The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Details of this remarkable journey are spotty, but we know that it was K. P. S. Menon, Devi’s old friend from China, who arranged the gathering with the Kremlin bigwigs. He had since become ambassador to the USSR, and when Devi, traveling with a student of hers in northern Europe, wanted to visit her old homeland, she turned to him for help. It’s not clear how the idea came about, but that summer, with the Cold War raging and the Soviet Union still very much cut off from the Western world, Devi managed to get papers and visit the country of her youth for the first time in more than forty years. Her student, whom she refers to as Bala Krishna but otherwise says little about, accompanied her.

  She arrived in Leningrad after giving a lecture in Oslo. Much of it was unrecognizable, though the house where she’d lived with her grandmother when the city was called St. Petersburg still stood. In Moscow she checked in to the once-grand Hotel Metropol, where she’d stayed with her mother as a girl. People gawked at her as she walked the streets in her sari, stopping her to ask where she was from and why she was there.

  According to a story she later told, a young man noticed one of her yoga books under her bag at a restaurant and begged her to sell it to him; at the time, books about Eastern religions were available only on the black market. She gave him the book and even offered to teach him a deep-breathing technique, though they had a hard time finding a place where they could be alone. The streets were too crowded, and he knew better than to go to a foreigner’s hotel. Finally, they hid in a quiet corner of a subway station, but Devi had to cut the lesson short when a suspicious soldier started watching them. “The prospect of being questioned at a police station did not particularly appeal to me,” she writes. “It would have been rather difficult to explain why an American citizen, dressed in an Indian sari, would want to show a strange Russian youth the Yoga method of deep breathing—and in a subway station at that!”

  Despite the oppressive atmosphere, Devi never really expressed any anger toward the Soviet system that had turned her and her mother into refugees. This wasn’t, contrary to the Red-hunters’ suspicions, due to any sort of leftist impulse. Rather, it was a product of her determined political detachment, a result of both her other-worldly inclinations and her spiritual discipline. Once, she recalls in her memoir, some students in Paris were discomfited by her refusal to condemn the Bolsheviks. “They weren’t interested in talking with someone who simply accepted things as they were and decided to live her life free from historical conflicts,” she writes. For someone who’d been buffeted by global cataclysm the way she had, part of yoga’s power was its promise of an escape from history, a way to remain impervious to life’s daily chaos and contingency.

  While Devi had no interest in communism, she was happy for the chance to bring yoga to Communists. She got her chance when Menon arranged a reception for her attended by top Soviet officials, including First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan (the second-most powerful figure in the country, next to Nikita Khrushchev) and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Devi, the only woman in the large hall, stood on a small platform covered with carpets and plants and, speaking in Russian, gave a brief overview of hatha yoga. Her student Bala Krishna demonstrated a few postures.

  When she was finished, the assembled dignitaries peppered her with questions. Their interest wasn’t as odd as it might seem—while the Soviet Union was hostile to religion, there was a lot of official interest in what was called “human reserves,” hidden potentials that might somehow be unleashed for the benefit of the state. During the late 1950s, as a result of rumors that American researchers were conducting telepathy experiments aboard submarines, there was a burst of Soviet research into parapsychology, including a brief period of openness to Western experts. Starting in 1963, reported the British magazine New Scientist, “Numerous Western researchers travelled to Russia and found a fair amount of activity and interest in the paranormal, although the focus was frequently different from that in the West. Russian workers tended to be far more preoccupied with physical and biological effects than with the so-called ‘mental’ phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance.”

  Not surprisingly, researchers into human reserves were particularly interested in the feats of Indian yogis. Searching for ways that cosmonauts could control their physiological processes in space, a scientist named A. S. Romen spent several years researching yoga methods before developing a technique called “self-regulation,” essentially Sovietized hatha yoga. It began with deep relaxation in which practitioners would breathe rhythmically while attempting to release all muscular tension. Then they would, through the power of concentration, try to raise and lower their body temperatures and manipulate the rhythm of their heartbeats, just like advanced yogis. Afterward, they would breathe deeply and do simple stretching exercises. Some of Romen’s subjects learned to perform yogic abdominal contractions while seated in the lotus position.

