Narayan Maharaja Camp Enabling A Molester Guru? Gaura Harrison / PADA

Apparently: Premananda Prabhuji's Web site https://kripa.tv/

Throughout the Cold By Gaura Harrison

... My step-dad was the well reputed, local beach bum. His name was Bart. We called him Pooh-Bear, for his hairy chest and sickening sweetness. He liked to have a good time. He was a smooth talker, and he had talked his way into a friendship with Martha, who owned the beach. Knowing the owner and all, I felt a sense of belonging at Sunny Cove, permission to play.

At home, I recluded to my room, my bed, my books and my mind. Home was strange, and my world was stranger. My father, William, had four children. My mom, Renee, had two, and my step mom, Lesley, had two. 

We were cult babies. First in line was my elder brother, Davan. In 1988, he was born in Cape Town, South Africa, at the Hare Krishna Temple that together my parents had started. A year after Davan, number two brother was born, Toshan. His mom, Lesley, was something like a novice priestess at the temple in Cape Town. 

My dad was caught having an affair. Lesley got pregnant. My father was the temple president and was expected to exhibit more decorum. During Lesley’s pregnancy, amid scandal, all three new parents moved from Africa to Southern California with Davan. They all landed in a house together selling paintings door to door to get by. 

Toshan was born there, and I was conceived. From there, pregnant with me, Mom left, taking Davan and moving to Santa Cruz. Dad and Lesley followed with Tosh, becoming homeless for a time. I was born in Santa Cruz as well as Lesley’s daughter, my younger sister, Ajita.

Growing up with my mother's animosity for my father, my father’s shame and sadness and the involvement of my step parents, I felt no rooted belonging. I fought with Davan. Pooh-Bear and Lesley fought with us. Davan recounted later, he felt that going between houses, Lesley and Pooh-Bear were playing intelectual ping pong and we were the balls. On the weekends, Lesley the radical feminist, ex-cult hippy, would say,” You shouldn’t let him talk to you like that. You have to stand up for yourself. Don’t let Bart bully you!”

Then during the week Bart, the art dealing, ex-cult, trash hauler, beach bum would say,” Gaura, you can’t talk to me like that! First, I’m in charge and second, I’m on your team!” I was a quiet and timid child.

At a Hare Krishna festival, when I was twelve, a new Hare Krsna boarding school, Gurukula, was announced. Mom asked me if I was interested and I said i’d give it a try. I didn’t even pause to consider. I was ready for change.

Gurukula represented for me a stark change in lifestyle. It took me away from the coast and Sunny Cove. The Gurukula was in Badger, California, in the rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In Gurukula I followed my attraction towards drumming and cooking. I had group lessons on the mridanga (Bengali hand drum) five days a week, forty five minutes a day, for two and a half years. On many occasions I got to cook lunch for the entire school, 25 students. These skills, drumming and cooking, later got me tickets around the world.

With a Group from Gurukula, I started visiting India when I was twelve, returning three times before moving there when I was seventeen. During this time, my connection to India started to grow. The headmaster of the Badger Gurukula was Braj, short for Brajendra Nandana. 

Braj was enamored with this sadhu, saint type, that lived in India, named Premananda Prabhuji. Prabhuji meant a lot of things to a lot of people. 

To me, he was the sexual predator that turned my life around. 

Although, I wouldn’t come to understand that until about a decade after my first visit to India. At gurukula I heard Prabhuji spoken of in reverent tones. ”Should you be so lucky, you may have the opportunity to bow at his feet.”

During this time at Gurukula, my connection to home dwindled. My mom called me regularly at first. My dad called me sometimes. I had trouble talking on phones. One word sentences were typical. On my home visits, my allergies would flare and I’d get a reminder of how miserable I could get at home. The common ground that connected me with my siblings eroded by my indoctrination at school. They were all in public school, living pretty normal lives. I was being trained out of books from ancient India. We grew apart.

When I was 16, I had a falling out with Braj and things began to change again. I was sent home. I had a talk with my mom and decided to take a high school equivalency exam. Then I was going to join the Matha (monastery), in India. My mother knew that I would be taken care of in India. I was going to stay with Prabhuji. 

