Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories": Part 1 REDUX
Imperfect Paradise
LAist Studios
4.5 • 535 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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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Transcript
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| 0:54.4 | This is Impro Paradise from L.A. Studios. A show about hidden worlds and messy realities. I'm your host, Antoniaz E. This week, we're rerunning one of our favorite Imperfect Paradise series from last year, yoga's queen of conspiracy theories. I was like all in, a yoga teacher that talked like that, |
| 1:00.6 | that was real, that was grounded, that was so brilliantly intelligent. I knew instantly |
| 1:08.8 | this is my teacher. |
| 1:16.2 | This story came about because of a recurring conversation I kept having with LAS correspondent Emily Garrett. We both kept noticing a strange phenomenon mostly on Instagram during the pandemic. |
| 1:22.6 | People we knew who were very into wellness were posting a lot of conspiratorial content, |
| 1:28.4 | and it was particularly noticeable in the yoga community. |
| 1:32.3 | Popular teachers began talking about far-right conspiracy theories, |
| 1:36.2 | questioning vaccines, and railing against government lockdowns. |
| 1:40.2 | It occurred to some yoga teachers that if they had something important or spicy or perhaps even inflammatory to say about the pandemic, that could actually increase their engagement. |
| 1:57.6 | In L.A., it's hard to avoid wellness culture. and so it didn't take Emily Long to find one teacher, |
| 2:03.1 | whose plunged down the conspiracy rabbit hole was especially public and controversial. |
| 2:08.6 | The spiritual or wellness scene as it stands, it's been hijacked by all of this kind of woke agenda. |
| 2:16.6 | Here's L-Aist correspondent. Correspondent, Emily Garon, with the story. |
| 2:29.1 | It's 9 a.m. in Venice, California, and a white woman and a white turban and |
... |
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