Documentary on 3HO/Kundalini Yoga Cult Exposes Abuse by Yogi Bhajan

The first of a number of documentaries about the 3HO Kundalini Yoga cult are starting to appear online and on video streaming services.

Yogi Bhajan preaches family values and healthy living through Kundalini yoga, but abuse allegations tear a rift through families and across generations inside his spiritual empire.

YouTube US Only. True Believers: The Dark Empire of Yogi Bhajan –

Alternate Link: Vice Video

Unofficial YouTube Version – This should be viewable in other countries. It is a lower resolution version and the link may break if YouTube takes it down.

If you can’t watch any of these versions, here is the transcript:

Transcript
0:06
-This is the handgun that I used when I was on guard duty with Yogi Bhajan. That was back in the ’80s. I also had a gallery.
0:13
I probably have the biggest collection of Yogi Bhajans “so-called” art, if you want to call it that.
0:19
As you can see, there are drawings of phalluses. There’s a woman here in the center,
0:25
and then he’s put the word power here. I think it’s really indicative of how abusive he was.
0:32
He’s got God written here. -Kundalini yoga is notorious
0:37
for being a highly intense form of yoga. And for more than four decades, it has been dominated by the name of one man —
0:44
Yogi Bhajan.
0:54
His movement, 3HO, the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, currently has 30,000 devoted followers worldwide.
1:03
They continue to promote their leader’s teachings. -We have to be healthy, happy, and holy. -His healthy lifestyle, no drugs message
1:10
made him popular amongst presidents and people of influence. -He spoke with the pope.
1:16
This was the power of Yogi Bhajan everywhere he went. Not one president didn’t bow to him.
1:21
They looked like children in front of him.
1:34
-But new allegations are emerging, revealing a dark secret inside the organization
1:39
and pitting one generation against the next.
1:49
-I was sexually abused by Yogi Bhajan. He gave me a wedding ring, said I was his youngest wife,
1:55
I was his most innocent wife, called me the Virgin Queen. -Yogi Bhajan, I’ve never seen him as an abusive person.
2:03
I don’t believe the people who make the allegations. -I wanted to speak today
2:08
because I can finally come out of the closet, as it were. This story’s been a long time hidden.
2:15
There are so many people who don’t believe in us and that he did anything wrong.
2:20
I am 100% a believer that 3HO is a cult. ♪♪
2:34
♪♪
2:39
-I haven’t been over here in years. There are a lot of these 3HO people that live here,
2:45
these Yogi Bhajan followers, in this neighborhood here. That’s Yogi Bhajan’s ranch entrance
2:53
or one of the entrances. That dome is part of that ranch. And Yogi Bhajan used to lecture in there.
3:00
-What is the purpose of communication? What is the purpose of talking? -Behind these gates hides the 20-acre compound
3:07
where 3HO founder Yogi Bhajan built his headquarters back in the 1970s.
3:13
[ Chanting ] Although he died in 2004, he is survived by 3HO
3:19
and a community that continues to revere him. A memorial in his honor, erected by the governor of New Mexico,
3:26
still stands today. -I was around Yogi Bhajan for about 30 years.
3:32
-But in recent years, members of his inner circle have broken ranks to describe the troubling events
3:37
they witnessed behind closed doors. -I did the guard duty, and I would take him in the middle of the night
3:42
up to different residences, and he would be dressed just in his underwear
3:48
and then a shawl he would put over him. I started to look deeper into what was really going on,
3:54
and I was really angry about it. My idea is that I want to remove
4:01
that Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway sign. Okay.
4:06
[ Gears shift ] ♪♪ He had women around him all the time, giving him massages,
4:15
you know, sleeping in the same room with him. There was no criticism of Yogi Bhajan.
4:22
-However, in the eyes of the first wave of believers, Yogi Bhajan can do no wrong.
4:27
-I think Yogi Bhajan was a person with great purpose. He came to set up a yoga program.
4:38
-The kind of yoga that Yogi Bhajan taught is basically get high yoga.
4:52
His was doing a very stimulates your nervous system, like, raise your arms up for three minutes
4:59
and do long, heavy, deep breathing. Well, if you do that, you’re going to kind of get stoned.
5:05
♪♪
5:18
-Yogi Bhajan’s physical yoga practice is rooted in spiritual teachings taken from Sikhism.