  So, Russian authorities would have been open to Devi’s message, as long as they were convinced she was promoting a useful technology rather than a form of irrational mysticism. Was yoga, Mikoyan asked, a religion? No, Devi assured him. Yoga helps people develop their full physical, spiritual, and mental potentials; it could be practiced by people of any faith or none.

  Yet the word spirit made Mikoyan uneasy. What was the difference between that and religion? In Devi’s telling, she countered by asking whether Tolstoy had a highly developed spirit.

  “Tolstoy is a spiritual giant!” Mikoyan exclaimed.

  Yet, she argued, he was refused a religious burial. “A spiritual giant is not always a religious person, and a religious person doesn’t always have a developed spirit,” she said. This seems to have convinced Mikoyan, since, as she told it, he approached the platform, held out his hand, and helped her climb down. Foreign Minister Gromkyo offered a vodka toast.

  For ordinary Russians who aspired to become yogis, Devi’s overtures to the Soviet leadership didn’t necessarily make things any easier. In the years after her visit, yoga books, including Forever Young, Forever Healthy, were illicitly translated, photocopied, and distributed by hand, and underground clubs devoted to yoga and other New Age practices proliferated, but the discipline was frowned upon and could get practitioners into trouble. A New York Times dispatch from 1973 headlined “Yoga Exercise Fad in Soviet Is Vigorously Attacked” quoted a meeting of athletic officials who had denounced yoga for doing nothing for “the development of active working people” and for being an “idealistic philosophy full of mysticism.” In the 1980s, some Russian yoga teachers were still ending up in prison.

  Yet, three years after Devi’s trip, Dhirendra Brahmachari, yoga teacher to the Nehru family, traveled to Russia to train Soviet cosmonauts. (Years later, Brahmachari would come to be known as the “Indian Rasputin” because of his malign influence on Indira Gandhi.) In the Soviet Union, as in the United States, there was room for yoga as long as it was grounded in secular materialism, its mysticism pulsing just under the surface, waiting until the time was right to show itself.

  By 1960, anticommunist paranoia had calmed down enough that somehow the FBI, which had stopped following Devi and questioning her friends and students, didn’t notice her trip. At least, no mention of it appears in her file until 1962, when she landed on the Bureau’s radar again due to a tip by a suspicious woman named Doris Jean Hollenbeck.

  Hollenbeck worked in newspaper promotion and advertising, and her husband, from whom she was separated, was a colonel in the Marine Corps. She met Devi at a luncheon, and Devi, ever eager to enlist new acquaintances in her plans, thought Hollenbeck might be able to help her promote the use of yoga in American factories and in the military, which she believed would improve well-being and efficiency. She invited Hollenbeck to visit her at home, and Hollenbeck went.

  The newspaper woman, wrote an FBI agent, “was of the opinion that she was ‘being sounded out’ to determine her personal attitude toward Russia. During the course of the visit, DEVI brought out that she is the daughter of a former Czaris
t General Officer. DEVI indicated no displeasure with the current Russian Regime. She talked of the use of Yoga by Russian industry, Russian military forces, Russian Cosmonauts, etc.”

  Hollenbeck’s apprehension didn’t stop her from visiting Devi several more times, either because she was intrigued or because she wanted to gather more information. During a subsequent get-together, she overheard Devi and her husband discussing Devi’s travel to the Soviet Union, and noted to the FBI that she was “favorably inclined” to the trip. (It’s not clear if the conversation she overheard was about the 1960 journey or about plans for a future one.)

  “Mrs. HOLLENBECK said DEVI and her husband are part of an International Set,” reported the FBI agent. Hollenbeck had, she admitted, “no information that would indicate DEVI is trying to use her program to the detriment of the United States.” Yet, the report said, reviewing Devi’s books and recordings, Hollenbeck had concluded “that the material is soporific in nature and that it could be part of a program to be used against the U.S.”

  This might have been the start of a new round of surveillance, but the FBI seems to have lost interest, perhaps because agents believed Devi had relocated to Mexico, where she and Knauer bought a villa in 1960. (One memo written in response to Hollenbeck’s claims notes that Devi was in Mexico and says, “No further investigation in this case is contemplated at Los Angeles.”)

