LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Two portraits of Yogi Bhajan hang on the walls at the Guru Ram Das Ashram in Los Angeles. Both are covered in fabric to hide his face. This Sikh temple was once at the heartbeat of a rapidly growing sect from the west. But after posthumous sexual assault allegations surfaced 16 years after his death, this gurdwara became a “Yogi Bhajan-free zone.”

“I'm still sorting out the internal conflict of still practicing the practices as he taught them, and continuing to learn more about the horrendous cruelty that he was capable of and that he actually did,” said Mrs. Khalsa, a member at the temple who asked to keep her first name anonymous as a protection to speak freely.

Yogi Bhajan is a self-proclaimed religious leader and guru from Punjab, India, who grew an empire of students dedicated to his spiritual teachings. The Guru Ram Das Ashram is a Sikh temple in Pico-Robertson that started in 1972 as a stronghold for Yogi Bhajan’s Western followers. Many took Kundalini yoga classes in their hometowns across America and soon converted to Sikhism.

Before his death in 2004, Yogi Bhajan expanded his global operation to encompass nearly 50 for-profits and nonprofits. One key nonprofit is the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, or 3HO, which is the organizing movement for Westerners committed to Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga teachings. Yogi Tea — one of the empire’s popular for-profit products that is sold in most grocery stores across the country — reportedly made over $6 billion in 2021 alone.

Today, the temple attracts both Punjabi Sikhs and Western Sikh-converts, but it’s rooted in a generation of vehement Yogi Bhajan followers who made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles in the ‘70s and ‘80s. His teachings spread through a network of acolytes who traveled across the country, posting fliers on college campuses, to recruit young members. Thousands of Westerners became Sikhs then converted to Sikhism, participated in arranged marriages, moved cross-country, and adopted lifestyles to honor their leader. But nearly 16 years after Bhajan’s death in 2004, some community members accused him of sexual abuse, propelling a deep schism that divided the community. Many left, but the few who stayed remain devoted to his teachings.

The exodus followed a 76-page report by a third-party organization, An Olive Branch, that determined he “more likely than not” engaged in sexual battery, sexual assault and sexual harassment with his followers.

“A lot of community members took the turbans off, they took the white clothes off, they cut their hair and they changed their name back,” said Simran Sat Sangeet Kaur, a current member and secretary of the Guru Ram Das Ashram in Los Angeles. “The thought was that we've all been part of a cult all these years.”

The Guru Ram Das Ashram is the only Los Angeles congregation that formed around Yogi Bhajan’s spiritual teachings. Unlike the roughly 20 Sikh gurdwaras around the city, it’s non-traditional because of its Western influence.

Most of two generations of followers are converts from the west. But many didn't even come to him for religion. They just wanted to do Kundalini yoga.

“If somebody would have said to me, ‘If you do this, you're going to be changing your religion, I probably would not have kept going,’” said Simran Sat Sangeet, who was 20 years old and living in St. Louis, Missouri when she started following Yogi Bhajan in 1976.

Kundalini yoga is a Yogi Bhajan-founded practice, according to doctoral religion academic Philip Deslippe. And yoga isn’t a Sikh tradition, he said.

“Yogi Bhajan cobbled together bits and pieces from other people, and then presented it as this ancient, secret, powerful yogic tradition when it very clearly wasn't,” Deslippe said about Bhajan’s Kundalini yoga practice.

Deslippe, a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara, said “it's a bizarre claim” for Yogi Bhajan to say that there's a Sikh yoga tradition.

“When you look at the actual details of how Yogi Bhajan describes it, it's even more absurd,” Deslippe said. He said Bhajan claimed that the 10 human gurus practiced his yoga, but Deslippe said there are no records, artifacts or other evidence to back Bhajan’s claim that the gurus practiced yoga. But, he added that these claims likely took hold beginning in the ‘60s because there was no internet access and the American public doesn't know much about Sikhism.

Manjit Singh is one of the earliest devotees who came to Los Angeles to study with Yogi Bhajn in 1971. “We were all kind of wild,” he said, referring to the hippie movement of the late ‘60s.

“[Yogi Bhajan] always stuck with Sikh principles, he just gave them life to us,” Manjit said. He added that the congregation changed after Bhajan’s death, because to him, it was all about the “magic of the master.”

In 3HO’s high-point in the mid-1970s, its membership was the size of a large high school, about 3,000-5,000 people, Deslippe said. Deslippe said the group is hard to count because 3HO is many things at once: a group of for-profit commercial entities, a yoga organization and a community of Sikh converts.

The group is shedding members. Deslippe believes the member count hovers around 3,000, and despite members being born into 3HO and members joining through yoga classes, growth should be happening but isn’t.

