalini yoga is a chant-heavy form of the practice that was popularized by Yogi Bhajan, who was accused of sexual misconduct. iStock; Skye Gould/Insider The 'Yogi Tea' guru Unlike the more mainstream Hatha or Vinyasa classes that millennial yuppies are known to pop in and out of before Sunday brunch with friends, Kundalini yoga presents a prescriptive lifestyle.
Kundalini yoga was brought to the US in the 1960s by Yogi Bhajan, who died in 2004. It offered codes to live by, and Bhajan's followers — largely white ex-hippies — were thirsty for enlightenment. They called themselves "American Sikhs," though the practice had nothing to do with actual Sikhism.
Followers got up before the sun to meditate and chant Sanskrit mantras for hours. They wore all white, covered their heads with turbans, and followed restrictive diets. There was intense breath work known to make yogis light-headed.
The Kundalini enterprise became known as 3HO — Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization — with a headquarters in LA. It also grew increasingly popular: first with schools and ashrams in New Mexico and India, and then with Bhajan's creation of the popular (and now ubiquitous) Yogi Tea brand, which was bought by East West Tea Company in 1972. As Bhajan's influence grew, he acquired the government-contracted firm Akal Security, as his followers would hand over parts of their businesses to their master, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
After Bhajan's death, some of his students tried to stake a claim as his successor, splintering off from 3HO to build their own studios and followings.
In recent years, followers have painted a darker picture of Bhajan's rise. Many of those followers have come forward, either in the media or on social platforms, with accusations that they were beaten or sexually abused by him. In January 2020, Bhajan's longtime secretary, Pamela Saharah Dyson, published a tell-all memoir, "Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan" that included accusations of rape.
Many others continue to see him as a saint and have publicly called his accusers liars.
Jagat rising
Jagat was widely seen as the most visible heir to Bhajan's movement.
Working alongside her was Harijiwan Khalsa, Bhajan's former student and later Jagat's own teacher. Khalsa, whose given first name is Steve, was dubbed the "toner bandit" by some in the media after being sentenced to two years in prison for his role in a fraudulent scheme involving the sale of copy-machine toner that was never delivered. He is the founder and percussionist of the Grammy-award-winning band White Sun.
He is also known to forcefully defend Bhajan against the abuse accusations. In February 2020, Harijiwan published a 52-minute video in which he sits cross-legged on a stage in front of a room full of people dressed in white garb and says Dyson, Bhajan's secretary, made the accusations simply for financial gain.
A popular Kundalini yoga teacher in LA, Jagat founded Ra Ma Yoga Institute in 2013. Within six years, she had become synonymous with Kundalini yoga on the West Coast.
Hours before Alicia Keys hosted the Grammys in 2019, Jagat reportedly led her in breath work. She and other teachers at Ra Ma have aligned themselves with other wellness-forward celebrities like Kate Hudson and Russell Brand, which elevated Jagat's profile and landed her positive press in outlets like Vogue and People.
Until her reported death, Jagat lived in a relatively modest LA home she rented from a Ra Ma follower and drove a Nissan SUV, members said. But in the rest of her life, they said, she did whatever she could to eat, travel, and live like the Hollywood elite.
"She will only ride business class or first class. She will only stay at five-star hotels," Nicole Norton, whose job it once was to book travel until she quit in 2019, told Insider several months before Jagat's death. "It can't be anything less than."
As Jagat's popularity grew, she became more active online.
Increasingly Jagat used her streaming platform and social accounts to offer advice about topics varying from sex, beauty and motherhood to bizarre diets — like going days or weeks eating only fruits that start with the letter P.
Norton said she still carries some guilt about how she aggressively marketed Ra Ma's costly services to new yogis. After every class, she was expected to hand out pamphlets for workshops or festivals. The cachet of these events grew when students realized they might brush elbows with celebrities like Keys, who attended workshops and events as recently as 2019.
Eventually casual students would graduate from weekend classes to costly teacher-training classes, in-person trips or yatras, and women's programming, Norton said.
Norton said students were told that any problem they had — addiction, mental-health issues, procrastination — could be solved by investing more time and money into Ra Ma events and programming.
