How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

THE NEW YORK TIMES
JANUARY 5, 2012

Editors’ note: We’re resurfacing this 2012 magazine article for Smarter Living so you can feel a little less guilty about skipping that yoga class.

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.

At Sankalpah Yoga, the room was packed; roughly half the students were said to be teachers themselves. Black walked around the room, joking and talking. “Is this yoga?” he asked as we sweated through a pose that seemed to demand superhuman endurance. “It is if you’re paying attention.” His approach was almost free-form: he made us hold poses for a long time but taught no inversions and few classical postures. Throughout the class, he urged us to pay attention to the thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way — pop, pop, pop.

After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

Black seemingly reconciles the dangers of yoga with his own teaching of it by working hard at knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something — the shoulder stand, the headstand or putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.” Though he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a legendary Manhattan-based physical therapist who devised a method of massage and alignment for actors and dancers, he acknowledges that he has no formal training for determining which poses are good for a student and which may be problematic. What he does have, he says, is “a ton of experience.”

“To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘O.K., we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’ — it just doesn’t work.”

Salazar: I would say I’m a 7 out of 10 on the flexibility scale.
DANIELLE LEVITT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”

“They look at me like I’m crazy,” he goes on to say. “And I know if they continue, they won’t be able to take it.” I asked him about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips.” “One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints,” Black told me. “The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements.” I asked if she still taught. “Oh, yeah,” Black replied. “There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”

Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. Jagannath G. Gune, who helped revive yoga for the modern era, made no allusion to injuries in his journal Yoga Mimansa or his 1931 book “Asanas.” Indra Devi avoided the issue in her 1953 best seller “Forever Young, Forever Healthy,” as did B. K. S. Iyengar in his seminal “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965. Reassurances about yoga’s safety also make regular appearances in the how-to books of such yogis as Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois and Bikram Choudhury. “Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda, a guru who made 10 world tours and founded ashrams on several continents.

But a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people, a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals — among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities. In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.

Doctors traced the problem to an unresponsive nerve, a peripheral branch of the sciatic, which runs from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the legs. Sitting in vajrasana deprived the branch that runs below the knee of oxygen, deadening the nerve. Once the student gave up the pose, he improved rapidly. Clinicians recorded a number of similar cases and the condition even got its own name: “yoga foot drop.”

More troubling reports followed. In 1972 a prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell, published an article in The British Medical Journal arguing that, while rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in relatively young, healthy people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but also from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in whiplash — or certain yoga poses. Normally, the neck can stretch backward 75 degrees, forward 40 degrees and sideways 45 degrees, and it can rotate on its axis about 50 degrees. Yoga practitioners typically move the vertebrae much farther. An intermediate student can easily turn his or her neck 90 degrees — nearly twice the normal rotation.

Hyperflexion of the neck was encouraged by experienced practitioners. Iyengar emphasized that in cobra pose, the head should arch “as far back as possible” and insisted that in the shoulder stand, in which the chin is tucked deep in the chest, the trunk and head forming a right angle, “the body should be in one straight line, perpendicular to the floor.” He called the pose, said to stimulate the thyroid, “one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our ancient sages.”

Aduba: You know when people jump up into those crazy positions, like they stand on their eyeballs or something, while you’re sitting there just trying to figure out which side of the mat you used the last time? I envy them.
DANIELLE LEVITT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Extreme motions of the head and neck, Russell warned, could wound the vertebral arteries, producing clots, swelling and constriction, and eventually wreak havoc in the brain. The basilar artery, which arises from the union of the two vertebral arteries and forms a wide conduit at the base of the brain, was of particular concern. It feeds such structures as the pons (which plays a role in respiration), the cerebellum (which coordinates the muscles), the occipital lobe of the outer brain (which turns eye impulses into images) and the thalamus (which relays sensory messages to the outer brain). Reductions in blood flow to the basilar artery are known to produce a variety of strokes. These rarely affect language and conscious thinking (often said to be located in the frontal cortex) but can severely damage the body’s core machinery and sometimes be fatal. The majority of patients suffering such a stroke do recover most functions. But in some cases headaches, imbalance, dizziness and difficulty in making fine movements persist for years.

Russell also worried that when strokes hit yoga practitioners, doctors might fail to trace their cause. The cerebral damage, he wrote, “may be delayed, perhaps to appear during the night following, and this delay of some hours distracts attention from the earlier precipitating factor.”

In 1973, a year after Russell’s paper was published, Willibald Nagler, a renowned authority on spinal rehabilitation at Cornell University Medical College, published a paper on a strange case. A healthy woman of 28 suffered a stroke while doing a yoga position known as the wheel or upward bow, in which the practitioner lies on her back, then lifts her body into a semicircular arc, balancing on hands and feet. An intermediate stage often involves raising the trunk and resting the crown of the head on the floor. While balanced on her head, her neck bent far backward, the woman “suddenly felt a severe throbbing headache.” She had difficulty getting up, and when helped into a standing position, was unable to walk without assistance. The woman was rushed to the hospital. She had no sensation on the right side of her body; her left arm and leg responded poorly to her commands. Her eyes kept glancing involuntarily to the left. And the left side of her face showed a contracted pupil, a drooping upper eyelid and a rising lower lid — a cluster of symptoms known as Horner’s syndrome. Nagler reported that the woman also had a tendency to fall to the left.

Her doctors found that the woman’s left vertebral artery, which runs between the first two cervical vertebrae, had narrowed considerably and that the arteries feeding her cerebellum had undergone severe displacement. Given the lack of advanced imaging technologies at the time, an exploratory operation was conducted to get a clearer sense of her injuries. The surgeons who opened her skull found that the left hemisphere of her cerebellum suffered a major failure of blood supply that resulted in much dead tissue and that the site was seeped in secondary hemorrhages.

The patient began an intensive program of rehabilitation. Two years later, she was able to walk, Nagler reported, “with [a] broad-based gait.” But her left arm continued to wander and her left eye continued to show Horner’s syndrome. Nagler concluded that such injuries appeared to be rare but served as a warning about the hazards of “forceful hyperextension of the neck.” He urged caution in recommending such postures, particularly to individuals of middle age.

The experience of Nagler’s patient was not an isolated incident. A few years later, a 25-year-old man was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, complaining of blurred vision, difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. Steven H. Hanus, a medical student at the time, became interested in the case and worked with the chairman of the neurology department to determine the cause (he later published the results with several colleagues). The patient had been in excellent health, practicing yoga every morning for a year and a half. His routine included spinal twists in which he rotated his head far to the left and far to the right. Then he would do a shoulder stand with his neck “maximally flexed against the bare floor,” just as Iyengar had instructed, remaining in the inversion for about five minutes. A series of bruises ran down the man’s lower neck, which, the team wrote in The Archives of Neurology, “resulted from repeated contact with the hard floor surface on which he did yoga exercises.” These were a sign of neck trauma. Diagnostic tests revealed blockages of the left vertebral artery between the c2 and c3 vertebrae; the blood vessel there had suffered “total or nearly complete occlusion” — in other words, no blood could get through to the brain.

Two months after his attack, and after much physical therapy, the man was able to walk with a cane. But, the team reported, he “continued to have pronounced difficulty performing fine movements with his left hand.” Hanus and his colleagues concluded that the young man’s condition represented a new kind of danger. Healthy individuals could seriously damage their vertebral arteries, they warned, “by neck movements that exceed physiological tolerance.” Yoga, they stressed, “should be considered as a possible precipitating event.” In its report, the Northwestern team cited not only Nagler’s account of his female patient but also Russell’s early warning. Concern about yoga’s safety began to ripple through the medical establishment.

