Electronic Enlightenment Eighties Style: The Beta-max Guru, Logan’s Run, and Germs
January 2013 and Kensington High Street is awash with people dressed all in white. The wealthy residents of this part of London look aghast as crowds resplendent with turbans and sheepskin mats pile out of the Tube station. “I bet the residents don’t know what to make of this” said one of my companions. “No”, I laugh, “it looks like a Star Wars convention”. I remember it was a tumbleweed moment; I had sorely misjudged the mood among my travel companions. They were proud to be a part of all of this. As always, I was deeply uncomfortable.
Ain’t Nobody
We were on our way to White Tantric Yoga. An annual event for Yogi Bhajan’s UK based Kundalini yogis. For trainee teachers a day of White Tantric Yoga is compulsory. I’d worn civilian clothes to the venue; the other students traveling with me were less discreet. As we sat on the Tube, I was acutely aware of people staring at us. In the 80s I once wore a white puffball skirt to a disco that became so illuminated under the ultra-violet light that I looked like an orb, floating around the dance floor. People laughed openly. It was a hideous fashion faux pas, never repeated. In fact, from that time on, I began dressing to go below the radar. Dressing up as a druid to travel on the Tube is the stuff that haunts my nightmares. But here we were.
Kensington Town Hall provided the unlikely venue for this albino extravaganza. It seemed somewhat incongruous, to be holding such an out-there event amid the concrete and wood paneling of civic London. I reluctantly changed into my Tantric whites and stepped into my second 80s trauma flashback of the day. The practice itself is performed in pairs and nobody wanted to partner me. Or at least, by the time I had changed, everybody had found a partner. So, I found myself in the corner of the main hall with the other rejects, until paired with a lady from Finland.
White Lines
White Tantric Yoga is weird, I mean properly weird. If you haven’t heard of it before, I recommend you Google it and look at the images. We were ushered along lines marked out by tape on the floor. I sat on one side, my Finnish partner on the other. There were maybe 9 or 10 long rows in the hall. Monitors policed the rows with a heavy hand. I came to blows with them twice. Once because I hadn’t tucked my hair under my white woolly hat. And once because I wasn’t sitting close enough to the person next to me. This practice required intimacy beyond my comfort zone & awoke my inner germaphobe.
The monitors were sadistic. With hindsight, even then there were warning signs about Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga – no one seemed very happy. In fact, the older yogis were downright harsh and rude. My husband has a deeply ingrained fear of nuns from his Catholic schooling. I’ve never met a nun, but I imagine the older Kundalini yoginis are kindred spirits, with hair screwed back under tight turbans and red scrubbed faces. Yoga would have had a very different vibe had these been the faces used to promote it on Instagram. Practice yoga and have the joy sucked right out of you.
Welcome to the Jungle
Once everyone was in place, a senior yogi took to the stage and led us unsuccessfully through some yoga poses. It was like trying to move on the head of a pin. Unless you moved in absolute synchronicity with the person next to you, you had no hope. My head, beneath my woolly hat, started to sweat. There was no ventilation in the hall, and five minutes of breath of fire created jungle like conditions
The session facilitator was one of the late Yogi Bhajan’s disciples from the States. She was a cross between Carmen Miranda and Princess Leia – bedecked in white satin robes and wearing an enormous head covering, consisting of an unusually tall turban with large gemstone and flowing train. Still, she was nice enough, and explained a little of what would happen to us.
For background, in 1971, Yogi Bhajan claimed that he had been crowned Mahan Tantric (head honcho of Tantra) after the presiding Mahan Tantric, Lama Lilan Po of Tibet passed away and bestowed the title on him. In typical Yogi B style, there is no evidence of this. On his passing, he took the title with him rather than bestowing it on anyone else, presumably because, even in death, he was unwilling to surrender his “special-ness” and control. So, now WTY is facilitated by someone from the White Tantric Team, which pretty much involves dressing up and pressing a remote control. Yogi Bhajan recorded hours of WTY before he died, to be played via enormous screens at these events.
Under Pressure
Most of the exercises were thirty minutes or an hour long and involved some variation of staring into your partner’s eyes, sitting back-to-back, chanting and/or holding your arms in the air. Yogi Bhajan in all his finery appeared on screen with a ring to rival the Pope’s and vast jewellery on his wrists and round his neck. The organisers of WTY believe Bhajan was in a trance when he recorded these sessions. He was fairly incoherent but then I have never really understood much of what he said.
