Record #1: Cult #1, Berkeley, CA

Record #1: Cult #1, Berkeley, CA

Berkeley, 2001. I was twenty-something, restless, and aching for spiritual direction when I drove eight hours through the night to knock on a tantric yoga teacher's door. He told me I needed to do something extraordinary to prove my devotion. So I showed up in the fog at midnight.

This is the record of a tantric yoga community in the Berkeley Hills led by a teacher who claimed lineage with Swami Satyananda Saraswati and Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati at the Bihar School of Yoga in India—gurus who had never heard of him.

It was a community where beautiful, devoted women enforced the hierarchy. Where silence was considered devotion. Where questioning was spiritual immaturity. Where sexual abuse was disguised as sacred tantric "practice."

I thought I was choosing spiritual freedom and transformation. I was choosing erasure.

This is my origin story—why I recognize cult patterns and manipulation in yoga communities so clearly now. Why I can't be gaslit by institutional yoga's accountability theater. Why I understood exactly what was happening when abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public. Why I left Ashtanga yoga when so many others couldn't.

Years later, the truth emerged: the teacher had been raping one of his students for years. There were lawsuits. Whispers of women drugged. A pregnant woman. He eventually fled to Thailand.

Had I pleased him with the fish dinner I cooked that night, I would have lived in that house. I would have shared her fate.

I walked in hungry. I left dangerous.

This is Record #1: Cult #1

Content Warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of sexual coercion, spiritual manipulation, and abuse within a tantric yoga community. Please take care of yourself while listening.

#yogacult #tantricyogaabuse #berkeleyyoga #spiritualabuse #cultrecovery #yogateachertraining #ashtangayoga #pattabhijois #yogaaccountability #guruabuse #sexualabuseinyoga #yogacommunityredflags

Next Episode: Record #2: Cult #2, Mysore, India

About Magnolia Zuniga:

Magnolia Zuniga is a former Certified Ashtanga yoga teacher and one of only 20 women worldwide who were certified by the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) before publicly walking away from the lineage. After abuse allegations against Pattabhi Jois became public, she stopped teaching Ashtanga sequences and lost her certification—choosing survivor solidarity over professional advancement.

She now teaches at ABQ Yoga Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing on decolonizing yoga practice, recognizing cult dynamics in spiritual communities, and building accountability in yoga spaces. She speaks publicly about institutional abuse, guru culture, and what yoga becomes when you remove the harmful power structures.