These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive reporting — they reveal trends rather than totals — but the spike was nonetheless statistically significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds of therapists.

Blaemire: The plow was the easiest position of the day — though it is quite a strange feeling having your face that close to your knees.
DANIELLE LEVITT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Around this time, stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments — the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint — failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and dislocations.

In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors. The answers to the survey’s central question — What were the most serious yoga-related injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen? — revealed that the largest number of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of risk — nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warning — pointed to a decided shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.

In recent years, reformers in the yoga community have begun to address the issue of yoga-induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff — a yoga instructor and therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina — revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again. The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin Quistgaard, described reinjuring a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class. “I’ve experienced how yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt — and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis.”

One of the most vocal reformers is Roger Cole, an Iyengar teacher with degrees in psychology from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. Cole has written extensively for Yoga Journal and speaks on yoga safety to the American College of Sports Medicine. In one column, Cole discussed the practice of reducing neck bending in a shoulder stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of folded blankets and letting the head fall below it. The modification eases the angle between the head and the torso, from 90 degrees to perhaps 110 degrees. Cole ticked off the dangers of doing an unmodified shoulder stand: muscle strains, overstretched ligaments and cervical-disk injuries.

But modifications are not always the solution. Timothy McCall, a physician who is the medical editor of Yoga Journal, called the headstand too dangerous for general yoga classes. His warning was based partly on his own experience. He found that doing the headstand led to thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition that arises from the compression of nerves passing from the neck into the arms, causing tingling in his right hand as well as sporadic numbness. McCall stopped doing the pose, and his symptoms went away. Later, he noted that the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose). “Unfortunately,” McCall concluded, “the negative effects of headstand can be insidious.”

Almost a year after I first met Glenn Black at his master class in Manhattan, I received an e-mail from him telling me that he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote. “Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”

The injury, Black said, had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists. He had developed spinal stenosis — a serious condition in which the openings between vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing excruciating pain. Black said that he felt the tenderness start 20 years ago when he was coming out of such poses as the plow and the shoulder stand. Two years ago, the pain became extreme. One surgeon said that without treatment, he would eventually be unable to walk. The surgery took five hours, fusing together several lumbar vertebrae. He would eventually be fine but was under surgeon’s orders to reduce strain on his lower back. His range of motion would never be the same.

Black is one of the most careful yoga practitioners I know. When I first spoke to him, he said he had never injured himself doing yoga or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming any of his students. I asked him if his recent injury could have been congenital or related to aging. No, he said. It was yoga. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”

Black recently took that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the subject deepened by his recent operation. But his warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was a little more emphatic than usual,” he recalled. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html

Estate fight continues between Yogi Bhajan's widow, female assistants

Tom Sharpe
New Mexican
December 29, 2011

More than seven years after his death, Yogi Bhajan's widow and his younger female assistants disagree over how to divide his multimillion-dollar estate — which now includes the trademark rights to Yogi Tea.

Less than a year before his death in 2004, Yogi Bhajan, founder of a religious community near Española, signed a codicil to his 1987 will that called for a portion of his estate to go to a living trust to support 15 of his assistants.

His widow, Inderjit Kaur Puri, also known as Bibiji, did not immediately move to open a probate on his estate or to challenge the codicil assigning at least $4 million to the trust.

But in October 2007, the three trustees of the living trust sued Puri, claiming she was delaying distribution of funds to the trust by claiming she knew nothing about it.

In a counterclaim, Puri asked that the trustees be removed because, as three of the 15 assistants benefiting from the trust, they are in breach of their fiduciary duties.

Noting that Yogi Bhajan was suffering from physical and mental ailments at the time the codicil was signed, the counterclaim says the "assistants to Yogi Bhajan signed his name to the documents."

In April 2009, state District Judge James Hall dismissed the trustees' complaint but left the counterclaim intact. Hall retired at the end of 2009, and the case was transferred to District Judge Sarah Singleton, who waited until Nov. 7 to hold her first meeting on the case. She set a trial date for March 19.

Neither the trustees' lawyer, J. Katherine Girard, nor the trustees themselves, Sopurkh Kaur Khalsa, Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa and Ek Ong Kar Kaur Khalsa, have been available for comment.

Puri's attorney, Surjit Soni of Pasadena, Calif., agreed that the former assistants are due income from the trust. But he said that because Yogi Bhajan had handled his family's financial affairs, "like most guys tend to do," Puri was unaware of his donations to the living trust.

Soni, who is also Puri's nephew, said he is asking the judge to apply community-property rules to the case, so that the "marital estate" is divided in half and payments to the 15 assistants come out of Yogi Bhajan's portion, not Puri's.

Not until 2009, five years after Yogi Bhajan's death, did Puri move to open Yogi Bhajan's will to probate proceedings in state District Court in Santa Fe. Judge Barbara Vigil assigned Christopher Cullen, a Santa Fe lawyer, as the personal representative of the estate, but "gave him very specific but very limited instructions about what he could investigate and how he could investigate," Soni said.

As a result, Cullen was unable to identify all of the assets of the estate, and Vigil ordered the probate closed, "saying no other assets have been discovered," Soni said. "We disagree with that because we don't think the investigation was complete." He said he is appealing that closure.

This year, the estate became significantly more valuable because of a federal trademark case over Yogi Tea — a blend of black tea, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger and peppercorns that Yogi Bhajan used to serve at his kundalini yoga classes and went on to sell at his restaurants and health-food stores.

In 2004, a Eugene, Ore., company called Golden Temple of Oregon began marketing Yogi Tea, using Yogi Bhajan's name and likeness, under an agreement with him. This continued for four years after his death, with royalties split between Puri, the assistants' trust and a religious trust. In 2008, Golden Temple quit paying royalties and using Yogi Bhajan's name and likeness, but continued to use the name Yogi Tea to begin selling another tea called just Yogi.

Puri sued, and this fall an arbiter ordered Golden Temple to cease using the trademark by Jan. 1 and pay $822,302 to Yogi Bhajan's estate, based on sales in recent years. With Yogi Tea sales of $27 million in 2009 in the United States and Europe, the Eugene Register-Guard estimated the heirs might be owed another $485,905 by the end of 2012 — plus what they might gain from selling the trademark to others.

A separate but related case was brought in Oregon state court by the ministers of the religious trust, Unto Infinity, against Golden Temple. This month, a Portland, Ore., judge ruled that Golden Temple's CEO, Kartar Singh Khalsa, unjustly enriched himself and other company executives at the expense of Unto Infinity. Monetary damages have yet to be determined, but Unto Infinity is seeking $50 million. Several other trademarks used by Golden Temple, in addition to Yogi Tea, remain in contention.

Soni, Puri's attorney, said these rulings prove that not all the assets of the estate were identified — partly because the trustees for the assistants did not thoroughly investigate. "We demonstrated there are trademarks that the trustees did not appreciate, recognize, pursue, claim — that we, at great personal expense, have been able to secure," he said.

The litigation over Yogi Tea has been covered closely by the Sikh News Network (sikhnn.com). A November article there pointed out that the assistants are "Caucasians" who converted to Sikhism and assumed their Sikh surnames, posting photographs of the former assistants who were not wearing the turbans or dress worn by traditional Sikhs.

"Peraim Kaur, one of his personal staff members, in her testimony for another lawsuit in Oregon, described how she worked long hours for little pay," says the article. "She told the court she had no vacations and was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also is common knowledge that his personal staff was discouraged from having outside relationships."