5:25
-He made tremendous contributions to the Sikh culture, which nobody ever heard of,
5:31
practically, outside of India before he came here, and to the yogi culture.
5:36
-Those who came to follow the physical and spiritual sides of 3HO often stayed for Yogi Bhajan himself,
5:43
who seemed equally devoted to them.
5:48
-Yogi Bhajan called me Premka. The names had spiritual meanings.
5:55
He said it meant “beloved of God.” ♪♪
6:01
I grew up in Seattle with a lot of religion in my family.
6:08
When I was 21, I arrived in Los Angeles, happy to leave my entire past behind and start over again.
6:17
♪♪ I was sort of alone in a very big new environment.
6:24
♪♪ I had learned that Yogi Bhajan was teaching yoga classes.
6:30
I was looking for Eastern philosophy, Eastern thought, and I was looking for a teacher that could tell me
6:38
what I was supposed to do. When I came into class with Yogi Bhajan,
6:43
it was full of this whole entire hippie commune that had come from New Mexico.
6:51
-When Yogi Bhajan comes to Southern California in the late 1960s, revolution is in the air.
6:58
-Yeah, we were the free love generation. ♪♪
7:04
We were looking for something that was different than the kind of repressed living in the ’50s.
7:10
-It was kind of a free love movement. I was caught up, like everybody else of my generation,
7:17
in the Vietnam War protest.
7:23
-There was a lot of turmoil at the time with the Vietnam War. Draft resisters and deserters, we were saying,
7:30
We’ve got to find an alternative to the current status quo. The ’60s was an expansion of awareness.
7:37
People were hungry to find out what makes us kinder. There was the music,
7:43
there was the aliveness of sexual experimentation, there was drugs. There was a sense of, “What’s life about?
7:49
What are we doing together?” -This thirst for change creates a spiritual gold rush,
7:55
as gurus flood into America from abroad to minister the biggest influencers of the day.
8:01
♪♪
8:09
-So Yogi Bhajan comes along, along with, you know, there were probably 20 or 30 major teachers from the East,
8:16
and they bring this kind of cultural wisdom. Again, this is early ’70s.
8:21
We didn’t have websites that give this information and these teachers. We weren’t inoculated against this kind of…
8:27
someone who knew something about life that we didn’t. -I saw Yogi Bhajan standing in the back of the room,
8:34
this tall, incredibly good-looking man in a bright pink turban.
8:39
All of a sudden, I saw this purple aura around his head,
8:44
and I’d keep blinking my eyes, and it didn’t go away. It majorly impacted me
8:51
in terms of is this my spiritual teacher? He just kept pulling me into activities with him.
9:00
What was most enticing was his interest and his curiosity about me.
9:09
As I kept taking more and more administrative responsibility, he created a title of secretary-general for me.
9:18
-With Pamela’s help, 3HO becomes an official religious organization.
9:23
And as more yogis join, Bhajan starts to issue them with holy names and positions.
9:29
-My role was Yogi Bhajan’s driver and confidant. One day, I went to a yoga class,
9:36
and we chant, “Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo,” to start the class. The moment I chanted, “Ong Namo,”
9:43
I saw the universe. And I saw so many things when I chanted,
9:49
and I heard, “I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.” And I saw him, and it was like, “Wow.”
9:54
-He gave me a job to write his biography, so he gave me a title. He said, “Messenger From the Guru’s House,”
10:00
and the rest was on me. -He wanted people to go out with it. He said, “I’m not creating students.
10:06
I’m creating teachers.” -Come on, come on. -People would go through these couple of week trainings,
10:13
and then he would send them out elsewhere in the country and say, “Go. Go teach Kundalini yoga and open an ashram.”
10:23
-I was the head of the ashram in Canada for 15 years. It started with simply putting some posters up
10:29
to teach Kundalini yoga. People would show up for a class, 10 or 15 people. And then there was this urge
10:35
that we wanted to live in the same either neighborhood or in the same house. And that led to, “Let’s buy a house.”
10:41
So it became an ashram. -He actually had a letter go out
10:47
suggesting to people that they put their ashrams, their houses, in the name of the organization.
10:54
And this would help them with being tax exempt on their property taxes and stuff
11:00
because it would be a non-profit. And it would be held for the future generations.
11:06
♪♪ -3HO was growing, growing, growing the whole time.
