HBO doc Breath of Fire examines the case of Guru Jagat

A new documentary series, Breath of Firefocuses on the rise and sudden fall of a kundalini yoga teacher named Guru Jagat, whose story received wider attention in 2021 by journalist Haley PhelanVanity Fair Story “The Second Coming of Guru Jagat”.

The four-part series, premiering October 23 on HBO, expands on that Vanity Fair piece, bringing together on camera friends, family and former associates of Jagat and Kundalini yogis practicing at various levels to talk about who Guru Jagat really was as a person and the ironies of their yoga business, which was aimed at helping people who are struggling to make ends meet succeed in business.

Breath of Fire comes three years after Jagat, who was born Katie Griggs, died suddenly of cardiac arrest aged 41. But her friends and family aren’t holding back Breath of Fire. As her own mother, Nansy Steinhorn-Galloway, says: “I mean, it’s hard to think of her as a cult leader, but what else would you call her?”

Kundalini Yoga, explained

Of the many different ways to practice yoga, Kundalini yoga is considered marginal.

“If yoga is like a tree, kundalini is kind of like a wayward branch of that tree,” says Philip Deslippe, an expert in yoga history and a doctoral candidate in the religious studies department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is featured in the series.

Kundalini Yoga focuses on calisthenics movements, breathing exercises and chanting. “Kundalini is kind of a weird jumble of different practices, so it can vary a lot from one class to the next,” explains Deslippe, “whereas there’s more of a regularity from one Hatha yoga class to the next.”

Kundalini yoga is the brainchild of customs officer-turned-yoga teacher Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, who, according to a 1977 TIME report, called himself Yogi Bhajan, the “supreme religious and administrative authority of the Sikh religion in the Western Hemisphere.” 110 “ashrams”, communities with a spiritual focus, of its followers worldwide. Today his company is best known for producing Yogi tea.

As a proponent of vegetarianism and meditation, Yogi Bhajan was in the right place at the right time and struck a chord with the values ​​of the counterculture movement. As Deslippe puts it, Yogi Bhajan “read all the hippies around him, adapted quickly, and presented himself as the yoga guru they were hoping for.” So he puts several things together into what he calls Kundalini yoga. “

Guru Jagat’s Rise to Fame

How did Katie Griggs, born on a Colorado farm in 1979, become “Guru Jagat,” one of the most popular yogis of all time?

Jagat had been looking for spiritual alternatives to rehab during a very dark period in her life. She had been raped in college and the trauma led to drug and alcohol abuse. Breath of Fire includes a clip of Jagat talking about how she got into kundalini yoga. “I recovered from addiction and heartache,” she says.

According to the series, Jagat began to view her Kundalini yoga teacher Harijiwan – who learned Kundalini yoga from Yogi Bhajan – as a father figure. Her biological father left her when she was one year old.

“She spent the rest of her life looking for a father and a spiritual mentor,” her mother Steinhorn-Galloway says in the documentary series.

Her stepfather Rabbit Galloway adds: “The dad thing is allowed [Harijiwan] to get more into their psyche… If you know someone has trauma around a topic like dad, you can use that to take advantage of that person. And I think that’s exactly what happened.”

It is not clear when Jagat began practicing with Harijiwan, but in 2011 she tried to make a name for herself in his world, calling herself “Kundalini Katie.” Friends noticed that she had started wearing a turban. In 2012, she began publicly calling herself Guru Jagat, and in 2013, she founded a yoga studio called Ra Ma Los Angeles. Sister studios were subsequently opened in cities such as Boulder, New York and Mallorca. At the height of her Kundalini yoga career, Jagat’s classes attracted celebrities such as Christy Turlington, Russell Brand and Alicia Keys.

Phelan, who interviewed several of Jagat’s associates, says she became Harijiwan’s face for what he saw as the future of yoga.

“Harijiwan was looking for a young female face to help him start a yoga studio and raise his profile, and I think he knew that as a middle-aged white man, he wasn’t the one to do that would create new ventures,” says Phelan Breath of Fire. “I think he wanted a girl because he realized that was where the yoga industry and wellness was going.”

According to Deslippe, Jagat was able to successfully use social media to build a following of mostly young women who were focused on self-help and feeling unfulfilled in their lives, in terms of money, relationships and work. One of his best-selling programs was his Business School, virtual workshops in which Guru Jagat gave spiritual advice aimed at people trying to climb the corporate ladder.

Jagat was also an early adopter of Instagram, where she would post snippets from her classes that could be streamed online to paying subscribers. Clips of her rocking out to music made her likeable and sparked effusive comments from fans.

Guru Jagat’s crash

Kundalini Yoga has always been controversial. In 1977, TIME reported that Bhajan’s followers considered the founder “the holiest man of the era” while “opponents denounced him as a charlatan and a heretic.”

Bhajan was accused of rape and sexual misconduct before his death in 2004, but the allegations only gained greater attention after the #MeToo movement in 2017.

In 2020, Pamela Dyson, a former lover and co-worker of Bhajan, wrote in her memoirs that Bhajan caused her to have an abortion when he found out she was carrying his child. Her report inspired other followers to make allegations of abuse. In the docuseries, Mahan Kirn Khalsa, who was born in a Kundalini ashram, talks about how she was raped by Bhajan but is determined not to let this trauma define her. “It just felt good to say it,” she says in the documentary, “just to say those words, what took me so long to say – 25 years – it was okay because I was free.” She teaches continued yoga, got married and started a family.

When allegations against Bhajan came to light, “it triggered a crisis for everyone who practiced kundalini yoga,” says Deslippe. Harijiwan, Guru Jagat and every Kundalini Yoga teacher had to ask and examine questions. Followers of Jagat started losing faith in her when she cast doubts on sexual abuse survivors by defending Bhajan online. Phelan writes Vanity Fair that Jagat shared a video on Instagram dismissing Dyson’s story and captioned it: “This story is no truer than any other story – the truth, as always, is in the eye of the beholder.” Nicole Norton, Jagat’s former guru personal assistant, speaks in the series about the irony that Jagat preaches feminism but tells her staff at her yoga studio to post messages of support for controversial figures like Bhajan.

The post angered Jagat employees, who began speaking anonymously online about their toxic work environment. Former employees report on their experiences Breath of FireThey claimed they were paid less than minimum wage while Jagat was experiencing financial difficulties with the studio. One of their desperate attempts to raise money was to offer would-be followers a mentorship at Jagat — at a cost of around $20,000 — which required filling out an application asking probing questions about the applicants’ relationship with food. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jagat began promoting COVID denial and anti-masking conspiracy theories.

But before any real reckoning could take place, Guru Jagat died suddenly of a heart attack on August 1, 2021, at the age of 41. After ankle surgery, she suffered a pulmonary embolism. Ra Ma had just celebrated its eight-year anniversary, with a website that received around 2 million unique visitors and 20,000 online subscribers each month. It still exists today.