THE SECRET PRACTICE

Tamraz details her experience with a much older yogi grifter in this memoir.

In the 1990s, the author, a life coach and memoirist, was completing her undergraduate degree at Harvard when she met “Swami Arun” on a trip to India with James, her 15-years-older boyfriend, whose hold on her had recently “weakened.” Arun soon drew her into his “secret practice” of yoga, which included instructions to “press into the perineum, the small muscle between the anus and the vagina.” He eventually asked Tamraz for money and engaged her in a sexual relationship. After her first stint in India, the author returned home to New York City, where she had grown up with her divorced, New Age–oriented mother. But she soon married Arun, “the same age as Dad, thirty-three years older than me,” in France, where her wealthy, Lebanese-born fatherhad a professional base, and she earned a graduate degree in business. She worked various corporate jobs to support Arun’s lifestyle, which included drinking alcohol, smoking pot, and shopping. He launched a never-prosperous yoga school, where “Tao,” the spirit whom he channeled as part of his communion with “elders,” decided a young female employee must be his lover. This betrayal, coupled with a growing attraction to a work colleague, led Tamraz to divorce Arun, although not without struggling against a strongly embedded belief in his powers. The narrative is an intense and suspenseful memoir serving both as a cautionary tale and a dramatic depiction of masterful mind-control practiced on a vulnerable party. Through descriptions of her fractured family life and a recounting of Arun’s tactics, the author makes being duped by him believable and understandable. She also offers commendable insight into her own role in the dynamic and surprising empathy for her abuser by the story’s end.

A gripping account of falling under the sway of a con artist weaponizing New Age spirituality.