A Sip of Something Sour: The Sinister Origins of Yogi Tea

In my early twenties, newly minted in Los Angeles with the shimmer of curiosity in my eyes, I found myself tucked into a small studio on Sunset called The Golden Door. It promised transformation, transcendence, and if you listened closely enough—maybe even truth. The people wore white turbans. They chanted in syllables I didn’t understand, but the sound vibrated in my ribcage like lullabies from another life. The scent of incense hung thick in the air. Someone wept quietly during shavasana. I remember thinking, I’ve never felt this kind of collective longing for a different existence.

This was Kundalini yoga, a discipline brought to the West by Yogi Bhajan, a towering figure swaddled in mystique. He claimed to be a guru from India. But as I later learned, he wasn’t born of some ancient Himalayan tradition—he was an airport customs officer turned spiritual empire-builder. His “teachings” were not plucked from some sacred lineage but stitched together here in America, an imported mysticism marketed for the Western ache. Still, I stayed for a while. There was something entrancing about the gong and the melodies, about a room moving as one organism.

Over time, however, I grew suspicious of the spectacle—the curated purity, the expensive retreats, the hushed conversations about people in the “community” experiencing immaculate conception and the belief that the soul of an unborn child leaping into the mother at exactly 120 days pregnant. Hmmm. I like to think I am a very open-minded individual, but…