11:14
It went from tens of thousands to 50,000 to 100,000.
11:20
-This explosive growth transforms 3HO from a small tribe into a national movement.
11:27
The momentum brings a constant stream of believers into the fold. -Slowly bring your hands overhead.
11:33
-Yogi Bhajan was empowering our imaginations and saying, “Imagine. Work towards a new tomorrow. Work towards a healthy, happy, holy culture.”
11:54
-Yogi Bhajan taught us to get up at 4:00 in the morning, to be vegetarian, no alcohol, no drugs,
12:00
keep ourselves chaste. -He had a thousand things to do about everything
12:07
how to sleep, what direction, what clothes to wear, if you wear your hair up in a rishi knot,
12:14
it’s good for your electromagnetic field in order to become better.
12:28
80% of the marriages were arranged. -There would be a course,
12:34
and he would line up all the unmarried men on one wall and all the unmarried women on the other,
12:39
and they just matched them up, and said, “You marry you.” -From the marriages arranged by Yogi Bhajan, children started being born into 3HO.
12:47
-The first generation chose to become part of 3HO and told the second generation, “This is what you have to do.”
12:55
And the second generation had no choice… unless we were going to run away.
13:00
Right? But we had no choice. -I have no complaints because he made us hippies into something different.
13:07
-We lived a pretty clean lifestyle. We lived together. We raised our kids together.
13:14
It was exactly what it said — healthy, happy, and holy. And that’s why it was very difficult to leave.
13:32
-I remember that there was a point when he said to me, “Premka, your faith must be so perfect
13:40
that if I ask you to kill someone, you will just do it.”
14:17
-Now, here is the entrance, Guru Ram Das Estates. This is where he lived for five years of his life.
14:23
He lived… in that room at the end. He slept in here.
14:29
He had one attendant every night to attend him. [ Bird calling ]
14:34
He got animals and put them on the property to make it for children, just to be like a place that’s natural,
14:42
not just a cold American house in a suburban division.
14:47
This was all for us, for the future. -By 1984, summer solstice celebrations
14:53
at Ram Das Puri ranch in New Mexico are in full swing.
14:59
It’s been 14 years since Yogi Bhajan first arrived in the US, and 3HO is now running more than 100 ashrams worldwide.
15:08
But as his influence grows, so does the need for money to sustain the ashrams
15:13
and their recruitment drive. -We were organized in a certain way where we could create businesses very quickly,
15:20
and the other ashrams around the world, because they had that kind of — you could call it worker bee, but it’s a happy worker bee.
15:27
But it wasn’t mindless. We started a lot of yoga centers, Toronto’s first real health food store.
15:33
Some of the products are nationally known, Yogi Tea. -You’ve probably seen it. Have you seen it before, Yogi Tea?
15:40
-Yeah, I think I have, yeah. -That’s good. They call it Yogi. That’s their main income producer now.
15:45
-Yogi Tea was small. All of a sudden, these big health food stores came,
15:51
and Yogi Tea became the number one herbal tea in the United States in three years,
15:57
so all of a sudden, we’re doing a billion dollars, $1.2 billion of business a year.
16:03
-That was us. That was the people. That was the entrepreneurial spirit of all of us.
16:09
-Of all the businesses that came out of it, the big one was Akal Security. -The security firm that 3HO starts is very lucrative.
16:17
-The US government pays them to defend federal courthouses, embassies, and immigration detention centers.
16:24
-This was all Akal Security. They had a billion dollars in contracts all over the world.
16:30
-He had so many cars. These are limousines, cars that he bought.
16:36
When he would meet the president of the United States, dignitaries, he went in a limousine.
16:42
-Yogi Bhajan was fascinated with wealth. He traveled, and there was always personal luxury around.
16:49
Most of us were hippies. We loved simplicity. -We worked long hours and made very little money.
16:58
He called it a spiritual mafia. -We were always donating money to him, so he was receiving a tremendous amount of funds
17:07
for the yoga that he taught, personal donations.
17:13
-This property, he had people who were devoted and took a piece of land that had nothing on it
17:19
and did this with people who made minimum wage for 40 years.
17:25
♪♪
17:30
-All of his subjects essentially were poor. I’d say about 90%.
17:36
And then there was this 10%, and then there was that upper echelon of the 3%.
17:42
I mean, it’s just the rich and the poor, for sure. -I was really little, 1 or 2. My parents were very poor.
