WHEN MEDITATION TURNS TOXIC
TARA Brach was four months pregnant when she miscarried at a women’s retreat in Española, New Mexico. She was 30 and had spent the past eight years as a devoted member of 3HO, a community promising spiritual awakening.
The loss devastated her. She believed that extensive physical activity in the desert summer heat might have contributed to her miscarriage, so she wrote a note to her spiritual leader, Yogi Bhajan, suggesting they exercise care with pregnant women in the future.
Bhajan waited until the next public gathering to respond. In front of a roomful of her peers and without previous warning, he sternly declared that no summer was hot enough to cause a woman to miscarry. He then called on Tara to stand up and “hear the truth”.
She’d lost the baby, he said, because she was too worried about her career – and “motherhood isn’t a profession”. Now shouting, he accused her of being a liar; he could tell she was one from her aura, he claimed.
“You wanted to have a child, that is true. Everyone knows that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have spread your legs,” he spat. “But you got it, and then what?”
He told her she needed to go sit and “work it out”.
Tara, in shock from the public humiliation, retreated to a little one-person meditation hut called a gurdwara, where she spent most of the night.
Meditation in her ashram – which she practised for several hours after beginning the day at 3.30am with a cold shower – focused on cultivating a “state
