Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories": Part 1 REDUX

Norco 80

LAist Studios

True Crime

4.2 • 887 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before her sudden death in 2021, Guru Jagat had become a famous Kundalini yoga teacher based in Los Angeles. But as the global pandemic grew, she started talking like a far-right coronavirus conspiracy theorist. What does her journey down the rabbit hole tell us about the appeal of conspiracies in the yoga and wellness community?

Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories" explores Guru Jagat’s rise to fame and follows along as she responds not just to the pandemic, but to a #metoo movement scandal that rocked the Kundalini yoga world in early 2020. It also explores themes of misinformation, how a healthy distrust in government and medicine can turn dark, the "relativism around truth" in the wellness industry and the influence of social media on radicalization.

The series first came out in December 2022. We're republishing it because it's one of our favorites and remains relevant. We've updated the series with a fourth episode.

In this first episode, Guru Jagat starts the pandemic with an understandable skepticism of official medical advice, but quickly grows to embrace an array of far-right conspiracy theories.

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Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Helen Hong co-host of the trivia podcast go fact to yourself join a Saturday August 17th at the Crawford in Pasadena with guests
0:08.4	Taren Killum from s and l and comedian Jen Coburn tickets tickets at LAAS.com
0:13.2	slash go fact yourself.
0:15.0	On the air, on the app, online, we're a 24-7 newsroom.
0:20.2	We cover the news whenever it happens and we get you the news wherever you are.
0:24.8	L. Studios. Studios.
0:44.0	This is imperfect paradise paradise from Allea Studios, a show about hidden worlds and messy realities.
0:57.0	I'm your host Antonia Sulejido.
1:00.0	This week we're re-running one of our favorite imperfect paradise series from last year,
1:04.6	yoga's queen of conspiracy theories.
1:07.4	I was like all in a yoga teacher that talked like that that was real, that was grounded, that was
1:15.0	so brilliantly intelligent. I knew instantly
1:18.0	I knew instantly this is my teacher.
1:21.0	This story came about because of a recurring conversation I kept
1:25.0	having with Elias correspondent Emily Geron. We both kept noticing a strange
1:29.5	phenomenon mostly on Instagram during the pandemic. People we knew who are very into wellness
1:35.3	were posting a lot of conspiratorial content and it was particularly noticeable in the
1:40.9	yoga community. Popular teachers began talking about far right conspiracy theories, questioning vaccines,
1:48.0	and railing against government lockdowns.
1:51.0	It occurred to some yoga teachers that if they had something important or
1:57.0	spicy or perhaps even inflammatory to say about the pandemic that could actually increase their engagement.
2:07.0	In LA, it's hard to avoid wellness culture and so it didn't take Emily Long to find one teacher whose plunged down the conspiracy rabbit hole was especially public and controversial.
	...

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