If she wasn't pushy enough, Norton said, Jagat would get upset.
"Once we get you to come to Camp Grace, it's really fucking over. You're going to come to whatever workshops we tell you to. You're going to come spend a couple thousand dollars to camp with us," she said.
"Whatever issue you have, we have a kriya or a class that will solve that issue and bring you back for more because we just created this mindfuckery where you think that you're being healed but in reality it's just hypnosis, manipulation, and abuse."
Jagat's classes involved loud music, banging gongs, and short, intense breath work.
As students, and especially prospective teachers, got more involved with Ra Ma, they were encouraged to live their life in accordance with the strict rules Bhajan laid out decades ago.
Senior teachers at Ra Ma boast about their "scientific" approach. But there's scant, if any, evidence of science-based techniques at work.
Jagat's practitioners were told not to wear black because it shrinks their aura and not to wear rings on their middle fingers because it interferes with their connection to Saturn. A former student included footage of Jagat in a TikTok video in which Jagat appears to claim that COVID-19 lockdowns were linked to an "alien war."
At workshops held in the US and in Spain, the practice is grueling. Students are taught to wake up around 3:30 in the morning to do chanting exercises and meditation that can last hours, followed by a series of classes or workshops and sometimes free labor.
Some students who couldn't afford the workshops told Insider they were encouraged to attend and then pay off the fees by doing work for Jagat and the studio. Even among those who were able to pay full price for their sessions, volunteer work masqueraded as "seva," or service, and even tithing is encouraged under Bhajan's teachings.
"With the yoga, you get really high. There is a physiological shift that happens and you're kind of spaced out, basically," said the actress Jules Hartley, who is known for her work in shows like "Black-ish," "Fuller House," and "Dear White People" and who studied with Jagat. "Sometimes it's called 'Kundalooney,' and like with any addiction there is a honeymoon period with this."
"During the honeymoon period, you'll do anything," Hartley said.
Rick Ross, the director of the Cult Education Institute, has researched the effects and practices of destructive groups for decades. Over the years, he has received many complaints and concerns from former members of the 3HO yoga community.
Ross said that breath work and intense meditation can make practitioners more susceptible to "undue influence."
"It's important to understand that we can reach a trance state through many pathways, and one way would be through breath work and intense meditation," he said. "And when that's part of a group process, that can be seen as a tool to make people more suggestible, more malleable, and then the leader can manipulate their perception of reality, their feelings regarding the group and regarding their life. And it becomes part of the coercive persuasion process."
Looking for a big break
Hartley, the actress, got involved with Kundalini yoga in 2011, at a time when she was dealing with grief and a dramatic breakup.
A friend had recommended a 3HO-affiliated studio called Golden Bridge.
The grand production of the class got her hooked. By the end of the first class, she had booked 10 more sessions and registered for a Kundalini festival in the desert. She began doing "seva" at Golden Bridge and other 3HO-affiliated studios in LA, sometimes in exchange for discounted classes.
When Ra Ma opened two years later, Hartley was brought on, unpaid, to lead morning meditations, called "sadhana."
Hartley left the Ra Ma and LA yoga circle in 2017, after experiencing a series of panic attacks that she attributed, in part, to the hectic and prescriptive lifestyle of Kundalini.
In teacher training, which is required to get the most updated "downloads," students are taught not to sleep more than four hours a night, Hartley and other former students said.
"They manage to really get this notion out that teacher training isn't this thing you take one time. You take it again and again and again. It was a way for them to bring in more bodies, bring in more people," she said. "That becomes your whole social world."
Sometimes family would ask why she was dedicating so much of her time to yoga, and Hartley said that at the time she believed it's where she would land her big break in Hollywood. Classes were so popular among celebrities that paparazzi would stake them out on weekends, she said during an interview with the Instagrammer MysticalMina in September 2020.
"You know, you wake up at this time of the day, you do this meditation, you take this kind of shower, you eat this, you drink this, you use this on your body," Hartley said. "Everything, down to the tiniest detail, is prescribed by Yogi Bhajan. A lot of us were following that as much as we could."
