Emily Guerin  00:00

Previously on Imperfect Paradise. [music in]

Jaclyn Gelb  00:03

I was like, all in. A yoga teacher that talked like that- that was real, that was grounded, that was so brilliantly intelligent. I knew instantly. This is my teacher.

Matthew Remski  00:17

The first six months of the pandemic saw my social feeds turn into just a bloodbath of attention seeking, and panicked pivots with regard to content.

Cassidy George  00:32

I think the podcast gave her the space to platform the people and the thinkers who she truly believes in and who she follows without having to actually take accountability for saying those things herself. [music out]

Emily Guerin  00:44

I first contacted Guru Jagat's mom, Nansy, a year ago. She calls her daughter Katie, which is the name she gave her at birth. At first, Nansy agreed to an interview, but then she changed her mind. And this happened again a few months later. But in early November 2022, something changed.

Nansy Steinhorn  01:07

I wanted to apologize, Emily, to you, because I was grieving when you called before. And I was angry.

Emily Guerin  01:17

You don't have to apologize. It's okay.

Nansy Steinhorn  01:20

I want to.

Emily Guerin  01:21

Well, I appreciate that. But I mean, I, I understand. I mean I, I don't understand. I have a, a son, but you know, I, I, I don't understand what it's like to lose a child, but um, I didn't take anything personally.

Nansy Steinhorn  01:36

Good. I talk to Katie every night when I go to bed. And she has such a humor. [EG: Yeah.] Anyway, I was talking to her, and she said, Mom, don't you get the joke? What's that, I said. She said, Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Do you know what that is?

Emily Guerin  02:06

Yeah, that's a line from a song.

Nansy Steinhorn  02:08

Janice Joplin. "Freedom's just another word..." Really, once you've lost a child what else is there to lose?

Emily Guerin  02:20

I think Nansy wanted me to understand that by the time her daughter died in August 2021, she'd kind of already lost her.

Nansy Steinhorn  02:28

We were inseparable until the pandemic and her crazy, volatile ideas.

Emily Guerin  02:39

[music in] In this episode, I'll try to figure out what happened. What was it about Guru Jagat's life and her yoga practice that led her to embrace these "crazy volatile ideas?" This is Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories." I'm Emily Guerin. [music out] [pause]

Emily Guerin  03:10

Guru Jagat was born Katie Ann Griggs on a farm in Colorado, delivered by midwives in a home birth. She grew up back East with her stepfather, her brother, and her mom, Nansy. This 2016 clip is from the YouTube channel The Fullest, and it's one of the very few times I heard Guru Jagat or Katie, talking about her background at length.

Guru Jagat  03:32

[audio clip-YouTube-The Fullest (music)] My mom was a cosmic lady and um, kind of a failed hippie. She's an amazing person and, and kind of helped us to be exposed to a lot of different things. And she was a spiritual woman and is a spiritual woman. So my childhood was definitely kind of unusual in certain ways.

Emily Guerin  03:51

I asked Nansy what she thought Katie meant by that, and she told me the kids were always around spiritual people. She was Jewish, but the family attended Unitarian and Buddhist and Episcopalian services. They lived at a silent retreat center [music in] in a really small town in Maryland, where Nansy was the cook. Katie's first car was an orange Subaru, and she covered it in stickers that said, "Question authority" and "Co-exist." She introduced her friends to Kombucha, to Indian food, to what it was like to kiss another girl. Nansy told me Katie always wanted to be famous. "She was a star child," she told me. When Katie was in her early 20s, she moved to New York City. She got a job waitressing and got really into astrology. This longtime friend of hers, Patti Clark Hippolyte, told me that the two of them liked to smoke weed and walk around the city trying to guess people's charts. Katie explained what happened next on an alternative medicine podcast called "The Balanced Blonde: Soul on Fire."

