Perspective: The perils of self-styled gurus

By Pragya Bhatt

Pragya Bhatt is a yoga teacher, author, scholar and a poet. She routinely writes about yoga, society, philosophy and contemporary perspectives and lessons to be learnt from these. She is also the Vice-President of WICCI Karnataka Yoga Council

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Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty was published in 2020 and went on to become The Sunday Times’ #1 Bestseller.  But as recent events show, Shetty himself didn’t think like a monk.

I first encountered Jay Shetty on Instagram sometime in 2022, a platform where he has over 15 million followers. He piqued my interest: a light-eyed man of Indian origin who claimed to have spent many years in an ashram in India, studying with his gurus, and living an ascetic lifestyle.  But the more I scrolled, the more questions I had.  Where in India had he studied and for how many years exactly?  Who were his masters?  Why was he no longer a monk? There were many gaps in his story that didn’t make sense to me, and as a full-time yoga practitioner, teacher and author I wondered when he found time to practice between writing his books, producing his podcast, going on world tours and being a famous influencer.  

I felt validated by the recent exposé over his false backstory and plagiarism of social media content.  But this controversy reveals something deeper about content creators and content consumers.

Everything on social media is a carefully curated projection, and it’s alarming that an increasing number of people are clamouring to join the ranks of the ‘influencer’. On one hand, we have access to the most amount of information than ever before, and on the other, it has become difficult to navigate through that information. Even the most painstakingly created, relevant content is short-lived and lost in the sea of social media.  After all, can you remember what you ‘liked’ this morning? Even the platforms themselves drive content based on trends rather than original thought and conviction. The content does not seek to inspire thought or action that can lead to change. Instead, it’s meant to titillate you momentarily to provoke a reaction and satiate boredom and ennui. 

Jay Shetty was doing the same: creating an admixture of instant wisdom (insta-wisdom) that sounds profound and life-changing and ironically enough, building a self-help empire of over $30 million while thinking like a monk. In his own words, his purpose is “making wisdom go viral”. What’s more, while other content creators carefully credit their sources, he felt he could get away with passing off others’ ideas as his own. Disturbingly, for far too long he did get away with it.  The other day I spotted his book Think Like a Monk in Higgins Bothams and I thought, if only he had given credit where it’s due, things may have been very different.  This is a wake-up call for every person who has a presence on social media. Within the yoga-spirituality-wellness space, sounding sagacious grabs attention: everybody is seeking a “higher truth” to fix life’s problems. Is our authenticity lost somewhere between the trending reels and like counts of social media, or are we able to stay true to ourselves and the experiences we have had? 

This also illustrates the perils of getting our ‘news’ on social media.  Many had raised their voices against Shetty, demanding that he give them credit for the thoughts and teachings he was passing off as his own. Because of Shetty’s popularity and reach, those voices were largely unheard or ignored.  Does the content we consume wake us up and inspire us to question, think, reason and engage consciously with the world?  Or is the content making us dull, listless human beings so enthralled by a green-eyed charlatan (pun intended) that we turn a deaf ear to an opposing viewpoint?  

This is particularly relevant for us in the yoga space because at times the guru-shishya parampara discourages questioning (as controversial as this might sound). Many of us get complacent with the generic information we’re given, parroting what we read or hear, like ‘yoga means union’ (although this is only one definition of ‘yoga’) or ‘yoga is not asana’ (although asana is an integral limb of yoga). In the case of a self-styled guru, who takes advantage of the parampara and all it means, (and we have seen many like Jay Shetty), do we ever stop and try to explore these claims further to delve into the depths of this subject we love?

However, in this age of information overdose, it’s heartening that some of us were awake to the suspicious quality of Jay Shetty and his empire.  It takes a special kind of viveka, discrimination to spot the real message under the minimalist cream aesthetic. Jay Shetty might have ‘saved’ many people through the content he stole from others, but had he actually spent time under the tutelage of a guru in an ashram in India, he might not have had to steal. But perhaps then he would have been one of the countless (and faceless) yoga/spiritual teachers focused on inner growth, struggling to make ends meet with a few steady students, and not enjoying the fame and celebrity he does now.  After all, this was a pretty “shitty” thing to do, Jay Shetty.