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If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat Pray Love”

“Eat. Pray. Fall in Love with [our] Inspirational India Tour. Starts at $19,795 per person, based on double occupancy.” — Micato Safaris

Marta Szabo’s spiritual journey started off a lot like Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir, “Eat Pray Love.”

“I was at a point in my life,” recalls Szabo, now 53, “when I didn’t have a lot of options.”

Like Gilbert — who’s played by Julia Roberts in the movie, out Friday, based on the book — Szabo had endured a bad breakup. Like Gilbert, she was a writer in her 30s, unhappily living in New York City, unsure what she wanted to do with her life. She, too, needed to find herself. (Unfortunately, unlike Gilbert, she didn’t get a generous book advance with which to do the finding.)

McKay Imaging
Marta Szabo warns women searching for enlightenment not to fall into an ashram con game.
Photos: Eat, Pray, Zilch
READ MORE: THE 'EPL' MARKETING GUYS WANT YOUR GREEN

PHOTOS: 'EAT PRAY LOVE' PILGRIMS

Both Gilbert and Szabo discovered an international organization called Siddha Yoga — specifically, its gorgeous, charismatic female leader, known as Gurumayi. “My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face,” Gilbert writes, in her book, of the first time she saw a photo of the guru. “Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced, ‘I want a spiritual teacher.’ ” Both women ended up at the group’s ashram, Gurudev Siddha Peeth, in Maharashtra, India.

Getting a guru: For Gilbert, this decision was a lifesaver. For Szabo, it derailed her life for more than a decade. And for thousands of women entranced with the “Eat Pray Love” phenomenon — the movie, predicted to be a major box-office contender, has spawned more than 400 retail tie-ins — it could fall somewhere between overpriced self-help and good old-fashioned fraud.

“If you see an organization that’s personality-driven, focused on this individual leader who members seem enthralled with, and who can do no wrong, you may be dealing with more of a cult than enlightenment,” warns cult expert Rick Ross, who’s spent more than two decades chronicling the dark side of so-called spiritual salvation.

New Yorker Daniel Shaw, another former Siddha staff member, explained the group’s near-instant appeal. “Initially, my experiences were very powerful, like Gilbert’s,” says Shaw, now 58. “I was at a turning point in my own life. I was pretty unhappy. And when I encountered Siddha it was like magic — the experience of stillness, the music, the incense. I found myself feeling peaceful for the first time in a very long time

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The film, like the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir on which it is based, doesn't name the real-life ashram or guru, and Gilbert has never revealed the guru's identity. Readers of the book are instead treated to breathless but abstract passages like this: "Then I listened to the Guru speak in person for the first time, and her words gave me chill bumps all over my whole body, even across the skin of my face. And when I heard she had an Ashram in India, I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible."

But if you’re somewhat familiar with India’s spiritual landscape, it’s easy to figure out that this "feminine, multilingual, university-educated" guru is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — the head of the SYDA. For starters, India doesn’t have very many female gurus, and fewer still that speak impeccable English and reside in the United States.

Gilbert also dedicates a sizable chunk of the India portion of her book to the troubles she has with the "Gurugita," an obscure 90-minute-long hymn that Gurumayi's devotees are required to chant every morning. Having been to a Siddha Yoga meditation workshop myself, I’m well acquainted with the tedium that is the Gurugita, and as far as I know, Siddha Yoga is the only Hindu spiritual order to have made the Gurugita such an essential part of a devotee's daily practice.

The ashram in the book is located in a small village just outside Mumbai, while SYDA's India ashram is tucked away in a rural idyll called Ganeshpuri, some 50 miles from Mumbai.

The book is littered with other telling biographical details about Gilbert's guru that
match up with Gurumayi — that she joined the entourage of an Indian swami (a Hindu religious teacher) as a teenager, that she served him as a translator for years before being given guru-hood, and that she was only in her 20s when she became his successor.

Earlier this week, the New York Post drew the same SYDA connection to "EPL," as others have.

When Salon contacted Gilbert's publicist at Viking to confirm that Gurumayi was in fact her guru, we were told, "No comment. Liz has always made a concerted effort to respect the privacy of the ashram."

But the evidence is overwhelming.

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In 1994, the New Yorker revisited these accusations in the article "O Guru, Guru, Guru," written by Lis Harris. Harris found several other women who said that Muktananda had forced them to have sex with him. But she also chronicled Shetty's behavior as the new guru. Shetty displayed many of the same traits as her mentor. She ran a hate campaign against her brother, who had been named as a co-successor by Muktananda, beating him and isolating him until he finally gave up his claim on the SYDA's spiritual mantle. She denied all allegations of Muktananda's sexual abuse and shielded other sexual predators inside the ashram, including a man called George Afif, who was convicted of statutory rape. Harris' piece even hinted that Shetty herself had had sexual relations with Afif. "While I was working on the story," Harris told Salon, "I was constantly followed [inside the ashram]. Men with walkie-talkies wouldn't let me go anywhere on my own. They were always asking my driver questions. A woman who I worked with in the ashram's kitchen was even noting down every word I said. It was very Big Brother-like."

