The Message and the Messenger: My Journey Through Yoga, Power, and the Price of Awakening by Shane Elizabeth
I noticed the robes right away and thought to myself, Oh, no… not again.
It was 2018, and I was watching a documentary on Netflix: Wild, Wild Country. I remembered hearing it was something about a cult in Oregon, but as it began to play, I recognized those robes.
I had worn those… red robes.
The voiceover described “the cult of a sexual predator,” and everyone was wearing the red robes I had worn four years prior in India. Then, there he was—Osho—or as the documentary called him, Bhagwan. He came onto the screen, and my heart fell into my stomach. I had been to his ashram in India; I practiced what he taught. His words once moved me. His Dynamic Meditation gave me the tools I needed to release so much pain. While in India, I grew. I opened up, and my heart expanded through his methods and his words, despite the red flags. The ashram prided itself on Osho being the “spiritually incorrect guru,” but I was fine with it because he was already dead, and no one spoke of sexual assault or decades of crimes, bribery, and abuse. It was the modalities I was after, not the man.
I was thirty years old, lost in Los Angeles, hell-bent on self-actualization through new age modalities, when I first made my way to the mat, but with over 350 hours of teacher training in various forms of yoga later, I am neither a teacher, nor student. I was seeking a spiritual connection and found it through the words of predators while never becoming the prey. But I didn’t know that at the time. This lack of infatuation with “the teacher” was what kept me safe, but what do I do now? When the messengers fall, should their messages?
My journey began with Bikram yoga. Bikram Choudhary came from India to Los Angeles in 1971 and gained immediate success for his strict style of yoga involving a set of twenty-six poses done in 105-degree rooms. By 2010, his empire was at the height of its success, and that’s when I entered. Bikram was known for his lavish car collection, mansions, and anti-guru gluttony, but none of that mattered to his community. I quickly found out why it wouldn’t matter to me either. The practice took me from drinking too much and put me on the path of yoga—the unionization of my body, mind, and soul.
Six years into living in LA, my college days had blurred into my “young Hollywood days.” Exhausted from chasing the scene and the dream, I needed a change, and fast. Bikram was a physical awakening for me of the body. Once I committed to those ninety-minute sweat meditations, my body began to heal, and yoga soon bloomed as a new passion of mine. After almost a year of clinging to those classes instead of clinking glasses, I decided I wanted to understand more, but I also wanted to teach it. However, I heard his teacher trainings were like “joining the army for yoga” and involved relocating yourself to a hotel in San Diego for three months and paying him over $10,000. I already didn’t like this self-proclaimed guru and that program felt like a scam, so I opted out. I would later learn I had avoided his predatorial bullet. However, the next stop in my yoga exploration took me one step closer to this smoking gun.
In 2011, I found Anusara Yoga. The yoga of “flowing with grace.” It was a new style of yoga originating in 1997 that pulled from several ancient Indian traditions. It was a small community, not nearly as well-known as Bikram, but I was drawn to it because I found “my teacher.” Another reason I set out on this spiritual quest was because I wanted to get away from organized religion. I grew up Catholic, but I was interested in learning about spirituality outside the framework of being a Christian. Her classes were layered in ancient texts, peppered with knowledge of the mystical arts and yogic philosophy. Anusara Yoga was about the mind, and mine awakened, but my teacher wasn’t the guru. She had been certified through him and could teach, so I signed up for 180 hours of training.
Through my teacher, I learned the history and mysteries of traditional Indian yoga. We studied the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, along with new information on Anusara yoga. I learned all the poses and terminology for how to build out sequences I would one day teach and studied all the required text on this specialized branch of yoga. I soaked up every text, every philosophy, every yogic modality like a child learning words for the first time. Except these words of Anusara came from a white man born in Ohio known as John Friend. He was the “guru” of this community, and the one thing I hated most about this practice. People treated him like a God, including my teacher, and I never understood why, but it was also becoming clear to me that this was a theme in the yoga world: Everyone gets hooked on “the Guru.”
They praised this “Mr. Friend” so much I was immediately turned off. I made sure never to take a class of his and avoided knowing him. Something about all that praise gave me a bad vibe. However, I loved learning from his wisdom. His words on the page launched me deeper into my spiritual journey with yoga.
It was the last weekend of my all-day trainings; I had accrued 180 hours over a year to get certified when my teacher came in and dropped the news to all of us. John Friend… was a predator.