Breaking point
Norton, too, said she was sleep deprived and overworked during her time at the institute and that calls and text messages from Jagat would come in all day and night. Norton said that if she didn't respond immediately, Jagat would later chastise her in public — a possibility that filled her with anxiety.
According to Norton, it was also common for Jagat to make staff run and do errands.
One day, Norton said, Jagat asked her to pick up her sneakers in another town. When Jagat decided she didn't like them, she was told to return them. Then when she got back to the studio for the second time, Jagat changed her mind and made her go back to the store to buy them again, Norton said.
"It's a form of manipulation and a form of abuse," Norton said.
When staff traveled with Jagat, former members told Insider, business meetings were often held as late as 2 a.m. and there was no time to adjust to jet lag. During these extravagant trips, employees were expected to pay for their own flights, food, and other necessities, six former staffers told Insider in interviews.
That final trip to Mallorca, in 2019, was Norton's breaking point.
According to Norton, on the last day of that trip, she and other staff were humiliated in the front of the studio because nobody had cleaned Jagat's Airbnb rental,and there was candle wax all over the wall.
The next morning, Norton and a teacher left for the airport at 4 a.m. to take Jagat's bags and wait for her to arrive — only to have Jagat call her shortly before the trip to ask Norton to reschedule her flight so she could sleep in.
Norton had finally had enough.
Ross, the expert on dangerous groups, said that the complaints from staffers like Norton match typical scripts for reinforcing subservient behavior.
"The question is not whether or not the guru is acting in a reasonable and respectful way, but rather, are you willing to respond to orders?" Ross said. "That type of blind obedience is reinforced and expected, so you will be at the airport, regardless of a history of last-minute cancellations or whatever because the important thing is your obedience, your submission to the authority of the group, without question or criticism."
Hartley finally left the group in 2017. She met up with Dyson, the former secretary, who allowed her to read her unfinished book.
"All of us, for years and years and years, were supporting this abusive system of control that all of us got stuck in," Hartley said. "I had a really promising modeling career, and then I was working in Hollywood. I probably could have done a lot more with my career there."
The publication of Dyson's book last year, as well as recent efforts to stem cultural appropriation of turbans and other Sikh customs, caused friction within the Ra Ma and Kundalini communities.
Yoga-centric podcasts and social-media pages have started to pop up, sharing the stories of people who have left the community.
'The guru knows your secrets'
Four years after Hartley found Kundalini, Elizabeth Grignon, of Long Island, New York, was introduced to the world through a friend and fellow yoga enthusiast.
At the time, Grignon was looking to deepen her yoga practice and was told that the best way to do that was to take classes in LA with Khalsa, who at one time went by the nonspiritual name Steve Hartzell, and his partner Tej.
"This was where you'd want to be: You'd want to be in LA, you'd want to get your teacher certification, and you'd want to learn from Steve and Tej," Grignon said she believed at the time.
"I was a bookkeeper for my father, and I was earning around $25 an hour and upwards. I quit and went to California to get my teacher training."
Grignon said that before arriving in LA, she knew the Kundalini community was quirky in the sense that they wore all-white garb but had no idea how far it went.
"I knew they dressed weird, but when I saw Steve walk in with five to eight very young women dressed head to toe in white, with turbans and scarves, and nobody was talking, and they didn't look at you," Grignon said of her arrival in LA. "They ushered in this man from his car with a special gong and his special drink. I was like, 'Oh, this is a fucking cult.'"
After she arrived, Grignon said she and her peers were asked to take on spiritual names, instructed to eat or not to eat certain foods, and told to deprive themselves of sleep.
The hours of meditation each day, she said, put her in a trance.
"In private it would be OK, I guess, but when it's in a group setting, it creates a sort of suggestive atmosphere, to be receiving information we now realize is QAnon conspiracy stuff," she said.
Despite being uncomfortable with the programming, Grignon carried on because she felt a teacher-training certificate from Ra Ma would be valued in the yoga world.
In addition to paying more than $3,500 for a yearlong certificate program, she was also encouraged to join the women's leadership program, which was then called Immense Grace.