Katie/Guru Jagat  04:53

[audio clip-The Balanced Blonde: Soul on Fire] Post 911 in New York, everyone was super freaked out, and I remember I had met this girl who was like kind of a mystery, like she wore a turban, and there was a vibe, and I was like, she was like, Come to my yoga class. I knew it wasn't what I had known of yoga. So I went, and within 20, 25 seconds, I had like a major kind of mystical experience kind of what- [Jordan (interviewer): 25 seconds?!] I mean, big time quickly, like the whole kind of lotus of the crown chakra [Jordan: Whoa.] opened and like the heavens parted and the angels were singing, and I was like, Whoa, this hasn't happened to me yet in my, my two [Jordan: Yeah.] hour kind of Mysore practice. And so I was very, I mean, I was hooked, right? Like I knew I had found something I had been been looking for. And that's how you know you're kind of in your destiny path.

Emily Guerin  05:39

In the notes on this interview, the host, Jordan, who I presume is the "Balanced Blonde," called Guru Jagat "an inspiration of a modern woman living fully in her power." Guru Jagat, she said, presented Millennials with a gateway to Kundalini, an ancient spiritual technology. [music out] Nansy, Guru Jagat's mom, was far less impressed with her daughter's new obsession.

Nansy Steinhorn  06:06

I never got it. I tried to do it. It was a cruel chore to do Kundalini Yoga.

Emily Guerin  06:15

A cruel chore. That's how Nansy described Kundalini Yoga. She's referring to the endless repetitive movements or the simple poses held for a painfully long period of time.

Nansy Steinhorn  06:28

For years when she came home, she turned the heat up to do yoga, to do hot yoga. She did it obsessively. She didn't have a normal relationship with it.

Emily Guerin  06:43

But it worked for Katie. As she would later tell Yogi Times, Kundalini Yoga helped her heal from addiction, from heartbreak, and from what she called a "crazy childhood."

Philip Deslippe  06:54

If you are young or searching, or in a time of crisis, it seems to offer a whole lot of answers from the largest questions to the smallest question.

Emily Guerin  07:03

This is Philip Deslippe. He practiced Kundalini Yoga in LA for many years, and then he began attending UC Santa Barbara to get his PhD in Religious Studies. That's where he wrote a paper about the history of Kundalini Yoga. Philip told me that Kundalini Yoga was first practiced in the United States in the late 1960s. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movements were in full swing, and lots of young, spiritually dissatisfied Americans were searching for enlightenment.

Philip Deslippe  07:32

I think Los Angeles was probably one of the most fertile fields that a spiritual entrepreneur could work in the late 1960s. They were looking for a guru, they were looking for a teacher, and there he appeared. [music in]

Yogi Bhajan  07:46

[audio clip- YouTube-What Love Is] Love what you understand, is very different than what love is. Actually, love is, is self-acknowledgement. When I love myself, I can be so rich. I can love everybody.

Emily Guerin  08:11

Yogi Bhajan, the founder of Kundalini Yoga, arrived in LA in 1968. He was tall, good looking, and had a long beard and flowing clothes. He said all the right things, things that felt radical at the time: Find God within. Love over fear. The attitude of gratitude is the highest way of living. If you search YouTube, like I did, you will find tons of his speeches.

Yogi Bhajan  08:37

[audio clip- YouTube] It's very easy to give up. In adversity, keeping up is securing the joy, the happiness, your own flow, your own grit. Giving up- it just giving up.

Emily Guerin  08:57

Yogi Bhajan told everyone that Kundalini was a powerful, ancient form of yoga that was previously secret, until he brought it to Los Angeles.

Philip Deslippe  09:06

He's teaching classes where students are doing excruciating exercises and intense breathing for 11 minutes, 21 minutes, 31 minutes. So that is going to induce really extraordinary experiences. I think that that's one of the things that makes him so popular.

Emily Guerin  09:29

Yogi Bhajan encouraged serious students to meditate before dawn, take cold showers, and wear turbans and white clothing. He arranged marriages and instructed parents to send their children to his boarding schools. It was a pretty strict and all-encompassing lifestyle, but people liked it. And soon thousands of people all over the world were practicing Kundalini and opening studios and ashrams of their own. Yogi Bhajan met presidents and governors. He met the Pope. His students went on to teach yoga to Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow and Demi Moore. He bought a huge compound in New Mexico, built a ranch, and held retreats for thousands of people every year. His followers started a bunch of companies, the most well-known of which is Yogi Tea, which I'm literally drinking right now. [music fades out] Yogi Bhajan wasn't just a guru; he was a spiritual entrepreneur. And Katie liked that. Here she is on the YouTube channel The Fullest again.