The Sikh News Network's correspondent on those stories, Kamalia Kaur, described herself as a "survivor of the YB [Yogi Bhajan] cult." Kaur, now 58 and living in Bellingham, Wash., said she joined Yogi Bhajan's Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, or 3HO, 40 years ago after taking a kundalini yoga class with her husband at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Years later, while living in the Bay Area of California, she began questioning the "organization's dysfunctional side," she wrote in an email. "Soon I was shunned — and former students started calling me and telling me their horrible stories. Then I got a threatening phone call."

Kaur eventually divorced her husband, who remained with Yogi Bhajan's organization. She gave up custody of her three children, turned over her money to her ex-husband, "and hit the streets. But I couldn't stop studying the story of my life," she wrote. "When you lose the years 18-37, your prime, to ... serving a sociopath, you might as well dedicate a few years to warning and educating others about authoritarian groups."

She now moderates an online forum called "The Wacko World of Yogi Bhajan" on which both Kaur and others have referred repeatedly to Yogi Bhajan's assistants as his harem. But that may be the least of the charges on the website, where Yogi Bhajan is accused of a variety of illegal activities, including fraudulent marketing schemes, drug dealing and corruption.

Recently, Kaur has pointed out that one of Yogi Bhajan's former assistants was an aide to former Gov. Bill Richardson. "Siri Trang Kaur is one of the younger women listed among the fifteen 'personal assistants' in Bhajan's trust," she wrote. "She's cut in for six percent of the distribution in the trust that's part of Bibiji's continuing legal dispute with the harem."

Siri Trang Kaur, who sometimes uses the last name Khalsa, is listed as an associate of Albuquerque political and public relations specialist Doug Turner in a firm called Policy and Positions. The company's website says she was the director of marketing for the firm that first brought Yogi Tea and other Golden Temple products to the market, worked as a foreign policy adviser in Richardson's 2008 presidential campaign, and that she is now "on assignment with the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan." She did not return an email seeking comment on this story.

Soni dismissed Kamalia Kaur's allegations: "We have resisted getting involved in that kind of silly debate. If she's got an ax to grind, she's got an ax to grind. If her experience is less than optimal, that's fine. ...

"What exactly is a cult? Every born-again community, whether it's Baptist, Anglican, Buddhist, every one of them is a cult. Cult, unfortunately, has a negative suggestion and implication."

Kaur is hardly the only former Yogi Bhajan disciple to break with 3HO. Guru Sant Singh Khalsa, who in 1982 unsuccessfully challenged the U.S. Department of Defense's rule banning servicemembers from wearing traditional Sikh garb, said he became disillusioned after visiting India and realizing that real Sikh culture was different than Yogi Bhajan had led him to believe.

Now living in Yuba City, Calif., Gura Sant said Yogi Bhajan's devotion to tantric yoga, astrology and other "new age" practices would be forbidden by traditional Sikhs, who also would abhor the "cult of personality" that sprung up around him. He recalled that Yogi Bhajan collected art that traditional Sikhs would consider pornographic and regularly slept in his room with one of his "secretaries" while his wife slept in another room.

As early as 1977, Time magazine took notice of rumors about Yogi Bhajan's assistants. "Bhajan has repeatedly been accused of being a womanizer," it said in a story about 3HO. "Colleen Hoskins, who worked seven months at his New Mexico residence, reports that men are scarcely seen there. He is served, she says, by a coterie of as many as 14 women, some of whom attend his baths, give him group massages, and take turns spending the night in his room while his wife sleeps elsewhere."

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/Yogi-tea-brouhaha

Alas poor Craniosacral. A SCAM of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

Mark Crislip

Science Based Medicine

December 16, 2011
It is hard to Sokalize alternative medicine. The closest has been buttock reflexology/acupuncture, but that is a tame example.  Given the propensity for projections of the human body to appear on the iris, hand, foot, tongue, and ear, postulating a similar pattern on the buttocks are simple variations on a common SCAM (Supplements, Complementary and Alternative Medicine) theme. The buttocks?  Not really different from any of the other focal acupunctures.  Most of SCAM does not concern itself with application of reality  and physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, etc can all be expected to be ignored with virtually all SCAM modalities.

Every time I think the heights (or depths) of absurdity has been reached, I discover a Braco the Starer or Himalayan Salt Inhalers. This blog is not affiliated with the British Medical Journal in any way, and although this is being published near Christmas, I want no one think that what follows is a hoax.  I am not, I repeat not,  making up what follows. It is not fiction. Well, it is fiction, but not written by me and believed and practiced by some who really should know better.

Craniosacral Therapy

Like many SCAM modalities, from Reiki to Chiropractic,  Craniosacral Therapy (CST) was invented? discovered? fabricated? pulled out of the a..,  well, er, Drs Novella and Gorski want this to be a professional blog *, so lets say, a three letter word that starts with ‘a’. Air. It was pulled out of the air by William Garner Sutherland.

While a student at the American School of Osteopathy in 1899, Dr. Sutherland pondered the fine details of a separated or “disarticulated” skull. He wondered about the function of this complex architecture. Dr. Still taught that every structure exists because it performs a particular function. While looking at a temporal bone, a flash of inspiration struck Dr. Sutherland: “Beveled like the gills of a fish, indicating respiratory motion for an articular mechanism.

I guess  drug use was more popular than I thought back in the day. Maybe I am not able to get the right photograph of gills to see the connection. You? Do you see the connection, or do you lack the “unique genius” of  Dr. Sutherland ? Because the temporal bones are beveled like fish gills (!), the bones of the head are supposed to move relative to each other (!) with respiration (!).  That is the insight that lead to CST. I wonder if the abstract announcing his discovery would have been accepted at the  International Conference on Integrative Medicine.  It makes gluteal reflexology appear reasonable in comparison.

Dr. Sutherlands’ insight did not stop there.  He synthesized his observations into “The Primary Respiratory Mechanism”:

This Primary Respiratory Mechanism has five basic components:

1) The inherent rhythmic motion of the brain and spinal cord.
2) The fluctuation of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes and nourishes the brain and spina l cord.
3) The shifting tensions of the membranous envelope (dura mater) surrounding the brain and spinal cord. This entire membranous structure acts as a unit and is called a “Reciprocal Tension Membrane.”
4) The inherent rhythmic motion of the cranial bones.
5) The involuntary motion of the sacrum (tailbone) between the ilia (hip bones).

I don’t know that means.  I read the words, I think about what I understand about anatomy and physiology, I reread the above and I got nothing. A word salad, it appears to be all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Repeat.  It is not meant to be fiction.

To make it more mysterious, or fanciful, the CSF has tides:

“1) the cranial rhythmic impulse; a more superficial rhythm expressed at an average rate of 8-12 cycles per minute,
2) the mid-tide; a tidal rhythm that carries ordering forces into the body expressed at a slower rate of approximately 2.5 cycles per minute and
3) the long tide; a deep and slow rhythmic impulse expressed about once every 100 seconds. The long tide is considered to be the first stirring of life and motion as the Breath of Life emerges from a deeper ground of stillness at the center of our being.”

I know topic was the death of MacBeth’s wife but Act 5, Scene 5, lines 26-28 keeps running in my head. It is an explanation of physiology that would be right at home on Dr. Oz’s site, but has no relationship to any known anatomy or physiology. Other explanations of the tides make no sense to me, containing nothing I can recognize as content amongst what appears to be a word salad.  Although I suspect CST would appeal to Bloodline aliens.

I do not think there is a SCAM where the practitioners deny the evidence in their hands.  There are videos of CST therapists saying that, unlike what is taught in medical school, the bones of the skull are not fused and articulate.  They say this with Yorick in their hands, a skull evidently never contemplated.  If you have ever held a skull in your hands, or been in a neurosurgical case,  it is evident that the cranium is notable for the rock solid joinings of bones.  The metaphor is thick skulled, is it not?  It is not fish-gilled skulled.