“It's graying, and the young people are leaving,” Deslippe said.

In 1979, Simran Sat Sangeet heard the first whispers of the sexual assault allegations from her husband, Harkirat Singh. It was just one month into her marriage, arranged by Yogi Bhajan and officiated two weeks after meeting one another.

Her husband said he thought Yogi Bhajan was having sex with some of the women, and Simran Sat Sangeet questioned it. He responded: “F— Yogi Bhajan!”

Although she believed the allegations were true, Simran Sat Sangeet didn’t know how to proceed because she feared backlash from Yogi Bhajan, who employed a chilling effect to curb negative speech in the community.

“I can't talk about it because he was very powerful and very manipulative. And you were not allowed to say anything about things like this, he would chop you up in public real quick,” she said. “Everybody pretty much toed the line.”

She also feared ostracization from the entire community.

This was corroborated by Khalsa, who is in her 70s and from the southeast region of the United States.

“Throughout the decades, there have been rumors that were quickly squashed,” she said. “We were told: don't listen to so-and-so, they've gone negative, they’re spreading lies and they're slandering the teacher.”

Simran Sat Sangeet said her husband questioned Yogi Bhajan because Harkirat grew up in a traditional Sikh household in India and knew Sikh culture.

“He said [Yogi Bhajan is] brainwashing everybody,” Simran Sat Sangeet said. Her husband wouldn’t let her go to Yogi Bhajan’s biweekly Kundalini Yoga classes in L.A., she added, which she abided by to keep family peace.

Simran Sat Sangeet stayed in the congregation because her practice was centered around the guru — the scriptures that are worshiped in traditional Sikh religion — rather than Yogi Bhajan’s teachings. She cites her relationship with her Sikh-born husband as a major factor in deciding to stay at the congregation in the aftermath of the Yogi Bhajan controversy.

“It really saved me that I married an Indian Sikh,” she said. “For most of the Americans, their focus was on Yogi Bhajan, because he was the one that brought everything to their life.”

She also said it’s a priority to be in an English-speaking gurdwara because the other Los Angeles temples don’t hold services in English.

Despite the controversy, she remains grateful to Bhajan.

“I'm very grateful to him at the same time because I love the lifestyle that I've been living,” she said. “I will continue to live it until I'm no longer on this earth.”

Within the marble walls

On a damp Sunday afternoon in January, about two dozen people walked barefoot from flooded sidewalks into the Guru Ram Das Ashram. The marble-lined walls were adorned with illustrations of the Golden Temple in India. Before walking in, devotees touched one finger to the ground, and the same finger to their forehead — a symbol that even the dust on the floor is holy in their sacred space.

Khalsa is a short, soft-spoken woman dressed in traditional, all-white Sikh attire. She said that the leadership has made the temple a Yogi Bhajan-free zone. Two portraits of their late leader have been covered with fabric that fits snuggly around one large frame and one medium-sized frame in the north arm of the L-shaped gurdwara. Following the sexual assault allegations, the leadership decided to remove the portraits. But they were blocked by their parent organization, the Siri Singh Sahib Corporation, which asserted ownership rights of the portraits. The congregation also halted mentions of Yogi Bhajan in prayer, and stopped playing excerpts of his lectures.

“For some people, that makes the place safe and free from Yogi Bhajan’s obvious influence or presence,” Khalsa said. “For others, it's deeply offensive, because they still honor him as their teacher and as the founder of the gurdwara.”

Khalsa said before 2020, about 60 people participated in Sunday worship. But, some members left because of Bhajan’s allegations, and others because of the leadership's response to row back on Bhajan idolization.

She stayed in the congregation because of her deep theological alignments with Sikhism, and points to her meaningful Sikh baptism in 1982. She said others have stayed because they are English-speakers, the gurdwara may be close to family homes and the small congregation allows for more opportunities to participate than in a traditional Punjabi gurdwara.

Deslippe hazards a guess as to why others stayed past 2020. First, it’s a question of identity. “It's very difficult to change who you are at a certain age. And that's a major change,” he said.

Khalsa, like other first-generation followers in Los Angeles, are working to reconcile their emotions.

“We were taught that these practices would help a person stay clean, clear and pure and avoid corruption for greed, sex or power. To learn that Yogi Bhajan, the yogi, who could not control himself in certain circumstances was a valuable spiritual lesson for me,” she said. “Don't expect any human to be superhuman.”

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Khalsa said that Yogi Bhajan is completely irrelevant for Punjabi attendees.

“It's kind of a shrug of the shoulders for the most part,” she said about how Punjabi Sikhs feel towards his influence.

The Song of the Khalsa rang during the religious service at Guru Ram Das Ashram. This song, according to Yogi Bhajan in a 1977 statement, has the 3HO’s “entire philosophy” in its lyrics.