  Devi had fallen in love with Mexico while visiting the heiress Gloria Gasque, former president of the International Vegetarian Union, at her home in Tecate, a town directly over the border. Tecate had a lovely, arid, Mediterranean climate and had been spared the tawdry tourist invasion that had transformed Tijuana, twenty-five miles to the west. Gasque had built a three-story house with sixteen bedrooms at the foot of a mountain that the Americans called Tecate Peak and the Mexicans referred to as Mount Cuchuma. Rancho Cuchuma, as Gasque had named her estate, was surrounded by an organic vegetable garden and a small stand of fruit trees; inside the house were splendid oriental rugs, tapestries, and crystal chandeliers. It seemed to Devi like an exotic and refined palace, the sort of place she had lived in many years before in India.

  Next door to Gasque’s house was Rancho La Puerta, a world-famous health spa. The owners, Deborah and Edmond Szekely, had founded it in 1940 as part health camp, part commune—at first, everyone had to bring his own tent, chop firewood, and perform farm chores. Edmond Szekely, a world-traveling polyglot Hungarian shaped by Lebensreform, was an early evangelist for whole, organic food, and much of what he and his wife served came from their garden: fresh raw milk from their goats, wild sage honey, sprouted wheat, salads, and tropical fruits.

  Initially, the camp was called the Essene School of Life. The name was based on Szekely’s claim that an ancient Aramaic manuscript hidden in the Vatican Library, the Essene Gospel of Peace, revealed Jesus as a prophet of vegetarianism, fresh air, and health fasts. Soon, word got out that a visit to the Essene School of Life was a great way to lose weight, and a new sort of guest started showing up: women who wanted to be pampered while they searched for the keys to eternal youth.

  The Szekelys changed the name of their retreat to the less metaphysical Rancho La Puerta. Deborah added calisthenics classes, dance classes, hydrotherapy, herbal wraps, and other beauty treatments. Naturally, they needed a hatha yoga teacher. So when Gasque died, the Szekelys suggested that Devi buy Rancho Cuchuma. Knauer put up the money, and in 1962, Devi opened a yoga school where she would train a generation of teachers to meet the burgeoning American demand.

  The nature of that demand was quickly changing. The United States was on the verge of the Age of Aquarius, when huge numbers of spiritually parched Americans would turn eastward, seeking not just health but also transcendence. As they did so, Devi would cast off the air of industrious pragmatism that had, until then, served her so well in Los Angeles and Moscow alike. Yoga in the West was about to get a lot more ecstatic and wild, and Devi, who never really gave up her quest for a guru, was about to find a brand-new god.

  · CHAPTER 14 ·

  IT’S NOT CLEAR what Devi expected to get out of her madly impractical trip to Saigon in 1966, when the Vietnam War was raging. In her writings and interviews, she says only that she went there to conduct meditations. The trip was part of a grand but amorphous project called the Crusade for Light in Darkness, which Devi began in 1965, but because it never really came to fruition, she didn’t write much about it. It’s likely that she was pulled to Vietnam by the same centripetal force that always drew her to the spinning center of things; even as she professed a desire to live outside history, there was a part of her that loved being close to the action. She’d had success in the past with impulsive leaps into foreign lands and barely constructed plans that somehow seemed to work out, and she had faith that wherever she went, even a country at war, the universe would ensure her well-being.

  The idea for the Crusade arose during a fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963. Devi had quite a following in the city thanks to Elsie Frankfurt, who, along with her sisters, had founded Page Boy, the country’s first line of fashionable, upscale maternity clothes. Frankfurt, a millionaire and a minor celebrity, had met Devi while vacationing at Rancho La Puerta and been so impressed that she instituted daily yoga breaks for all employees in her Dallas factory, bringing Devi to town that spring to help start the program. Over two days, Devi went from department to department, offering individual instruction in deep breathing and restorative asanas, and then leading the whole office through relaxation exercises over the loudspeaker.

