Stephen Josephs

Common Boundaries MagazineJuly-August 1992

In 1992 Stephen Josephs was featured as part of a Common Boundaries magazine article titled “Leaving the Ashram”. This was another big awakening event that helped so many leave the YB Group in the early 1990s.

When he lived at the 3HO ashram in Boston, Gurushabad Singh Khalsa would rise at three o’clock in the morning. He would jump into a cold shower, then dress in freshly pressed orange and white robes. While his wife showered and dressed, Singh would comb his beard and wrap his long auburn hair into a white cotton turban. Then the Khalsas would walk down the hall to the ashram’s meditation room, where they would spend the next several hours with the group, reading prayers, doing yoga, meditating, and chanting.

After a light breakfast Singh would rush off to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Neurolinquistic Programming where he taught therapists and business clients new ways of learning. At some point he would squeeze in more time for prayer and meditation. After a full day at the office and a quick supper, he would spend his evening taking care of community business. As Northeast regional director of 3HO (the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization,) he had plenty to do: make phone calls, counsel individual 3HO members, run group meetings, and confer with Yogi Bhajan, the Sikh mystic who headed the organization. Around 10 pm he would fall into bed.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, from the time he was 26 until he was 37, Singh was a loyal devotee. He trusted Yogi Bhajan enough to let him arrange his marriage to a total stranger. At the guru’s suggestion, he sent his 10 year old son of that marriage halfway around the world to a school in India, where the yogi said the boy would be safely out of the reach of the shallow American culture that would impede his spiritual growth. Singh was heartsick about the separation, but he complied.

Then after 12 years of ashram life and despite the prestigious position he had won within the group’s inner circle, his doubts began to overshadow his beliefs. As he learned more about Neurolinguistic Programming, he began to see how the guru’s use of language induced altered states in his listeners. He noticed how thoroughly the guru’s reaction to anyone who questioned him tended to stifle dissent, belittling and ostracizing anyone who questioned him. For a time he stayed on, half believing Yogi Bhajan’s threats that anyone who left the group would be “cursed in this world and the next.”

One day a devotee who had suffered a miscarriage was severely berated. According to Singh, Yogi Bhajan stood her up in front of several hundred people and accused her of killing her own baby, sacrificing the child to her “professional ego.” The language he used was crude and humiliating. A few days later one of Singh’s dearest colleagues who wasn’t a devotee refused to appear on a public podium with Singh. The friend had heard about the incident and couldn’t believe that Singh would not protest such inhuman treatment.

“Something shifted in my chest.” says the man who used to be Singh, “as if a key were turning. I began to make plans for leaving.”

Today, Stephen Josephs, the former Gurushabad Singh Khalsa, gets up when he wants to. In a spacious, light filled room on the top floor of his Charlottesville Virginia home, the 46-year-old psychologist goes through a series of tai chi and chi kung exercises, works with his dreams, and practices mindfulness meditation. Although he is no longer consumed by religious fervor, he remains very much a seeker. Together with his wife, Alice (formerly Gurushabad Kaur Khalsa) and their 18 year old son, Sean, now a senior in High School, Stephen lives a simple satisfying life shaped in large part by the lessons he learned when he left the ashram.

A Cosmic Mid-Life Crisis

Stephen Josephs is one of hundreds of people who in the 1960s and 1970s took their search for a more meaningful life to spiritual gurus and to ashrams set apart from the world. Years later, many of them are reexamining that decision. Some flee the ashram in shock and disappointment when their beloved gurus fall from grace, enmeshed in scandals involving the abuse of sex, money, or power. For others, the break with the group is sort of a cosmic midlife crisis. One day they simply wake up to find the answers the ashram once provided have evolved into a whole new set of questions. Who am I now? Who – or what – is the authority in my life? Is the ashram a spiritual sanctuary for me, or has it merely become a hiding place?

A Prison of Specialness

For Stephen Josephs, the days and months after leaving the ashram were filled with struggle and pain. Feeling cursed as a traitor by his guru, abandoned by God, and oppressed by his own spiritual failure, it was, he recalls, “like God had just handed me a pink slip”. The central task in front of him was to develop his ego – perhaps the tool most crucial to survive in the secular world, and something he had worked assiduously to transcend or even vanquish during more than a decade in the ashram.

Emerging from ashram life required “reawakening the real self instead of posturing as this fiercely transcendent spiritual being.” Josephs now says.

Trading Sikh robes for Western clothing and cutting his hair to a fashionable length helped. Still, having spent more than a decade following strict religious rules regarding everything from what clothes to wear to what food to eat, taking back the power to name his own tastes and make his own judgements was an awesome endeavor.

“I had to trust my own emotional response, rather than smother them in mantras and dutiful behavior,” he says. “I had to let other people see that self I had camouflaged in religious regalia.”

Leaving Yogi Bhajan was the first step toward escaping what Josephs and others call the “prison of specialness” that the ashram often becomes – a place that feeds the devotee’s need to be unique, raised above the crowd by virtue of a higher spiritual destiny. While trapped in this prison, Josephs had lost touch with family and friends. He demanded prodigious achievements of himself and allowed himself no moral weaknesses.

Even after leaving the ashram he felt a compulsion to be extraordinary. “I was driven to find a special identity, ” he says, “to keep alive my narcissistic posture toward the world.” But the frustrations that met him on the outside made it difficult to sustain the illusion of specialness. Where before he had felt inflated, extraordinary, on speaking terms with the Divine, now he felt depressed, unremarkable, sent back to square one.

“The issues I joined the group to avoid – issues of intimacy and identity – came back to the surface.” Josephs says now, “To reclaim myself I had to complete the developmental tasks I had avoided by entering the ashram. It was like being born again, ordinary. “