Dear Community,

I want to personally address the Book, Premka, White Bird in a Golden Cage. A memoir that examines the complex and abusive relationship between Yogi Bhajan and his student and general secretary, Pamela Saharah Dyson. I had a very enlightening conversation with a trusted member of the community who knew Premka well and I believe her. As the founder of Dream Hive, host of Kundalini Yoga Teacher Trainings and Yoga Therapist, I feel compelled to speak into the important and timely dialogue that has been raised by this revelation. It is important to me that my community of friends and collaborators knows how I stand and what my relationship is to Kundalini Yoga and Yogi Bhajan. At Dream Hive we believe that the ministry is shared, we sit in circles and hold a vision of an egalitarian leadership. We reject the top-down and male-centered authoritarian pedagogy and organizational structures of the past. We have always held the student-teacher relationship as sacred and do not condone the misuse of power, privilege or the breaching of boundaries essential for healing and trust.

I am a feminist, a survivor of sexual abuse, a breastfeeding mother, a mother of sons, a mother of a daughter, I am a wife and a teacher and I have a very deep and sacred commitment to the truth and to healing trauma, especially trauma that lives in the bodies of women and the earth. I see my work and life path as a commitment and experience of restorative spiritual justice. I work with many men and women who are uncovering the painful truths of our unspoken sorrows, we gather daily to regenerate our bodies with movement, to tell our stories, to pray and to enliven with music and deep inquiry. 

Dream Hive is a One-Room Schoolhouse for the Soul. We are a multi-lineage space for healing in community and therapeutic encounters with spirit. We see Kundalini Yoga as an effective broom to sweep the path, it works swiftly and without fail to strengthen the body, mind, nervous system, it creates new neural pathways to connect us to our inner voice and teacher, to our intuitive center. This Sat Nam, this truth must prevail, but we must do this private inner work in connection to others, the true teacher is community and we must face everything together. Our three Kundalini classes a day offer opportunities to bathe in sacred sound and to move the life-force energy through the system, we sing, laugh, sweat and rest together, it is beautiful. This spiritual practice is a discipline (we do need discipline to face the rigors of life) and a technology that has brought tremendous healing and light into my life and those of my clients. I honor my own experience with this technology and give deep thanks and bows to those who have selflessly annotated, codified and organized this technology in a digestible and accessible platform. I simultaneously give genuine thanks and respect to our elders and ancestors in this tradition for their generous and imperfect love. Many of them unpaid, unheralded and unrecognized

Yogi Bhajan is a remembered ancestor, he lives on the family wall at Dream, besides photos of my children, friends, and family. I give thanks to him as I give thanks to all those who have come before me, the great ones, those addicted to power, those that are weak guilty, injured, and even the empowered ones. To the great poets and impotent ones, to those who hold all of our lineages. We must not silence the truth or hold only one thread of it, we must hold all of it and this is truly rigorous and brave, to hold it all is what we do in circles at Dream, it's our project. Premka has given us such rich material and her truth and I hold it with love, tenderness, and sisterhood.

Lineage is an interesting and complex inheritance. I’ve been cleaning out my mother's house when I open the door, I still smell her gardenia perfume and her cigarettes. I feel the sadness about the ways she failed to become fully actualized. I have loss and regrets associated with her, but I also understand that her story is incomplete. I carry her breath and I am still alive, her daughter walks on this earth, imperfect too, but more resourced from the inner work, more resilient from the community work, more supported by an inner life, and more sober. 

We are the culmination of migration patterns, nutrition, environment, we are the acquired experiences of the world. Let's use what is good together to repair, renew and move forward with great consciousness, sadness, justified rage, and love. Let us become the egalitarian and selfless servants of the divine that are worthy of our children's imitation. Let us be brave, loving, and tender truth-tellers, let us not abuse, let us not be abused, let us learn, grow and restore this world to sacred harmony.

In truth, solidarity and continued growth,

Luisa Giugliano (Harpriya Kaur)