Acupuncturists may blather about meridians and homeopathists drivel on about the memory of water, but at least they do not hold the dis-confirming evidence in their hands, denying its existence.  I have seen patients deny an obvious tumor or the symptoms of advanced AIDS.  Look at that skull in your hands.  The bones do not move. To have a whole field of SCAM based on the denial of palpable reality is most curious.  As Marx said, sort of,  “Who are you going to believe, Sutherland or your lying eyes?”

What does a practitioner do with the insight that the CSF flows incorrectly and the cranial bones are out of wack? CST

“involves the practitioner “listening through the hands” to the body’s subtle rhythms and any patterns of inertia or congestion. Through the development of subtle palpatory skills the practitioner can read the story of the body, identify places where issues are held and then follow the natural priorities for healing as directed by the patient’s own physiology.”

As I gather from the gibberish of the YouTubes and CST sites, they push the bones of your skull back into place, alter and optimize the flow of CSF and make you better. I think.  Because nothing they say really makes any anatomic or physiologic sense:

The trained practitioner palpates for the sensation of resistance on the skin surface overlying the spine and cranium. Resistance is thought to be indicative of underlying CSF stasis, and following treatment, the absence of drag may indicate that the CSF stasis has been reduced.”

as one of a tedious series of examples.  They can feel the tides and CSF rhythms and alter them. They can change the tides, at least the CSF tides.  I am old school when it comes to altering tides: And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.  But that is obvious, which is why it is an aphorism.

The cranial rhythmic impulse is an oscillation recognized by many bodywork practitioners, but the functional origin of this impulse remains uncertain. We propose that the cranial rhythmic impulse is the palpable perception of entrainment, a harmonic frequency that incorporates the rhythms of multiple biological oscillators. It is derived primarily from signals between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Entrainment also arises between organisms. The harmonizing of coupled oscillators into a single, dominant frequency is called frequency-selective entrainment. We propose that this phenomenon is the modus operandi of practitioners who use the cranial rhythmic impulse in craniosacral treatment.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously indeed.   Take an anatomy and physiology that does not exist, then postualte a mechanism of action.  At least in that respect there is not a difference between CST and acupuncture or homeopathy. Except quantum. Where is the quantum. We need quantum.

Practical Uses of Quantum Physics Concepts in CranioSacral Therapy

Adding a few new intentions to your hands-on work is quite simple. All you need to do is incorporate a few principles of quantum physics.
First, we direct our energy into hard, stiff or restricted areas of the client’s body.

Of course, I giggle like the immature person I am. I know. What an infant.  But I giggled a lot writing this entry; truly a field of infinite jest.  Of course, the only real parallel between CST and quantum of any kind are N-Rays, sharing identical reality.

Similar to other SCAMs, there is zero consistency in the ability of CST practitioners to feel the same tides in the same patients.

Two registered osteopaths, both with postgraduate training in diagnosis and treatment, using cranial techniques, palpated 11 normal healthy subjects.
METHODS:
Examiners simultaneously palpated for the CRI at the head and the sacrum of each subject. Examiners indicated the “full flexion” phase of the CRI by activating silent foot switches that were interfaced with a computer. Subject arousal was monitored using heart rate. Examiners were blind to each other’s results and could not communicate during data collection.
RESULTS:
Reliability was estimated from calculation of intraclass correlation coefficients (2,1). Intrarater reliability for examiners at either the head or the sacrum was fair to good, significant intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from +0.52 to +0.73. Interexaminer reliability for simultaneous palpation at the head and the sacrum was poor to nonexistent, ICCs ranging from -0.09 to +0.31. There were significant differences between rates of CRI palpated simultaneously at the head and the sacrum.
CONCLUSIONS:
The results fail to support the construct validity of the “core-link” hypothesis as it is traditionally held by proponents of craniosacral therapy and osteopathy in the cranial field.

Reproductively and the ability to consistently feel the tides has been refuted in more than one trial. King Canute they aren’t.

In reality what do CST practitioners do?  They lightly massage your head.  To treat everything from Downs to headache to PMS.  It is an all purpose diagnostic and therapeutic intervention, like all SCAMs.

There are no shortage of videos demonstrating the techniques of CST, one practitioner states she pushes the bones back into alignment with a 5 gram pressure, the weight of a nickel.  I do not think a nickles worth of pressure would move a skull bone a quantum amount,  not even if dropped off the Empire State Building.

Once I had a colleague (really, a colleague. Not me) who commented he liked to have hair cuts because the scalp massage with the wash and condition was very relaxing, and I will admit that lying on ones back while you head is massaged looks very pleasant, especially if it occurred in the middle of a busy work day and was paid for by Blue Cross.  If you had a process that was due, in part, from stress, I can see where a CST session would be most beneficial. I always return to the example of the relaxing effect of apes mutual grooming, although “in deference to one million years of human evolution, the therapist won’t try to pick fleas off his patient.” Or so one hopes.

I wrote the last paragraph before I did a Pubmed search on the topic.  Lets see if CST helps headaches independent of the incomprehensible blather that underpins the field.  I bet it will be helpful  for anything with a subjective endpoint and I bet that for hard endpoints, CST will do nothing.

There are 56 hits on the Pubmeds using Craniosacral therapy, and there are no even remotely well done studies using CST.  The most interesting predates the NEJM asthma article discussed at length at SBM.

In it:

Subjects were randomly assignment to one of five groups: acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, acupuncture and craniosacral, attention control, and waiting list control.

METHODS:
Subjects received 12 sessions of equal length with pretreatment and posttreatment assessment of pulmonary function, asthma quality of life, depression, and anxiety. Medication use was also assessed.

Can you predict the results?  Yep.  Patients were subjectively improved, but their objective asthma was not better.

When treatment was compared with the control group, statistically treatment was significantly better than the control group in improving asthma quality of life, whereas reducing medication use with pulmonary function test results remained the same.

As one would expect from a relaxing head massage. Others are also less than enthusiastic about CST

Despite the structural integrity of the skull, CRT proponents insist “Eppur si muove“. And there is one time where the bones of the skull are moveable: after head trauma.  Then, perhaps, pushing on the skull, even 5 grams worth, may not he such a good idea.  I have seen enough trauma over the years to be cautious around breaks in human structural integrity.  Not so much with CST:

Although craniosacral manipulation has been found empirically useful in patients with traumatic brain injury, three cases of iatrogenesis occurred. The incidence rate is low (5%), but the practitioner must be prepared to deal with the possibility of adverse reactions.

Why do I think of the word “squelch” when I read the abstract; too much Joe Aberrcombie of late?  It turns out that the adverse reactions from CST are every bit as fanciful as beneficial effects:

These three cases represent a diversity of adverse reactions following craniosacral manipulation. The first patient had exacerbation of vertiginous symptoms during diagnostic evaluation alone. After sphenobasilar decompression, visceral symptoms involving cardiac, respiratory, and gastrointestinal systems arose. This feature suggests either brain stem or vagal effects as a possible source of the symptom complex. The second patient had exacerbation of headache complaint, but, more important, a disturbing psychologic/psychiatric problem, necessitating psychiatric institutional care. The severe total body spastic reaction seen in the third patient continues to defy explanation. The possibility of a brain stem seizure triggered by stimulation of the upper cervical spine and cranial base or posttraumatic cervical dystonian remains plausible. Extensive evaluation failed to demonstrate a specific cause.

It is a tough economy, and jobs are scarce.  For 5 to 12 thousand dollars and 700 hours (150 if you are already a licensed massage therapist) you can be a CST provider.  That’s 88 days of education, about a semesters worth.  And then maybe you can practice at a University Medical Center. Like Ohio. Or Duke. And of course, Dr Oz  has offered CST, so you know it must be nonsense.