“It’s a total Western thing,” said Saheb Singh, a Punjabi Sikh from the Namdhari tribe. “This is not in Sikhism.”

Though Saheb does not affiliate with Yogi Bhajan or his teachings, Saheb said Sikh’s do not discriminate against certain gurdwaras or their leadership.

“Being a Sikh, we have respect for everyone,” he said. “Though I'm not a follower, I do respect [Yogi Bhajan] for the right reasons.”

Saheb said that for Westerners who came into Sikhism for religious devotion, Sikhism takes priority. But, he said this devotion is not universal. “People who have come through 3HO and the Kundalini practice, for them, the Kundalini side takes precedence over Sikhism.”

“Oh, you're a Sikh now”

Harkirat Singh migrated to the United States in his 20’s, first leaving India with a Scottish man who took him to England in exchange for a case of whiskey. Only after arriving in America he became involved with Yogi Bhajan — which is rare, as most Sikhs around the world do not know of or practice Kundalini Yoga.

But, his wife Simran Sat Sangeet anchored roots in this lifestyle in 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Simran Sat Sangeet was the fourth of six children in a Catholic family. She and her mother would attend various religious events in their hometown, and one day they appeared at a meeting of different religions. She said a man with a white turban stood up and invited everyone to visit his ashram — a spiritual boarding home — and experience Kundalini yoga. She noted he said everyone could spend the night and wake up early with them.

She tried out a yoga class in the St. Louis ashram soon after.

The then-20-year-old was living at home at the time and working at a gas station. Her parents were going on vacation for two weeks, and told Simran Sat Sangeet — whose name is Sanskrit and was adopted six months into her practice — and her two younger siblings that they couldn’t live at home when they were gone.

“I didn't know where else to go,” she said. “So I went to the ashram.”

During these two weeks, she woke up at 3:45 a.m., prayed, did yoga and practiced meditation.

Everything started to align for her. They were all vegetarian, and she had wanted to change her diet since high school. The ashram owned a health food store in the Central West End in St. Louis, and she later began working there. They were told to wear a turban and the color white, “the color of pureness,” and she started wearing white from head to toe.

Simran Sat Sangeet said as she was taught, she started to dress differently and wear a turban. Then over time, the group started to do Kirtan, the spiritual music performance, and practice certain prayers as a part of a Sikh gurdwara.

“You started to do the practices of Sikhism, but you didn't really know the label for it,” she said.

She added that at the time, she didn’t know Kundalini Yoga and meditation were connected to any religion. “It took me quite a while before my mind actually said, oh, you're a Sikh now,” Simran Sat Sangeet said. “The merge wasn't so black and white.”

Yogi Bhajan encouraged his followers to change their names to a Sanskrit name, in line with the new identity and lifestyle they work to make for themselves. His philosophy was that it would be too easy to relapse back into your old lifestyle, according to Simran Sat Sangeet. She remembers sending a letter to her family asking them to call her by her new name.

“I didn't realize at the time that it was hurtful,” she said. “I was just very self righteous about it.”

Deslippe said the majority of people who joined 3HO in the ‘70s are from Catholic and Jewish backgrounds, or people who are “raised on a religion.”

“They become hippies and they become disaffected from their childhood fates,” Deslippe said. “But when they come back to a faith through the counterculture, it fits.”

Khalsa was born into a small Episcopal church in the Southeast, where she attended church every Sunday and sang in the choir. She studied at a graduate school in New England and discovered Kundalini yoga for health reasons around 1980. There, she discovered Yogi Bhajan’s style of practicing Sikh Dharma.

“It all felt and fit like an old shoe,” she said. During the winter solstice of 1980, she received her Sanskrit name from Yogi Bhajan who could “look at a person and see all their souls previous incarnations” and “give a mantra name that would help keep a person on that track,” Khalsa said.

She attended her first summer solstice yoga-intensive in 1982, what she describes as a “rigorous and uplifting” experience taking classes all day and camping out on the hard ground in tents in the high desert where temperatures hit high during the day and low in the night. There, a group of mutual friends introduced her to a Los Angeles man who was looking to marry. Time after time, they met at yoga-intensives until they decided to get married at summer solstice 1983, shortly after moving out to Los Angeles to anchor at Yogi Bhajan’s main hub.

“We were all so young and idealistic,” she said of her young love.

Now, the modern Los Angeles community has shifted. There’s a whole spectrum of people who have left or stayed, but many, like Khalsa, feel stuck in a gray area.

“Others who believe the stories have walked away and will have nothing to do with anything that he touched,” she said. “And a lot of us are somewhere in between. It's very, very raw for us.”