The organization tried hard to keep the New Yorker from publishing the story, even threatening it with litigation. According to Marta Szabo, a one-time devotee of SYDA who wrote the book "The Guru Looked Good," Shetty once called a secret meeting to chant and perform "weird Reiki" against Lis Harris and the New Yorker's then-editor, Tina Brown. "When the article finally came out, they took every copy of the magazine that they could find and burnt them in a great pile," Harris says.

Rumors also abound of untold millions stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. (Rodarmor's exposé features Muktananda talking about just such a thing.) The foundation's workshop fees run into hundreds of dollars, and devotees who work at the ashram are mostly unpaid. "Just the money I collected from a single intensive [meditation workshop] amounted to $14,000," says Szabo.Daniel Shaw, a former devotee who now runs Leaving Siddha Yoga, says that using human conduits to ferry cash from the U.S. to India was a common practice within Siddha Yoga. "I've been asked to carry large amounts of cash under my clothes during several trips to India. Others used to carry jewelry," he says.

Charges have never been pressed against the organization. Shetty stopped speaking to the press soon after she became Gurumayi and has not publicly addressed any of the accusations in a long time. But when Rodarmor spoke to her for his piece in 1983 — just after she had taken on the mantle of guru-hood — she denied all allegations of sexual abuse against Muktananda and of the existence of Swiss bank accounts. In Harris' piece, the group's swamis (high-ranking members) steadfastly maintained that Muktananda never broke his vows of celibacy. The SYDA did not respond to Salon's request for a comment.

SYDA is now a shell of its former mid-'90s self, despite the bestseller and newfangled Hollywood associations. The South Fallsburg ashram, which once hummed with as many as 4,000 devotees, looks forlorn. Many defectors say that they left because of Shetty's increasingly authoritarian behavior and her subtle attempts at control and manipulation. "She was just mean. She humiliated me in public. She certainly wasn't enlightened," says Szabo, who was once part of a team that edited and rewrote parts of the public talks for which Shetty was revered.

In 2004, presumably about a year after her encounter with Gilbert (whose book came out in 2006), Shetty disappeared from public life. Now followers only get an occasional video message from their master. Shaw believes that the appearance of websites like Leaving Siddha Yoga caused Shetty to retreat into a world where she has full control. Others say that she's just tired of playing guru.

It's anyone's guess if "EPL's" film release will cause a renewed surge in SYDA's membership. Or if a new wave of popularity will force Shetty to come back into public view. But Gilbert's account of her time in India, her naive view of her guru as a "compassionate, loving" and "enlightened" master, and her faith that Muktananda was a "world-changing" and "self-realized" leader are all a sad chronicle of the human need to find spiritual anchors, and then to believe that these ordinary, and often deeply flawed, men and women are the path to our salvation.

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cobra said...
If any of us ever do get over it it will be a long slow process, and it will take a lot of patience and being good to ourselves.

We are not at fault here, she (Gurumayi) didn't go away because of some failing in us so please nobody blame yourself.

If anything she is at fault for not living up to what SYDA promised us, a living guru.

Remember hearing, "If you take one step towards the Guru she will take 10 steps towards you"?

Yeah, not so much now. I challenge SYDA to give us the real reason for whats going on, not empty platitudes and assurances that everything is business as usual.

September 18, 2010 3:24 PM

Seekher's reply follows.

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D.

I never lived in Ganeshpuri (SYDA's Indian ashram) but I visited in 1987, and the morning I returned I sat in a coffee shop on 1st Avenue and wept that I was in its silent gardens no more.

I like your haunted house metaphor better now that I understand it's we "outties" who haunt it with the ghosts of tenacious memory...

Read the rest of Seeker's reply here.

[ritualsofdisenchantment.blogspot.com]

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Gilbert also dedicates a sizable chunk of the India portion of her book to the troubles she has with the "Gurugita," an obscure 90-minute-long hymn that Gurumayi's devotees are required to chant every morning. Having been to a Siddha Yoga meditation workshop myself, I’m well acquainted with the tedium that is the Gurugita, and as far as I know, Siddha Yoga is the only Hindu spiritual order to have made the Gurugita such an essential part of a devotee's daily practice.

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The Siddha Yoga Ashram schedule consisted of rising each day at 4:00am to chant thirty minutes. Next came an hour-long meditation followed by a Spartan breakfast. In India it was only weak tea. In American we had hot cereal, but the sleep deprivation and the extremely low protein vegan/vegetarian diet kept everyone weak and pliable so as to be totally under his control. I have read since that this kind of diet lowers vital testosterone levels in the blood, increasing estrogen, making men equally compliant.