17:50
There was never enough food. Literally, my shoes were flip-flops.
17:56
My mom held several jobs just to make ends meet.
18:02
-While 3HO parents are working around the clock to barely scrape by, Yogi Bhajan has plans for their children.
18:12
-Do me a favor. Tell everybody, life comes once
18:18
and chance to get educated comes once, but dying to just learn to become educated
18:26
is not enough. But to become learned
18:32
and to live learned is one chance in whole life. -Yogi Bhajan wanted to establish a school in India
18:39
where people could send their children. He thought it d be better for the children to be there. -There was the idea that this would make them strong,
18:47
it would serve them. -Here I am, I’m this kid, right? I’m living in these squalor situations.
18:55
So when India came up to me, I’m thinking in my mind, like, it’s “Aladdin” from Disney.
19:01
I’m going to go to India. This is going to be great. -India was this mystical land,
19:06
and it was the land of the gurus, it was the land of the Sikhs. It was somewhere that I dreamed of being.
19:12
We were told that we were these old souls, we were in charge of our own destiny,
19:17
and that our generation was the ones that were going to be these leaders. And Yogi Bhajan was going to be the physical person on Earth
19:24
that would guide me in my spiritual life. And I was 8 years old.
19:31
When I got to the school, that’s when the reality hit that I am not safe.
19:40
-People had so much trust. Looking back on it, what were we thinking?
20:52
-This is like the neighborhood that I grew up in. Everybody in the neighborhood were from the 3HO community,
21:00
and there’s a lot of dark stuff in the story of the community. But as far as, like, an upbringing,
21:07
I really do value a lot of what I grew up with. Just — it’s really awful
21:13
that it was… it was all being run by this total sociopath.
21:22
Everything in that community absolutely went through the lens of, “Well, you know what Yogi Bhajan said about that.”
21:29
It was really inescapable. True believers of Yogi Bhajan really believed that sending
21:35
your kids to the schools in India was the absolute best thing that you could do for them, and why would you go against that?
21:44
-In the 1980s and ’90s, at the peak of its powers, 3HO is running four boarding schools across India,
21:51
aiming to indoctrinate a new generation. Children as young as 2 are separated from their parents
21:57
and flown to India. Some remain there for a decade, immersed in a curriculum that prioritizes Bhajan’s teachings
22:05
over math and reading. -Every day, you re going to be doing Kundalini yoga and meditation and be learning Yogi Bhajan’s teachings.
22:12
True believers of Yogi Bhajan were sent to the school to administer the school.
22:18
When I was there, it was very military-style, extremely rigid. There was an extreme devotion to Yogi Bhajan
22:26
as a sort of superman of some kind. -It wasn’t even human.
22:31
He was basically God.
22:42
I was 6, 7, and 8 at the time. We always had to work hard, we always had to go clean,
22:49
and we were always put in very tough physical situations, I felt.
22:56
And if we complained, we were weak, we were the “problem” child, so you just learned to keep your mouth shut all the time.
23:03
It was a battle of survival. -We were in a constant risk of corporal punishment from the teachers,
23:09
and it was a brutal, brutal place. -I was beaten by teachers, and there was a time where
23:17
the girls in our dorm were caned every single morning. My parents couldn’t afford to bring me home.
23:23
So, I went over at 8. I didn’t see my parents until I was 11.
23:30
One of the things that was really hard for me to admit to was how I tried to commit suicide twice…
23:38
because I felt alone, and I didn’t have parents to mediate or hug me
23:44
or make sure I was okay. And so I felt like, you know, I have to get their attention by ending my life.
23:52
♪♪
23:58
-He had thousands and thousands of people trusting him. Oh, yeah, you all start sending your kids to India.
24:05
These kids will be enlightened. It will be wonderful. All bullshit. It was power.
24:12
I sent my son away when he was 2 at the bequest of Yogi Bhajan.
24:18
We went to pick him up. Because of that time period, he didn’t recognize us.
24:23
Pure, pure child abuse.
24:33
Sending my kids to India…
24:40
that’s a rough one.
24:46
And I’m working on it. ♪♪
24:53
I’m working on it. ♪♪
25:02
-There was tremendous social pressure. People were sort of looked down upon
25:08
who didn’t send their kids to the boarding schools as lacking a certain amount of faith in the program.
