HBO Doc Breath of Fire Explores Fall of Guru Jagat

A new documentary series, Breath of Fire, focuses on the rise and sudden fall of a Kundalini yoga teacher known as Guru Jagat, whose story was brought to wider attention in journalist Haley Phelan’s 2021Vanity Fair story “The Second Coming of Guru Jagat.” The four-episode series, premiering Oct. 23 on HBO, expands on the Vanity Fair piece by bringing together, on camera, friends, family, and former employees of Jagat and Kundalini yogis, who practice across a range of levels, to talk about who Guru Jagat really was as a person and the irony of her yoga business, which aimed to help people succeed in business, struggling to make ends meet.Breath of Fire comes three years after Jagat, who was born Katie Griggs, died suddenly of cardiac arrest at the age of 41. But her friends and family do not hold back in Breath of Fire. As her own mother, Nansy Steinhorn-Galloway, says: “I mean it’s hard to think of her as a cult leader, but what else would you call her?”Kundalini yoga, explainedOf the...