As a student of gemology who was also working long hours as a student of Kundalini, Grignon told Jagat she couldn't afford the Immense Grace membership, and Jagat invited her to work it off as a bookkeeper for her and the studio.
At the time, the company was two years behind in filing its taxes, Grignon said, and she knew it would be a lot of work, but she took it on because of what she described as a culture of "FOMO" — fear of missing out — on the other programming.
Grignon said that, while working for Jagat, she witnessed Jagat act in a controlling and abusive manner toward staff, ordering them to run around LA to do her errands.
"She's screaming at us because she's leaving her car out front and getting parking tickets because someone isn't moving it to the parking lot fast enough while the assistant is out getting her five beverages all over Venice," Grignon said. "I remember thinking, 'Come to class early, park it in the back, and walk. You're not a princess."
But that's not what is taught in Kundalini.
Another time, when Grignon was away visiting her family, she said, Jagat called her frantically to say that a manager had quit and that Grignon would need to take over the woman's duties at the studio.
"She said, word for word, 'I will never hire another single mother," Grignon said, adding that she found the comments offensive.
"I was really not having respect for her at this point, but I was sitting here thinking, 'This is real yoga, and I'm going to learn this yoga and get my certification and move on," she said.
Students told Insider that they were led to understand that for whatever amount they served their teacher, the universe would reward them tenfold.
Some Kundalini students, apparently heeding this teaching, sometimes bent over backward for their leaders, handing over parts of their business, gifting, and even tithing their teachers monthly, in hopes that they would see a spiritual return.
And if a demand wasn't met in a timely manner, Jagat would berate the students, sometimes referencing the private, personal trauma she had students share during private one-on-one sessions, Grignon said.
One day, in the middle of the studio, Jagat called out one student by saying her missteps were tied to the abuse she experienced by her mother, according to Grignon.
Another time, Grignon said, Jagat chastened a student for being sick too much, saying it was because the student swallowed the semen of her partner — another member of the group who Jagat knew had a genital condition.
"These are private things that she'd share," one former student said. "This is in the middle of class, and most of these classes are recorded."
Ross said that this kind of behavior is common in dangerous groups, including cults, because it serves to "break" the student, and sensitive information can be used as blackmail against a student who questions the leader's authority.
When members share some of their most vulnerable memories, they are again relinquishing control to the group's leader and are more likely to accept advice about what they need to change about themselves.
"The guru knows your secrets, knows your vulnerabilities. And at another point, they can use that to leverage you, to control you, to manipulate you," he said. "And this is not what yoga is supposed to be about."
The 72-hour rule
It's easy for people outside of Ra Ma to ask, "Why don't they just leave?"
But for those who are in it, it is their whole world, and teachers have excuses for everything, former members said.
The periods of insults and screaming, for example, were called "auric adjustments" and students were taught that they should be grateful and feel privileged to be yelled at because it meant the teachers found you valuable enough to "waste their sound current on you," Grignon said.
When students wanted to go home to see family, Jagat would discourage it, telling them that if they stayed away for more than a few days, everything they learned in Kundalini would be undone.
"She said if you stay there more than 72 hours, your subconscious would be reverted, and you don't want to end up like your family," Grignon remembered once being told. "Obviously at this point, I realized what was going on, and I replied, 'I love my family.'"
Norton, too, remembers the 72-hour rule.
"Everyone fights with their parents, gets annoyed at their parents. They're using that against you," Norton said. "They say, 'If you're with your parents for more than 72 hours, you're going to go back to your childhood patterns, and you've done all this work. Why would you want to do that?'"
Students then start thinking they're not spiritually strong enough to go visit home yet and need to do more kriyas to make sure they can handle being away from the community, Norton said.
Really, though, Norton believes it was Jagat's way of isolating people from their families until they were so deeply integrated into the group that they were less likely to leave.
"If your parents are saying, 'Hey I think you're in a cult' or 'This sounds really toxic,' like my parents said, my initial response was, 'You don't know what you're talking about. You're just trying to trigger me.'"
Setting rules around when members should and shouldn't see their families is a clear indicator that leaders want to control the environment of their followers, Ross said. It's not something that would happen if you were simply a member of a typical yoga studio or gym, he added.
