Dahn Yoga: Body, Brain and Wallet

Author: Kai Falkenberg

In September 2006 Amy Shipley was a bubbly junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, majoring in education. A homecoming court princess in high school, Shipley worked evenings as a cocktail waitress to pay for college. Two years later Shipley says she was a "glassy-eyed train wreck" who had difficulty reading and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She graduated with $32,000 in loans--none of which went for tuition. What happened? She signed up for yoga at an outfit called Dahn Yoga&Health Centers, a Mesa, Ariz. national chain of 139 yoga centers.

Fifteen months and dozens of workshops later she says she was not only out a big chunk of change but, as she puts it, "fully cooked"--indoctrinated into a cult.

Shipley, now 25, is one of 27 former Dahn practitioners who filed suit in Arizona in May claiming the group subjected them to psychological manipulation and fraudulently induced them to spend thousands of dollars on Dahn yoga classes and retreats in Sedona, Ariz. and other places. The punishing techniques, they say, included forced isolation from friends and families, exercises like bowing 3,000 times all night long without breaks, disciplining members by sticking their heads in the toilet and making them lick other members' feet, and having them hold certain poses, like the push-up position, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. On top of those charges, the suit alleges that Ilchi Lee, the 57-year-old Korean founder of Dahn and its spiritual leader, sexually preyed on young female disciples.

Dahn Yoga calls the suit frivolous and has filed a motion to dismiss on various grounds, including prior settlements with three of the plaintiffs. Two of those settlements included unusual provisions forbidding the former members from complaining about Dahn Yoga to any government agencies. Ilchi Lee is also seeking to dismiss counts against him personally, contending he wasn't directly involved.

Calling Dahn Yoga a cult, says company rep Joseph Alexander, "is laughable" and "culturally racist. … It's no different from acupuncture when it came to this country. It just takes a lot more educating for people to accept it."

The explosive charges threaten what appears to be a highly lucrative enterprise. The charismatic Ilchi Lee (born Seung Heun Lee) founded the parent company, Dahn World, in 1985 in Seoul. Dahn ("energy" in Korean) is derived from an ancient Korean form of training that aims to maximize the health of body, mind and spirit through a combination of yoga, tai chi and martial arts.

Dahn, a.k.a. Dahn Hak, has 1,221 centers in nine countries. The company and its affiliates employ 5,053 people and claim 1.9 million people have practiced Dahn yoga. It also has 22 "Body and Brain" franchises in the U.S. at which it teaches a technique it calls brain wave vibration, a kind of "yoga for the brain" that uses rhythmic movements to "balance" your mind and reduce stress. Information on the firm's revenues is sketchy. A South Korean weekly magazine reported that Dahn World had global revenue of 170 billion won in 2003 (that's $133 million today). Dahn World boasted in that publication that margins far exceeded those of Korean car manufacturers. Some internal documents seen by forbes suggest Dahn will take in an estimated $34 million this year in the U.S.

The lawsuit's allegations echo what many cult experts like Steven Hassan, Rick A. Ross and Cathleen Mann have been saying for years about Dahn. Hassan, a Somerville, Mass. mental health counselor who has helped scores of former Dahn members, says the group uses deceptive recruitment and mind-control techniques to create a dissociative disorder among followers, splitting them off from their families and value systems. Dahn's spokesperson says these unfounded "rumors and innuendoes" are simply efforts to hurt a large and visible brand in yoga training.

The current suit isn't the first against the group. In 2002 former Dahn devotee and manager Sun Hee Park filed suit in California state court, alleging that Dahn brainwashed her and its other members for profit and that she was coerced into having sexual intercourse with Lee. The defendants settled the case for an undisclosed sum.

Three years later the siblings of Julia Margaret Siverls, a ccny professor, filed a wrongful death action in New York state court, charging that their 41-year-old sister "was drugged and killed by the Dahn Hak cult" during a training retreat in Sedona. The siblings claimed Siverls died of heat exhaustion during an endurance hike up a mountain in 90-degree weather with virtually no food or water and wearing a backpack filled with 40 pounds of rocks. The Dahn defendants denied any wrongdoing. After three years the two remaining Dahn-affiliated defendants settled the action.