25:15
I do think that the schools were created to make willing servants
25:21
out of the children of the people of this community. The parents could work harder for the businesses,
25:28
work harder for the non-profits, just be more in the hands of the guru.
25:34
He was the final say on everything, and he wanted it to stay that way.
25:40
We all bought into a philosophy that really sort of diminished the importance of familial bonds
25:47
and made it kind of more easy and acceptable to send your kid all the way around the world
25:53
to a crappy institution. And it’s something I’ve been dealing with for my whole life, I think, because of that.
26:01
♪♪
26:09
-Yogi Bhajan separated children from their parents, really so that we’d be reliant on the religion.
26:15
But what I think his ultimate goal was that we were reliant on him telling us what to do. We were being groomed to obey everything he said.
26:23
So off we went to whichever place he told us to go to.
26:30
-When some of these kids came back, there wasn’t the encouragement to go to college,
26:35
particularly some of the young women. They were encouraged to join his staff.
26:41
-In March of 1991, when I was 16, I got back from India,
26:47
and then one of the staff members called my parents and said that he wanted me to come out to New Mexico
26:53
and be with him. -Right around my 18th birthday, I was applying to colleges.
26:59
I was told, “Yogi Bhajan wants you to put off college for a year and work at the Secretariat.”
27:06
And of course, this was considered an honor. I absolutely did not want to do it. I wanted to go to college,
27:12
but I did it because my parents thought this was a great idea, and if you decided you didn’t want to be with him,
27:20
Yogi Bhajan, or part of whatever he told you to do, you were excommunicated, essentially,
27:25
even if you kept your turban on. I was around a lot of the secretaries.
27:32
There was just this gaggle of women around Yogi Bhajan all the time. They seemed like so happy to be around him
27:42
and do whatever he wanted. -He created his whole circle of staff members
27:48
that could go on different trips with him. We had to just serve him, be with him,
27:55
practice perfect surrender, and give up any autonomy.
28:01
I began to take care of him at night physically, you know, massaging him.
28:08
If you were being his attendant for nighttime duty, you did not get much sleep.
28:15
-I was being taught how to take care of him at night. I was absolutely being groomed to be one of his concubines,
28:24
100%.
28:31
He did.
29:06
-Every summer, women from the 3HO community gather in New Mexico for Yogi Bhajan’s summer camp.
29:18
The intention of the camp, he says, is to provide them with purity of thought. -Charming, sexy. Look at them. Seduce them.
29:27
-We were sent to a camp every summer for about six weeks, where he would try to give us
29:33
lectures on how to be a good wife or a good woman. Our only worth was either a happy husband or a happy yogi,
29:39
but essentially it was six weeks of berating and making sure those women were subservient.
29:49
Yogi Bhajan’s abuse towards me started as soon as I was around him and his entourage.
29:56
It turns out the secretaries are really… just a harem of women at his disposal
30:02
to either groom girls for him or be part of his bed.
30:08
Really, night duty and cleaning his house, those were all things to get you ready to be in his bedroom.
30:18
-For a number of years, he was claiming celibacy. He didn’t initiate sexual contact with me
30:27
for a few months. And by the time he did, I had hunkered down into the programming,
30:36
and it was okay because he was the teacher and he was the one determining my life.
30:45
But I learned that he had named me publicly in a way I did not ever know about.
30:53
Premka, it’s a name that actually any Punjabi would know
30:59
meant like a mistress. He claimed to have an exclusive relationship with me
31:06
for eight years out of my 16 years, until I found out he was having
31:13
sexual relations with other women at the time. ♪♪
31:20
From the standpoint of the power dynamic, anyone that he was with was rape.
31:26
Nobody feels they have much choice in the situation. You know, he’s the one in control.
32:00
Rape can’t happen unless a woman invites it. There is no way that a woman can be raped.
32:06
I mean, what an absurdity. Anyway, how do I feel about that?
32:12
I feel like he was covering himself. ♪♪
32:18
-I was cleaning the house and he said, “Turn around for me,”
32:25
which I have subsequently learned was a common thing he did with people.
32:30
And he touched my boobs, like, very — as I finished turning around. I remember, it was almost like sizing me up.
32:39
And then he said, “You’re turning out nicely.” You know, like I’m getting ready for him, essentially.
