Yogis’ Son Tells of ‘bad Apple’ at Ashram

The Australian
December 5, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/yogis-son-tells-of-bad-apple-at-ashram/story-fngburq5-1227146486153

THE son of an elderly Sydney couple who run the NSW yoga school at the centre of child sexual abuse claims says he was aware there was a “bad apple” in the organisation “who hurt a lot of people”.

Brian and Mary Thompson (known as Vivekananda and Hridayananda) have refused to comment publicly on witness testimony this week on abuses at the Satyananda yoga school in the 1970s and 80s to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

But their son Charles Thompson, 53, told The Weekend Australian his parents were forced to return from India to “clean up the mess” after criminal allegations against the school’s yoga master, Swami Akhandananda.

“I met him. He was a bad apple,” Mr Thompson said by phone from Pune, 150km southeast of Mumbai. “From what I can understand, (Akhandananda) hurt a lot of people.

“He was eventually arrested and jailed. My parents were disgusted, but from memory I think they were here in India at the time. They had to come back to clean up the mess and they have been running it without incident.”

Sydney woman Bhakti Manning told the royal commission this week she suffered sexual abuse from the age of 15 at the hands of two of the ashram’s senior yoga masters, and was coerce­d into sex by the inter­national yoga movement’s Indian founder Swami Satyananda Saraswati, as well as his current successor, Niranjananda, at the Munger ashram in India — even though sex was forbidden.

Other former child residents have told of being raped by Akhandananda, being forced to show their genitalia, being starved and given morphine for minor ailments.

The swamis implicated in the allegations all claimed to be ascet­ics and strictly enforced celibacy in the movement’s Australian and Indian ashrams.

Yesterday another woman who attended the organisation’s Bondi yoga centre at the same time as Ms Manning told the commission she had entered into a violent and perverse sexual relationship with Akhandananda as a 16-year- old.

The woman known as Shishy, who went on to work at the NSW central coast Satyananda yoga school in the 70s and 80s, admitted she had betrayed children who attended the school by beating them and summoning them for sex with Akhandananda.

Shishy, now 53 and a key witness, also admitted to starting a sexual relationship when she was 24 with a 14-year-old boy at the school, at her partner’s behest. “He told me that I should start initiating him in the same way he did the girls,” she said.

“He became extremely violent toward me when I refused.”

The commission heard that Shishy was present when Akhandananda had sex with under-aged children there, and that she was also expected to have sex with Swami Satyananda during his visits to Australia.

Akhandananda was convicted and jailed for child sex offenc­es in 1989 but was released six years later after his conviction was overturned following a change to NSW laws. He died from alcoholism in 1997.