White Tantric Yoga was hard! It was hot! Holding your arms in the air for 31 minutes is horrible. Staring into someone’s eyes for any length of time is extremely uncomfortable. My hips started to ache. My head was sweating so much my hair had taken on an enlightened frizz. And there was no space. As if that wasn’t bad enough, loud 80s style synthesizer music was played over the speakers. Imagine Yes crossed with the soundtrack to The Shining, or a horribly ominous version of Hair the Musical. There were times in that hall I felt like I was in the Carousel ritual in Logan’s Run, had I been sucked up into oblivion I would have been rather glad.
When Doves Cry
The idea is that tantric energy works in lines. Sitting us in strict lines, taps the room into diagonal energy, and it’s this that is supposed to cleanse the unconscious.
“During this process, the diagonal energy connects the participants to the subtle body (expanded state of consciousness) through the electronic media. This works the same way as a worldwide telephone system that relies on satellites and electromagnetic energy in order to connect two parties.” (whitetantricyoga.com).
Of course, there is zero evidence of this and I’m not sure what the benefit is of connecting to a telly. As for creating an organic telecommunications network, I don’t think it would have sustained a game of Chinese Whispers let alone cosmic connections.
It’s hard to quantify what effect it had on me. Yes, I was spaced out by the end of it, but I suspect that was in some part due to dehydration. I don’t recall any great shifts in my awareness while I was there or in the days after it. I did, however, get sick after it. Not just me, in fact, loads of people came down with flu. My tutor dismissed this as a healing crisis. Nowadays we would call it a super-spreader event.
White Tantric Yoga is allegedly “an ancient group meditative practice that works on clearing out the deepest corridors of the subconscious mind”. But where are the roots of these practices? Where are the studies to back up these claims? As with all things Yogi Bhajan, grand claims are unsubstantiated, techniques vague, and lineage conveniently obscured by secrecy.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
However, I can’t dismiss it completely - there were benefits. You can’t go through an experience like that without some outcome. It was, in effect, a giant stress position, maintained over 7 or 8 hours. From the chaos, the lack of space, the uncomfortable temperature, the humiliation of dressing up like a wizard, the staring into a stranger’s eyes, holding arms above the head for ridiculous periods of time…. This is the sort of thing that would make someone crack under interrogation. So of course, in a situation like this you do come face to face with your unconscious, with your habitual ways of responding to stress, how you react when the going gets tough. It tests your endurance and resilience, and because you are working with a partner, you deal with ideas of competition, cooperation, fears about letting someone else down. This has nothing to do with wearing white, chanting Humee Hum, or sitting in a particular pattern; it’s nervous system basics, and general psychology.
There is much to commend in Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga in this respect. I have always thought it a great practice for the stresses of a fast moving, information heavy modern society. What lets it down is all the nonsense that goes with it – the costumes, spiritual names, unsubstantiated claims to special-ness, religious connotations. If it was just taught for what it is, people could relate to it and find it incredibly helpful. To use a modern comparison, Bhajan’s Kundalini is like Putin’s big tables, grand gestures, pomp & fake news, compared to the relatable authenticity, resilience, and courage of Zelensky.
I remember one of the teacher trainers declaring that the reason Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga isn’t more popular is because the World isn’t ready for it. I suspect there is a belief that at some point the World will evolve into the Aquarian Age and these white robed, hyper spiritual people will lead the way, having been recognised as vastly more evolved human beings. Personally, I hope the World is never ready for more uniforms & rules, false claims, and pretense. If we do evolve, I hope it will be into genuine empathy & humanity, creativity, and authenticity.
Tainted Love
Just before the pandemic, allegations of sexual abuse and other inappropriate behaviour involving Yogi Bhajan finally came into the open. For a lot of followers of Yogi B’s Kundalini, this was too much, and they abandoned the practice. The organisers of White Tantric Yoga, however, have decided to continue. On their website, this justification appears:
“In 2020 (16 years after Yogi Bhajan's passing) credible allegations were made regarding sexual abuse by Yogi Bhajan. Since White Tantric Yoga® workshops have been presented over all these years, and have been effective and added value to the lives of thousands of students even during the time that the alleged abuse happened, we decided to continue to offer the workshop based on its merits.” (whitetantricyoga.com).
Bhajan, it’s claimed, was “that rare teacher that could open the space into expanded consciousness”, even, it seems via VHS and Beta-max. It’s a pity he couldn’t have opened that space for himself and dealt with his own subconscious, before abusing and manipulating so many of those who trusted him. And that seems to me to be the big elephant in the room with anything now associated with Yogi Bhajan – he claimed to be celibate and advocated a yoga system that allegedly cleansed the unconscious and delivered calibre and strength of character. If it didn’t work for him, the Mahan Tantric, the Big Kahuna, then can anyone really recommend it in any credible way?
“Your job is to discipline yourself. Your job is to control yourself. Your job is to deal with everything in life with affection, love, and kindness.”
-Yogi Bhajan, we can only assume, being ironic.