32:45
-I was doing dishes, and he came up from behind me, and he grabbed my chest, and he just kind of said,
32:53
“I’m just telling you to stand up straight and have a good posture.” And he put his hands on my chest, and he said,
32:58
“Be proud of these.” He gave me a wedding ring, called me his wife, said I was his youngest wife,
33:05
I was his most innocent wife, I was his virgin wife, called me the Virgin Queen.
33:12
Called me the Virgin Queen. -And he starts yelling at me about not being a virgin.
33:18
I essentially think he wanted to make sure I was a virgin so he could break me.
33:23
-He would force me to come watch pornography with him. He then said to me the next time he saw me,
33:29
“Come get in bed with me.” And he didn’t stop asking me. And he changed it into,
33:35
“You need to learn how to kiss. Come make out with me.” And I just got more and more aware of
33:42
that I was in danger. -I was freaked. And I just wanted to get out of there.
33:48
There was no one else there. I was so scared. The adrenaline was rushing, and I walked to that door,
33:54
and I was like, “I’m never going back.” I think that if I had stayed,
33:59
the abuse would have never ended. -I’m not turning around. I am not going to give him a kiss.
34:07
I am not going to get into bed. Looked at that door, and I was just in my mind thinking, “I need to get out of here.”
34:14
Walked over to the bed, and he reached for me, and my whole body just froze.
35:20
-My hands were shaking. I think he might have seen that I was crying. And then he just brought my face close to him
35:26
and kissed me on my forehead. And I walked out of that room, and I felt, “I will not tell anyone this,”
35:34
because I didn’t want to hurt the community. And I thought that I was the only one,
35:40
and I thought it was worth holding it in so that no one else would hate him.
35:45
♪♪ -Silently, many women in 3HO are suffering grievous abuse behind the scenes.
35:53
Meanwhile, their venerated guru was meeting Pope John Paul II to discuss world unity.
36:06
The ’90s are jet-set years for Yogi Bhajan. When he’s not entertaining dignitaries in his ashram,
36:12
he’s advising governors and meeting with the rich and powerful.
36:22
As the noise around 3HO grows, so do its finances. And Yogi Bhajan wants it all.
36:29
-People would open a business, and as soon as the business was halfway successful,
36:35
he would sweep in, send some of his secretaries from the accounting department,
36:40
and say, “Oh, we can just take that now.” And he would do the same thing with the properties.
36:45
In the late ’80s and ’90s, he began to come in and take those properties.
36:52
And as far as I know, the equity went in his pocket. -I think a lot of the money went towards buying extravagant gifts
36:59
for Yogi Bhajan. I remember giving him envelopes full of cash. He would take it, and then he would say,
37:06
“Oh, put it by my altar,” and he’d pretend that he was meditating on it. -The scale of Yogi Bhajan’s corruption
37:14
in some way matches the scale of how big the organization grew.
37:21
The depth of corruption was on so many different levels. Yogi Bhajan was a huge swindler,
37:29
amassed huge amounts of money, and he also was actually a rapist.
37:35
The amount of abuse that he was carrying on.
37:40
-There are so many people who’d set up a lot of this abuse in motion. I never warned anybody about what happened.
37:48
I knew I wouldn’t be believed. Things never changed. -After 16 years, I chose to leave.
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Literally, I’m sure there’s at least 100 women that he assaulted. There are many who will never speak up
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because he kept it covered, and people were terrified. If you listen to any negativity about the teacher,
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it will pollute your spiritual destiny, and you will fall. You will fall from grace. You will fall.
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-Whenever allegations emerged about his behavior, Yogi Bhajan returned fire.
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And to this day, he has many who are prepared to defend him, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
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-[ Chanting ]
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I was raped. I was this. I was that.
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Wow. I don’t believe it. They’re barking dogs. They’re barking at the master.
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Instead of going on with their life, they need to slander him. When you see them on this thing,
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look at their faces. See if you think they’re lying.
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I’ve looked. I have my conclusion. He was celibate. He had diabetes.
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It wasn’t possible. And they imagined it.
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Read his lectures, watch his tapes, research it. What can I tell you? You can believe me, not believe me.
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This isn’t a cult. ♪♪
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-In 2004, after a long battle with diabetes and heart disease, Yogi Bhajan dies at his home in Española at the age of 75.
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-Honoring the life and contributions of Yogi Bhajan, a leader of Sikhs,
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and expressing condolences to the Sikh community on his passing. -Congress hails him as the king of spirituality.