Guru Jagat  10:25

[audio clip-YouTube-The Fullest (music)] He represented to me like a true rebel spirit and a true spiritual master. And so I said, I want to be like that guy. That's, that's, that's, you know...

Emily Guerin  10:35

And so, she took on a spiritual name. [music in] Spiritual names are derived from the Sikh religion. They're considered tools both to elevate your practice and guide you toward a deeper awareness of who you are. Today, all you have to do to get a spiritual name is request one from this website: spiritual-names.org. If you want one quickly, kick in 40 bucks. Yogi Bhajan died in 2004. But when he was alive, he gave out most of the names including, Katie claims, hers. Here she is telling that story to the yoga and meditation influencer Light Watkins, in a video he posted to YouTube.

Guru Jagat  11:14

[audio clip-YouTube-Light Watkins] When I got it, I was like 20 years old, and I remember everybody else got you know, their spiritual names and it was very kind of like, you know sweet, their names, and very beautiful, and then he, you know, was like Guru Jagat, and I was like, [Light Watkins laughs] Oh no! What am I gonna do? That sucks, like, how, how am I ever gonna get around that one? You know? Um- [duck under]

Emily Guerin  11:35

Guru Jagat, she says, means bringer of light to the universe in Sanskrit. The spiritual names were very confusing for me. I talked to so many people who I expected to be Indian because they went by names like Dharma Khalsa or Teg Kaur, but they were actually white Americans. More on this later. [music out]

Emily Guerin  11:57

In the early 2000s, Guru Jagat moved to LA. She later told Light Watkins, among other people, that this was because Yogi Bhajan told her to.

Guru Jagat  12:06

[audio clip-YouTube] I was studying with Yogi Bhajan, and uh- [interviewer: Directly with him?] Yeah, he was still alive. I mean, he was very ill, so we [interviewer: Mmm.] weren't like, it wasn't like you got a daily thing, but the amount that he taught those last two years, I tried to be around. LA is the seat of Kundalini Yoga in the West, so he kind of sent me this way. He sent me to LA and so I, I started teaching at his original school for a decade. [interviewer: Wow.]

Emily Guerin  12:30

She lived in a converted garage and began teaching under the name Kundalini Katie. She wouldn't use her spiritual name professionally till much later. She offered "yoga and astro wisdom" and "eight day yoga and bowel detoxes, back by popular demand." Her website from the time is kind of cute, really, everything written in pink and purple Comic Sans, and way too many exclamation points. But on summer solstice in 2012, amateur hour ended. [music in] That's the day Guru Jagat says she received the message from Yogi Bhajan that altered the course of her life. That's after a break. [music out] [break]

Emily Guerin  13:20

[music in] Summer Solstice is kind of like sleepaway camp for Kundalini Yoga people. It's a 10 day retreat in New Mexico where everybody sets up tents among the Juniper and Pinyon Pine. There's a station to fill your water bottles, huge communal meals, and yoga and meditation classes beneath a big white tent.

Guru Jagat  13:38

[audio clip-YouTube] And I'm sitting there singing, and I hear Yogi Bhajan very clearly say like a thunder dome in my head, RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology. [laughter]

Emily Guerin  13:57

Five years later, Kate Hudson would be taking classes at RA MA, and Guru Jagat would be getting written up in People Magazine and the LA Times. But this was 2012. The RA MA Institute was nothing, and she was a nobody getting a dispatch from a dead man.

Guru Jagat  14:14

[audio clip-YouTube] My eyes were you know, open the whole time, and I was looking up at the ceiling getting a complete download of exactly what the business plan needed to look like. And, you know, I'm business minded, but I'm not number minded. And it was given to me exactly, all the numbers exactly daily, weekly, monthly, who was involved, how it needed to be involved, built from the bottom up in 31 minutes. [audience murmurs] So um, we get out of there and I'm you know...