There are probably other institutions that offer the raging nonsense that is CRT, but I grow weary of the searching. But it should not be part of any University, since

…we believe that craniosacral therapy bears approximately the same relationship to real medicine that astrology bears to astronomy. That is, this approach to “health care” is medical fiction, and it is not appropriate to teach fiction as part of medical or allied health curricula.

I wonder if Duke or Ohio are going to offer astrological readings or have John Edwards as a Visiting Lecturer.  It would only be a lateral step, not a step backwards.  Seriously.  If your local Hospital or University offers CST, go elsewhere.  They have a demonstrated commitment to the irreparably goofy.

To sum up: CST now beats Braco the starer.  I don’t think The Onion could do better.

Footnote

*I remain uncertain as to why the editors let these posts through.

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/alas-poor-craniosacral/

The money I poured into a religious sect

Heather Siegel
Salon.com

December 4, 2011

My sister said Kabbalah helped her cope with our mother's death. Would it work for me?

Twelve years ago, in staccato breaths, my sister came home to our bachelorette apartment and told me she'd had a breakthrough at a Kabbalah establishment in Manhattan over the loss of our mother. She'd been taking courses for a few months and, in a private meeting with the rabbi, at his suggestion, Jas simultaneously screamed and tapped her heart chakra when she heard a crack and felt a gush of pain. In that instant all her buried emotions erupted forth  things she'd never allowed herself to feel. Then she felt forgiveness, acceptance and finally peace.

It all sounded so hokey, and yet I couldn't help feeling envious. I wanted to experience that gush of emotions. I signed up for the course, along with my brother, Greg and his soon to be wife, Lauren. Tuesday nights, we carpooled into Manhattan together, and scribbled furiously in our notebooks as Rabbi Jehudi, with his thick beard and tailored suit, explained to us  and the 60 other emotionally stunted people who'd paid a few hundred dollars for the class  that we couldn't play the game of life well until we'd learned the rules.

Rabbi Jehudi instructed us to 'scan' the 72 Names of God by running our finger from right to left over a photocopied chart of Hebrew letters. These letters, we were told, included all the 'sequences of DNA consciousness' that provide healing, success, protection and fulfillment in every aspect of our lives.

It took yogic concentration to keep a straight face, but I somehow managed, even with Greg's elbow jabbing at my side. With the rest of the class I ran my finger over the laminated page from right to left, blocking from my mind that I did not read Hebrew, and focusing on the idea that the physical connection was enough. Whether it was because Id skipped dinner, or because I was less cynical than I'd thought, I cant say, but in that instant what I can only describe as a zap of electricity coursed through me, and I was all but sold.

After a few months of taking courses, I started going to Shabbat at the rabbis house in Queens. The room was split in half with folding partitions. Thirty women sat on one side, 40 men on the other. The men wore all white. The women wore wigs and skirts. I was told that the separation wasnt anti-feminist; if anything, women were thought to be on a higher spiritual plane, and men were the lowly beings who sorely needed to hear the prayers  without the distraction of looking at women.

My 28th birthday I spent dipping myself into a Mikveh tub at the Manhattan complex. The room was a sort of spa, with lockers, showers and a small round pool. Jas stood at the edge with me, and scanned the prayer that was taped to the wall. We dropped our towels and immersed ourselves in the magical water, dunking our heads 20-something times, and letting the water absorb all of our negative energy. Afterward, I felt lighter, and lightheaded. I also couldnt stop laughing. What the hell were we doing?

And yet, except for the occasional head-rearing of self-awareness, I had grown as superstitious as my fellow practitioners. The basic premises of the classes  that I needed to take responsibility for my life, and that everything is cause and effect  weighed heavily on me. What had I done to warrant locking my keys in my car during a snowstorm? What did it mean that Id cut my finger while chopping onions? Was this rash on my arm really due to gossiping (apparently all skin conditions were)? What could I do to rid my life of chaos?

I wanted to balance my tikkun, or souls correction that Id inherited from my parents and from my past lives.

For $2,000, I booked a room and meal package at the Marriot Marquis for Rosh Hashanah Event 2000. Thousands of people from all over the world attended, including, of course, Madonna (as well as Marla Maples, and Monica Lewinsky). As the Shofar mooed, I leaned my head back and saw a speck of blue light. It grew to the size of a nickel and began to pulse like a very large heart. Later, the Hevrahs, full-time Kabbalah volunteers, congratulated me. Blue was healing light, and I must be on a high spiritual plane to see such light.

But was I actually feeling better? To be honest, I wasnt sure. To know if Kabbalah was working, the rabbi had told us, just take stock of your life. Have you changed your movie? My movie was pretty much the same since Id started Kabbalah. I was still far too susceptible to outside influences, although I fancied myself wiser. And that unpredictable sadness still crept in from time to time, and left me stunned. At the beach, watching a mother and daughter walk along the shore together  seeing the way their hips and calves were shaped the same, the younger and the older versions of the same woman  I lost it.

Driving to the cafe I owned one afternoon, I decided to give it my best shot. I rolled up my windows, screamed and tapped my chest. Nothing happened. Nothing cracked open. Deciding that my technique was lacking, I called the establishment and arranged a private meeting with the rabbi; he wasnt available but his wife, Rebecca, also a teacher there, offered to see me later in the week.

Sitting at her desk, littered with picture frames of her five children, Rebecca played with a strand of her brown wig, and listened to my complaints about my mild depression with a scowl on her face. When I mentioned how I was struggling to come to terms with my mothers death, she asked why I chose to come down to a mother who would die. She also told me I needed to stop worrying so much about myself, and start thinking about other people.

I began tithing. I offered my cafe as an additional place to hold classes. The place was primarily a night spot, and so in the mornings, Rebecca ran a womens group on Tuesdays, and Rabbi Jehudi used the place for an office on the other days. I gave him the key, and the alarm code, and when he told me he really needed a laptop, I gave him my computer. A few weeks later, when he told me that the PC didnt really have the functionality he needed, I gave him $1,100 towards a Mac.

At the establishment, I took more classes: the study of irises, auras, palms and faces. The rabbi showed photocopied faces of strangers. Could we tell which faces were humanitarians, and which were SS officers? The humanitarians had perfect symmetry to their faces. The SS officers had asymmetrical faces, and too much sclarel show  too much white showing in the eyes  a telltale sign of a murderer.

From there, I squinted and stared at unsuspecting people, at the bank  the movies, the diner  and tried to get a glimpse of their auras. (The most effective way to do this was to stare at a person as he stood against a white wall, since auras have many colors.) On dates, I studied lines on mens faces  as well as my own (my forehead lines showed sexual issues)  and tried to discern who would be a spiritual mate, even though Rebecca had told me that women were the spiritual pioneers in the relationship, the vessels to receive the channels.

I volunteered for Meal on Wheels, Big Brother Big Sisters and Fish, a senior citizen driving program. I mailed money orders to people anonymously, planted trees, mailed checks to any organization that asked for a donation  it was, after all an opportunity to give  and never walked through Manhattan without spare change and singles in my coat pockets.

One afternoon, Jas called to apologize for forgetting to leave her half of the mortgage, and told me to write the check myself from her checkbook. It was then that I realized how many, many thousands and thousands of dollars she had been giving. Seeing all those numbers back to back did not sit right with me. I called Greg and told him that I was starting to suspect that the three of us might be brainwashed.

Starting to suspect? He laughed, and mimicked a robot, I Am Not Brainwashed. Must Give More Money Or My Soul Will Melt.

The first of the three of us, he had no choice but to disentangle himself; as a struggling musician back then, he simply couldnt afford to keep up.

