What I Learned from Visiting the Yogaville Cult

 I lost my best friend to a cult. 

We met in undergrad, studying similar disciplines in the same department and became close. 

Brianna was effortlessly cool – she seemed to really know who she was and was comfortable in her own skin. She had this effortless thrifted style, was always reading about interesting topics, had a large group of fascinating friends. She was funny and smart and creative in ways I could only dream of being. A kind of joyous calm seemed to radiate off her, and as an incredibly depressed person at the time, I craved this energy. 

For part of the time we lived in Baltimore City, she rented a room from this woman who lived in the wealthy, bohemian neighborhood of Mount Washington. In that kitchen she taught me vegan recipes, and we’d walk down the rainy autumnal street to a nearby yoga studio for the free community classes.  

Back then, yoga felt euphoric. Finishing in corpse pose in the dim lighting of a yoga studio, my entire body had this feeling of being perfectly stretched and aligned, peaceful and centered. It wasn’t long before I was practicing several days a week. 

Those are still days I look back on with great nostalgia. 

At the same time, I knew she was involved with a yoga community called Yogaville, but my mind always framed it as “commune” or “intentional community” rather than “cult”. She often regaled me with stories about Yogaville, the people there, and how much she enjoyed just being there. 

I don’t remember when I became aware that it was a cult. I thought her constant travel between our university and the cult was because she didn’t want to drive all the way back to her home state during school breaks. She had spoken sparingly about the religious beliefs, mentioning that there was a guru at one time but now he was dead, and the community was carrying on without him. Sometimes we would talk about Yogaville as a cult in a tongue in cheek manner because how could a person who was obviously so happy to be there be in a real-life cult? 

It wasn’t until I went to the cult’s compound in 2018 that I understood. 

What is Yogaville? 

Yogaville is a Hindu ashram tucked in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Buckingham, Virginia. It was founded in 1980 by Swami Satchidananda Saraswati (1914-2002), an Indian yogi whose western bona fides are opening the Woodstock music festival in 1969, being the guru of musician Carole King, and founding his own type of yoga, called Integral Yoga, that is now an international institution. 

Copyright Getty Images

The first Integral Yoga center was founded in New York City in 1966 and has since spread to six continents. After opening and closing ashrams in California and Connecticut, the guru and his devotees settled in Buckingham, Virginia.

The current iteration of Yogaville has its own green street sign like any other small town might. It was way up in the mountains, past run-down trailers and yards filled with ATVs and old washing machines. 

Once you get to the 750-acre property, however, all the poverty of the surrounding area falls away. At the top of the rise, past the driveways to the various areas of the Yogaville compound, you have this view of beautiful rolling blue tinged hills and the St. James River – a wandering blue ribbon between the trees. 

Despite hunting being a primary form of sustenance in the surrounding area, many deer take refuge on the ashram property, including an albino deer the residents believe brings good luck (and that I thought was a ghost the first time I saw it on a misty March morning), only adding to the mystique. 

Yogaville itself feels a little like college – there’s a main campus with various buildings including residence halls, a dining hall, a lecture hall/ritual space, an auditorium, yoga and meditation rooms. There are other parts of the property including the farm that furnishes most of the food for the ashram, the late guru’s house, various administrative buildings and warehouses, temples, and of course the LOTUS. 

The LOTUS, or Light Of Truth Universal Shrine, is a large 12-petaled pink lotus flower-shaped building that embodies what the guru often described as his raison d'etre – that there are many paths to the same One God, and that interfaith understanding and work is key to world peace. This is the basis of the Integral Yoga logo. 

My Time at the Cult

After spending five days at Yogaville and after knowing about the cult for three years prior to that, I finally understood how my smart, beautiful, critically thinking friend could get hooked. 

1. Community 

In a world that is incredibly divided and where community is missing from most people’s lives, Yogaville provides a community of likeminded people, a sense of belonging. Brianna often talked about loving the non-familial intergenerational friendships she forged at Yogaville with people in their 70s and people in their early 20s to late teens, and how she those types of friendships are absent in her secular life.