Find me at www.magnoliazuniga.com and https://www.youtube.com/@MagnoliaSezSo

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Before we begin today, a warning that this episode contains descriptions of sexual coercion, spiritual manipulation, and abuse within a yoga community. Please take care of yourself while listening. This is called Record No. So before I walked away from Ashtanga Yoga, before I became one of the few people willing to name what Patabi Joyce did to his students, I survived a different yoga cult. This is Berkeley, California, 2001. I was 20-something, I was restless, I was aching for something I couldn't name. I drove eight hours through the night to knock on a teacher's door because he told me I needed to do something extraordinary to prove my devotion. So I showed up in the fog at midnight. I thought I was choosing spiritual freedom, but I was actually choosing Eurasure. And this is the story of a yoga community led by a teacher who claimed lineage with Indian gurus who refused to recognize his story. This was a community where beautiful, devoted young women enforced the hierarchy, where silence was devotion and sexual abuse was disguised as practice. I guess this is my origin story, and it's why I recognize manipulation so clearly now. Why I can't be gaslit by beautiful statements from yoga teachers or yoga studios or yoga institutions. It's why I know exactly how these systems work because I've lived inside them multiple times in different iterations. This is record number one, cult number one. I wasn't lost, I was looking, and I walked into something I didn't yet know how to name. I knocked on the teacher's door in the middle of the night, not knowing it would be years before I walked away. The cold, foggy roads of the Berkeley Hills twisted beneath me as I arrived after an eight-hour drive from Los Angeles. And even in the dark, I could make out silhouettes of the lush trees within the dense forest, and the kind of silence I was deeply unfamiliar with and really uncomfortable in. Every curve in the road felt like a portal revealing only glimpses, the thick greenery, a stray porch light, a house buried in the red woods. I mean, what led me there, it wasn't wanderlust. It wasn't even faith. It was a phone call. I phoned the teacher in the late afternoon earlier, and we talked for nearly an hour. He told me about the lineage, the teachings, the sacred rituals, and he smoke, he spoke with the authority of someone who had arrived, who had who had tasted something most people only sort of circle in theory. I was 20-something, I was restless, I was aching for direction, and I was completely intoxicated by what he was offering. He spoke of two gurus living in India in Bihar, India, Swami Satyananda Saraswati and Swami Nidanjanananda Saraswati. He referred to them with intimacy like old friends or spiritual siblings. He called himself their brother guru, suggesting some kind of an unspoken inheritance. Later on, he would show photos from their secret ceremonies, hinting that he had been chosen to carry the lineage forward in the West. He also spoke of the Berkeley community like it was a secret order, a place for the devoted. I was intrigued. I asked, What does it take to be accepted? And he paused. Something extraordinary, he told me. Like what? I asked, half serious. I don't know, he replied, like showing up in the middle of the night. I laughed. He was silent. I hung up and I didn't hesitate. I packed a small bag with clothes. I didn't know where I was going to stay. I was nearly broke. But I packed up anyway. And that's how I found myself in the mist-covered hills of Berkeley, my headlights dimmed by the fog, pulling into a driveway that was carved into the side of the earth. This was before GPS, and I just had an address. I let myself be guided by instinct and the buzz of something unnamable that rung like hope, delusion, destiny, and hunger. I drove there chasing a feeling that I didn't have a name. When I arrived, I sat in the driver's seat staring at the front door. After all those phone calls and hearing all about his teachings and promises, I thought it would be somehow grander. But the gate to the kingdom was just a small wooden door tucked around the back of the house, made much smaller still by the lush scenery that surrounded it. It looked off, underwhelming, like it didn't belong in the story I had told myself. But I knocked. I had come too far, I told myself, too far to turn back, too tired to question the force that had pulled me here. I knocked, he opened the door, and nothing was ever the same again. This isn't a story about how I healed. It's about what happens when you stop pretending the system can be saved. So it was fall 2001, the country was unraveling, and so was I. My boyfriend Daniel and I sat in our loft bed in Venice Beach, watching the Twin Towers fall in real time. I didn't know what it meant or how it would reshape everything, but something broke open that morning. I think for everyone in the country and in the world, not all at once, but the cracks deepened. I watched the dust rise from the rubble on the screen and felt something similar stirring in me, that confusion collapse, a slow, quiet shattering of the story I thought I was living. At the time I was trying to escape Daniel, my almost famous boyfriend. He was an artist, yoga teacher, raw foodie. He'd stand in the kitchen, raw beef in hand, hipcocked, radiating that particular smugness that mediocre white men confuse for enlightenment. You know the kind. It's the kind of smugness women have been forced to study in order to survive. I mean, I was never patriotic. I never understood the American way, even though my family tried to drill it into me. The American dream was the one we fought hardest for. A one-bedroom apartment in Tucson, where eight of my aunts and uncles would sleep on the floor studying English, taking tests, working towards citizenship, that was the dream. And they all assimilated, I think. Except me. My mother drilled me with English flashcards until there was no trace of an accent. I learned this too was part of the American dream, to scrub away your origins. But not having an accent is not the same as belonging. I mean, I was raised by people who knew what it meant to be hunted, protesters, activists, survivors. I studied photos of my family, fists raised, mouths mid-chant, faces caught between fury and faith. This was the 60s when protests could still like shake a regime, when campesino marches could stop a convoy. And then there was silence. You know, mid-story, my family's expressions, they would