Siddha Yoga (Muktananda / Chidvilasananda)

Siddha Yoga emerged from Muktananda's 1970s Western teaching tours, which leveraged the post-counterculture market for Indian spiritual teaching and Muktananda's claim to be a siddha (perfected master) able to transmit shaktipat (spiritual energy initiation) instantly. The 1980s peak saw substantial Hollywood and tech-industry following — Werner Erhard, Marsha Mason, John Denver, and a long list of celebrity devotees publicly associated with the SYDA Foundation. Rodarmor's 1983 article — based on testimony from senior SYDA members including former personal attendants — documented Muktananda's sexual abuse of devotees, some of whom were as young as 13. Internal SYDA materials and former-leadership testimony established that the abuse was an open secret at the senior level, suppressed by a combination of devotional framing (the guru's actions are by definition divine), the threat of severance (devotees who left lost their entire community), and explicit organisational pressure. Muktananda died in 1982 designating Gurumayi (then 26) and her brother Subhash (later Nityananda) as joint successors; in 1985 Gurumayi forced Nityananda out following a power struggle, after which Nityananda founded a parallel organisation. Gurumayi has rarely appeared in public since the early 2000s but remains the legal head of SYDA. The 1994 Lis Harris New Yorker article O Guru, Guru, Guru extended Rodarmor's work and remains the canonical journalistic treatment; the 2010 Sarah Caldwell academic synthesis Stripping the Gurus placed Siddha Yoga in the broader pattern of guru-abuse cases.