He took care of all the young boys that came to the Matha. He was known as the mother of the matha. Although, the leader of the matha that I was going to stay in was Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayan Maharaj, know as Gurudeva. Gurudeva was older and toured during most of the year. When he was around, Gurudeva was insulated by a throng of devotees trying to accrue the blessings of his presence. Prabhuji saw to the day to day needs of the temple residents. He was the main reason that I wanted to go to India.

The first times I had stayed around Prabhuji, he was very affectionate, kind and generous. During my four month visit to India in 2004, I was staying in a building adjacent to the Matha. In the evenings, I’d go with friends I was staying with and hang out with Prabhuji. He would ask me how I spent my day and feed us sweets and snacks. He would encourage us to go to the temple functions and joke around with us. 

As we’d sit there, local residents would cycle in and out of his room. His room would fill up and his face would light up as he engaged in animated discussions with his visitors. Though most of his visitors were local, people would come from all over the world to speak with him. Sometimes the conversations were held with moist eyes and soft tones. 

Sometimes they were held in a rapid sing song garble of Hindi. Everyone who came was given something to eat, sweets, some clothes, or some attention. The residents of the temple came in and out asking this question or that. Some questions were of a spiritual nature, many were practical. “Will we have cauliflower and peas for our feast tomorrow or just cauliflower?” ”It's time for my daughter’s marriage, do you know a good match?” “When is Gurudeva returning?” ”How can I increase my inspiration?””Where did those pickles end up?””Is the guy with all the tools still here?”

A year later, 2005, I was fifteen. This year I went to India for a shorter visit, one month. About a week into the visit, a family friend that was staying with Prabhuji found me. His name was also Gaura, and he had grown up in Santa Cruz too. His father was also a Hare Krishna and had raised three sons without their mother. My mother would bake extra cookies and pies, when she baked and deliver them for Gaura and his family. 

Gaura told me that I was invited by Prabhuji to stay with them in a little complex they were renting. It was festival season in Vrindavan and accomodations were hard to come by. I took up the offer, moving into a small room with two friends from Gurukula. I felt so lucky to be staying so close to Prabhuji. Not only that, he had remembered who I was. I felt like the heavens had parted and facilitated my connection to this deeply spiritual person.

After getting sent home from school, I worked odd jobs saving up. I flew to India in August of 2007. Fall is festival season in India. Gurudeva always came back to India at that time of the year. My first few months were hectic and fun. I was awash with new information, new languages, new schedules, and a new life. The time flew by and soon festival season was over. Many of the pilgrims and temporary residents of the Matha went other places. Gurudeva left on a tour.

The temple had left just a skeleton crew. Daily, I would go to a morning lecture and would attend 2-3 hours of prayers in the altar room. I was assisting in the kitchen for lunch and making flatbreads in the evening. I would wash the pots from the kitchen at night. Even stripped to its bones the matha still seated 30-50 people for a late dinner. I’d finish up the dishes at 10:30 or eleven and go to sleep by 12am.

As December rolled in, I met the cold again. In India it is common to store your water tank on the roof and use gravity fed water pressure systems. It is also the custom for temple residents to shower after every time they pooped. This happened often as my bowls acclimated to India. The temple had no water heaters, and the water tank on the roof was haplessly exposed to the start of winter. My one pair of slippers were not allowed to be worn in the altar room or the kitchen and the floors were all stone or cement. There was no heater in my room, nor was there many anywhere in the temple. Everything was cold.

I would take my first shower before the first morning service at 4:30am. Sometimes I’d wake up early and go, with a small group, to the Yamuna river to bathe. The cold water definitely woke me up. Bathing at the temple, I would crowch under the tap on the third floor bathroom. As the frigid water rinsed over me, my nervous system would scream to life. 

My breath would slow and deepen. My mind would empty. There was no room for thoughts. My critical mind left, just as it did when I tumbled in the waves as a child. However, unlike playing in the ocean, I had no wetsuit, there was no sun beating down on me, and I wasn’t engaging in much aerobic exercise. 

It was 4:30am and I was trying to get to the altar room for morning prayers. During this first winter, I approached the water with anticipation and left with excitement. The cold baths would cycle back around every year. Though, when they’d come, I’d find myself in different corners of India and the world.