Everyone at the ashram was incredibly nice and everyone seemed really happy in their day-to-day activities.

The group of permanent residents at Yogaville is quite tightknit. During my visit, we drove to someone’s nearby property to bring them food from the dining hall because they couldn’t make it to dinner and their favorite dish was served (vegan spanakopita). The drive took at least 20 minutes one way, and we had to fend off a flock of chickens and a particularly aggressive goat in order to get my old sedan back to the ashram.

2. The Routine

At Yogaville, there’s a pretty set daily routine meaning that you don’t have to do much independent decision making, which (in small doses) can be nice. There’s no decision fatigue from deciding what to do every day, what to make for dinner, or even what you’re supposed to wear. 

For my visit, Brianna made a daily itinerary that reflected a part of the daily activities at the ashram. Though she left out much of the daily Yogaville activities – a tightly scheduled mix of meditation, yoga, eating, classes, work, eating, yoga, meditation, and eating – I still attended one of the 5AM meditation followed by a 6AM yoga class. 

While I dozed off in the 5AM meditation session, the 6AM yoga class was delightful. The room was lit by salt lamps and the dim reddish glow they let off was perfect for a wake-up yoga session that left me energized and centered. 

The normal routine for Yogaville residents is regimented, but it didn’t seem like anyone felt rushed. People moved about their daily activities, from their yoga classes to their assigned work, to meals, to the few hours of free time they were granted each day.

I am person that enjoys a lot of routine and I could see myself enjoying the Yogaville routines. 

3. Healthy Living

Much of the daily activities at Yogaville centered around “healthy living” – eating well, moving your body, and various wellness practices taken from Hinduism – from nasal irrigation to extended fasting. 

All the food at Yogaville was vegetarian or vegan, mostly unprocessed, and quite delicious. The campus at Yogaville is long distance from even a medium sized town, and therefore was free from noise, light, or air pollution. This was a major difference from the big noisy cities I was used to and made for a wonderful change. You’re quite close to nature with the aforementioned albino deer wandering about, and a variety of small woodland creatures. There are small hiking trails that crisscross the ashram property, which ashram residents are often found walking along. 

4. The Purpose 

Society often tells young people that they need to have some grand purpose to their life. They’re encouraged to dream big and figure out (by the time they register for university) exactly what they want to do and sign up for all the appropriate classes to learn how to do it. 

If your purpose isn’t “make other people very rich” or “own a business and exploit others for profit”, you may struggle. I saw a lot of young people at the ashram as temporary visitors who just seemed…. lost. They were drifting from place to place and seemed squarely on the path of “finding themselves”. Some would inevitably decide to stay at Yogaville indefinitely. I think part of this is because Yogaville offers a sense of purpose that (seems to) transcend worldly concerns, and so even the most mundane tasks become imbued with this sacred purpose. 

Everything you do is to support the ashram community and your personal enlightenment in the immediate sense, and in the larger sense, to support the vision of world peace of the late Swami. 

Most of the jobs on the ashram exist to ensure the daily running of the community. Though I am sure there are other roles, the ones that I performed to “pay” for my meals during my visit involved working in the kitchen: food prep, cooking, cleaning up, doing the dishes. This happens three times a day, a every meal and can be a major task if there aren’t enough people helping. 

There is someone who handles the food purchasing for the ashram to supplement what comes out of the farm. There are people who do manage the finances of the ashram, people who manage the enrollment and schedules of visitors. All of these jobs are tied together by the fact that they support the community and thus the vision of the Swami. 

---

The Darkness

There is, however, a dark side to the ashram, one that the casual visitor would likely never see. The community has actively worked to dissuade victims from coming forward and has been allegedly threatening lawsuits against anyone who speaks out about abuse at the ashram.   

Swami Satchidananda was accused of sexual assault by ten women – with the assaults occurring as early as the 1960s.  While presenting himself as a celibate monk, the Swami was coercing the women around him into performing sexual acts. The accusations first emerged in the 1980s and then 2022 a lawsuit was filed against the ashram, alleging that the organization was negligent in allowing the abuse to occur. 