Emily Guerin  14:41

In the video where Guru Jagat tells the story, she's onstage at some kind of yoga festival. She's sitting between a giant amethyst and a yoga teacher named Harijiwan, who later uploaded it to his YouTube channel in 2013.

Guru Jagat  14:54

[audio clip-YouTube] Come support us, be a part of the aquarian vision. [cheering]

Emily Guerin  15:04

It's a pretty remarkable origin story. It lends Old Testament gravitas to the creation of a yoga studio that's kitty corner from a Whole Foods and across from a payday loan place. [music out]

Emily Guerin  15:18

Guru Jagat became an evangelist. But she recognized that Kundalini Yoga, as taught by Yogi Bhajan, needed a facelift. Really, it needed a new face. Her face.

Matthew Remski  15:30

We're talking about somebody who clearly sees the branding value of associating with Yogi Bhajan's authority, but at the same time, understands that it has to be updated.

Emily Guerin  15:47

This is Matthew Remski, the author who hosts the podcast Conspirituality.

Matthew Remski  15:52

Millennials and Gen Xers are not going to wear the Kundalini crowns neatly wrapped forever, right?

Emily Guerin  16:03

Instead of the tightly wrapped turban, Guru Jagat wore head wraps that barely contained her blonde beach hair. Instead of long white robes, she wore embroidered peasant tops, [music in] linen shawls, and heavy gold door knocker earrings. She stocked her Venice studio with the tokens of Instagram spirituality: crystals, palo santo, little jade triangles, and sage. Her goal, as one longtime student told me, was to bring Kundalini to the masses, to demystify it, and not make it so sacred.

Emily Guerin  16:37

The RA MA Institute opened on April 19th, 2013, at golden hour. And like almost everything else after this point, the opening class was recorded and distributed on multiple platforms, including YouTube. In the video, people sit elbow to elbow on sheepskins in front of a stage with Guru Jagat in dead center. They chant. They jump to the beat of the gong. They raise their arms, a sea of white shirts, white headscarves, white faces.

Guru Jagat  17:05

[audio clip-YouTube-RA MA Institute Opening] We've created this space so that every time you walk in here, every time you think about it, every time you say the mantric frequency RA AM, and that- those parts of you that have forgotten, those parts of you that need to remember, those higher [music out] octaves of why you came, why you chose to incarnate at this moment on the planet, remember. That's what we've created this space for. So thank you for being here.

Harijiwan  17:30

[audio clip continues] Let's give her a big hand. [clapping and cheering]

Emily Guerin  17:35

That male voice congratulating her is this teacher Harijiwan. He uploaded this video later to his YouTube channel.

Emily Guerin  17:42

[music in] In the next few years, Guru Jagat's reputation grew. Her classes got more crowded. Her Instagram followers ballooned. She began expanding. She opened studios in Mallorca and Boulder and New York, and she traveled constantly, offering retreats in India and the South of France. She once told Los Angeles Magazine, "I want to open for Lady Gaga." And she got a lot of press.

YouTube Audio Clips  18:08

"Guru Jagat isn't your typical yoga guru." "Coming to the stage, Guru Jagat..." "I'm here today with Guru Jagat..." "This is um, Guru Jagat..." "Alicia Keys is an active member of the Kundalini Yoga community here at RA MA in Venice, California."

BBC Audio Clip  18:24

The American has built a multimillion dollar business as a yoga master to the stars.

Emily Guerin  18:30

She wasn't just a teacher anymore. She launched the Guru Jagat Collection, a line of $300 dresses that were a living altar to the modern woman. She taught "Yogic Technology of Enlightened Leadership" at the Harvard Innovation Lab. She was now refusing to tell reporters her birth name. She told Los Angeles Magazine that that was in order to protect her brand and to honor her spiritual identity. [music out]

Emily Guerin  18:58

And it wasn't just in public.

Rabbit  19:00

She demanded that we call her Guru Jagat.

Emily Guerin  19:03

This is her stepfather. His name is Rabbit. He and Guru Jagat's mom, Nansy, now live in a small town in Virginia.

Rabbit  19:09

And in my own head, I said, I'll be damned if I'll call you Guru Jagat. I think it's totally impractical and rude and disrespectful to her mother, which calls her Katie. Okay? It's Katie, not Guru Jagat. Guru Jagat is a put on name, like the clothes.