Then came a longwinded 2 hour chant specifically to the Guru called “The Guru Gita” which was specifically designed to brainwash the participants further with repetitive endless chanting about how “the Guru is God.”

This Chant to the Guru went on and on, reinforcing the fact that the devotee must obey the Guru.

Fear tactics inherent in the chant left only the deduction that if you left the Guru or displeased the Guru seriously bad things would certainly happen to you.

All chants were “required” unless one had work for the Guru doing other bidding.

The “Guru Gita”, with its 188 verses on how to view and obey the Guru was “mandatory chanting”, totally designed to keep control of each devotee’s physical, emotional, and nutritional state of being.

All behavior was designed to break the will power and spirit of the devotee and hand over custody of these broken souls directly to the Guru for further manipulations that pleasured the ego of the Guru.

The extremely long hours of completely free service to the Guru kept the Ashrams running. During “dinner” there was more chanting and then after dinner more and more chanting if you weren't working. Most of the time broken down devotees were always working.

There were never breaks. Disciples all worked seven days a week with only chanting or meditating if there wasn't work to do.

However, if you were staff, which I was, work was continuous and endless.

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From the outside it is easy for me to say now that the Ashrams looked like safe havens to vulnerable seekers, but when you got inside you began to see the evil cesspool of black magic manipulation and the solipsistic folly of the Guru.

In the recent best seller "Eat, Pray, Love" it is very easy to figure out that Elizabeth Gilbert is speaking directly of the Siddha Yoga Ashram in India. She glamorizes her mere month visit and her personal glorification and accounts have pointed the way for many seekers to find this Indian Ashram, easily distinguished even though she never mentions the name.

After having left this abusive cult it is fairly easy to assume that the Ashram name was never mentioned out of fear and her own manipulated devotion as a newbie/novice.

We, on the ex-Siddha Yoga Chat Group, have counseled many people to stay away from this place when they find our website on the net searching for Ms. Gilbert’s Ashram.

It would have been literally impossible for Ms. Gilbert to be able to have seen the truth in her short visit, as it took me 26 years and so many others decades.

I was finally able to look back and see how my deep desire to please the Guru and find the "spiritual enlightenment” I desired so intensely was the calling card the Guru needed to target me.

Over a period of five years, my spirit and will power were slowly and methodically broken down and eroded beyond my mind’s understanding of Swami Muktananda's ....dealings.

'Thus my story began.

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"The first big question I have is: how do you deal emotionally with the fact that Gurumayi has disappeared?"

Hello folks of guru enchantment and disenchantment. Appreciate the blog and especially this question. I think it's a trully great self inquiry. Very honest to ask.

I wanted to believe I was all over and beyond the training wheels of SY because I made the conscious choice to walk away after 20 years of bliss, magic and some of the best times of my life, but my emotions and dreams at night say otherwise. There is a pining in my heart for sangha and the beauty of all those gorgeous rituals, fire, amber oil, rose petals, ghee and Brahmin priests, etc., I adored the chanting, the honoring of deities, the sparkling order and beauty of the shrams. I seemed to flourish in those atmospheres then. But, my experiece is, right now, that the day of the Guru is over, and thus I no longer feel drawn to any spiritual community revolving around a head figure, whether they are a living or past historical Master. But, what's interesting to note on this process: As the "bliss ninny, bhakti-type" I tend to be where temperament is concerned, my emotions are very slow to process all this mysteriousness of spiritual evolution. So, slow that for probably the last 7 years now, I have been having the same darn disturbing dreams (at night when I sleep) of revisiting different Siddha ashrams where I had spent so many passionate days. All have this drab, shell-like, atmosphere with Stepford-wife-like sevites or obnoxious karma police types lingering around, espousing the current "rules of Siddha Yoga". Sometimes, Gurumayi is in these dreams, and it's the only part of the dream that has a more real quality to it.

Jury is still out on the interpretation. Except now, after finding this blog site tonight, I feel a bit more connected again. I have always wondered what happened to all my friends from the Siddha Yoga community as we all seemed to have drifted far apart all over the states and world, consumed it seems, by almost impossible and tragic challenges of life which I used to feel relief from (or was it escape) in the sangha. Life is complicated and plain difficult without the obvious grace I felt from my spiritual seeker days. I miss those sweeter, blissfully ignorant times where I was actally avoiding some of my life. Now, the rubber is meeting the road and there is no mighty Guru in town to deliver feel better moods.
Namaste,

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This quote refers to what someone described as the secret install the guru in your mind
meditation--and not that it was at this point in the intensive that the Rule of Silence was imposed...ahem. Gurumayi was still around.