“The Institute stood by as this abuse occurred, failed to investigate, and actively encouraged it. By teaching young women to obey unquestioningly and requiring them to work closely alongside him, the Institute was an integral component of Swami Satchidananda’s abuse scheme.” – the lawsuit alleges

However, it’s not just Swami Satchidananda who has been implicated in questionable treatment towards women at the ashram. In this harrowing post from a cult education website, a father tells the story of his daughter, Catherine, who visited the ashram and essentially became indoctrinated and under the control of a swami there. The cult did everything in its power to prevent the family from speaking to their daughter and seemed to exert a strange level of control over her. 

Former Satchidananda devotee and individual featured in the hit Netflix series Tiger King, Doc Antle, was also accused of grooming teen and pre-teen girls, domestic violence, polygamy, and running his own cult (as can be seen on the Netflix series). 

Doc Antle with Swami Satchidananda

I had my own brush with a predator during my visit in 2018. After one of the several daily yoga sessions, one of the residents who was seated next to me in the yoga class, said “I didn’t know you were a yoga master,” on the walk to the dining hall and winked before walking off. He seemed friendly and I didn’t sense anything from him other than an intense personality. Brianna told me later that day that he had come to the ashram fresh out of prison and a life of drugs but had turned it around with the help of yoga and meditation. It wasn’t until years later she would reveal to me the open secret of his questionable behavior with female ashram visitors. 

Later that same visit, Brianna and I were spending time with some of the younger residents in the coffee shop the cult operated for visitors. Drake’s “One Dance” played over the radio and Brianna’s hips swayed to it while she made herself a drink. I was shocked to see the men in the room openly staring, running their eyes over her body hungrily. 

Immediately, alarm bells rang in my mind, and I wanted to whisk her away from these lecherous men. How could people who claim to be above the worldly pleasures look at her like that? 

This is one of the strongest memories I have of my time at Yogaville, and while the accompanying surge of emotion was gone, I still remember the feeling of the strong urge to protect my friend, to take her far from these men with predatory looks in their eyes. 

---

There was a lot about Swami Satchidananda, Integral Yoga, and Yogaville that I felt reeked of hypocrisy. 

His private residence at Yogaville is preserved exactly as it was at the time of his death in 2002. It is filled with beautiful solid-wood furniture from the 1970s, and giant hand-carved wood panels depicting scenes from the Bhagavad Gita. Out in the carport were several antique Rolls Royce cars. 

In fact I have a very distinct memory of a photo of the Swami driving a luxury car in his robes, his long beard blowing in the wind. 

At the ashram, it felt like his taste for luxury was seen as a quirk, rather than a sign of greed or that he had lost sight of the organization’s mission. 

The Swami also crafted a network of businesses, foundations, and other profit generating ventures. 

There’s the Integral Yoga Institute, that sells classes, yoga teacher trainings; Yogaville itself that offers a yoga retreat space, yoga teacher trainings, their yoga equipment supply business, a health food store in New York City, the books written and published by the ashram that all students are required to purchase. 

Brianna had said that she had seen some of the ledgers for the ashram and there was a LOT of money flowing in, and I’d guess not a lot flowing out because the ashram ran off the essentially free labor of the residents. 

Before ever visiting the cult, I had realized that being at Yogaville essentially kept Brianna broke. Because it’s in a remote area, there aren’t a lot of job opportunities outside of the ashram. The fulltime jobs with benefits are coveted and rare. A kind of nepotism reined, where, at least among the 20-somethings we spent time with, those with the fulltime jobs were the children of people who been part of the ashram from the early days. 

Right before I visited her at the ashram, Brianna had been offered a desk job at the ashram. While she had been at the cult on and off for four or five years at that point, it made sense why she was so excited to be offered one of the full-time positions – as it also meant health insurance and the ability to rent a broken-down single-wide trailer from the ashram (versus the congregate housing on the ashram property with four to eight people per room).

