‘The place Did Justine Go?’ One Girl Disappears Into Devotion

A number of days earlier than Christmas in 2020, quarantined with Covid within the basement of a Hare Krishna ashram in Philadelphia, Justine Payton admitted to herself how unhealthy issues had gotten.

She was 28 years outdated and had $72 to her title, after spending years working seven days per week in a cycle of cleansing, cooking, instructing, worship and promoting books on the road. She rose at 4:30 every morning and her days ended at 9:30 p.m. If she violated the house’s strict guidelines — sneaking a chunk of chocolate, say — her fellow devotees would report her to their chief, whom they knew as Mangal-arti.

Ms. Payton had moved to Philadelphia to assist open the Mantra Lounge meditation middle on the behest of Mangal-arti’s “religious grasp,” Devamrita Swami, a New York-born, Yale-educated chief within the Hare Krishna motion.

The accountability was an honor, she believed on the time. The motion had given her pleasure, objective and group when she desperately wanted it. Now she was reaching new followers with the identical issues that first attracted her: low cost yoga and vegan meals, after which meditation, chanting, and volunteer work.

However over time, the expertise soured into one thing she would later describe as emotionally and spiritually abusive. Though she was bringing in cash for the middle by means of e book gross sales, she stored none of it, she stated, and had to make use of her financial savings to pay for some toiletries and different requirements.

After Mangal-arti, who had no formal medical or psychological coaching, instructed her she had borderline persona dysfunction, she stated, she had begun to doubt her personal instincts about even essentially the most primary info of her existence, doubts that mirrored Hare Krishna teachings about not counting on one’s personal feelings. (Mangal-arti, whose authorized title is Aarti Khoda, stated in an announcement to The New York Occasions that she didn’t make a prognosis, however inquired whether or not Ms. Payton may need the dysfunction due to her “excessive conduct.”) Ms. Payton contemplated taking her personal life. She was paranoid, lonely and really, very drained.

Ms. Payton didn’t consider herself as half of a bigger story concerning the reputation of different religious practices within the splintering non secular panorama of Twenty first-century America. She hadn’t but parsed the borderlines separating keen self-abnegation, psychological sickness and abuse. She craved transcendence, and like an rising variety of People, she didn’t discover it in Christianity or one other historic monotheistic faith.

She discovered it as a substitute in a a lot youthful motion that, for earlier generations of People, conjured hippie freedom or cult conformity. For her, although, these associations had been lengthy up to now. The Hare Krishna motion appeared to reply her deepest questions. She was a seeker, and for some time, she had discovered what she was on the lookout for.

When she received sick within the first yr of the pandemic, nevertheless, the basement quarantine was the primary time in 5 years that she had been alone for a sustained time frame. It was the primary time she had time to suppose.

She picked up the telephone and known as her dad.

A Seek for Religion

Ms. Payton was raised on a leafy downtown road in an prosperous suburb of Chicago. She was near her dad and mom and her three siblings. When the youngsters had been little, the household had dance events in the home. Ms. Payton would toss her hair round to the “Be-In” track from the musical “Hair”: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” she would sing. “Beads, flowers, freedom, happiness.”

She was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, from which she imbibed the lesson that a big non secular establishment may have ugliness in its previous, however nonetheless do good in particular person lives. Her household later joined the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination.

In an essay she wrote for a affirmation class in eighth grade, an expertise meant to usher her into grownup religion, she wrote that she wasn’t positive she believed in God. Ms. Payton’s highest worth on the time was independence. She moved throughout the nation for school, then took a semester off and lived in Rwanda.

She was about to depart for a study-abroad program in France when she got here down with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a dysfunction through which the physique’s immune system assaults its nerves. She was briefly paralyzed from the neck down. She had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and now she lived at residence within the suburbs and couldn’t feed herself.

She turned 21 throughout her convalescence, and the unconventional lack of management made her query every thing. She started eager about what it meant to be separated from her personal bodily existence.