"The way they maintain control is they keep you in a bubble, an echo chamber where you hear what they want you to hear, you see what they want you to see, and their edicts, their ideas, and their program is reinforced by other members under their control," Ross said. "So when a group is that controlling, they see visiting your family or, for that matter, going outside of the group as an interruption in their control."
Senior teachers regularly drill into their students that "this is your spiritual family. This is your karmic sister,'" Norton said. "It's to get you to feel guilty."
Norton said others stay because leaving would mean dissociating from everyone they know and love.
"Once you're in the community, you only know the community. For people who have been in for years, they don't know anyone else, so it's really scary to just leave because you don't know how to act in the world," Norton said.
The fall of sister studios and a $10,000 legal settlement
Grignon and other former staff who spoke to Insider said that Ra Ma has gotten a lot of funding from wealthy investors with Hollywood and cultural connections as well as wealthy students — some of whom, according to old bookkeeping documents provided to Insider, contributed upward of $40,000 a year.
And yet, by the time Grignon took over the books in 2015, the main studio, in Venice, was barely staying afloat, she said.
Jagat, she said, was spending too much on decorative and neospiritual items like crystals and using business funds on her personal expenses, all while her employees were working up to 60 hours a week, with some being paid as freelance contractors on 1099s without health insurance, she said. Other former employees echoed the claims that they were barely being paid, and most of the work they did was in exchange for classes.
But Jagat was still looking to grow the business. She and three business partners had just opened a studio in Boulder, Colorado, and she was talking about opening another in Mallorca, Grignon remembered.
"She's traveling around the world, but the studio can't make money unless she or Steve teaches," she said. "I'm like, 'Why are we trying to open a Mallorca studio when we can't afford the Venice studio?'"
According to interviews and documents obtained by Insider, Jagat's role in the Boulder and Mallorca studio would have mostly been as a figurehead or guest speaker. She would supply the studios with yoga props and let them use her brand while the monetary investment would come from the local partners.
But for Jagat's partners, the frustration was not solely with her. In interviews with Insider, they kept bringing up another name: Harijiwan Khalsa. (Messages sent to Khalsa seeking comment for this story were not returned.)
Hughes, whose partnership with Jagat on Ra Ma Mallorca had ended badly, said Khalsa — whom she had never heard of — arrived with Jagat and took over the grand-opening ceremony and appeared prominently on stage.
"The weirdest thing, the first alarm bell, is that I'm supposed to be her partner all of this time," Hughes said, "and she never mentions that she's got another business partner, Harijiwan. Not once does she mention this teacher."
"The day of the opening, he turned up like he's literally the fucking king, ignores me, walks in, gets onto the stage," Hughes said.
Hughes said the opening was still a success due to the large crowd brought in "pretty much 50-50" by her and Jagat's team.
A week later, though, Hughes was taken off-guard when Jagat demanded that she wire $1,900 — which she estimated was about half of the profits from the opening — to Harijiwan for his role on the day.
"I'm like, excuse me? What? What about all these people who have literally been working 12 hours a day?" Hughes remembers saying, referring to the rest of the Ra Ma staffers who had been on the island working ahead of the opening for very little or no pay.
Hughes said she resisted sending the payment for a few days because it didn't feel right but was repeatedly screamed at by Jagat during several conversations until she did.
"I wasn't really allowed to question it, and that's when I realized I was a muppet, and this idea that she had of having this small little quaint yoga studio in Mallorca, which she painted, wasn't the case," Hughes said. "She had another plan, and I never got paid as the months went on."
After ending her relationship with Ra Ma in August 2016, Hughes learned that another Ra Ma-affiliated studio in Boulder also ended its relationship with Jagat.
Right around the same time Jagat had partnered with Hughes, she had also partnered in February 2015 with three women in Boulder, according to a legal complaint — which ended in a settlement — obtained by Insider.
A well-known yoga instructor in the area, and her two investors, rented a studio and hired an employee, and gave Jagat part ownership in return for her Ra Ma branding and guest teaching at the studio.
