Amrit Desai / Kripalu (1994 leadership crisis)

This record documents Amrit Desai (born Amritlal C. Desai, 16 October 1932, Gujarat, India) and the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health — not the unrelated Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin founded by Charles Anderson, which this catalogue covers separately under its own slug (see notes). Desai trained under the wandering Shaivite monk Swami Kripalvananda from age 15, emigrated to the US, and founded the first Kripalu ashram in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania in 1972, naming his style of hatha yoga 'Kripalu Yoga' after his teacher. The community relocated to Summit Station, Pennsylvania in 1976 (residential staff reaching roughly 150) and then to a former Jesuit novitiate in Lenox/Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1983, which became, by contemporary press accounts, the largest yoga-based residential community in the United States; by 1994 Kripalu-trained teachers were active in all 50 US states and 45 countries.

Within the ashram, single residents were required to practice celibacy (brahmacharya); other residents were expected to report violators, who were then expelled. Desai himself had declared this celibacy rule for the community in 1968, after the birth of his own third child, with Kripalu marking the declaration with a large celebration — while, according to Kripalu's own subsequent account, Desai and a senior associate were themselves violating the rule they enforced on others. In 1994, several female resident disciples came forward with allegations that Desai had coerced them into secret sexual relationships while he preached and enforced celibacy for the wider community; Desai admitted to sexual contact with at least three female disciples and was forced to resign as Kripalu's Spiritual Director. In an open letter to the community he wrote, 'I deeply regret any suffering I have caused to the people directly involved and to the entire Kripalu family.' The Boston Globe and Berkshire Eagle covered the disclosures at the time, and Susan Eden's 1994 account 'Encounter with Power' recounts the episode from within the community. Kripalu's remaining board reorganized the center as a non-residential, non-guru-centered wellness and retreat destination — a restructuring generally treated in subsequent yoga-community literature as a successful institutional reform, distinguishing Kripalu's case from centers that collapsed or continued unchanged under the same leadership after comparable disclosures. Desai resumed teaching at the original Sumneytown ashram in 1996, moved to Salt Springs, Florida in 2002, and had already founded the Amrit Yoga Institute there in 2001, where he has continued to teach a related method under the 'Amrit Yoga' / 'I AM Yoga' banner to a smaller following, entirely separate from the reformed Kripalu Center.