She learn and reread “Siddhartha,” Herman Hesse’s novel and a defining textual content of Sixties youth tradition. The story follows a person in India in search of religious enlightenment within the time of the Buddha.

“What’s meditation?” the protagonist asks himself. “What’s leaving one’s physique? What’s fasting? What’s holding one’s breath? It’s fleeing from the self, it’s a brief escape of the agony of being a self.”

She recovered from Guillain-Barré and determined to complete her school diploma in New Zealand. There, an acquaintance handed alongside a flier for a Sunday feast at a Hare Krishna temple. Ms. Payton knew little concerning the Hare Krishna religion, past these childhood days of twirling round to music from “Hair.”

The surroundings she walked into that Sunday appeared made exactly for her. Because the Nineties, the motion has tried to attraction extra on to Westerners.

The Hare Krishna motion developed from a Sixteenth-century Indian custom, and exploded as a worldwide phenomenon when a charismatic Hindu guru referred to as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in america within the Sixties, attracting crowds of younger folks to Tompkins Sq. Park in Manhattan together with his chanting and his saffron robes. He known as the motion the Worldwide Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON.

His timing was impeccable, assembly a counterculture primed to embrace ISKCON’s practices of communal dwelling, ecstatic dancing and asceticism. Inside 5 years, the mantra “Hare Krishna” was in every single place: amongst throngs of devotees proselytizing in airports; in “Hair”; in a No. 1 hit track by George Harrison.

The primary wave of American followers had been principally white, however over time the motion turned extra Indian American and fewer high-profile. By the Nineteen Eighties, it was beset by scandals, together with lawsuits over sexual abuse and accusations of “brainwashing.” Within the late Nineties, the motion’s personal official journal uncovered widespread bodily and sexual abuse of kids at Hare Krishna boarding faculties.

Some American followers nonetheless stay at ashrams — the usual type of membership within the Sixties and ’70s — however many extra have typical houses and jobs and attend providers on weekends. A spokesman, Anuttama Dasa, estimated that ISKCON presently has roughly 100,000 absolutely initiated members all over the world, and 15 million who attend conferences.

“There’s only a few Western, American folks which are becoming a member of the Hare Krishna motion immediately,” stated E. Burke Rochford, a professor emeritus of faith at Middlebury School who has studied the religion for many years. “Sure, they’re inquisitive about yoga and sure, meditation, however not in what ISKCON is requiring of their members.”

There’s a sense of urgency among the many getting old first technology of devotees, he stated, to recapture the creativeness of youthful white People — to not push out Indian immigrants, however to protect Swami Prabhupada’s calling to achieve non-Indian younger folks.

The middle Ms. Payton wandered into in New Zealand in 2014 was headed by an American-born guru named Devamrita Swami, who has a mission to draw “Westerners,” that means non-Indians. Devamrita Swami’s innovation was that ISKCON ought to be what the scholar Nicole Karapanagiotis has described as “an edgy meditation- and mindfulness-based social membership.” As an alternative of temples with elaborate statues of Hindu deities, he opened “lofts” and “lounges” the place Hindu imagery is minimal. He inspired programming on environmental sustainability, rebranding ISKCON theology’s emphasis on giving up materials pleasures as a instrument for addressing local weather change.

“You felt like an honored visitor while you walked in there,” Ms. Payton recalled in an interview. “The entire thing was type of ethereal and fascinating.” There was a vegetarian meal, music, incense and yoga. She began attending and volunteering repeatedly, and some months later she moved into an ISKCON ashram in Wellington, New Zealand.

On the finish of 2015, Devamrita Swami inspired Ms. Payton to assist Mangal-arti begin an outreach program in Philadelphia.

Earlier than she moved there, she went to Illinois to spend a couple of weeks together with her dad and mom, Dean and Lisa, who had initially been accepting of her entrance into the motion. They understood that the Hare Krishna religion spoke to their daughter’s compassion, in addition to to her pursuits in local weather change and veganism. By this level, nevertheless, they had been turning into involved.

“She had misplaced her autonomy,” Mr. Payton stated. “Her tone modified, her bearing modified.”