shift, and voices would drop, and they'd start to speak about those who disappeared from protests, from kitchens, from buses on the way home, of police who didn't stop at beatings. Their sentences would trail off like smoke. And it was like I could watch memory vanish in real time. And I was part of that vanishing too. Back in Berkeley the next morning, I met the community. Some lived in the house with the teachers, others lived in nearby neighborhoods in Berkeley or Oakland, a few commuted in from San Francisco. We woke early and gathered in silence. Our first practice was what they called a one-hour non-conceptual meditation. This meant sitting without instruction, without movement, without story, eyes cast slightly downward, spines tall, breath steady, no mantra, no teacher's voice guiding us. There were ten of us in the room. Some sat on cushions, others directly on the floor. Our faces were expressionless, our muscles softened into stillness, and at the front of the room the teacher sat elevated on a wooden pedestal facing us, also lost in meditation, watching without watching, present without participating. I could feel all eyes on me, the new girl, the stranger who arrived in the middle of the night. To them I had appeared out of the fog, out of nowhere. When the session ended, one of the residents, an older man who lived in the house, said, Wow, you sat perfectly still the whole time. That's impressive. I wasn't sure how to respond. It struck me as a strange compliment, as if stillness was a performance, like endurance was the point. Then there was a teacher. He spoke with unshakable confidence, the kind that convinces you he knows more than you do, even if he doesn't. He didn't speak in metaphors or riddles the way so many spiritual teachers do. He was direct, brutally so. He was biting, cruel. He called it honesty. And if you were on the receiving end, it was framed as an honor. Every humiliation was a teaching. You had to be grateful for it. He wasn't a monk with a shaved head or flowing robes. He didn't radiate stillness or spiritual severity. He was relatable. He was approachable. He was the kind of teacher who laughed easily, made eye contact, and made you feel seen. He felt like a friend. His students were predominantly young white women, beautiful, quiet, devoted. One of them still stands out to me. She was one of the most striking women I had ever seen. Red hair, bright green eyes, tall, lean, the posture of a ballerina. Her skin was so pale her features seemed to blur into each other, like her face hadn't fully committed to being here. Only her eyes held shape. They sparkled from across the room, alive with something ancient and unreadable. And that first morning I'll never forget, she put her arm around my shoulders and walked me to the kitchen. She knew I had appeared in the middle of the night, and she needed to stake her claim. To anyone else, it looked like a warm welcome, a high priestess ushering in the newcomer. She lived in the house full time. She moved through it like she belonged. But as we walked, she leaned in and whispered something into my ear. I don't remember what she said. Maybe I never fully heard it. Her voice was more hiss than words. At the time her grip on my shoulder tightened. It was too firm to be friendly, too sharp to be kind. This was a warning. She wasn't welcoming me. She was showing me her place in the hierarchy. She wasn't the teacher, but she was the boss. She was the gatekeeper. She was cloaked in grace, but she was essentially a snake in silk. Over time I would get to know her better. She was quiet but commanding, eyes cast downward, but she was always watching. She knew the rhythms of the house and her muscles. Sometimes it felt like she could read your thoughts before you said anything at all. And these beautiful women, they were not the leaders, I soon learned. They were the enforcers. If you cried for any reason, you were told your ego was dying. If you questioned anything or pushed back even slightly, you were told you weren't ready. They didn't guide, they watched, corrected, smiled tightly and bowed often. The hierarchy was invisible, but it was absolute. We meditated every morning before sunrise. It was optional, but it was silently expected. And afterward, there was a one-hour yoga class focused not on movement, but on subtlety. The angle of a wrist, the softness of the gaze, the breath beneath the breath. No music, no mirrors, no praise. Now everyone in the community was a householder. They were working jobs and managing daily life, but the practice was all-consuming. Most rituals took place before and after work hours, and weekends were packed with guru practices, service, and teachings. They called it seva, not work, but spiritual offering, sweeping floors, chopping vegetables, folding flyers, tending to the altar. But seva wasn't about the task. It was about how you showed up, humble, focused, devoted. The teacher didn't hover, but his presence kind of lingered. He rarely praised, but when he did, it felt like a blessing. And most days he said nothing, neither approval nor punishment, just silence. We gathered for deity worship in traditional tantric and Hindu forms. Ceremonies bloomed with color and precisions, flower garlands, brass lamps, bells, sandalwood paste. We offered rice, fruit, fire, breath. During yagyas, the fire ceremonies, we sat around a copper flame spooning ghee into the fire as Sanskrit mantras rang out in unison. Smoke curled through the room, clung to our clothes and hair. The air was thick with something ancient, something we were not meant to revere. Even if we didn't understand it. We chanted until the mind surrendered, until we forgot what had brought us there in the first place. My longing to belong was a low, constant thrum. As a Mexican indigenous girl with Arab and Jewish ancestry, I was never going to be safe in that room. I was never going to belong, but I didn't know that yet. The women who raised me were loud, strong, opinionated, and assertive, but living in America, I realized quickly how different this was. White women were passive, agreeable. They were silently cruel. They were suffering, make no mistake, but they never cast their gaze towards the root of the rot. They turned it on other women like me. The women who raised me would have burned this place to the ground. The women in the community micromanaged me with surgical devotion. They'd cut a little here, correct a little there. They didn't guide, they carved. I didn't really understand the rules, but I was constantly violating them. There was hierarchy, obedience, and quiet