Sexual Abuse Rife at Yoga Group, Royal Commission Hears
By Rachel Browne
Outwardly he preached "abstinence, chastity and austerity" but behind closed doors the international yoga master Swami Satyananda Saraswati groomed and violated a young follower, a royal commission has heard. The founder of the globally renowned Satyananda yoga movement forced one of his followers into degrading sex acts while she was living at his ashram in India in the 1970s and '80s, the commission heard. Bhakti Manning told the the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse she was first abused by Satyananda's disciple, Akhandananda, and another swami in Australia when she was 15.
She moved to Satyananda's ashram in India, as a 16-year-old where she said he made her have sex with him while others were watching. Ms Manning told the commission that when the guru became angry he would force her into "violent, aggressive sex". He infected her with a sexually transmitted disease but she did not get pregnant, suspecting the leader was "firing blanks". She said that Satyananda, who died in 2009, was "worshipped like a saint" by his followers. Ms Manning initially did not report the abuse to the movement's Australian headquarters at Mangrove Mountain on the central coast because she believed members would see it as a privilege rather than a crime. "What was done to me by these people was not going to be considered a crime," she said. "The only person who was going to be considered criminal - if I reported it to the people at the ashram - was me, for being a bad disciple and not accepting what the guru had chosen to do to me for my own good." A former child resident, APR, gave evidence of horrific abuse including being pinned down by ashram members and raped by Akhandananda in a ritualistic setting when she was seven. She told the commission she also recalled Satyananda being on top of her, even though she was "raised to believe he was like god, pure love". APR, who was moved to the ashram in 1978 when she was three, described members as being "groomed into a place of powerlessness", with adults rarely intervening to protect children. "The ashram was the kind of place where if you screamed, no one would come, so over the years I learned not to bother," she said. She told the royal commission that ashram children would prey on each other like something out of the dystopian classic Lord of the Flies. She described an invitation to attend a healing ceremony as part of the ashram's 40th anniversary early this year as lacking compassion, saying: "I thought it was insensitive to say that yoga is this wonderful thing when most of the yogis I know are paedophiles and egomaniacs." Tim Clark, who moved to the Mangrove Mountain ashram in the early 1980s when he was about 13, told the commission he endured hard labour, frequent beatings and was forced to spend three days and nights outside with no food as punishment for leaving the retreat to see a band. "They took away my childhood, they brainwashed me ... they took away opportunity by enslaving me instead of educating me," he said. The hearing, before Justice Jennifer Coate, continues.
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