“The place did Justine go?” Lisa Payton puzzled.

Her witty, vivacious daughter now rose at 4 within the morning to chant, and spent all her time cooking, ceremonially providing every meal to the deity Krishna earlier than permitting her household to eat. Her voice was getting softer, virtually melodic.

Lisa tried to grasp. Image a mountain, a pastor at her church would inform her later. God is on the prime, and Justine is on one among many paths up the mountain. However it felt as if her daughter’s path was main her farther and farther away from her household, and from any semblance of the life they’d imagined for her.

When Ms. Payton left for Philadelphia, she despatched her father a handwritten letter that he nonetheless retains in his pockets.

“I want you possibly can see how my coronary heart has modified, how it’s open to the world round me in a phenomenal method,” she wrote. “I’m happier and extra content material than ever.”

The Mantra Lounge

In Philadelphia, Ms. Payton moved with Mangal-arti and some different devotees right into a temple, after which right into a rented home, whereas they labored to open the Mantra Lounge within the fashionable neighborhood of Fishtown.

Mangal-arti was born in Calcutta. She discovered the Hare Krishna motion in her early 20s, whereas working in a financial institution in Australia, and he or she selected Devamrita Swami as her religious grasp, a job akin to a priest or mentor. She is charismatic and bright-eyed; in video recordings of her instructing, she speaks cheerfully and appears to make intense eye contact together with her listeners.

Ms. Payton stated in an interview that her psychological well being was already deteriorating badly by the point she received to Philadelphia. She had been raped in school, and was experiencing signs related to post-traumatic stress dysfunction.

Mangal-arti was the primary particular person Ms. Payton instructed about having been raped. Ms. Payton remembers her suggesting that her ensuing struggles had been brought on by inadequate faithfulness: She wasn’t bowing deeply sufficient throughout prayers, wasn’t working exhausting sufficient, and was trusting an excessive amount of in her personal instincts. Ms. Payton listened, and tried to purge herself of need and disobedience. She started overlaying her head together with her sari, as an indication of devotion.

In an initiation ceremony in 2017, she swore to abstain from “illicit intercourse,” intoxication, meat-eating and playing, and he or she obtained a brand new title designating her as a servant of God: Gaura-bhakti.

The ceremony was commonplace for devotees in search of deeper dedication to the religion. What was not commonplace was that Ms. Payton felt that Mangal-arti was turning into a very powerful particular person in her life.

Three ladies who lived in the home stated that they shared personal data with Mangal-arti, solely to find that Mangal-arti later shared it with others. They stated that Mangal-arti prolonged after which withheld affection in ways in which had been emotionally manipulative. Ms. Payton would later say that Mangal-arti fostered an “ambiance of concern.”

Mr. Dasa, the spokesman for ISKCON, stated the group acted shortly to research Ms. Payton’s and different followers’ claims that Mangal-arti engaged in emotional abuse and manipulation.

“We by no means condone” Ms. Payton’s expertise of “critical issues” on the ashram in Philadelphia, Mr. Dasa stated in an interview. “It doesn’t in any respect characterize the standard expertise of a Krishna devotee at any of our tons of of temples all over the world.”

Mangal-arti did encourage Ms. Payton to pursue remedy independently, which her dad and mom paid for.

“Mangal-arti gave the impression to be the one particular person whom Justine had a private relationship with, intensifying her reliance on her,” her therapist wrote in a later assertion summing up their classes.

Ms. Payton stopped seeing that therapist after lower than a yr. Her final session was a joint assembly with the therapist and an “intense and overbearing” Mangal-arti, in accordance with the therapist’s written account.

Different devotees reported comparable experiences. After assembly Mangal-arti in Canada, Shannan Mann moved into the ashram in Philadelphia with Ms. Payton and a handful of others who labored on the Mantra Lounge. Mangal-arti had a protracted checklist of guidelines, all the way down to how she ought to bathe and the way she ought to half her hair, Ms. Mann stated. Ms. Mann, too, stated Mangal-arti can be candy and maternal one second, and jealous and hostile the following. (In an announcement, Mangal-arti known as Ms. Mann’s account of her experiences “utterly false and baseless”.)

