Indian yoga gurus blamed for sexual misconduct at ashrams

A British journalist has unearthed a dirty nexus of an Indian yoga guru, Swami Vishnudevananda Saraswati associated with Sivananda, one of the biggest yoga movements in the world, to have sexually abused several of his disciples repeatedly for years at the ashram headquarters in Canada.

Vishnudevananda Saraswati was a disciple of Sivananda Saraswati, and founder of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres and Ashrams. He established the Sivananda Yoga Teachers’ Training Course, one of the first yoga teacher training programmes in the West.

BBC journalist and yoga teacher Ishleen Kaur, investigated the matter as Sivananda was also the yoga ashram where she had sought asylum and solace.

“In December 2019, I received a notification on my phone. It was a post in my Sivananda Facebook group about the movement’s late founder, Swami Vishnudevananda. A woman called Julie Salter had written that Vishnudevananda had sexually abused her for three years at the Sivananda headquarters in Canada.

Julie Salter worked for 11 years as Vishnudevananda’s personal assistant, until his death in 1993. Salter and other women described their experiences to the BBC journalist and yoga teacher Ishleen Kaur as how they suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Vishnudevananda and some other gurus for years.