  After her visit, every day at 1:55 p.m., switchboard operators at the factory would interrupt all calls to announce, “[Y]oga break starts at 2!” When the hour struck, the entire factory shuddered to a halt. Buyers in the showroom were told they could either wait or join in as Elsie or one of her sisters used the loudspeaker to lead the session. “The elevators are motionless and the porters lay down their mops,” reported the New York Herald Tribune. “Since there aren’t enough mats yet to go around, some of the employees stretch out on the floor and others push aside the maternity dresses and lie down on the cutting tables, while they breathe deep and perfect their yoga.” The story also noted that Frankfurt was planning to make yoga clothes—what she called a “lotus suit”—for expectant mothers, prefiguring the prenatal yoga boom by several decades.

  Because of Frankfurt, the Herald Tribune reported, yoga was “running rampant” in Dallas. So it was a natural place for Devi to stop while on tour for her latest book, Renew Your Life through Yoga, which describes how yoga offers release from anxiety, the “Problem of Our Age” and “one of the greatest menaces the civilized world must face these days.” When she realized that she was going to be in the city at the same time as President John F. Kennedy—whose iconic wife, Jackie, had worn Page Boy attire during her pregnancies—she hoped to meet him and possibly teach him some deep-breathing exercises that he might use to cope with the enormous strain of his job.

  He was dead before she got the chance. Kennedy’s assassination shocked her deeply and seems to have awakened in her some of the religious hunger she’d put aside during the years of her great American success. Like much of the emerging counterculture, she was becoming convinced that the world was in the midst of a spiritual crisis, one that yoga and meditation could perhaps help to solve. Thus, after years of trying to persuade Westerners that yoga had nothing to do with religion, she suddenly found herself ready for a divine quest.

  The details of that quest, though, never quite got nailed down. Part of the plan was to build what she called a “Tower of Light” in Tecate, with an eternal flame that she would carry from country to country like an Olympic torch. This would be followed by a series of mass meditations held in stadiums in which people would “attempt to stir the ‘forces of light’ into action to combat the ‘forces of darkness’ so active in this day and age,” she told the New Cosmic Star, a monthly New Age newspaper. “We will stress the performance of acts of kindness, ligh
t and goodness…keep your heart clean, be extraordinarily kind.” Afterward, all participants would light a candle from the eternal flame and keep it burning in their windows until the end of the Crusade.

  In April 1965, everyone in Devi’s address book received a typed fund-raising letter suggesting that they honor her sixty-sixth birthday by making a donation toward the project. “On May 12, her birthday, INDRA DEVI will start on a ‘CRUSADE FOR LIGHT IN DARKNESS,’ believing that this will bring LIGHT into the lives of thousands and possibly millions because she wants to spend the rest of her life on this CRUSADE,” it read. “Without adequate assistance, without proper organization and necessary funds, this COURAGEOUS LITTLE WOMAN who is always full of enthusiasm, always ready to help others has decided to start on this CRUSADE because she says, ‘the call is so persistent that she cannot disobey it and will just go ahead believing angels and men will come to help.’ ”

  The Crusade kicked off at a ceremony on May 8, when the mayors of Tecate and nearby National City, California, joined her to lay the Tower’s foundation stone at Rancho Cuchuma. There was another ceremony on May 12 at National City’s Kimball Community Hall. That year, she released a vinyl record, Indra Devi Presents Concentration & Meditation, whose cover described her as “The World’s Foremost Authority on Yoga” and the “Founder of the Crusade for Light in Darkness.” Its front featured a portrait of Devi by the Dallas artist Dmitri Vail, known for his expensive paintings of socialites, celebrities, and politicians. She’s shown in a white sari with a sort of silver Renaissance halo behind her head. Eyes cast heavenward, she stands before what appears to be an altar and holds a small oil lamp in her hands, like an offering. Never before had she presented herself in such an overtly spiritual guise.

  On the recording, which is less than a half-hour long, her voice is melodious and almost girlish as she instructs listeners to summon their inner light through visualization and concentration, and then to direct it outward, toward those they love as well as those they hate. She enlists her audience in a cosmic spiritual struggle, saying, “Those who are on the dark side are very active. They’re violent, they’re loud, they kill…and what are you doing, if you are on the side of light? You cannot just do nothing.” As she presents it, meditation becomes both a way of letting go of the world and of improving it.