My Husband Left Me For A Cult

Liz hodgkinson was living a normal upwardly mobile family life in the suburbs. Then her husband discovered yogic bliss and everything changed.

When I tell people my husband left me for a woman 25 years older than him, they wonder who the seductress was. In fact, it was a four-foot tall Indian woman in a white sari, who spirited him away from me in 1981. He has been in thrall to her ever since.

She was – and is – Dadi Janki, the now 101-year old head of the female-led Brahma Kumaris spiritual movement. She turned my husband from a militant, religion-hating atheist into a God-fearing yogi who gets up at 4am every morning to meditate. He now leads a life of monk-like asceticism and austerity.

It all began in the late 1970s, when Neville, then a completely normal medical correspondent on the Daily Mail, was invited to a conference at Westminster Abbey.

During the meditation session after the talk, Neville experienced a sensation of never-before-achieved bliss, serenity and peace. Blinding white lights flashed before him in a dramatic Damascene moment.

It was better, he said, than sex; better than the most lavish banquet or beautiful scenery. It was more wonderful than anything he could have imagined and, naturally, he wanted to repeat it.

He then began researching the many meditation movements springing up at the time, but found nothing to interest him. Then, fatefully, he came across the Brahma Kumaris – Sanskrit for ‘the daughters of Brahma’.

At the time, they had a little centre near where we lived in Richmond. So, one evening, Neville and I went to see what they were all about. Five white clad women sat calmly in a circle and, when it came time for meditation, Neville once again had that sensation of utter bliss. When, later, he met Dadi Janki, a yogi of undoubted wisdom and charisma, he was captivated, and lost to me for ever.

He initially maintained that the Brahma Kumaris (BKs) were talking complete nonsense, with their beliefs in reincarnation and the world endlessly repeating itself every 5,000 years.