A year after my arrival in the Matha, I took monk vows. I kinda did it for attention. I had stayed the previous summer in Bangalore, South India. I’d had a falling out with Prabhuji. I wanted to stay in Mathura with him and he wanted me to go to Bangalore. He was being a jerk about it. We weren’t really talking when I came back for the fall festivals in 2008. 

I wanted to get his attention. I wanted him to be affectionate to me like he had been when I first started coming around. I thought that by taking monk vows, he wouldn’t be able to ignore me. I was right and I was wrong.

I ended up in Bengal winter of 2008, but I was having visa problems. 

I needed to leave the country every six months for my visa. So, I took a train to Nepal and stopped in Mathura on my way back. Prabhuji had a rotating group of boys that would massage him in the mornings, afternoons and nights. In India everyone gets massage. In the mornings, people dawn their towels and go to their roofs and courtyards. 

In the sun, parents massage children, children massage grandparents and people massage themselves. I had massaged Prabhuji on many occasion, but this night is when he made his move. The difference that night was that when I was leaving the room with the other boys, Prabhuji called me back,“ Gaura, wait. I still have some pain in my back.” Laying on his belly, with his elbows caulked out behind him, he rubbed his lower back.”Lock the door.” I locked the door, crossed the room and knelt beside him in the mosquito net. Massaging his back turned into him pulling me onto the bed next to him. He has Yoda’s grammar. Though, his voice is a little more sing-song than Yoda’s, and he talks much faster.

Earlier in the Day, I had asked Prabhuji about how to control lust. He told me not worry about it. As if to reassure me about how I had nothing to worry about, he began to ask me what sexual experience I had.

“I used to masturbate, but I haven’t been.” I replied.

“Oh, you would do handycrafts? If you have stopped though, then what is the problem?”

“I still have wet dreams. How do I make those stop? I am supposed to be a brahmachari (celibate monk).”

He told me about a folk remedy, kutira, that I could get nearby for cheap. Then, he asked me,” Have you never gotten sexy with ladies?”

I said,”No.”

Prabhuji asked,”Not even kissing?”

I said,”No”

He said,” Good.” I left shortly after, wondering what he meant when he said good. I’d regularly spent a lot of time thinking about what Prabhuji meant by something.

That evening, back in his room, Prabhuji’s intentions began to unfold. He picked up on the afternoons conversation saying,” Where did you learn about handycrafts?”

“The boys at school,” I said. We were laying on our sides facing one another. He put his outside arm around me. I thought he was trying to comfort me. I didn’t understand what was going on.

He was holding me. He told me,” Don’t worry about the boys at school. Poor boy. Oh, its ok. I am here, I love you.” He kissed my face. I was embarrassed. His hand snagged on my belt line as he slipped his hand into my robe. The other arm was still around me. My heart rate increased and my body tensed. I cringed, taking slow deep breaths.

As he began manipulating my penis, he said,” This linga (penis) has given you so many worries. Don’t worry now. Its ok, I love you.” To his many insistences of love, I replied,” Prabhuji, koro na, koro na.” (Please stop) Besides those few word on repeat, I was frozen. My penis remained flaccid. 5 or 10 minutes passed. Eventually he stopped. As he withdrew his hand from my robe, his arm around me remained. His insistences of love continued and among them he told me not to tell anyone about this, because they wouldn’t understand.

As I left the room, he followed me to the door, locking it behind me. I walked slowly through the empty temple to my room. I’d had a full adrenaline surge and I was feeling disassociated. I knew that the experience I’d just had changed things. I didn’t know how. The pedestal I held Prabhuji on may have cracked, but it did not yet crumble. I was a young 18. That was my first sexual encounter. I didn’t understand what had happened, and at the time, Prabhuji was my world.

The following days blurred into the following months and years. Something similar happened the next night and within the next few days, I went back to Bengal. I drifted further away from Prabhiji the following years. I stayed in Bangalore again the next summer and Bengal the following winter. On a tour, I visited Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia. Gurudeva was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2010 and passed away in January, 2011. Early 2011, I moved to Miami to be the priest at a new temple. 2012 brought me to a rural Hare Krishna settlement in Texas. Then, back to India.