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-And recognize his legendary compassion, wisdom, kindness, and courage.
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-But to many, his death means he’ll never face justice. -The amount of women that he did this to
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and the level of abuse. He sent us to the schools. He sent us to the camps.
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We were told to call him our grandfather. And the fact that we were just sexual beings for his taking
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is so infuriating and so hard, and it’s like, I’m furious, I’m hurt.
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This is not the way a Sikh should behave.
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-In the Kundalini yoga world, there has been an upheaval. -I have been rocked to my core. -How do we move forward with all these allegations?
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-It is only 15 years after the death of Yogi Bhajan that the allegations against him finally gain traction.
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-Because of her memoir claiming sexual abuse. -“My Life with Yogi Bhajan” by Pamela Saharah Dyson.
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-I needed to tell my story to help liberate so many of the women who were abused by him
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and who never spoke until my book came out. -Pamela Dyson’s memoir
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exposes the abuse she suffered at the hands of Yogi Bhajan. Its release prompts many more victims to come forward.
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-This is the first time I’m speaking out on a public level. -We’re all talking about it.
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For the first time in my life after 30 years, I’m believed. -With 3HO’s secrets now in the spotlight,
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an independent investigation launched by 3HO reveals that at least 25 allegations of sexual abuse
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are most likely true. But Yogi Bhajan’s most ardent followers remain unconvinced,
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opening a rift among the believers. -He didn’t like this kind of nonsense, kind of abuse.
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He didn’t tolerate it. And now that people are whining and crying and trying to make a case that he was an abuser,
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it’s a gross misrepresentation, by my view.
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-The side of Yogi Bhajan that was so charismatic and embraced us
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felt very, very real. And those people who are still believing in that,
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it’s all they know. They can’t understand this other aspect of him.
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-Pamela Dyson, you know, I’m aware of her allegations. She did an excellent slander campaign,
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but it’s not truthful and has no basis in fact, as far as I can tell.
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-It’s been a little bit hard for me because while I’m so grateful that the book came out,
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if it had just been Pamela and nobody else had said anything, nothing would have changed because she had no credibility in that community.
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Nobody believed her. Her role… to me, was setting up a lot of the infrastructures
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of what 3HO is now. I am 100% a believer that 3HO is a cult.
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-Yes, I do. However, I was as gullible
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and manipulated as everyone. And I know that’s hard for some people to see because,
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especially, I think, from the eyes of the second generation, who would see me as Premka the secretary-general,
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and that was an illusion. ♪♪
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He would tell me that I had no other destiny, kept me locked, not looking for or hoping for anything else.
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I didn’t ever expect that I would become pregnant. I just thought that he could control that.
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A lot of the belief that we held, I thought that he had superior capacity,
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and he immediately just brushed it off, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.
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We’ll have it cleaned out,” was his terminology, when we get to India.
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The abortion was performed in a small, little clinic, hole-in-the-wall place,
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which nearly killed me. ♪♪
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-I made a really difficult choice to leave all of the friends, all of the family that I had in 3HO.
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I’d like to reconciliate with the people, and I’m definitely open to working with them and staying here.
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-I do think there are healthy things about 3HO, and that’s living a clean lifestyle.
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I really do believe that. Exercise, in terms of yoga or whatever it is, and being clear in your mind in meditation.
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I don’t think you can have true happiness if you can’t make your own choices.
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However, I always felt an urge to still do yoga and meditation,
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albeit not Kundalini, and I still find myself reaching out to people I grew up with.
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♪♪
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-I don’t think it ends with him just because he’s dead. The structure is what compels the behavior
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and keeps it cycling on through time, and that continued on after him.
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In the long run, I don’t think 3HO as an organization will survive unless they’re truthful.
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-They have to start reporting sexual abusers, not hiding things.
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They have to actually be honest with themselves and not hold any person up on a pedestal ever again.
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♪♪
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-There’s been many, many accounts of the sexual abuse by Yogi Bhajan.
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If I had known, boy, I would have… I probably would have shot Yogi Bhajan, to be honest with you.
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♪♪
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♪♪
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This is the original Kundalini yoga asana manual. I practice this one meditation.
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You’re supposed to be able to see auras when you practiced it, he said for 40 days.
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But I never was able to see auras. And I don’t really think that it increased my aura, either.