in-balans.one

From 2008 to 2018, Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan ruled my life.

My passion was intense. I took cold showers, did my sadhana, experimented with the kriyas, meditated for hours, bought books and DVDs, attended all possible courses and workshops, led the Belgian Kundalini Yoga Federation for eight years, taught several yoga classes a week, organized and assisted in teacher trainings in Belgium and neighbouring countries and in a few countries in East-Africa.

And yes, I also wore a turban while teaching and sometimes even outside the yogaroom.

From time to time I heard rumours on abuse. But that was all slander, "they said".

'They' were my yoga teachers and yoga friends. Don't listen to it. It's all fantasy.

In 2012, the abuse came very close. Hari Singh, one of the teachers from the Sat Nam Rasayan* course that I organised in Belgium, seduced two young students into a sexual relationship knowing that both were in a vulnerable situation due to relationship problems. For months I asked the SNR leaders to take appropriate action, but I was asked to remain silent. Because of my insistence I was excommunicated by Guru Dev Singh, the so-called Master of SNR. He declared Belgium a no-go zone for all SNR activities for two years.

At the end of September 2020, eight years after the events, I wrote a letter to Guru Dev Singh asking him if today he was a little more open to acknowledge that harm had been done by Hari Singh and that such transgressive behavior has no place in a spiritual activities .

You can find his answer and the full SNR abuse story from Belgium here.

* Sat Nam Rasayan, or SNR for short, is a meditative healing technique that uses Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan as a basis.

In 2018 I came across a scientific article about the lies Yogi Bhajan told about his past, his teachers and the origin of his version of Kundalini Yoga. I asked questions about this to various leaders in the International KY organisation. No answer came.

I was angry, especially because of the silence. And I was disappointed because I realised that I had participated in spreading those lies during my yoga classes and as an assistant in teacher training courses in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Burundi, Kenya and Ethiopia. "This is an ancient technology," I had told the students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yogi Bhajan just made up the yoga sets on the spot.

I quit teaching and resigned from the KY board in Belgium.

Byebye Kundalini Yoga, I thought.

Early 2019, someone told me about the involvement of Akal Security* in the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border. I felt the unrest inside me again.

I rejoined the board of the Belgian KY Federation, so that I could put pressure on the leaders in the US from within, to ensure that the non-profit KY yoga organisations would not be sponsored by a security firm that supported Trump's governmental shady practises.

Again I was disappointed because they did everything not to hear us. It took more than a year before they responded.

* Akal Security, like Yogi Tea, is a profit organisation that is part of the Siri Singh Sahib Cooperation (SSSC), the umbrella organisation that also includes all non-profit Kundalini Yoga organisations such as KRI and 3HO.

And then in January 2020 the gate was lifted. Pamela Saharah Dyson released her book 'Premka - White Bird in a Golden Cage. My Life with Yogi Bhajan.'  A storm broke out in the International Kundalini Yoga community. Pamela testifies in her book about the sexual and power abuse she experienced in the many years she spent with Yogi Bhajan. Many other gruesome testimonials followed. The KY world began to shake to its foundations and it still does. You can read more about this here.

I felt relief as I read the book: at last the elephant in the room was given a name and no one could miss it anymore. Now it was possible to purify.

As the representative for KY Belgium at the International level, I came into contact with many people who had very different reactions to the allegations against Yogi Bhajan. There were those who burned their books. Others left the organization. Still others continued to worship Yogi Bhajan as a saint.

Within the international KY organisations that are led from the US, hard work was and is still being done to build a future that will look different from the past.

In Belgium, the reaction was unimaginably silent. Sometimes I had the impression that I was the only one experiencing the storm in the Kundalini Yoga waters. Was I the only one who was bothered  by the fact that we had been lied to over the years? I wondered.

More and more it became clear that a great deal of information about the abuse had been available since the 1980s among leaders in the organisation. But it had been concealed and swept under the carpet. They did nothing with it.

Fortunately, I had already stopped teaching in 2018. Otherwise my problems of conscience would have been worse. Hundreds of times I wondered why my 'Byebye Kundalini Yoga'-plan just didn't work out. I seemed to be stuck to the KY organisations even though I had stopped practising for a long time.

And then one morning between waking and sleeping, a sweet angel whispered a simple message in my left ear: Do something constructive with this, and then you will can go.

It was July 2020. I proposed to the board of the Belgian KY Federation to set up an Integrity hotline in Belgium. They agreed. I contacted Sensoa, the Flemish expertise center for sexual health. They wanted to guide us drawing up an Integrity Policy. In the fall we had workshops with them.

I spoke about our initiative at a meeting with the national representatives of the Kundalini Yoga federations from all over the world. Some countries asked to keep them informed about our approach because they might do something similar.

At international level, there is an organisation EPS (Ethical and Professional Standards) that deals with ethical issues, but their texts are quite 'far away' for the 'regular yoga teacher and student'. Even if EPS will adapt their working methods and instruments to the current situation and needs, it remains a top-down approach. What we created is more bottom-up. Although from a yoga student's point of view it is still top-down as it was  developed at national level. But seen from the global perspective, it is bottom-up.

Mid December, early in the morning the angel returned to me. He whispered, again in my left ear: Create a website to share your policy documents.

And so this child was born just before Christmas 2020: www.Integrity-in-Yoga.one.