Heal, restore and achieve optimum health with Dr Kamaraj and the Yog Mandala team in La Mirban Resort, Varkala, Kerala. If you want to improve your quality of life, the instructors and therapists of Yog Mandala Shala will help nurture your full potential in a relaxed and positive environment.
In 2007, Dr Kamaraj set up Yog Mandala Yoga School on Varkala’s North Cliff, Kerala in south west India overlooking the Arabian Sea. He teaches Hatha Yoga, Vinyasa Flow Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, Sivananda Yoga, Acro Yoga and Meditation classes. Lately he offers certified yoga teacher trainings by donation!
I’ve known Dr. Kamaraj when he started his yoga school for holistic health in 2008. It was then when Varkala, in the state of Kerala India, was still a less populated spot on earth. Even today it is beautiful but a bit more touristic. Kamaraj quickly built a strong training with recurring International students each year.
He holds a Bachelor of Naturopathy & Yogic Sciences (BNYS) degree from Dr MGR Medical University, Tamil Nadu, an integration of Naturopathic Medicine and Yoga Therapy.
As part of his studies, a year’s internship was spent doing Therapeutic, Hatha and Dynamic Yoga; 6 months in Nisargopchar Nature Cure Ashram and 6 months in the National Institute of Naturopathy, Pune. Both the Ashram and the NIN have strong links with Mahatma Gandhi.
He spent 2 months studying Ashtanga Yoga at Sthalam8 Yoga Studio in Mysore, run by Ajay Kumar.
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Mara - 27. December 2018 at 23:37
Hey Dany,
Not sure you remember me – it’s Mara from one of Kam’s ttcs last year. I realise you have been practising with him for a very long time and you have had a good experience.
I just wanted to share mine and others…I don’t know if you sensed it while we were there, but it was a pretty stressful situation.
I am trying to raise awareness of his practices so people can speak up if this happened to them…I think it is quite important that young women know what he is capable of.
I am sorry if this is disturbing especially if your experience with him is pretty different…
This is our experience, February-March 2018
I met Kamaraj in Varkala India where he had his own yoga school. My partner, his mother and I took yoga classes there for around a week. His classes were great, focused on kundalini rising, allignment, meditation and chanting. His personality is very charismatic, he made us feel safe and ultimately…fall for it.
In a yoga setting it is easy to open up, as emotions can start flooding out without control. This is what happened to me in one of the sessions, at the end of which Kamaraj came to offer me his help.
After privately opening up to Kam about a recent crisis (as you probably know, yoga can bring up a lot of conflicts of the past as you open up and become vulnerable), he tried to “treat me” with a massage which culminated with a very intense experience – even after a very conflicted me said no, not once but a few times, he prioritise and forced onto me that ‘checking my chakra’ activation down there is important as ‘women have blockages there’.
My brain at the time was telling me that staying there for a whole yoga course with my partner will help me become stronger, and stop those things from happening to me (as the previous crisis was related to this). I also decided that if I were to stay, I had to brush this in the light of something that I wanted, something that helped me, and put all my confidence in Kamaraj, convincing myself that this was tantra yoga, chakra activation and a “healer” who wanted to help me. Everyday the truth came out bit by bit, and with other women coming out and sharing their experience, I realised he was “man healing” (aka…I know what’s best for you as a woman and that’s me, a man) and manipulating us all.
In order to understand Kamaraj more as a person during this time:
The yoga course had 6 people initially – 3 of who dropped out in the end, tired and sick of the drama.
Some of us lived at his house along with previous students who completed the course and were now Kamaraj’s friends. Looking back at it, it all seems so obvious – the first thing we noticed as we entered the house was the amount of beautiful young women living together under the same roof.
Here, his grandmother was cooking for us – having to deal with teenager-like behaviour from Kamaraj who was either on his phone or shouting at her in Tamil when she asked him anything.
In this setting, each week we found ourselves more stuck in his drama, and we started seeing the negative impact Kamaraj had on other people’s lifes.