The news ripped through the community and tore it apart within days. Most were stunned, devastated, confused. I was not. Not only was he using his studios across the U.S. to sell and transport illegal marijuana, but he also admitted to being the leader of a sex coven! Allegations poured out about sex “key parties” he hosted at his workshops and teacher trainings, where he handed out keys to his room. It was also revealed he forced most of his inner circle of women to participate, even those who were married, and if they refused, they were exiled from the community.
My teacher was a part of that inner circle. Was she a part of this sex coven too? This part shocked me. I felt betrayed, not by the guru, but by her. I knew what she taught was authentic and genuine, but it was attached to darkness, and I clung to the idea that I was there for the messages, not the messenger. This concept became more important to me the deeper I explored these yoga communities of the West.
Everyone seemed to get hooked on the guru. But I was hooked on the words—the message—and when I met the person who spoke them, I chose to disassociate. However, I was only one inspiring teacher away from the inner circle this time, and it was a close call because I really admired her. What she taught me continued to heal my body and lift my mind. I had benefited, but I never got certified. John Friend stepped down, giving his rights to Anusara away, and the organization was never the same. The words, lost in translation because of the flaws of the messenger, the not-so-friendly John Friend. He preyed on women in his inner circle while I stayed on the outskirts, preying on the knowledge. I used that knowledge to take me further into my own self-actualization that had nothing to do with him, but everything to do with his teachings, and I left the community still thirsty for wisdom, not ready to roll up my mat.
A friend of mine was already deep into Kundalini Yoga at this time, and she invited me to a class. It became an easy jump into the next leg of where this spiritual journey took me, which was head first into the wackiest world of them all. However, this became the spiritual awakening I had been searching for. If Bikram was the body and Anusara was the mind, Kundalini Yoga was the spirit and the final link in my unionization of all three.
Kundalini Yoga was presented as “the yoga of awareness” and by far the largest yoga community I got involved in. It had thousands of followers and studios worldwide, dating back to 1968. Their guru was Yogi Bhajan and his style of yoga is unique because its traditions were pulled from Sikhism instead of Hinduism. Classes are based around breath work, mantra, and bizarre poses. Since every sequence is done with your eyes closed, the experience became a personal journey inward for me.
I came face-to-face with my old self during those meditations and broke through past barriers of shyness and feelings of not being wanted. I purged layers of old insecurities and stepped into stronger versions of me, and it was noticeable off the mat. My family and friends began to see me as a spiritual being with knowledge to offer, and I never once spoke of a “guru.”
But everyone else sure did.
Yogi Bhajan died in 2004, but the worship of him was still alive and thriving in 2012. Everyone wore all white and practiced on sheepskins because those were his rules. Caucasian hipsters walked around in turbans because he said they must be worn. Followers changed their names to ones of the Sikh faith because Yogi Bhajan said everyone had “a spiritual name that would elevate them to their higher selves.”
Even though I only had a picture of him, I got a bad vibe from this guy too. Those bushy eyebrows and sinister eyes said it all, but his words were literally the word of a God to this community, and it felt like “John Friend” on steroids. He was immortalized, and devotees claimed they had visions of him. He would appear to them and tell them where their next studio should be. He would tell them how to live, who to date… Since Los Angeles was the mecca of his empire, I was taking classes and learning from his direct lineage of teachers who were now in their seventies. All of them were Caucasian with Sikh names, and I knew it was ridiculous.
I didn’t practice on the sheepskin, nor did I take a spiritual name, but I did wear the white, and I did learn hundreds of mantras. I chanted for hours, getting myself into trance-like states of ecstasy, and I felt my kundalini rising. This was said to be the oldest and most authentic yoga practice in India, and the awakening of the kundalini—the energy serpent that rests at the base of your spine—was said to be the fastest route to change. I clung to that, and during those classes, I began to change for the better. I became stronger on the inside.
I was fully immersed in the community and had “my teacher,” but I didn’t follow her. She had minions who praised her close connection to Yogi Bhajan, but that hook never landed in my back. She was one of his personal secretaries for decades, but I put all that nonsense aside and reaped message after message, as they applied to me, while the messenger remained dead.