Emily Guerin  19:29

Lots of people told me that Guru Jagat changed as she got famous. And some of her former employees said that as a boss, she was a tyrant, an abuser. I'm not gonna focus on this part of Guru Jagat's story, mostly because there's already been a lot of reporting about it. Cassidy George's story in Vice and Hayley Phelan's story in Vanity Fair. But also because I don't think it's that surprising. Lots of people lose themselves, their humility, and maybe a bit of their humanity when they become famous. Not every famous person ends up with a QAnon poster on the wall of their business. So why did Guru Jagat? [music in] That's after a break. [music out] [break]

Emily Guerin  20:13

[music in] Matthew Remski has spent a lot of time thinking about the connection between yoga and QAnon.

Matthew Remski  20:22

The American political scientist Michael Barkun identifies three pillars of conspiratorial thinking. Everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, uh and nothing is as it seems. And the strange thing about those three pillars is that they are also axiomatic to various readings in the modern world of yoga philosophy. So if you've been practicing yoga, these are gonna be very familiar ideas to you.

Emily Guerin  20:51

Matthew told me that these three themes can be soothing for people, kind of like a relief.

Matthew Remski  20:57

But then at a certain point, uh those beliefs can also curdle through a kind of paranoia and turn a person towards a susceptibility towards conspiracy theories.

Emily Guerin  21:08

Matthew said that Kundalini Yoga in particular might have made Guru Jagat more open to conspiracy theories.

Matthew Remski  21:14

It's really a totalizing environment that I think fits very well in with the totalizing and attention absorbing practices that emerge in uh, groups that begin following something like QAnon. Uh, so there's also like a behavioral uh, overlap that is about obsessive detail, complete commitment, uh and 24 hour a day attention.

Emily Guerin  21:41

Kundalini Yoga also offers itself up as a solution to a pretty wide range of health and emotional problems. To the extent that when the pandemic hit, Guru Jagat may not have felt like she needed vaccines or masks or social distancing to stay healthy. [music out] In Kundalini, there are meditations to activate your glands, mantras to improve your fertility, diets to reset your metabolism, and tonics to cleanse your liver. To be clear, not everyone who dabbles in home remedies ends up believing in conspiracy theories. But I do think if you're the kind of person who would rather do a cleanse than see a doctor, it's not a huge leap to wonder if maybe you could just heal yourself when confronted with a global pandemic. Especially if you'd been talking like that for years, like Guru Jagat had.

Guru Jagat  22:29

[audio clip-YouTube-Liver Cleanse Tonic] Hi, Sat Nam. This is Guru Jagat and we're getting ready for the holiday rejuvenation cleanse at RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology. And one of the technologies... [duck under]

Emily Guerin  22:41

In this YouTube video from 2013, Guru Jagat is standing next to a blender. Ginger, garlic, olive oil, lemons, and bee pollen sit on the counter.

Guru Jagat  22:50

[audio clip continues] ...so that, as Yogi Bhajan taught us, when you start to uh, flush the organs, the glands have to secrete in a certain way. When the glands secrete, then you get this youth and this vitality back, and in the psycho-emotional realm, your behavior becomes much calmer, much more, you know, uh consolidated so that as you maneuver through the rest of the holidays, you have this huge kind of glandular up-leveling. It's very powerful. So... [duck under]

Emily Guerin  23:23

When the pandemic hit, she took a similar approach as she had to health issues in the past, suggesting specific meditations and foods and breathing exercises to stay healthy.

Guru Jagat  23:33

[audio clip-YouTube-Boost Your Immune System in 11 Minutes] You're going to put this right uh, finger over the right nostril.

Emily Guerin  23:39

This YouTube video from late February 2020 is called, "Boost Your Immune System in 11 Minutes." In it, Guru Jagat is sitting on a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean, doing a fairly ordinary breathing exercise.

Guru Jagat  23:51

[audio clip continues] So sitting up tall, and we're gonna do Breath of Fire through the left nostril. Ready set go!

