Re: The downside of yoga

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Nothing about what is unfolding on Koh Phangan feels particularly unfamiliar to Rick Ross, a cult expert, deprogrammer and author, who’s been interviewed on the subject countless times. The secluded island setting is, he says, a much easier place to create the environment necessary for what he labels “destructive groups.”

“If you take people out of normal circumstances and put them on an island, surrounded by people who are locked into a particular leader, authority and mindset, they create … a false social proof,” he said in a recent interview from his office in Los Angeles.

“You completely control periods of time where they have no feedback other than the feedback they receive from other disciples, teachers, acolytes and devotees,” he continued. “You’re in control of what they’re seeing, hearing, who they’re interacting with. It can be very intense.”

It’s a reality Ava, now three years removed from Koh Phangan, knows all too well.

“No one is going to be interested in you if you don’t do the same as everybody else,” she said. “That meant dressing a certain way, acting a certain way. Then all the behavior comes very normal, because people all around you are doing the same thing.

“I lost all perspective completely.”

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While the stories of sexual coercion and rape might seem like obvious red flags to any potential acolytes, former Agama members spoken to by Coconuts Bangkok say the sexual initiations described are not introduced immediately.

Much as with better-known entities like the Church of Scientology, students are slowly graduated through levels — 24 in this case — only learning certain truths that might seem disturbing to a newcomer after first being properly groomed to accept the knowledge.

“It’s like a church,” explained Stephen, the project manager, describing what he saw as a form of manipulation. “They’ve created something that makes you feel left out when you don’t go.”

“People are always asking ‘Hey, have you done this?’ and ‘Why didn’t you go [to the group workshops]?” he said.

“By the time you reach level 3, you don’t really know what’s going on, so you want to go because you’re so curious. You want to be part of this elite group.”

Ava describes the experience as having a carrot continually dangled just out of reach.

“Every time you’re hanging out with people in the café, they’re like ‘wait until you get to this next level and you get this technique,'” she said. “It kind of kept you hooked.”

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But while proponents of tantric yoga insist that sexual activity plays a relatively small, if important, part in their holistic approach to well-being, students and co-workers at the Agama school describe a very different experience.

“All of his advice that he ever gave students involved sex. Sex was the answer to every psychological, spiritual, emotional, physical problem,” Miller said in a recent interview.

Multiple sources corroborated her description of an unrelenting emphasis on sex inside the Agama compound, an exercise in breaking down inhibitions to the point where sexual advances from teachers felt entirely unexceptional.

“Nancy, you have to give yourself to men, you have to seduce them with your eyes and have as many partners as possible in as many Zodiac signs as possible,” she remembers the guru telling her. It was the only solution, he insisted, to finding the long-term partner she sought.

Ava, who said she had repeatedly made clear her lack of interest in Tarcau didn’t get away with mere advice, however, describing being “constantly pressured by him.”

“This went on for two years,” she said. “Eventually, I just felt like I had no other option. I felt like I needed healing, and he convinced me that he was the one to heal me.”

Looking back, Ava, a painfully shy yet hopeful young woman when she arrived at the school, now sees the consistent pressure she faced with a painful clarity.

She was being “broken.”