1. He convinced* a female student to leave her studies behind and come to join the course, in the light that they would have an affectionate relationship on the side. On the night of her arrival he told me “it’s going to be a long night”, after suggesting that she was going to sleep in the house next door and he will be there for her arrival. After she came and felt weird to sleep in a building by herself with us next door, they shared a room in his house. To mention that Kamaraj has a wife and a child – but he thought he’d make it alright with us if he told us that him and his wife were seperated (which we later found they weren’t). * (yes, actually persuaded her via texts and calls – she confessed when she came over that she tried to stay away from the place and from him but he managed to convince her to come back)
2. There was a whole legal issue he was involved with as well, which we gradually find out more about. Initially we were made to believe that one of his close relatives, who he shared the yoga studio with, was a corrupt practitioner. We still do not know who was the corrupt practitioner (Kamaraj or his relative), but seeing that he convinced the above student to set his relative up to do something against the law, and be part of the trail herself…the odds are not in his favour.
3. Getting to know him during the month we were there, his personality came through and through. His wife eventually came there with the baby. We were not going to get involved in talking with her, as we knew that they were, apparently, seperated. From what we could see, Kamaraj was not very interested in being a positive influence for his son: shouting, ignoring his wife and lecturing her from the moment she stepped in the house. Maybe this was part of making us believe that they were seperated. We later on found out that this was a lie as well…
4. The wife was not the only one who received undeserved bursts of anger, lecturing, lack of attention… we had these everyday during our classes. Most of the time he would walk out of the class after we would try to confront him about his moral values in real life compared to yoga …It is difficult to look back at everything that happen and not to wonder how can someone with a degree in yoga behave and have such morals? Or maybe more appropriately, how can someone like that teach yoga in the first place?
We comfronted him multiple times, we made it our job to do that eveyday in the last week. We told ourselves that we have to make a difference, so others don’t experience what we did. We decided to stay for the whole course, confronting him and telling people who were having private treatments with him to be aware of his practice. We were knees deep in his life.
Everyday we would find out about more conflicts. Female students who abandoned the coruse because of his practices, female students who were inappropriately adjusted in class, previous complaints made to the landlord of the building where the yoga studio was, reviews on trip advisor where someone’s little sister was persuaded by Kamaraj to give him a massage.
We had numerous discussions with Kamaraj, asking him to act like a yoga teacher; to stop sleeping in the same room with his student; to stop lying about his real motiv. What came through in one of our discussions with him was that he has difficulties restraining his emotions and impulses if a young woman confides in him. It all started to make sense.
Maybe you, as a reader, never experienced Kamaraj in this light and you are doubting this will happen to you. It is your choice. All I can say is, he already managed to persuade tens of people (that we know of!) through his manipulative and dirty practices.
He is a charismatic person, and charismatic individuals usually are the best manipulators, as we experienced. The student who left her studies for him ended up being completely on his side, deciding to ignore what was happening and see only through the lens of the yoga wisdom that she needed…ignoring his morals and behaviour, protecting his every word more and more everyday – devoted to a non-guru (as he admitted to be); in the last few days remaining, she left the course. We assume this was because she could not stand seeing and hearing us trying to solve the conflict. Sadly, she would never talk to us again…We found it so weird to see her come to Varkala with a ‘why am I even here attitiude’ and then leaving us, loyal to this man after spending almost everynight in bed with him. But then again, for a short while, that’s what happened to me. We all do different and weird things in order to cope with trauma and the past.
After this chapter ended, two months after we left: no certificate for completing the yoga course. Kamaraj told us he needed a signiture from the alliance body which would take no longer than a month. We decided to take the manners into our own hands. One of the students emailed the alliance and found out that no student in the past year has ever got their certificate! All of these people, never said a word!! One of the previous students (we didn’t know this until we got back to the UK) even came to Varkala from Bengalore while we were there as Kamaraj promised her the certificate – and he never gave it her; postponing day after day!
In the end, we took the manner in our own hands again, and the student who emailed the alliance managed to get us all our certificates. The alliance told us that Kamaraj never paid for us to get the certificates in the first place. Why did he never tell us the truth if he knew it all along? Maybe we could’ve helped out – paid for our own (the yoga course was quite cheap so most of us would’ve probably understood and paid it ourselves).
It is so difficult to share my whole experience and our experience in words. It was probably one of the most distressing situations I have been involved in.
But that is why we, the vicitims of Kamaraj’s manipulative practices, decided to fight this issue; even if that meant exposing our vulnerability, naivity and falliable nature – so others will not have to make the same mistakes as we did and be so trusting of “Dr” Kamaraj’s Yog Practices.