Ms. Mann had recognized Ms. Payton in New Zealand. In Philadelphia, she was struck by how a lot Ms. Payton’s look had modified. She had misplaced weight and turn out to be strikingly pale, and he or she barely spoke. She had been reworked from an individual Ms. Mann noticed as daring and inquisitive to somebody lowered to watching Mangal-arti and “simply wanting her approval for every thing.”

In an announcement, Mangal-arti disputed virtually each ingredient of Ms. Payton’s account of her time in Philadelphia, and stated Ms. Payton appeared to have launched into a “focused marketing campaign” in opposition to her. She additionally identified that Ms. Payton usually thanked her throughout this era for her help.

Some folks on the small ashram had been completely happy. Mangal-arti supplied a number of testimonials to The Occasions from individuals who hung out on the ashram in Philadelphia or who stated they’d recognized Ms. Payton and Ms. Mann up to now. All of them seem to stay concerned in ISKCON or its practices. They described Mangal-arti as beneficiant and truthful, and characterised Ms. Payton and Ms. Mann as behaving erratically on the time, and as spreading falsehoods afterward.

‘Issues Are Actually Fallacious Right here’

Ms. Payton had been in Philadelphia for 5 years when she received Covid and moved into the basement of the ashram. For 3 weeks, she was on her personal, free from the grueling schedule of promoting and cooking and cleansing that had felt more and more oppressive to her. “Issues are actually flawed right here,” she remembers considering.

Lisa and Dean drove to Philadelphia after Christmas to retrieve their daughter, choosing her up on the curb exterior the ashram early within the morning. She had stuffed her belongings into a couple of black rubbish baggage. They barely spoke as they drove again to Illinois.

Over time, she got here to see what had occurred to her in Philadelphia as abusive.

In 2021 she and three different former and aspiring devotees registered formal complaints in opposition to Mangal-arti that had been reviewed by ISKCON’s governing physique, a board that oversees the worldwide group. A number of the 4 complainants, and others, additionally made complaints about Devamrita Swami’s management.

After two years, the board’s North American department dominated final yr that Mangal-arti should apologize in writing to Ms. Payton and the opposite Mantra Lounge group members whom she had “damage (mistreated, abused, shamed)” by her “actions and phrases,” and that she should not lead any ISKCON occasion or group for 3 years, amongst different penalties.

In her assertion, Mangal-arti described the ruling as rapidly accomplished solely after the The Occasions contacted ISKCON management final yr, an accusation Mr. Dasa strongly denied. She stated the group didn’t observe up on the proof she submitted to defend herself, and that ISKCON had issued an adjudication with out an investigation.

ISKCON’s committee overseeing gurus reached a call in early Might requiring Devamrita Swami to bear training on trauma and to submit a written plan to make sure that the “unhealthy dynamics” of Mantra Lounge wouldn’t be repeated, amongst different issues. Mr. Dasa stated the group was additionally contemplating new coaching protocols “for ISKCON leaders to keep away from these issues.”

The Mantra Lounge in Philadelphia closed in 2021.

Ms. Payton has tried to start out her personal life over, enrolling in graduate faculty in North Carolina, writing about her experiences, and restoring her relationships together with her dad and mom. Her boyfriend of two years not too long ago proposed to her in a rented geodesic dome within the mountains close to their residence.

However it will be too easy, in her view, to name hers a contented ending. She misplaced pals completely, she stays deeply ashamed, and he or she struggles with a way that she has misplaced time she is going to by no means get again.

She nonetheless finds magnificence in sure non secular texts, together with the Bhagavad Gita — though not the translations by the Hare Krishna motion’s founder. However she not practices any faith, and stated she can not think about associating with a non secular establishment once more.

She tries to be open to the expertise of marvel, she stated. “I believe that’s on the root of what I used to be in search of all alongside.”

Susan C. Beachy, Alain Delaquérière and Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.