She was a popular yoga guru. Then she embraced QAnon conspiracy theories
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QAnon — the baseless conspiracy theory that claims that a cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking elites control politics and media — is closely identified in political circles with some supporters of former President Donald Trump. But it also has a toehold in yoga and wellness circles.
Themes like everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, and nothing is what it seems are central to both yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking.
“If you’ve been practicing yoga, these are going to be very familiar ideas to you,” said Matthew Remski, a former yoga teacher and journalist who hosts a podcast about conspiracies, wellness and cults called Conspirituality.
During the pandemic, many yoga teachers began to speak more openly about their belief in conspiracies, to the point that there is now a term to describe this phenomenon: the “wellness to QAnon pipeline.”
To understand what wellness and conspiracy theories have in common, I decided to follow the radicalization journey of a Los Angeles-based Kundalini yoga teacher named Guru Jagat (to hear the full story, subscribe to the LAist Studios podcast Imperfect Paradise: Yoga’s “Queen of Conspiracy Theories”).
Content retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/02/1146318331/yoga-guru-qanon-conspiracy-theories.
This guru was a follower of the notorious 3HO “cult leader” Yogi Bhajan. So-called “Kundalini Yoga” was used by Bhajan as part of his group indoctrination process.