"

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As the Course dragged on and the Rule of Silence was imposed, I began to fear I could really slip off the deep end, especially after the "secret" install-the-Guru-in-your-bodymeditation which did NOT feel like a loving thing to do to myself, despite everyone's doe-eyed testimonials to the contrary.
[forum.culteducation.com]

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Subj: Another ex delurks (cont'd)
Date: 96-04-27 23:48:30 EDT
From: LifeAftrSY

Finally, after agonizing indecision, I quit graduate school and EST and moved
into one of GM's ashrams. I had a distinct thought that checking into this
institution voluntarily was far better than being committed to one
involuntarily, a direction I feared I was heading. Even my parents were
mildly supportive (though clearly, if cluelessly, concerned). And my state
did improve somewhat.

Unfortunately, I started to see the ashram as my home instead of a temporary way-station. I went on staff in the kitchen and limited my social life almost entirely to devotees.
I devoured the Correspondence Course.
I took as many courses as possible, and did more than enough seva to win the trust of the management.
I took, assisted, and occasionally taught Hatha Yoga.
I eventually did virtually every seva in the ashram but manage the place.

I think a lot of devotees may have seen me as a model devotee, with the one
annoying tendency of putting down my mind frequently. It took my almost ten
years to discover that this is what I HAD to do to keep myself on the "Siddha
Path".

I spent as much time with Gurumayi as possible, even going to India twice to
be around her in the "heartland" of SY. I had some very deep and tranquil
meditations at times. I hoped for the day she might pick me for something
special, bring me into the inner circle somehow, but it never happened. To
the end, I remained a gopher, and my main real satisfaction is that I got
pretty good at it.

The end of my relationship with SY was also precipitated by a nervous
breakdown.
I decided to save money to take the first Month-Long Course in
Ganeshpuri, and my boss at work agreed to allow me to work 12-hour days
towards that end.
A couple months before that summer, I got involved in an
affair with another devotee, and a monkey-wrench was thrown into my plans of sailing into the Month-Long Course and becoming utterly and finally purified
of this nagging sense of wrongness I could never get rid of.

The short-lived affair was unexpectedly stormy, and it continued into the Course because she was also attending it. To make matters worse, we were discussing marriage in India before the course started. I started having the wierd dissociated feeling I had when I was leaving graduate school, like I was living in a bubble of denial that I couldn't break out of.

As the Course dragged on and the Rule of Silence was imposed, I began to fear I could really slip off the deep end, especially after the "secret" install-the-Guru-in-your-body meditation which did NOT feel like a loving thing to do to myself, despite everyone's doe-eyed testimonials to the contrary.

I wrote Gurumayi about what was happening with me and she had her secretary tell me to meet Swami Umeshananda (the former shrink) when I got back to the States, and to do a lot of sports there too. I told everyone I was surprised and relieved at her compassion - I expected her to assign me to garden seva or something...'

It is worth pondering that Gurumayi has not been seen in public for 5 years. For…they are still asking for money.

The Anticult wrote

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Gurumayi hiding after installing herself in them is very powerful.
Gurumayi could also just be sick of all those people and wanted to be able to get away from them, while still keeping hold of the organization. Who knows, if she has not been seen, she could even have had face-lifts, and then just do whatever she wants.

But installing herself in their psyche's using advanced techniques, and then vanishing without saying anything is very very diabolical.

She knows if she tells them what she is doing, then it kills the mystery and power. A True Believer might think she is in other dimensions communing with demi-gods, when in reality, she's watching American Idol, or Bollywood Idol, and eating Cheetos, or whatever. (Most Gurus tend to love to watch TV for hours, and the male ones often play video games hours a day...nothing else to do, I guess.)

But the happy story is people can deprogram themselves and do a Guru UNINSTALL. Just do the opposite of what they did before. Kick her out of the body using imagination and self-hypnosis meditation, over and over. Reverse all the processes.

One has to do the same thing with Byron Katie if she is in your mind too. Kick her out using the same methods she installed herself, in reverse.

[forum.culteducation.com]

And..remember, that Muktananda learned 'tech' from Est founder Werner Erhard that he then applied to these Siddha Yoga Intensives, which Gurumayi then took on.

See this thread American Tantric Dissimulation

[forum.culteducation.com]


It is of great concern that so many keep believing it was only an application of bad Hindu guruism that affected them, when what was done to them was a combination of potent modern American hypno tech, first bundled together by Werner Erhard for mass groups (Large Group Awareness Training/LGAT, that was then combined with Hindu guru theatre, by Baba Muktananda.

People were given a dose of two powerful active ingredients--LGAT and Hindu Guru dynamics and dont seem to understand that the lingering after effects of both--the LGAT install the guru in your head

Thats like being given a heavy dose of both heroin and valium and only being treated for the effects of valium without also being treated for the effects of the heroin.