in-balans.one
VISIT the WEBSITE
www.abuse-in-kundalini-yoga.com
Using Survivor stories it draws a picture of the vastness of the abuse
in the Kundalini Yoga and Sat Nam Rasayan world.
Stories need to be told and listened to in order for Justice to take place.
About the sexual abuse in the Sat Nam Rasayan training in Belgium in 2012
Abuse should never be hidden or forgotten
as long as not all aspects of it are healed,
because then it makes you sick.
That's why I bring this story again, even if it happened 8 years ago.
If appropriate measures had been taken in those days, there would be no need to do this today. Healing can only take place when issues are brought into the light.
Sat Nam Rasayan is the healing technique linked to Kundalini Yoga.
I was the organiser of the training during which the abuse took place and at that moment I was also the president of the Belgian Kundalini Yoga Federation.
The teacher abused his position of power to seduce vulnerable students to have sex with him. In Dec 2013 they reported about the negative impact this had on them to the SNR leadership.
Click here for the full report on what happened. It includes messages sent by the students to the SNR leadership (they gave me their permission to use them) and I share my personal experiences being the organiser who was lied to and finally excommunicated.
Els Coenen - September 24, 2020
The story in brief:
In 2012 I organised a Sat Nam Rasayan training in Belgium.
One of the teachers started to have sexual relationships with two students in our training, while knowing that they both had relationship issues in those days and were vulnerable.
In 2013 the students spoke out. We requested the leadership of Sat Nam Rasayan to recognise the harm done, to heal the situation and to take measures to avoid similar abuse in the future. They asked us to keep silent. When we continued to bother them, they abruptly stopped the training in 2014, Guru Dev excommunicated me and declared Belgium a no-go zone for two years.
In 2020 when the allegations against Yogi Bhajan shook the Kundalini Yoga world, I was requested on the closed Facebook group 'Beyond the Cage' to tell the story of the sexual abuse that happened in Belgium in 2012 in the SNR training. With the agreement of the students involved, I posted the story on Sep 24, 2020.
The students involved also agreed that I would send a letter to Guru Dev Singh to see if he would respond in a different way today in 2020 than he did eight years ago. Perhaps he was now able to recognise that such transgressive behavior of a teacher towards students has no place in an education. But unfortunately.
My correspondence with Guru Dev Singh is shown at the right top of this page.
Isn't it time to stop looking up to so-called spiritual leaders who don't care about the integrity of students? who do not find it necessary to openly oppose sexually transgressive behavior of teachers to students?
The world is a dangerous place not because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.
That's what Einstein said. If you ask me, he was right.
Exchanges with Guru Dev Singh
(† April 5, 2021)
called Master of Sat Nam Rasayan
about this case
interesting read because they shed a light on how SNR leadership
deals with ethical issues
- Sep 29, 2020 - I asked GDS if after 8 years he can provide an answer to the students who informed him about the abuse
- Oct 11, 2020 - Response from GDS and my reply to it
Some extracts from the most recent letter
...
Guru Dev Singh replying to my letter of Sep 29, 2020:
Women want to regain power, but you can’t regain power by being a victim.
My reply:
Where did you get the idea that these women behave like victims?
I know them for many years. They are far beyond acting like victims.
They are not looking for power. They are power. Don’t worry.
And they have huge hearts, that’s why they agreed to give you here and now in 2020 another opportunity to upgrade your level of integrity.
...
...
Guru Dev Singh:
I don’t believe women are weak, I also don’t believe men are weak, they fall into a thought, one of thousands of ideas that are crossing their minds and one of those thousands of ideas becomes an action and if that action takes place, there’s consequences, and then what do we do? You can’t control the consequence of your action, nobody can control that, that’s why there’s theft and slavery and murder and sex, it all starts from a basic thought put into action. How do we control it – by causing fear of being burnt and reprimanded? How are we fair? Do we punish or vanish people? Or do we control it with our intuition that allows for empathy and compassion for others?
It’s the story of the Buddhist monk and the thief – Once a monk saw a thief climbing up a tree to steal peaches from a tree, so he ran and got him a ladder. The thief asked him why he would do that if he knew he was stealing, and he responded ‘because you could hurt yourself, I can live without my peaches but not with you getting hurt’
My reply:
The Buddhist story is beautiful. The Buddhist is preventing the thief from hurting himself and at the same time he gives him food for learning and allows him to experience the soothing effect of love and compassion. The Buddhist monk is far away from controlling and judging.
With their narratives and reflections, the women in the 2012 Belgian story of abuse, show you and your SNR community where you can find the ladder: By openly recognizing that sexual transgressive behavior is unacceptable in your trainings, you would provide a ladder to your teachers and students. By keeping your silence, you keep the ladder away from them. They risk continuing to hurt each other.
An ethical code about student-teacher relationships would be a good ladder, don't you think?
...