That year I spent my summer in Bengal and Mathura finally ending up in a Bangladeshi refugee settlement in Sindhanur, Karnataka(South India). A new temple was being started there. Prabhuji went with a group to help get things started and when they left, I stayed.

All together there were three temple residents in Sindhanur and I was senior. I had a lot of free time to structure. I would cook lunch, and in the evening I’d lecture about Bhakti Yoga, connection through devotion. I created a flower garden, and practiced my stitching on the treadle sewing machine. Sindhanur is located in a desert. There I saw more stars than anywhere else I’ve been. I wandered around the villages and talked to the local people. Although the temple was in Karnataka and the local language was Kanada, the refugees from Bangladesh, their children and grandchildren also spoke Bengali, Hindi and sometimes English.

In Sindhanur, I got a sim card for a cell phone that had been given to me. I called a friend in Miami, and I began to reach out to my family again. I had a long conversation with my father. He was excited about paying off his debt with the U.S. government, something to do with my mom’s financial aid and his inability to pay child support. He said he’d almost completed his payments. 

He’d be eligible to apply for a passport once his debt was paid off. He wanted to come visit me. We talked about John Bradshaw and sorting through the past. Dad recommended reading John Bradshaw’s books, Homecoming, or Family Secrets. A week later I got a call from Lesley telling me that my father had a serious stroke. Less than a week after that she called me to say goodbye to him.

The same week my mother was diagnosed with cancer and again my life began to churn. I had to go to Bangalore to get some dental work done. While there I spoke to Prabhuji and he told me not to go back to Sindhanur. I landed in a temple / orphanage outside of Bangalore propper. A couple friends from Mathura were staying there. I’d cook lunch for the kids there and take part in other projects. The orphanage was on 5 acres of banana and coconut trees. The surrounding area was agricultural. It was quiet and I had a lot of down time. The few months I spent there allowed me to ruminate before I returned to Vrindavan for festival season.

A numbness had crept over me. I didn’t know where it came from. I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I was angry and disassociated. I buried my feelings in simple tasks. I started teaching drum lessons, I made flat breads, and hung yogurt. I moved a wood pile and wandered around Vrindavan.

2013 brought me back to Badger. I stayed in the temple, cooked lunch and started watching Game of Thrones. My mom came and stayed with a friend on the next property over. We stayed there for a couple of months. This was her second cancer, and she refused kimo. She wanted to move to India for whatever time she had left. I assured her that when she was ready I would fly with her to India and help her get set up.

I went back to India for a summer and stayed till the start of fall. I wondered why I wasn’t happy there. I felt a dull emptiness, no connection. I asked myself what reasons I had to stay, but I came up empty. That's when I decided that I was going back to America. Two days later I was changing out of my robes into a pair of jeans, on a train heading to the Delhi airport. I had worked out a job trimming on a pot farm in Northern California and that's where I spent the next month. I bounced around California for a few months. Untill, in Spring of 2014 mom was ready for India.

We flew together from San Francisco on February 12th. Our taxi met us at the airport and brought us to Vrindavan. We arrived just in time for Vasant Panchami, the flower festival of spring. She lived the next year and a half in a small one bedroom on the bank of the Yamuna river. The room opened into the altar room of a temple complex run by women. I visited her twice before her passing. Her last words to me were,” We had a good run. Everything is coming together like a drama. It’s better than a dream. I love you Gaura.”

When she passed, I was living in Santa Cruz again and going to massage school. I had started seeing my partner, Keiko. I asked her out after a yoga class. The next year, when she got accepted to a Masters in Nursing at USM she asked me to come with her.

So, we moved to Maine. Keiko’s program demanded much of her attention. Isolated from anyone I knew, in a new world again, loneliness, and depression sank in. I had gotten some backlash when I started telling people about my experience of sexuall assault with Prabhuji. In effect, I was only in touch with a handful of people that I knew from Badger and the Hare Krsna world. I struggled with my job as a massage therapist. It was hard for me just to show up. There was a weird contrast between the intimacy of the physical interaction and the lack of other communication. In 2017, I started having wrist problems. I had to quit my job but my wrist problems continued.

I had a number of bouts of severe anxiety and depression and was looking for a way to manage my moods. I came across Wim Hof and his method. I remembered one morning as I was about to enter my cold shower thinking that the cold water spouting in my bathroom is Wim Hof’s God. Not my god but perhaps, it was godly. That morning I felt the cold wash over my body, but I did not feel cold.

