A Conversation with Kamalla Rose Kaur

On Breath of Fire, and Going After Yogi Bhajan Before It Was Safe

Today I interview Kamalla Rose Kaur, whose website Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan was one of the few accessible places to gather information about Bhajan’s yoga cult in the decades prior to his death. She started the site in 2001 and it continues to this day in scaled down form on Facebook. We talked about her experiences in and out of the cult, and what it is like to see the story hit the mainstream with the arrival of the docu-series Breath of Fire on HBO.

Before we get to Breath of Fire, perhaps you could explain to readers your experience with the 3HO kundalini yoga group, as an early member and then as an anti-cult activist with the longest running online site tracking the group and its crimes. How did you get involved with the group?

I joined when I was 18 and my first husband was 21. He was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship, so we moved to Philadelphia, which was a big switch from the West Coast.

We were both working all the time and were losing connection, so we decided that we would take a yoga class together. We went to the Student Union and there were three yoga classes offered, one taught by Janet, one by Bill, and one by someone named Guru Rakha Singh Khalsa.

I remember saying, “Oh my God, we can take yoga from a real guru!”

When we got through our first Kundalini Yoga class, I saw Guru Rakha's aura, which was peachy peach. We were walking home to our graduate student apartment, and all the colors were jewel like. My husband and I decided that the only thing that we could relate it to was mescaline–not LSD–mescaline.

We moved into the ashram in 1973 or ‘74. It was a smallish ashram, fairly loose. I think if we had had a real authoritarian ashram experience we would have left a lot earlier. As it went, I was in the group for 20 years, until I was 37.

We moved back to the West Coast in 1976 and lived first at the Salem OR ashram. The ashram directors were Nirbhao Singh and Nirbhao Kaur. It was the place where Kettle Chips got started. We worked in the Golden Temple Restaurant there, even though my husband was a physicist.

Around 1979, when my second daughter was born, we moved to California where my first husband worked for National Semiconductor, and then later he joined a startup that went public. So I was a Silicon Valley wife, driving around in my little cream colored Fiat convertible. It was fun!

What prompted your eventual exit from the group?

The easiest way to put it is that I wrote myself out of the cult. I went back to college majoring in Religious Studies at San Jose State University.  One day my friend, GuruBir Singh, from the Monterey CA ashram, handed me this book about how organizations often mimic dysfunctional families. It seemed to be talking about 3HO. Because so many of Yogi Bhajan students come from alcoholic families, I thought, at first, that we were projecting the role of the authoritarian addict onto Yogi Bhajan. I believed Yogi Bhajan was pure but we were acting out our dysfunctional crap on him. I published "3HO As A Dysfunctional Family" in our Bay Area regional newsletter, "Visions.” It was a four part series that came out every six months from 1990 through 1992.

After I got the second article published, it was confiscated at Winter Solstice Celebration, (which is an annual gathering of the group), by one of Yogi Bhajan’s bodyguards. That’s when I started thinking, “I wonder what’s happening here?”

Then former Yogi Bhajan students started calling me. Even a Punjabi Sikh or two phoned, praising me for the first articles in the series. We would talk for awhile and then they would say, “Oh, you don’t know, do you?” I had terrible cognitive dissonance but  it slowly started to sink in.

By the time I published the third Dysfunctional Family piece I knew that Yogi Bhajan and the group were corrupt. This was extremely painful. Then GuruBir Singh, who had given me the book in the first place, was set up as the kingpin of the Canadian Lottery Scam - but he wasn’t. For years I thought that he was framed because I had credited him in the article. That might even be true, but I have no proof.

So GuruBir was jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, and I received a threatening phone call from one of YB’s goons, who was later busted for gem fraud. He told me it would be better for me and my family if I didn’t go to GuruBir Singh’s arraignment.

That is when I really awakened to the fact that the religious organization I belonged to was actually a mafia. I  learned about Guru Jot Singh's drug and arms smuggling arrest in 1987. He was Yogi Bhajan's right hand man and East Coast regional director. I also learned that his partner, Gurupreet Singh had been assassinated right after the bust. His body was found in the trunk of a rented car, in Eugene OR, with a small caliber bullet through his third eye (center of his forehead). Thus the threat I received was very very real and terrifying.

I did go to GuruBir’s arraignment, because I’m me.  It was a crazy thing to do but I am bipolar, though I didn’t know it back then.

My first husband was furious with me for putting our family into danger. He didn’t want me to publish the fourth Dysfunctional Family article, but again I did. That one I aimed straight at Yogi Bhajan. I didn't care who else read it.

I went super manic. I actually wrote a fifth article which they didn’t publish, trying to expose the whole thing. Lots of things happened to me all at once. I had a death threat on my head. I was trying to protect my family because I knew they were after me, and I needed a divorce. So I gave my husband the money and the children, to protect them, and I hit the street. I have basically been living in poverty ever since.

Can you tell me a bit about how you started publishing Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan, which turned into the longest running online resource documenting the crimes of 3HO?

The very first internet anti-activist was Kartar Khalsa, who created the Rick Ross: 3HO page in the mid-1990s. She died of cancer in 2022 and we miss her tremendously. We became great friends, but at first she kicked me off!
When I started Wacko World I saw myself as the facilitator. I wanted Wacko World to not be able to shun people. I got ticked off sometimes, but I am anti-cult, so I seriously wanted to run it by rule of law. As moderator, I’ve never given myself the right to shun people or kick them off. I don’t care if the whole forum doesn’t like them, if they don’t break the rules, I’m not coming after them.
For years the Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan forum was just one click away for anyone typing in the words “3HO,” “Yogi Bhajan,” “Kundalini Yoga,” or “Sikh Dharma” in a search engine in combination with a word like “abuse” or “cult” or “lawsuits.” It was accessible, anyone could read it. It was there for over 20 years.

The Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan was up and running when Pamela Dyson published her memoir, Premka: White Bird In A Golden Cage. Her book detailed her years of abuse in the Yogi Bhajan cult. I started the Facebook group "Beyond the Cage" – though it wasn’t called that at the time. It was supposed to be a group to promote Pamela's book. I let in thousands of people and soon revelations of other's abuse in the cult started to come out. 

Soon after Premka: White Bird In A Golden Cage published the Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan website got hacked, and we lost it. But I’m hoping to get it back up in the next months. The "Beyond The Cage" group became run by Suzanne Jordan who moderates it still.

I know you had high hopes heading to the HBO docu-series Breath of Fire. How are you feeling after having seen it?

Well, that’s a little complex. It completes a huge circle in my life. I guess I’d call it a peak experience, but without the fireworks or colors.

All those years I was an anti-cult activist I had the dream of getting the story told on the mass media.

I actually worked for six years on the story with a famous Wall Street Journal reporter, John Emshwiller, who brought down Enron. But he couldn’t get his editor to publish. He basically said, it’s a book, it’s not a newspaper story.

In truth we got lots of news coverage, but it was always about little bits of the story - about Yogi Tea in Eugene Oregon, or Akal Security in New Mexico - but it was never the whole story, like in the documentary.

I’ve been waiting for Episode 3, in particular, for a long time, where they actually talk about all the various criminal activities, child abuse and the heinous sadistic sexual abuse of harem members by Yogi Bhajan. The docu-series doesn't  leave anything out. Not really. All the big dots have been filled in.

What did you think about how the documentary was structured around the story of Guru Jagat, the millennial guru in Venice, California?

When I heard that the HBO documentary was going to be about Guru Jagat, I was not pleased. This is because her racket was such a tiny part of the Yogi Bhajan global empire. She was a mean girl, nasty boss, but not a criminal or sadist.  But Philip Deslippe - Religious Studies scholar and expert in 3HO who is featured in Breath of Fire - changed my mind. He explained to me that documentaries are aimed at 35-year-old millennials these days. So having the millennial Guru Jagat as the star is relatable to the audience in a way that a bunch of old hippies are not. You feel compassion for her as you learn who she was. Yogi Bhajan, in contrast, was a monster. He was among the most evil people who has ever lived.

Guru Jagat was a sincere and innocent practitioner when she started.  Then she got hooked up with Harijiwan, who had been jailed for telemarketing fraud before becoming a super successful Kundalini Yoga Master. Harijiwan, in turn, was one of Yogi Bhajan's devoted students. So there was a lineage from Yogi Bhajan to Harijiwan to Guru Jagat. In 3HO they call this lineage of Kundalini Yoga Masters, the "Golden Chain.”

I think that anyone who sets themselves up as a spiritual teacher goes to the dark side. Marketing yourself as an enlightened Master who knows everything? If you aren’t corrupt when you start, it will make you corrupt. I’ve hardly seen an exception to that.

I have one question for you about the documentary. They talk to only a few people, and even though they struggled it doesn’t seem like they were ever in fear of their life. Do you think they captured the dread and urgency that a lot of people experienced?

No. A death threat is like. . .it’s a thing in itself. It’s a terrible attack all by itself. Because you never know. I’m not saying I constantly worried about the doorbell ringing for all those years, it’s just this constant low simmering fear. It made a difference in my relationship with my present husband. When I came back to my hometown of  Bellingham, WA, I met Ken. We were falling in love but I had to tell him I felt that we couldn’t have a relationship because I was marked by a mafia. He told me that he thought everyone should be in my sort of danger.  So we got married.

The other area that hasn’t been covered well in the docu-series is the experience of being shunned. It often gets ignored, like it’s not a big thing, but it’s huge. You feel like you’re in some sort of frightening and frustrating alternative reality. You just disappear, while those still in the group slander you viciously. It is difficult for people to really understand the power of shunning and what that does to human beings.

And don't forget I was actually being threatened by Akal Security, the 3HO security company with major government contracts protecting courthouses, airports, government buildings, with ICE contracts.

Akal Fucking Security!

Akal Security was first started by one of Yogi Bhajan's bodyguards. Anyone online was also at risk of being attacked by agents of Akal Security. That’s why I insisted at the Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan site that we all use anonymous screen names. Except for me, I was always "out," using my real name.

What wisdom do you think you’ve gathered from your many years dealing with this cult, first as a participant, then as a witness and chronicler?

Over the years, we have been constantly waiting for the next thing to happen. Since 2020, things have been happening pretty fast. But for the two decades before Pamela's book published we would wait months and years  for new things to happen, or to learn more information about the cult. I would get to the point where I was just going to let it all go. But inevitably right when I got ready to quit, something new would come to light and I'd be back in the saddle again.

When I got out of the cult I looked around and thought, Cults R Us. I saw them everywhere.  I understood that it’s just extremely toxic and abusive patriarchy. It’s just authoritarianism.

Because I lived through it I have a very deep experience of what authoritarianism is like. It can happen in dysfunctional families, and it happens with women and their bad boyfriends. Of course, with Trump it’s really obvious–it’s a full out cult.

I also think authoritarianism is a primate thing. Take gorillas, for example–you are going to have your Silverback alpha male and and the hierarchy of lesser males with the more submissive females.  In contrast, bonobos are matriarchal primates. Then you have humans who I think have the ability to practice equality, and when we do, everything blooms.

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