Then, in 2013, I made the pilgrimage to Yogi Bhajan’s ashram in New Mexico for an eleven-day summer solstice festival with two thousand others. It was there I felt something I could no longer deny. It had been four years since I embarked into the world of yoga, and I had done the work. I was attuned to energy and my intuition was stronger than ever when I found myself in his old cabin. This cabin was known as a sacred site, where he lived for decades and eventually died. Only the upper echelons of the organization were allowed in, but I was tasked with delivering them their morning detox soup, which I did not want to do. I deliberately stayed away from the inner circle.
I walked in. No one was inside. It was a small, modest place with outdated furniture. I placed the soup on the table and turned to leave, when I stopped. I was alone in this place that was supposed to be holy, but the energy was telling me a very different story. I began to move through the house and felt a heavy, dark sexual energy in each sparsely furnished room. The thoughts flooded my mind as if the walls were revealing decades of sexual abuse. I felt like I could feel the pain of generations of women in those walls, young and old. I had felt the energy of places before, but never had it been so specific.
My original plan was to begin a teacher training and pursue this knowledge after the festival, but everything changed. It would have been blasphemous to share what I felt, so I kept my mouth shut. Once back in LA, I pulled away from this community and by 2015, I was no longer practicing this form of yoga.
At this point, I moved home, back to Chicago, and went back to practicing Bikram because the heat was still undeniable in healing my body and the teachers only regurgitated the same statements so it was easy to tune them out. I had the knowledge now. I understood how to be in it, not of it—how to make that time on the mat my own and no one else’s.
Then, in 2019, Netflix dropped another bombshell documentary: Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, and I learned the truth about Bikram. Sexual allegations came out in 2011 from those teacher trainings in San Diego, and that would have been the year I almost went there. He is now a fugitive wanted for countless crimes in America but still travels the world teaching his yoga to followers, and it all circles back to this idea of the messages vs. the messenger.
Do these people know what he has done? Are they separating the two? I don’t believe he should still be allowed to teach, but I do believe the modality is bigger than him. Those poses are rooted in a centuries-old, ancient philosophy from India and were here before Bikram ever existed. The messages speak for themselves. The healing also speaks for itself.
Yogi, Guru, Predator is sadly a tagline that works for countless yoga empires now, and I still wrestle with my reality of learning about the light through and separating it from the dark. The word Guru translates to: One who takes you from darkness to the light. Yet, so many of them preach light, but wear darkness on their sleeve. Can these figures of spiritual power only hold so much light without eventually being balanced by the dark? Should we accept that if a messenger has messages, corruption controls the messenger, and tread lightly when spiritually seeking?
In 2020, the truth hit me again. Pamela Dyson, Yogi Bhajan’s most devoted secretary, finally had the courage to come forward and release her memoir. I was right about what I had felt in that cabin back in 2013. Dyson’s memoir, Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan, detailed it all. All the abuse that went on in New Mexico and beyond. Floods of women began to come forward after that, and it was clear this man had decades of sexual abuse under his belt. He was also a fraud, an embezzler, a crook, and a liar who made up a lot of those Kundalini Yoga poses. He disrespected the Sikh faith and was ostracized from India in the sixties, only to come to America posing as a God.
Yet still, Kundalini Yoga has not fallen, just like Anusara hasn’t, and neither has Bikram. In the Kundalini world, sides were taken. Lines divided studio against studio. Countless teachers stopped teaching except for the major teachers, while others tried to ignore the truth, or tried to preach the idea of a “flawed prophet.”
My spiritual quest through yoga involved dancing on the line of predators, but I grew through a journey separate from them—one that did not involve these men. As I continued to seek, I learned how to separate the beauty from all those beasts. This leaves me wondering if these spiritual “gurus” are nothing more than cosmic examples of the duality within each of us—extreme versions of our own inner polarities of darkness and light? Perhaps they show that without balance, humanity falls dark.
Fifteen years since that initial exploration, I definitely don’t have all the answers, and I still struggle with these messengers. But I definitely believe in the source I felt connected to above—him. Perhaps they were never messengers to begin with, but what I realized is that it’s not about praying to a force outside yourself, or giving your power away to any human deemed as “enlightened.” It’s about you. If you are seeking spirituality, you are seeking the messages, not the messenger. Listen to the ones that make their way to you. Throw away the parts that don’t align. Understand the tools. Weave your path. Become your own messenger.
Shane Elizabeth holds an MFA in Nonfiction and a Bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Journalism. Always crafting creative stories from the truth, Shane has spent the past fifteen years working as a story producer for non-scripted television in Los Angeles and is an award-winning screenwriter.