I went next. The money issue was certainly a huge part of my reluctance to continue, though I have since learned that not all Kabbalah institutions charge; in fact, there are many ways to study Kabbalah for free. I just so happened to pick a place that put a great deal of emphasis on money. The bigger problem was that I had somehow lost my own voice in the process.

Sept. 11 would shake me loose. On that morning as I was waiting for the Tuesday womens group to start, Rose, one of the group members, walked in and told me to turn on the radio. I did. Then I rushed to Gregs apartment, the nearest place, to turn on the television. Dumbfounded, we sat together watching the news that afternoon, like the rest of the country.

The following week, Rebecca showed up at the cafe, and gave the womens group her take on 9/11. She told us that for some time now, New York City had been a vortex of selfishness, self-absorption and intolerance, and that everyone who died called their death into their lives. I looked around the room, and saw faces that were having a hard time accepting that interpretation. I definitely was. While I still had respect for the core principles of the study, it was time to stop deifying others and trust my own thoughts  however selfish they may be.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/kabbalah_sect_open2011/singleton/

Kabbalah Centre: Marketing Superstition as Spirituality?

Rabbi Arthur Green
Huffington Post
October 26, 2011

The Los Angeles Times this week published a thorough and well-researched expose of the Kabbalah Centre.

As a student and teacher of Kabbalah and Hasidism for more than 50 years, I have been watching this travesty unfold. It now apparently is reaching its denouement. Along with many others who study Kabbalah, both within the academic world and beyond it, I have been hesitant to speak out publicly against the Bergs' empire because of their reputation for suing anyone who rises up against them. Unfortunately, some of my academic colleagues, fascinated by the numbers attracted to the Kabbalah Centre, have lent to them a certain legitimatizing cachet.

The truth is that the Kabbalah Centres are a bizarre combination of well-intentioned religious outreach and sheer hucksterism. Philip Berg, whom I met back before he became famous, was indeed a student of authentic Jerusalem Kabbalists of the Ashlag school. He decided in the 1980s to proclaim himself a rebbe or spiritual master. I do not think this was a cynical move from the beginning. Berg probably thought he was doing good by bringing Kabbalah to the masses. He looked around and saw the popularity of all sorts of eastern spirituality, attracting many Jewish followers among others, and decided that the turn of Kabbalah had come. He would simplify the abstruse teachings and make them accessible to those without his learning, allowing for a broad following.

The problem is that Berg went for the worst rather than the best within the Kabbalistic tradition. His own teachers had been interested in an otherworldly meditational system, one focused on restoring energies directed toward cosmic tikkun, or repair, leading toward messianic redemption. One may believe in this or not, but it is surely high-minded. But Kabbalah had always had a more popular and practical side, one that leaned close to magic. It was this part of the system that Berg peddled. His promises of success in love, business and other realms to those who drank his "holy" water, or stared, even without comprehension, at his highly priced books, were sheer nonsense. This is the worst of Kabbalah, preying on people's fantasies and fears. These claims would have horrified Berg's teachers, and he must have known that.

What Berg figured out is that superstition and the insecurities that attract people to it did not disappear with modernity. They exist in Hollywood just as much as in poor neighborhoods of Jerusalem. You just need to know how to market them. At this he became a genius. He took his outrageous promises and bundled them together with the sort of self-help advice one can readily find in many books sold in airport bookstores. To these he joined some light bits of true Kabbalistic learning. He wrapped them all up in bundles of red string, making an old Eastern European talisman, used mostly for keeping witches away from babies' cribs, a new identifying symbol for his "Kabbalists," most of whom had no real idea of what the Jewish mystical tradition was all about.

He did two more things that were revolutionary from his teachers' point of view. He opened study of Kabbalah and participation in its rites both to women and to non-Jews. One might think this to be praiseworthy. Many of us would like to see Kabbalah brought "out of the closet" and made accessible. Some of my own writings seek to do exactly that. But in Berg's case one has the sense that this was largely a commercial decision. There were more women than men wanting to learn what he had to teach and willing to pay for it. This is true of all the self-help literature and the following of many gurus in that field. But once he was willing to cross the bigger line of welcoming non-Jews to his fold, he really had struck gold. Thousands of seekers, many of them confused or disillusioned Christians, ex-Mormons and so forth, swelled his ranks. They were undoubtedly more awed than some of his Jewish followers, and more willing to pay.

The sad part of this story is that it represents a thorough mixing of goodness and cynicism. Many people testify that their lives were set straight by loyalty to the Kabbalah Centre, that they were freed from addictions, brought back from depression, or even just redeemed from the triviality of Hollywood and its values. Who could not thank the Bergs for the positive effect they have had on the lives of so many? But in the end, hucksterism seems to have won out. The "evil urge" is a pretty slippery character, especially when big money becomes involved. The Kabbalah Centre's founders and leaders, especially in creating a dynasty, have taken the reputation of an ancient and noble tradition and have sullied it for their own gain. Kabbalah deserves better.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-arthur-green/kabbalah-centre-hucksterism_b_1032890.html

Celebrities gave Kabbalah Centre cachet, and spurred its growth

Harriet Ryan and Kim Christensen
Los Angeles Times
October 18, 2011

The heightened profile of the L.A.-based Kabbalah Centre popularizing previously secret Jewish mysticism came with a continued emphasis on soliciting donations, sometimes in ways some found offensive. Then the IRS stepped in.

When Philip Berg decided in the early 1970s to teach kabbalah to the masses, he predicted that orthodox rabbis would stone him and his wife, Karen. For a long time, that seemed a pompous overstatement. Few people had even heard of the kabbalah school they ran out of their living room in Jerusalem and later in Queens.

But Philip knew that revealing the secrets of the Torah to any Jew who wanted to learn them -- spiritual teachings once open only to elite rabbinical scholars -- would be controversial. It also proved wildly popular.

Two decades later, the Kabbalah Centre had become an empire with branches in major cities, a publishing arm and scores of passionate young volunteers. Then in March 1990, the center caught the attention of a council of rabbis in Toronto. They didn't stone the Bergs, but they publicly disputed the validity of Philip's teachings of ancient Jewish mysticism and took exception to the center's aggressive fundraising.

"We have become aware of a group of young men promulgating the sale of so-called kabbalistic literature and of their establishment of classes in this topic," the rabbis wrote to the city's orthodox community. "We categorically state that the group known as the Centre for Kabbalah Research is not approved nor endorsed by the undersigned rabbis."

The letter was circulated among Jewish groups around the world. In Jewish enclaves where the center had long gone door-to-door soliciting donations, there was sudden hostility. People ordered members off their front porches and sometimes out of their neighborhoods. The repercussions reached the Bergs' two sons, who were students at an orthodox yeshiva in New York. Their teachers told them to abandon their father, according to a former member who at the time was close to the family.

The rabbis' denunciation might have been fatal to a more traditional Jewish organization. But the Kabbalah Centre taught that the closer a person drew to the light -- God -- the more the forces of darkness would target him. Followers saw the criticism as proof that the Bergs were on the right spiritual path. They hailed them as prophets.

Members of the chevre, the center's religious order, discussed the intense level of spiritual development one would need just to be Karen's assistant and lined up to eat Philip's leftovers as a way to show their devotion, former members said. The center's synagogues around the world had special chairs for the Bergs' exclusive use, even though they might visit only once a year.

It became standard practice to address the Bergs in the third person. "Does Karen want water?" followers would ask her. "How is the rav today?" they would inquire of Philip.

A large painting at the Toronto branch showed Philip in what struck one visitor as a classic Christian pose: Jesus leaning against a rock.

"It was the very same picture, except it was the rav's face," recalled Dorothy Clark, whose husband, Kenneth, helped Philip write books that sought to popularize kabbalah.