Emily Guerin  23:56

"What's it do?" reads the video caption. "Oh, just balances the emotions, adjusts the glands, and clears viruses and bacteria from your whole system." For many yoga teachers, Matthew Remski told me, the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to show off the miraculous healing qualities of their practice.

Matthew Remski  23:56

If you have spent the last 20 years making tortured and stretched medical claims about the effectiveness of yoga and meditation for certain illnesses, then the pandemic is your Waterloo. It's your time to shine.

Emily Guerin  24:32

Of course, there's nothing wrong with recommending that people meditate during a global pandemic. Only if it comes at the expense of treatments that actually work. Part of why I think Guru Jagat began talking so much about conspiracies during the pandemic is the company she kept. There was one man in particular who made a really big impact on Guru Jagat. I've already mentioned him by name twice: Harijiwan. Harijiwan was born as Stephen Hartzell, but he took on a spiritual name after he began practicing with Yogi Bhajan. He's taught classes and teacher trainings all over the world, from Latvia to Los Angeles. And on his YouTube channel, he talks quite a bit about the supposed health benefits of Kundalini Yoga.

Harijiwan  25:15

[audio clip-YouTube-Cold Showers & Kundalini Yoga] Feet under the cold water is the first step. Everyone should just do that. Because all the nerve endings in the feet- you get cold water, it energizes the whole nervous system. Nervous system, my electrical wiring system, that allows me to hold a higher frequency of energy.

Emily Guerin  25:32

I talked to a man who had taken one of Harijiwan's teacher trainings in the early 2010s, along with Guru Jagat. He used to go by Tony. Now he goes by Mahanraj Singh.

Mahanraj Singh  25:43

When I was going through my training in LA with Harijiwan, there was probably 100 people in the room. And there was our teachers on the stage. And you could tell that they were, they were grooming Guru Jagat because all of a sudden, you'd start to see her sitting up on stage. She really wasn't saying hardly anything. But she was sitting up there with them. And you could kind of feel this, you know, here she comes kind of thing.

Emily Guerin  26:12

Back then, Harijiwan was the celebrity, and Guru Jagat was his protege. And even after their roles reversed and Guru Jagat became the star teacher at RA MA, she continued to revere Harijiwan. Her Instagram was filled with photos of the two of them. In one, they sit side by side, heads bent over their laptops. "My most cherished moments" reads the caption, #harijiwan #gurujagat #studentteacher, #everything.

Nicole Norton  26:42

She would literally bend over backwards to do anything for him.

Emily Guerin  26:46

Nicole Norton used to be Guru Jagat's, personal assistant at the RA MA Institute.

Nicole Norton  26:50

Like, he was a Yogi Bhajan figure, right? Maybe even like a father figure. He was her moral compass. It may have been the Katie show. It may have been the Guru Jagat show. But he's the producer, the director, the writer. He's the one who did everything and told everybody what to do. This man controlled Guru Jagat.

Emily Guerin  27:16

Her mother Nansy agrees with this characterization.

Nansy Steinhorn  27:20

My daughter's father left when she was a year and a half old. I think it was daddy issues.

Emily Guerin  27:27

What do you mean?

Nansy Steinhorn  27:29

She was glued to Harijiwan because she missed her father.

Emily Guerin  27:34

[music in] Multiple former RA MA employees and students I spoke to said they heard Harijiwan talk about conspiracy theories. Jaclyn Gelb, Guru Jagat's former student, told me Harijiwan was talking about psy-ops, alien agendas, and evil cabals around when she first heard him speak, back in 2015 or 2016. Nicole Norton, the former personal assistant, said Harijiwan talked about lizard people, aliens, and the Illuminati in casual conversation and in class. Harijiwan didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. Here he is in May 2021, speaking on Guru Jagat's podcast, Reality Riffing.

Harijiwan  28:15

[audio clip-YouTube] There's hostile forces on the planet and with their own agendas. So why would I want you to stop you know, taking drugs and being a, a, a, a zombie in pain? Because it's much easier to rule dummies than it is to rule smart people.

