Els Coenen (formerly Ravinder Kaur) lives in Belgium. She was 49 when she took her first Kundalini Yoga class, immediately fell in love with it and became a teacher in 2008. She taught Kundalini Yoga for ten years, gave multiple classes a week, organized workshops and teacher training programs in Belgium and East-Africa and assisted in them. Every year she went to the European Yoga Festival, had a boot at the bazar to collect funds for the seva-based teacher training programs in East-Africa, combining this work with a job in the Telecom sector.
She organized a Sat Nam Rasayan training in Belgium. In 2013, two women were sexually abused by an SNR instructor. Because Els insisted that the harm would be recognized, and action would be taken to prevent future abuse, she was excommunicated by Guru Dev Singh master of this healing technique and student of Yogi Bhajan, and Belgium was declared "a no-go-zone" for SNR for two years. From 2010 till 2018 Els presided the Belgian Federation of Kundalini Yoga and represented her country at an international level. Disillusioned by many things she stopped all Kundalini Yoga related activities in 2018.
When in 2020 the book Premka triggered many survivors to tell their stories, Els stepped in again, hoping that the time for transparency and clarity had come. She was part of an advisory team of the Compassionate Reconciliation Program but stepped out at the end of 2022 as she experienced it as window dressing.
In April 2021 after she read or listened to survivor stories on many different platforms and had watched hours and hours of Uncomfortable Conversations, she contacted GuruNischan to collaborate. She made extracts of the interviews and put them together on a website (abuse-in-kundalini-yoga.com) to allow people with less free time to be informed. Now, she has written a book in partnership with GuruNischan, including voices of survivor stories called Under the Yoga Mat: The Dark History of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga.
Song Credit: Because of You – by Gustaph
The book can be found on the website below for platforms available for purchase in Europe, USA and many other countries throughout Asia as well.
www.abuse-in-kundalini-yoga.com
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Episode 60: Els Coenen (Ravinder Kaur; Belgium, 2008 - 2018)