An inner circle of very wealthy donors -- the "close people" as they were known at the center -- gave hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars in tax-deductible tithes and donations. Big donors were rewarded with seats at the Bergs' table at Sabbath meal, invitations to intimate prayer services and personal conversations. Those who grumbled were chastised by officials or other students.

"When you brought up something about the family, they would tell you it clearly shows you have an opening in your consciousness for Satan," said a former longtime member who grew disillusioned and left the center but did not want to be named because relatives are still members. "Clearly you are not doing enough to get the light."

Adored inside their organization, the Bergs continued to be vilified outside. Rabbis in Israel, Philadelphia and Queens condemned them publicly. At a religious conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, an orthodox rabbi gave a speech criticizing the center's practices and Philip's "scandalous" personal life, an allusion to the breakup of his first marriage. The center responded with a defamation suit, which it later dropped.

L.A. headquarters

The Bergs were spending more time in Los Angeles, running the center from a converted 100-year-old Spanish-style church on Robertson Boulevard. The location, which became the center's world headquarters in 1998, was near the heart of the city's orthodox community, but more significant was its proximity to Westside neighborhoods the entertainment industry calls home.

The first celebrity drawn to the Kabbalah Centre was Sandra Bernhard, who began studying in 1995. Bernhard was a raunchy stand-up comic who'd posed nude for Playboy. She dove into kabbalah classes with a charismatic Israeli teacher, Eitan Yardeni. She was effusive in the media about kabbalah, which she said had eliminated "at least 80% of the chaos in my life." In her Hollywood circle, she was a one-woman marketing campaign for Yardeni and the center.

"Sandra told me that I would love him, and that he was for real, and righteous," Roseanne Barr wrote in her memoir "Roseannearchy." Both comedians are Jewish, but other people Bernhard recruited were not.

In the Bergs' decades of challenging tradition, the center had remained fundamentally Jewish. The conflict with the orthodox establishment had always turned on whether kabbalah study was permissible for certain Jews -- women and men without yeshiva training. Gentiles were never even a consideration, and were a rare and generally unwelcome presence, according to former members. Gentiles at Sabbath services were expected to stay in the back and not participate.

"We had to be careful to avoid contamination," said former student Michel Obadia, recalling the concern over a "non-Jewish eye" witnessing the blessing of wine.

That changed with the arrival of Bernhard's diverse circle. Gentiles flocked to an introductory course she arranged in Manhattan.

"Non-Jews are welcome at this class," the New York Times declared in 1996 in one of several news stories that saw a hot, new trend in the scene of a yarmulke-wearing teacher from the center instructing a crowd of actors, models and designers.

It was difficult for some former disciples to square the ecumenical approach with the Kabbalah Centre they had known.

Jeremy Langford, an early follower who left the center in 1984 over concerns about its authenticity, said reports about gentile celebrities attending classes confirmed his belief that the Bergs were teaching "pop, light, quasi New Age, ersatz kabbalah."

Nothing garnered bigger headlines for the center than the arrival of Madonna. She enrolled at the L.A. center in 1996 at Bernhard's suggestion.

"It didn't really matter that I was, you know, raised Catholic or I wasn't Jewish and I felt very comfortable and I liked being anonymous in a classroom environment," she told television personality Larry King in 1999.

To the surprise of her detractors, Madonna stuck with her studies. She attended Sabbath services, had one-on-one study sessions with Yardeni, enrolled her daughter in the center's Sunday school and chose a Hebrew name, Esther.

The Kabbalah Centre suddenly had cachet among the rich and famous, and through them entree to a wider audience. Yardeni was at ease with big names and egos, and the Bergs tapped him as their Hollywood emissary. He had once worked as a door-to-door chevre and had a humility and directness that the powerful and well-connected found refreshing, and he was willing to accommodate busy schedules with private lessons.

"I thought Eitan was very, very bright and a very good spiritual teacher," said talent manager and producer Sandy Gallin, who first heard Yardeni speak at Barr's home. He said one-on-one tutoring with Yardeni taught him "to take the high road and to understand there is a greater power than you."

The list of celebrities attracted to the center grew to include Elizabeth Taylor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Yardeni held exclusive sessions at Westside mansions. Producer Christine Peters hosted one that drew entertainment figures that included her then-boyfriend, Viacom Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone.

"He was so wonderful," said Cindra Ladd, wife of former 20th Century Fox President Alan Ladd Jr., recalling classes she attended at a Pacific Palisades home. She said Yardeni would begin by reading from the Zohar and the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in Hebrew and English. He would relate stories about Moses and other biblical figures to daily life. Topics included how to achieve lasting fulfillment, how to transform oneself "in the light of God" and how to refrain from gossip.

"That was the hardest one for everyone," Ladd joked.

Yardeni's teachings about finding meaning beyond the material had a special appeal to those in her circle, said Ladd, who was raised a Mormon.

"A lot of times people in this town who are very successful are left with a feeling of 'Is this all there is?'" she said.

Tax exemption

The heightened profile of kabbalah meant enormous growth, but precisely how much is difficult to say. The parent organization, Kabbalah Centre International, was granted tax-exempt status as a church in 1999 and stopped filing returns.

The center's assets grew from $20 million in 1998, the year after Madonna went public with her ties to kabbalah, to more than $260 million by 2009, according to the resume of a former chief financial officer and tax returns the center and affiliated organizations filed before becoming exempt.

The center's revenue sources include fees for classes and sales of merchandise such as candles, red-string bracelets that the center says will ward off evil, and bottled water long touted as having healing powers.

Soliciting donations remained a focus of the Bergs and other ranking leaders. Major donors to the center or its affiliated nonprofits include Madonna, whose foundation has reported giving more than $10 million, and fashion designer Donna Karan, whose foundation has reported giving at least $2 million.

A prominent filmmaker said that after a few lessons with Yardeni, he received an unannounced visit from another official. You are a rich man and you should be giving millions, the filmmaker recalled being told. He said he ordered the man off his property. The filmmaker asked not to be named for fear of offending industry colleagues still involved with the center.

There also was pressure on less well-off students. George Cabral, a welder in Melbourne, Australia, who participated in a class on Skype, said that when he cut his $100 weekly tithe in half to pay bills, his teacher was furious. The man told him to write "I'm in debt to the cosmos" on a piece of paper each day. Instead, he quit.

Some requests came directly from the Bergs, as in the case of a wealthy Calabasas family who turned to the center after their matriarch was found to have cancer.

Samuel Raoof, a former Kabbalah Centre student, said his parents were invited to join the Bergs at their table after Sabbath services in 2000 or 2001. Raoof, chief executive of a skin-care company, said his parents returned to their own table and told him what happened: Philip had urged them to commission a Torah for the center to "help cure" his mother's cancer.

Philip did not mention money, Raoof said his parents told him. But later, the couple's teacher visited the father at his office, repeated the claim about the Torah's curative powers and requested a $100,000 donation to have a scribe write the scrolls, Raoof said.

Raoof said his father, a physician, was infuriated and refused the request. Raoof said the teacher, who had grown close to his mother, then went to a clinic where she was receiving chemotherapy and persuaded her to give about half the amount.

Raoof said his father eventually paid the rest, hoping the Torah dedication ceremony might provide his wife some final joy with family and friends. Month after month, the family was told the Torah wasn't ready, according to Raoof.

After his mother died in 2004, Raoof said, the family was told by letter that its donations had gone to the center's general fund, not for a Torah.

The center eventually agreed to create a Torah, Raoof said. The family ultimately rejected the offer and asked for their money back, which the center refused, he said.

