‘Breath of Fire’: The Unbelievable Story of the Elizabeth Holmes of Yoga

In 2016, Haley Phelan went to a yoga class. She stretched; she strengthened; she took deep, healing breaths. But mostly, she found herself captivated by the class’s teacher: a white woman wearing flowing white robes who called herself Guru Jagat. “I was immediately struck by her as such a personality,” Phelan says.

She kept an eye on Guru Jagat—a Colorado native who was born Katie Griggs—over the subsequent months and years, noting how the yogi’s girlboss-adjacent words of affirmation and natural charisma were drawing an increasingly enormous number of followers. The specific brand of yoga she practiced, kundalini, became especially popular in Hollywood, with celebrity adherents including Kate Hudson, Alicia Keys, Orlando Bloom, and Russell Brand.

Perhaps they were drawn by the way kundalini married athleticism and Eastern spirituality with a familiarly American work ethic: the practice wasn’t just an exercise program but a flourishing business. By 2021, as Phelan wrote in a Vanity Fair article published the same year, the yoga studio Guru Jagat had founded had thriving locations in Venice Beach, New York City, and Mallorca, as well as 20,000 online subscribers who each paid at least $19 a month to be a part of Guru Jagat’s flock. (Most of them, Phelan notes, paid even more to access the studio’s special workshops.) “As the wellness boom boomed, she just really personified what I saw as the troubling convergence of spirituality and capitalism,” the writer says.

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That uneasy marriage got even more volatile when Guru Jagat began espousing far-right conspiracy theories, leading to an ending that none of her followers could see coming.

This story is at the center of Phelan’s article, “The Second Coming of Guru Jagat”—as well as Breath of Fire, a four-part docuseries that will premiere on HBO and Max Wednesday, October 23. (See the exclusive trailer above.) Though the series is based on Phelan’s article, it also has a wider scope, exploring the tangled origins of kundalini yoga—a practice basically created wholesale by Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, a customs inspector who reinvented himself as a spiritual leader named Yogi Bhajan after immigrating from India to the US in the 1960s—and its troubling legacy.

“We see in this series [that] Yogi Bhajan coopted a Sikh faith,” says Hayley Pappas, who codirected the series with Smiley Stevens. Similarly, “Guru Jagat coopted feminism. Why did it take so many years for somebody to poke holes in the fact that it’s a white woman wearing a turban?” Her rise and fall bring to mind another once-successful millennial woman who had a similar trajectory. “She wanted to be a serial entrepreneur,” Pappas says. “She wanted to be famous. She was charismatic in that way. Elizabeth Holmes absolutely was a touch point and a reference for us throughout.”

The series weaves together interviews, stylized reenactments, and clips from a vast trove of archival material, evoking predecessors like Wild Wild Country while taking fully unexpected swings into material that’s both dark and absurd—like the allegedly abusive Indian boarding schools where some kundalini adherents sent their children. “There’s an element of snark and playfulness and humor, and yet we knew that we were also going to go to pretty deep and dark places,” Pappas says. “We wanted to approach this not as some salacious cult story, but as a human story. We wanted to be able to relate and connect with our characters and our subjects—and not say, ‘How could someone join that?’”

Because on the surface, what Guru Jagat was selling sounds pretty appealing. Phelan felt it herself when she spoke with the woman for her article. “She had an answer for everything, and a long answer. And often, she was hilarious. She was smart too. I mean, she was great to talk to, as you can see in the film,” Phelan says.

“We always said we wanted to hang out with her after watching it,” adds Stevens. Pappas agrees: “I was like, oh, she has jokes. And then there were a lot of stretches where you’re like, This does not make sense.”

Which, granted, is not so unusual for 21st-century yoga teachers, who seem particularly susceptible to spreading wellness-related quackery—whether they’re promoting kundalini or not. “I do not judge anybody who practices it, but going to a class now is pretty hard for me,” says Pappas. Especially “if a teacher’s saying a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes I’m like, Wait a second. Who are you?”