competition disguised as humility. Everyone smiled and bowed and watched each other watch one another. One of the one of the women was older than the rest. She was respected. She was a scholar. Of exactly what I I don't remember. But she made it known more than once that she was a Stanford graduate. She took me to breakfast and I I thought we were making we were gonna be friends. I told her how I would driven all night to meet our teacher, how much it meant to me. She looked at me, then down at her plate. Well, she said, cutting into a French toast, aren't you extraordinary? It wasn't a compliment, it was another warning. Years later she reached out like we were old friends. You see, she's a spiritual teacher now, with a following of her own. Apple tree. But even in the thick of my hunger to belong, something steady and unsentimental knew this was bullshit. Some women left quietly and we never heard from them again. Some ascended to positions of a power, no one asked why. You weren't supposed to, because questioning anything, especially relationships or power, was seen as a spiritual immaturity, especially when it came to sex. Tantra, as it was taught to us, sometimes included sexual practices. Not always, but sometimes, and always on a consensual basis. These practices were framed sacred, deeply personal, deeply spiritual, and totally off the table for discussion. To do so was considered a violation of its sanctity. And in our community, that silence was enforced. If you asked questions, you were seen as uninitiated. If you voiced suspicion, you were dismissed or even ridiculed. The more devoted you were, the less you asked. And I didn't have a language to name what we all sensed, but I saw the steady erosion of self that comes from being close to power but never holding any. It's palpable. And there was a moment I was tested. The teacher asked me to make him dinner. No one said anything, but I felt the room tighten. It was a silent gasp and a look passed among the women. They knew what it meant. If he liked my cooking, I'd be invited to live in the house with the teacher and a few carefully chosen residents. It would be an honor, a sign you were trusted, seen, closer. If my meal failed to satisfy him, though, I would remain in the outer circle like the women who commuted from hour from miles away. Now, I never really cooked before. I was raised by a traditional grandmother who lived in the kitchen. I grew up surrounded by the scents of homemade tortillas, fresh salsa and beans soaked overnight. Those foods meant safety, love, survival, but my mother hadn't inherited those traditions, and I had made the conscious choice not to either. Not cooking for me was a feminist act, a refusal. I wasn't going to spend my life feeding people who didn't see me. I wasn't going to earn my place through service. I wasn't going to stir pots like my worth depended on it. And yet, and yet here I was, desperate to be included and to move up in the spiritual hierarchy. And while I had been raised by rebels and fighters who refused to bow to the status quo, I was reminded that I was here in this house in Berkeley to discover something beyond what I already knew. I wanted to believe more than anything that there was something worth softening for. That maybe that was the key to transformation. My teacher requested fish. He preferred the light, delicate kind that doesn't really taste like anything. Kind of figures. It's the kind you're supposed to prepare simply, you know, with lemon and a few herbs, a gentle touch. The serpent priestess led me into the kitchen and watched over me like a hawk. She didn't offer any help. She simply stood close to me while I examined the teacher's spice rack and kitchen appliances. She watched every move I made with a nervous kind of awareness that she couldn't entirely disguise. She didn't offer suggestions, she didn't give me advice, she just watched. Anyway, I drowned the fish in turmeric and salt. The fish turned bitter and bright orange, clumps of the powdered root stuck together like clay. I remember thinking I'd ruined everything, that I hadn't been good enough, that I hadn't pleased him. I wasn't chosen. I didn't leave the yoga community right after that. For a while I remained on the periphery, but the moment that made it real, the moment I began to plan my exit, came when my teacher announced that he was opening a tantric yoga center in the middle of Berkeley. He framed it as a bold expansion, bringing the sacred into the city. To me, it felt like a sell-out move. If what we were doing was truly sacred, why package it, perform it, and sell it? My confusion was red as doubt, and they were right. If I didn't support the plan, they said it was because I didn't truly understand the teachings. I wasn't alone. Eventually, others began to question him too. Letters were sent to Swami Satyananda and Swami Niranjanananda at the Bihar School of Yoga, asking whether this teacher had ever been formally recognized. The school never replied in writing. Finally, someone called the school and got a definitive answer. They had never heard of him. Years later, after everything began to unravel, the truth emerged. There were whispers of women drugged, a pregnant woman, rumors of prison time, a trial of a trail of lawsuits, a passport stamped in desperation. He fled to Thailand. I also found out that he had been raping the serpent priestess most nights for years, slipping into her room while the rest of the house slept, no consent, no language for refusal, just practice. They called it practice, but it was possession. He took from her a little each night until there was almost nothing left. The women who lived in the house, or spent a lot of time there, had also known. Maybe not all the details, but the shape of harm and the rot in the room, and they said nothing. Had I pleased him with dinner, I too would have shared the same fate. Back then I was still figuring out what power meant. I didn't roar, I observed, I kind of tested. I watched what people thought they could get away with with me. I watched who they assumed I was. I let them underestimate me. I shrank when I had to, not out of submission but strategy. I needed to see what they'd do when they thought I had no power. I wasn't silent because I was afraid I was studying. I learned how spiritual hunger gets weaponized, how performance is mistaken for purity, how submission is rewarded, because power preys on longing. Like I mentioned earlier, that teacher eventually fled to Thailand. There were lawsuits. If you're in a community right now and something feels off, trust that.