Emily Guerin  28:32

Guru Jagat's stepdad Rabbit told me that she talked about astrology and the Illuminati long before she got into Kundalini. But Rabbit says after she met Harijiwan and started doing Kundalini, her interest in what I'll call "unprovable theories" deepened. Already by 2015, Guru Jagat was recommending yoga poses to help with scar tissue from alien abductions. She was talking about her friendship with Alan Steinfeld, who hosts an annual UFO conference in the desert, and wrote a book called Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence. And she was telling her students that AIDS was created by the government. [music out] But it wasn't until the pandemic that her fringe beliefs really began to affect her relationship with her parents.

Rabbit  29:18

We really saw it clearly when one day she called us. It started out normal you know, Hi, Mama, what you doing? And Nansy shouldn't have told her what we were doing. But we did. She says, Oh, we're watching CNN.

Emily Guerin  29:31

This is Rabbit. He and Nansy didn't see Guru Jagat much during the pandemic, but at least in the beginning, they talked to her every week as they had for years.

Rabbit  29:41

So then we get a big lecture from her about how CNN is. We shouldn't be watching it and that they're part of the deep state. I said, Wait a minute. I said that, that sounds like some QAnon bullshit. And she hung up on me.

Emily Guerin  30:00

Guru Jagat talked about this incident with her parents later in a RA MA class that I can't play for you because it's from her subscription only website. "They're very unhappy if I say anything about CNN," she said laughing. "So of course I have to hashtag my QAnon hashtags to them every time I say hello, just to fuck with them." Soon, the family wasn't talking as much as they used to.

Rabbit  30:22

She isolated herself from us. I mean, I think she realized that we weren't on board with the ivermectin or the conspiracy theories, or any of that.

Emily Guerin  30:33

When Guru Jagat broke her ankle in Germany, she told her mom Nansy that she wanted to return to Los Angeles immediately.

Nansy Steinhorn  30:41

Nobody could talk her out of things. Nobody.

Emily Guerin  30:46

Flying with a broken ankle can cause deep vein thrombosis, which can cause blood clots. Blood clots can migrate to block the arteries to the lungs, and that, various reputable medical websites taught me, can kill you. Although we don't know for sure, Nansy and Rabbit are convinced that this is how Guru Jagat, their daughter Katie, died.

Emily Guerin  31:09

[music in] Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Nansy and Rabbit. And I'm just yeah, I'm so sorry for losing Katie. Um, and I hope that in talking to me, at least I can- it, it, it helps me try to explain what happened in the past few years because it wasn't just her. It ha- This kind of thing happened to a lot of people. [music out]

Nansy Steinhorn  31:33

All right, thanks Emily. Remember "Freedom's [Janis Joplin echo] just another word for nothing left to lose."

Emily Guerin  31:43

There's one more thing that I think helps explain Guru Jagat's descent down the rabbit hole. But to tell you about it, [music in] I'm gonna need one more episode.

Pamela Dyson  31:52

I had no idea the impact my book would have. All of a sudden, these Kundalini Yoga teachers are going: What? [Emily: Yeah.] You guys have covered this up? And this man was a- abuser?

Emily Guerin  32:13

That's next time on the last episode of Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories." [music out]

Emily Guerin  32:19

[music in] Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories" is written, reported, and hosted by me, Emily Guerin. The show is a production of LAist Studios. Shana Naomi Krochmal is our Vice President of Podcasts and Antonia Cereijido is the Executive Producer for LAist Studios. Production research and sound design by Emma Alabaster. Research and additional reporting by Francisco Aviles Pino. Editing by Kelly Prime and Antonia Cereijido. Fact checking by Tess Kessler, Emma Alabaster, and me. Mixing by Donald Paz. Original music by E. Scott Kelly with instrumentation by Will Marsh, Nicholas Young, and Kamini Natarajan. Our theme song was written by Raaginder. Our website LAist.com is designed by Andy Cheatwood, and the digital and marketing teams at LAist Studios. The marketing team of LAist Studios created our branding. Thanks to the team at LAist Studios, including Taylor Coffman, Sabir Brara, Kristen Hayford, Kristen Muller, Andy Orozco, Michael Cosentino, and Leo G. Special thanks to Megan Garvey and Karlene Goller. Imperfect Paradise is a production of LAist Studios. Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. [music out]