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By the time the taxi deposits me on the corner of Stanton and Essex, in front of Guru Jagat’s just-opened studio, RA MA New York, I’ve already scribbled down a list of reasons why I am overdue in starting Kundalini yoga. I went to bed at two in the morning and woke up spent; I vocally, comically cursed the sudden lack of hot water in my Brooklyn apartment; I watched my anxiety rise in tandem with the city traffic. All that before nine o’clock. Inside, the room buzzes with people dressed in white—like a cast of extras from The Leftovers, minus the cigarettes—and I settle onto a fluffy sheepskin in gray pants and a navy T-shirt, like a wayward lamb who missed the sartorial memo. Guru Jagat takes a seat onstage between a laptop and a dogbed-size amethyst geode. The chanting begins, and everyone knows the words. My indoctrination has begun.
“That’s one of the reasons why we’re going to do so well in New York,” Guru Jagat explains to me after class, in a tête-à-turban outside on the open-air deck. “The nervous-system adjustment that the Kundalini yoga gives is just so relieving when you’re frazzled, underslept, and undernourished,” she says, watching me exhale into a cup of tea. “That part of it is so profound, especially for the urbanite.” Judging from the packed classes since last week’s soft opening, the city folk want in. And they’ve been waiting. In the four years since establishing her Venice flagship—a pilgrimage site that helped transform L.A.’s counterculture beach town into a wellness destination—Guru Jagat has stoked a growing fervor for Kundalini, a style of yoga that traffics in mantra-based meditations and percussive breathwork. (Save the arm balances for social media, she quips in class.) Sold-out workshops and retreats have spread the gospel from Mallorca to Hong Kong; a recent book and a subscription-based streaming platform, RA MA TV, beam her teachings and wry asides into serenely appointed living rooms around the globe. “I have no resistance to the technological age,” explains Guru Jagat, a self-described “CEO of a digital company” who riffs just as freely on virtual reality and Gen-Z as she does on the magnifying potential of the Aries full moon. Even her lexicon fights fire with fire: In the face of web-based distraction, Kundalini is the “technology that pulls the pressure off the psyche.”
That impulse to flow with, not against, the grain of modern times extends to the New York space. In addition to morning and evening classes (soon to expand into late-night offerings), Guru Jagat is piloting something she calls “yogic coworking”: Between noon and 5pm, members can pull a cushion—and a laptop—up to the low, Japanese-style tables; top-of-the-hour programming might include a seven-minute hypnotherapy session or a quick brain-refresh meditation, all for the sake of “cultivating your creativity,” she says, envisioning serendipitous collaborations. “I hate the word networking, but [RA MA] really has become not just a community of spirituality but also [of] people who are having interesting discussions, becoming friends, hanging out with each other’s kids.” It’s also a place to shop: for the requisite breezy whites by Myrah Penaloza, Agnes Baddoo’s leather carryalls, “activated” Moon Juice snacks by Amanda Chantal Bacon, and handsomely packaged skin care by Linné and Shiva Rose. (Another beauty secret, Guru Jagat tells me: cold showers. The irony.) This celebration of women entrepreneurs carries through to the building’s original tenant, a pioneering Lower East Side businesswoman named Minnie Silver, who died a couple years ago at 102. “It was a gravestone shop called Silver Monuments,” Guru Jagat says, pointing out the vintage metal sign propped up in the backyard; a neon “Victory” now hangs in the storefront window. “It’s been kind of mystic,” she adds of the sensed kinship. After all, what is a meditation called “Wake Up to Your Destiny” if not a call to leave a meaningful mark in this world?
RA MA New York, 125 Stanton Street; ramayogainstitute.com