Guru Jagat Was Not Alone: 'Breath of Fire' Review

We all know true crime is a tricky genre, to put it extremely generously. Besides the exploitative foundation of telling these stories (Something horrible happened to you? Excellent! Let’s make a miniseries!), there’s the narrative-making itself: who is the villain, who should have known better, who gets to be framed as a hero. Very good true crime tells its story, while making sure you’re aware of the very messy nature of bringing lived experience down to a simple, tellable, linear thread. Breath of Fire is very good true crime.

Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens’ Breath of Fire, a four-part Max docuseries, chronicles the rise and dramatic fall of Katie Griggs, aka “Guru Jagat,” and her inheritance of an abusive yoga cult. She was the face and figurehead of RA MA Institute, a glossy, celebrity-studded yoga center in LA-but the yoga in question is Kundalini yoga, a fictionalized bastardization of mainstream yoga and the Punjabi Sikh faith. This “ancient technology” was crafted and marketed-years before Griggs was even born-by a man who called himself Yogi Bhajan.

Over decades of manipulation, including grotesque and methodical sexual abuse and child abuse, Yogi Bhajan developed a prosperity gospel which involved his complete and unquestioned control over a huge number of followers. His abuses came to light-but Kundalini didn’t fade. He weathered legal attacks while mocking the victims publically, and died as an honored “religious figure.” That is, despite decades of recorded criminal activity so vast I don’t have the word count to go into it here. Some of these enterprises were legitimate and are still ongoing (Yogi tea, anyone?), but those are by far the exception.

Katie Griggs stumbled into the orbit of Kundalini yoga as a YouTube astrologer. By all appearances, she was essentially utilized as a young, feminine face to relate to a social-media generation of New Age seekers. The figure behind her, her teacher, was Harijiwan-a disciple of Yogi Bhajan who did time in prison after taking the fall for his teacher in one of the cult’s many, many illegal smuggling and con schemes. Griggs was a bright millennial figurehead to give Kundalini legitimacy moving forward into the Instagram age.

Based on the Vanity Fair article, “The Second Coming of Guru Jagat,” by Hayley Phelan, the docuseries details how Griggs slid further and further from reality while dominating a high-control group of unpaid or underpaid employees. (In a twist of fate, it was watching HBO’s The Vow, about the NXIVM cult, that opened some employees’ eyes about what king of group they were involved with.)

Griggs’ story is a tragedy and a horror story. As Guru Jagat, she weaponized trust and authority into cruelty and abuse, while embracing disturbing conspiracy theories and promoting them to her followers. That’s all true. But it’s also true that she herself was a follower: though her story is fascinating and the heart of the docuseries, she isn’t the root of the larger narrative.

As Phelan notes in the docuseries, it’s all too easy to tear down a woman who sinks into delusions on the dark side of the New Age industry. But just behind her is Harijiwan, now weaponizing Griggs herself as a commodity and a tool for his own authority. To Griggs, Harijiwan was a teacher and mentor-and not a kind one. He’s still teaching, still profiting, still comfortably in power.

The series does sometimes indulge in over-dramatized, jarring mash-up montages, but around that it does the real work: it’s telling the story of Katie Griggs as a whole person, from the perspective of people who cared about her. It’s a story primarily told by women, about a woman-and it’s told carefully, allowing for blame but also sympathy. Guru Jagat/Katie Griggs may be the core thread of the story, but Breath of Fire makes sure that the larger narrative is not about making her the fall person for a larger web of manipulation and harm.

There are a lot of interesting angles happening in the docuseries-from the New Age battle for souls via social media, to the seriously troubling number of white women in turbans-but there is a clear, journalistic incisiveness behind the storytelling. Breath of Fire keeps its subject human and keeps its eye on the larger system at play, while never absolving Griggs of her own actions.

All four episodes are now streaming on Max.