Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Breath Of Fire’ On HBO, About The Kundalini Yoga Industry And Its Controversial Young Leader

Breath Of Fire is a four-part docuseries, directed by Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens based on a Vanity Fair article by Hayley Phelan, about the Kundalini Yoga movement, highlighting the Yogi Bhajan, who brought the movement to the United States in the 1970s, to Guru Jagat, a woman who became prominent in the movement in 2012 after claiming she was Bhajan’s anointed successor.

BREATH OF FIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Reality is a trance. Your reality is a trance of your own making,” says a woman in a turban, speaking to an audience.

The Gist: Guru Jagat, who was previously a YouTube astrologer named Katie Griggs, opened the Ra Ma Insatiate in Los Angeles and quickly grew a massive following via social media. She was charismatic and empowering, and her mostly female fans really appreciated the message she spread, especially its spiritual component.

She claimed she spent time with Yogi Bhajan in the last few years of his life, though given he died in 2004, that part of her story doesn’t quite add up. As it is Bhajan, who brought Kundalini Yoga to the U.S., had controversy surrounding him as well as he set up the 3HO organization to manage his efforts. He also made gobs of money establishing or helping to establish companies like Yogi Tea. But he also seemed to employ only young women, and his infusion of Sikh religious symbolism and other aspects rankled Sikhs as a sign of appropriation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Although the Kundalini movement isn’t a cult, and Guru Jagat — who died at 41 in 2021 — wasn’t technically a cult leader, Breath Of Fire has a lot of the elements of a cult-related docuseries like The Program, The Vow, Wild Wild Country and others.

Our Take: The subtlety of how Pappas and Stevens lure us into a sense that Guru Jagat was a beloved figure before starting to drop the bomblets about the lies and half-truths she told is what we took notice of during the first episode of Breath Of Fire. They spent almost the entire first 52-minute episode extolling the virtues of both Jagat and of Bhajan, while slowly letting the audience know that neither was pure of motive or avoided major controversy.

We watched the first episode thinking that this was going to be a 4-part tribute to Guru Jagat, but every time we saw a scene of her talking in interviews or leading groups with her philosophies, we kept asking the same question, “How did this American woman rise to such a high position in an organization founded by a man from Pakistan?”

This is when we realized that Jagat may not have followed directly in Bhajan’s footsteps, as she claimed. That wasn’t really made clear by the producers until nearly the end of the first hour. All we heard were young, female followers of Jagat’s who loved her strength and the strength she gave them, and senior citizens who used to be young hippie followers of Bhajan’s fifty-plus years ago, saying many of the same things.

What was clear, as we hear from Sikh historian Hayley Phelan, is that Kundalini wasn’t a religious movement, as Bhajan tried to make it. The very idea that Guru Jagat would be sitting in an open turban, espousing Sikh philosophies under some sort of religious guise seems to be anathema to Sikh culture, and both Bhajan and Jagat milked it for massive profits. We just wish the filmmakers got to those ideas sooner in the first episode.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After an expert calls Guru Jagat a “photocopy of a counterfeit bill,” basically saying that Jagat was a fraud who copied Bhajan, who was another fraud, we see Jagat again give the speech about reality being a trance.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Philip Deslippe, a yoga historian, who pretty much is dismissive of the Kundalini movement from the first words we hear him say.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re always amazed at the credulousness of the followers that are interviewed in any documentary about a cult or cult-adjacent movement. Even after the leader they revered was discredited, they talk about their time in the movement in such glowing terms, you think they would still be there if they could.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Breath Of Fire takes its entire first episode to set up the controversies surrounding the Kundalini Yoga movement and its two best-known leaders, but even after slogging through that first episode, we still want to learn more.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.