It seemed that during my time there, a significant portion of the people who lived on or around the ashram people either were work-trading for their room and board, or were being paid close to minimum wage, and I can remember Brianna telling me that the lack of health insurance was a problem as she approached 26 and had chronic neck pain from an old injury. 

Many of the coveted full-time jobs were involving the yoga supply business. It’s ran out of a small warehouse, filled with yoga supplies – books, incense, straps, blocks, mats – anything a yoga practitioner could want (and likely doesn’t need). 

Some really unassuming older ladies worked in the warehouse’s office and clearly were suspicious of our attempts to use Brianna’s employee discount to purchase two blocks and a strap for me. At first glance they appeared like any other middle-aged mom, but I had to remind myself that these were also cult members. 

Finally, despite saying that interfaith work is the key to world peace, the Swami and the ashram clearly believe that their Hindu yoga, meditation, and wellness practices were the best way to reach optimum health, happiness, and spiritual enlightenment. 

One part of that was extreme fasting. As we became closer in college, Brianna would reveal some of the fasts she did – I remember when she was a Resident Assistant in one of the dorms at our university, she had the ingredients to her fasting drink lined up on the top of the microwave: apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, a little jar of cayenne pepper. This was all she was going to consume for a week.

Fasting is a known way to induce religious experience and is used around the world in religious rites however, my own flirtations with disordered eating taught me that extended periods of time without food makes it hard to think straight, and it’s harder to be observant. While I’m sure that there were some profound spiritual experiences that emerged in Brianna’s fasted states, I also wonder if this is a tactic of the cult to keep their devotees compliant, unquestioning. 

---

I don’t have a clean ending for this post. The lawsuits against the ashram are pending, the community is torn between those who believe the survivors and those convinced they’re lying. The ashram still seems to function as it always has – a refuge for predators seeking to evade accountability. 

But this ashram has led to loss in my life as well. 

A few years after the visit I write about here, I had moved to Tennessee for graduate school, and Brianna came to stay with me for a short period. She had been staying in the San Francisco Integral Yoga community and had journeyed by night bus to stay with me.  

She arrived in time for Thanksgiving and as it was my first Thanksgiving away from my family, I was thrilled she was there. We cooked a vegan feast that night and laughed at the colonialism of it all.  

After living together for a short time, we had a falling out and didn’t speak for five years. 

I believe that being trapped in the cult was partially to blame for this – though I was also not being the best friend I could have been at that time. When we did live together it seemed like she struggled with being away from the insulated Integral Yoga community, and so it was unsurprising when during an argument she told me she was moving back to Yogaville. 

At first, I was obviously incredibly mad and betrayed, and it took several years for me to make peace with what happened. I had to grieve the loss of a person I had truly treasured and who I understood as influential to me. 

She brought into my life things that were important years after our friendship ended – becoming vegan, getting into yoga, anti-consumerism and frugality, alternative health, urban farming and organic food.  

I also just missed her. 

Her humor and warmth, sending memes back and forth, commenting on recent events, sharing books and podcasts, her out-of-the-box takes. 

But those feelings faded, and I moved on, finished graduate school, moved to New Mexico, started a new career. 

I do see the cult as some of the reason our friendship and closeness ended – her inability or unwillingness to leave and seeming inability to live outside of the cult created a rift that couldn’t be bridged. It was incredibly sad, and I often thought about her, hung on to the items she left at my house for years, even moved once or twice with her personal items tucked in with mine. 

However, we have recently reconnected, and I hope that our friendship can continue to grow little by little. She’s out of the cult now and is working on a podcast about Yogaville and Swami Satchidananda “Surviving Satchidananda”. 

She’s also written about her experiences on Medium, and I’ve been shocked to read some of the things she’s experienced and seen at the ashram. It goes far beyond what I knew about. 

I sincerely hope the victims find peace and healing, and that the ashram that allowed these abuses to occur is held to account. I hope Brianna finds joy in the process of discovering who she is outside of the cult (and keeps kicking ass with her podcast!).