But over the next year, Jagat and Harijiwan, who was not part of the studio's agreement, would come to the Ra Ma Boulder studio on several occasions to teach classes and training, collecting more than $8,000, without returning any of it to investors, a lawsuit filed in Boulder County Combined Court alleges.
In June 2016, Jagat settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay the investors $10,000, and Ra Ma Boulder was dissolved.
People who were still affiliated with Ra Ma Venice in 2016, including several who asked for anonymity, told Insider that it was as if one day the Boulder studio just ceased to exist, and Jagat never mentioned it again. But she continued with new efforts to expand.
A final reckoning
On a Saturday afternoon last winter, several women walking along Stanton Street on New York's Lower East Side popped into the brightly lit studio and browsed its large selection of colorful crystals and sheepskin yoga mats in the gift shop, where books featuring Guru Jagat were displayed prominently.
Framed photos of Yogi Bhajan surrounded the stage.
A friendly yoga instructor who donned vibrantly dyed hair and a tiara didn't sport the traditional Kundalini whites, but rather pink loungewear.
She explained, unprovoked, to the single student she had that afternoon that there had been a rift in the yoga community last year and that whites weren't obligatory — especially in the winter.
The instructor was referring to the cultural fallout the Kundalini community faced in 2020.
As discussions about racism, Bhajan's alleged sexual abuse, and the pandemic bubbled to the surface, some followers started to question Harijiwan and Jagat's teachings.
One former student at the New York studio, Suzanne Geiss, who's part of the New York art scene, said that classes were "packed to the gills" in 2018, when she started taking classes here.
The rhetoric around women's empowerment and the low-pressure vibe drew her in.>
But then COVID-19 arrived. In the first few months of the pandemic, Ra Ma was telling followers that they needed to boost their immune system through their practice, but as time when on, Jagat started leaning into David Icke's 5G conspiracy theory, publicly opposing the shutdown, and, at one point, discussing COVID-19 victims as "souls that are choosing to leave the planet," Geiss said.
Ra Ma received more than $50,000 in Paycheck Protection Program loans between May 2020 and January 2021, according to public records reviewed by Insider.
By late 2020, sources said, there was also a shift in the kind of speakers Jagat would bring to events.
In December of that year, Jagat invited Icke, a conspiracy theorist, to speak.
Icke, a British former BBC sports presenter, has for years been promoting a bizarre theory that the world is run by a cabal of shape-shifting reptilian beings.
Branded a "hate preacher," by Jewish advocacy groups like the Community Security Trust, Icke has also spread theories that Jews financially backed Hitler, caused the 2008 financial crisis, and staged September 11.
In May, YouTube deleted his account after he baselessly linked COVID-19 symptoms to 5G mobile networks, in violation of the tech giant's policies. Facebook also deplatformed him for similar reasons.
Geiss said it was Icke's presence, paired with COVID-19 misinformation and language coming from Ra Ma leadership calling Dyson and other Bhajan accusers "liars," that put a bad taste in her mouth.
Icke didn't return a message from Insider seeking comment for this story.
Over the summer, Geiss was alerted to a Ra Ma text-chain conversation, in which someone compared Black Lives Matter protesters in Venice to "cockroaches." When one student expressed discomfort with the comment, Jagat chimed in defending her.
(The redacted chain has since been shared online, and Insider reviewed the unedited messages.)
Geiss said that around this time she learned she was one of the New York studio's top patrons and realized she had to disassociate from the brand.
"I can't give my money to people platforming David Icke," she said. They're "blatantly engaging in cultural appropriation. It was like every bad thing of 2020 they're doing."
Geiss was out. Many others were too.
For devotees, it was a shocking and turbulent time.
"You don't wake up and join a cult," one man who was devoted to Kundalini for nearly a decade said.
As Norton puts it: "For most people, they just give up too much money, and that's how they are affected. But for those who get closer, like me, who were working in it, it becomes very, very abusive."
And now, with Jagat's sudden death, Ra Ma's future is even more unclear.
Tickets for a retreat in the south of France for later this month are still for sale. Harijiwan Khalsa, along with two other senior teachers, are due to headline the event.
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