Raoof showed The Times copies of four canceled checks from late 2003 and early 2004, drawn on his parents' account and made out to the Kabbalah Centre, totaling $107,000. The word "Torah" appears in the memo field on three of the checks.

The elder Raoof declined to discuss the matter but confirmed his son's account.

How much of the center's money made its way to the Bergs is unknown.

Their lifestyle changed markedly after the celebrity influx, however. Billy Phillips, a longtime family friend, said the Bergs had previously lived like paupers with no privacy in simple accommodations at the Robertson Boulevard center, which followers considered beneath their status.

"People had been begging to give them houses," Phillips said.

In the mid-2000s, the Kabbalah Centre bought three houses side by side in Beverly Hills for the couple and their two sons. The homes on South Almont Drive are relatively modest by Beverly Hills standards, with appraised values of up to $1.8 million each.

"They are far from being mansions," said Naftali Gruberger, a Brooklyn cabinetmaker and one of Philip's sons from his first marriage. "My house is bigger than that."

Birthday parties for Philip were elaborate affairs, including one in 2003 at a Hollywood Hills mansion where Michael Buble and Madonna serenaded the guest of honor.

Donors lined up to cover the cost of the parties and other luxuries, demonstrations of loyalty that assured a place in the inner circle, former members said. Gifts included private plane rides, jewelry and trips to Europe and Mexico, they said. Supporters defend such gifts as expressions of gratitude.

"If there's a really rich student, very wealthy, and he wants to cover someone's car lease and that's the way he gives, are you going to insult him and not take the gift?" Phillips said.

Arthur "Archie" Falkenstein, a Toronto volunteer who worked closely with the Bergs, said, "Everything they have is donated or bought for them.

"Show me one spiritual leader in the world who had not been given gifts," he said.

Some former associates say the Bergs made gambling trips to Las Vegas, where the center has a branch, and that the couple sometimes stayed at Caesars Palace and other casino-hotels on the Strip. They were frequent enough players to receive complimentary meals, rooms and limousine rides from the airport, according to three people who said they had gambled in Las Vegas with the Bergs.

One of the three recalled an occasion when Karen played craps at Caesars with a stack of $100 chips while Philip watched "like a bystander."

A second former member described casino trips when both Bergs played blackjack at the $100 table. The man said IRS agents investigating the center's finances had recently questioned him about the Bergs' gambling and that he had given them the same account he gave The Times.

The Bergs were staying at the Bellagio in September 2004 when Philip suffered a stroke, said people who were in Las Vegas with them. It was a devastating blow for followers who had been taught that the truly spiritual could conquer illness. The community rallied with round-the-clock Zohar readings outside his hospital room.

Philip, who began using a wheelchair and had difficulty communicating, could no longer lead the center.

Succession debate

The issue of a successor was debated at a 2007 meeting of the chevre in Boca Raton, Fla. The obvious candidates were the Bergs' sons: Yehuda, an outgoing jokester who favored baseball caps over yarmulkes and interrupted spiritual lessons to announce the Lakers score, or his younger brother, Michael, an introverted scholar who had a close friendship with Madonna.

The sons, both in their 30s, were well liked, but some followers did not see them as mature enough to lead. Karen was urged not to step aside, said two people who attended the meeting. She and her sons are co-directors of the center, but Karen, 68, is chief executive of the parent organization, Kabbalah Centre International, and is identified as "spiritual leader."

As the center continued to court Hollywood -- Yardeni officiated at the wedding of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore in 2005, Yehuda Berg threw a paparazzi-mobbed book party at Kitson's flagship store on Robertson -- it seemed to de-emphasize Judaism more than ever.

"You don't have to stop being Catholic to study kabbalah. You can be both," a member from Miami said in a marketing video that claimed the center's teachings were "known to Jesus" and applicable to "those of no faith."

Some longtime members became upset about what they perceived as Madonna's outsize influence. After the singer adopted a son from Malawi, she and Michael Berg co-founded a children's charity with offices at the center. The cause seemed worthy, but difficult for some to reconcile with the center's teaching that donations should be confined to efforts that spread the Zohar.

"Everything changed once Madonna began to study," said Barr, the comedian. "Madonna had great intentions, and has done a lot of good things in the world, but her fame was so immense that there was no way that God or kabbalah or the rav or Karen Berg or heaven and Earth could remain the same in the face of it."

After Philip's stroke, a number of major donors and celebrities, including Barr and Bernhard, left the center. Norton Cher, a New York apparel manufacturer who said he donated about $400,000 over a decade, said he and his wife disliked what they saw as Karen's all-business approach.

"It just got too commercial," he said. "The people there just wanted more and more and more. We kind of decided we don't need a broker: When we want to talk to God, we'll do it ourselves."

The disaffection spread. The empire the Bergs had built over four decades suddenly seemed vulnerable.

Shaul Youdkevitch and his wife, Osnat, high-ranking chevre who had been with the center since the 1980s, departed in 2008. "The magic was gone; the love turned to confusion, cynicism and bitterness," Youdkevitch wrote in a blog post addressed to "dear friends" at the center.

He said that after complaining that Karen had too much power, "we were presented with an ultimatum -- to have us agree that Karen Berg possessed Ru'ah HaKodesh -- Holy Spirit (total obedience to every decision of hers) or that we could no longer work within the Kabbalah Centre."

"Biblical law has never allowed any human being to be above the law and above constructive criticism," Youdkevitch wrote.

The dispute became ugly. A lawyer for the couple sent a seven-page letter to Karen detailing the money they had brought to the center and demanding $7 million for their three decades of unpaid work. The center had 72 hours to respond, the lawyer wrote, or the Youdkevitches would ask authorities to investigate its finances.

The center called the couple's bluff and sued them, alleging that a kabbalah group the Youdkevitches had started nearby was unfairly competing with the center and using its trademarks and trade secrets. After months of legal wrangling, the center dropped the suit.

Many longtime "close people" who had provided donations and companionship were gone. Increasingly, Karen leaned on Moshe "Muki" Oppenheimer, an Israeli management consultant. Oppenheimer's forceful presence, at a time when Philip was less visible, became a topic of conversation.

Rumors of an affair between the two became public in June 2010 when the New York Post's Page Six gossip column published a denial from a Kabbalah Centre spokesman. The paper called the allegations "a false story" and quoted a center insider who blamed a disgruntled ex-member for trying to create "a scandal that could destroy the Kabbalah organization."

The gossip was beaten back, but a greater threat to the organization was about to emerge.

Allegation of fraud

In August 2010, Nicholas Vakkur complained that he was fired as chief financial officer after less than three months because he had uncovered income tax fraud at the center.

"This is very serious business," Vakkur wrote in an email that circulated among center officials. "I have little choice but to cooperate with the IRS and bring down the entire Kabbalah Centre."

Months later, the criminal division of the IRS launched its investigation, focused in part on whether the Bergs enriched themselves with members' donations. Prosecutors subpoenaed financial records from the center and two affiliated charities with links to Madonna.

Among those the IRS agents interviewed were former employees and ex-members. Those questioned in recent months said investigators possessed an impressive knowledge of the Bergs' world, right down to the name of a casino host who arranged free hotel rooms for the couple in Las Vegas.

Celebrity followers have gone silent. Less famous adherents continue to defend the Bergs.

"They have spent their whole lives spreading kabbalah and trying to help people," said Falkenstein, the Toronto volunteer.

Phillips, the longtime friend who participates in a weekly scripture study that the 82-year-old Philip attends, said it is inconceivable that the family has done anything wrong.

"When it comes to honesty, integrity," he said, the Bergs are "infallible -- or they are not kabbalists and there is no Torah."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-kaballah-founders-story-part-two,0,4137283.htmlstory