I still think of wim’s words often,” You have the power to control your body. You have the power to control your emotions, just as nature intended it to be. Health, strength and happiness, all you want, it’s there. It's free, as free as cold water and air. Breathe and believe. In the cold, with your breath you can achieve what takes meditators decades, in days. Oxygenate the body. Take control.”

As I approached the shower before sitting down to write this, my breath slowed and deepened. Turning the tap to cold, the air inside my little glass shower stall began to cool. I could feel my skin contract. I tilted my head into the stream of water. My chest heaved and while I leaned back, the icy water trickled down my spine. My nervous system riled and I stepped forward.

Entering the water, the muscles in my chest and core fire in cycle with my breath. My shoulders rotate and my knees bend as my spine snakes gently forward and back. My body surges with muscular contractions. When I pay attention to the sensation of the cold numbing my skin, it is met by something. I feel the cold, but I do not feel cold. I feel powerful, in control and calm. A playfulness takes over, and I begin to rub my arms, legs, chest, back and neck. Minutes pass, issued on by my breath. Stepping out of the shower, I feel alive and ready for whatever comes next.

=====================

Another sexual predator was unmasked. Watching this film felt too close to home. There were different characters, a different setting but the plot mirrored my story. My predator was also a manipulative, cocky, Bengali guru type. Insulated by a diehard following, he answers to no one, and his mental illness is defended. 

I feel pity for those that guided me to him, for falling under his spell and for the people still bound to him. I feel shame that during his professions of love for me, I was kissed and molested by a demented man. I feel rage that my tears and pleas for him to stop were not enough disincentives. 

For me, the experience was of shock and terror, for him, another notch on the belt. I feel the full-hearted connection and compassion, that he stole from my youth, breaking through as my heart goes out to the others that have been attacked in similar ways. He still sits on his Guru seat, and my prayer for you is that you be careful around Premananda (Prabhuji).

Silence benefits the perpetrators. Stand up and speak out against sexual predation.

[PADA: Premananda still sits in his guru seat, with the acquiescing of the Narayan Maharaja community? Or what? Of course nothing new here, Narayan Maharaja supported the GBC's sexual predator guru process. And NM says the creators of the Gaudiya Matha's sexual predator guru process are bona fide gurus. In sum, Premananda  is "insulated by a diehard following." And he is defended. And these are the people who are claiming to be better than the GBC? 

What are they doing to remedy this person who is evidently a predator acting as the living guru representative of GOD Almighty, and the guru of their mission? Apparently, not much. Worse, this Premananda fellow seems to be a homosexual pedophile posing as God's successor, which is the same deviation we had going on under the GBC -- with devastating consequences for the victims. Is there no concern for the victims? 

Anyway, Gaura Harrison is very brave to come out and make a public complaint about these rogues. And we say "bravo to that," at least he is trying to save others from being potential victims. More than the other NM lot is doing. He also says he resents the people who set him up to accept this process, and he is right on that count as well. The enablers are also guilty. We were telling the Badger folks ages ago that this NM program is in bed with the GBC's molester messiahs process and thus it should be avoided. 

But we have had Brajendranandan, Gopa Vrndapal, Mula Prakriti and the whole Badger mob saying -- we need to have our children worship the head priest of the GBC's molester messiahs program, namely Narayan Maharaja: Who is also the Head defender of Tamal and -- the main suspect in the poison complaint of Srila Prabhupada. This is the group of folks we wanted our children to worship? And now that their program has proven to be a failure, they are not speaking up? The victims have to stand up and proclaim -- your emperor has no clothes?

Anyway, we hope this sparks some reconsideration in the Narayan camp of whom they are promoting as their gurus, including their head guru NM, who was Tamal's bucket boy for years together, where they had pedophiles floating around under Tamal's regime left, right and center. This whole thing is pretty disgusting, of course you'd need some sort of moral compass to know it is disgusting. And that might explain why so many of these people allow all these programs to continue without protest, they have no internal guidance. Meanwhile, they are discussing gopi rasika. This is all gliding down to the lower planets, thats all there is to it. ys pd]