Escaping the Sex Guru

"Sex guru" Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Jane Stork, formerly "Ma Shanti Bhadra"

(WAtoday.com.au, April 10, 2009) For nine years Jane Stork was a devotee of "sex guru" Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who in the 1970s and '80s led a cult known for their orange clothes and free love.

Along the way she surrendered her name and identity as a suburban West Australian housewife and mother to become Ma Shanti Bhadra — a woman prepared to do anything, even murder, for her master.

In her new book, Breaking the Spell: My Life as a Rajneeshee and the Long Journey Back to Freedom, Stork writes about how she got sucked into the cult and finally broke free after being jailed for an attempt to kill the Bhagwan's doctor.

She also provides an insight into the mind of the Bhagwan and his mouthpiece Ma Sheela — who famously pronounced "tough titties" in a 60 Minutes interview in 1985 when it was suggested the Orange People were not welcome in a local town.

Stork was introduced to the Bhagwan's teachings through a psychologist she was seeing because of personal and marital problems. The psychologist worked in the public health system but had just returned from Pune, India, where the Bhagwan had established an ashram, a place of religious retreat. "I didn't even notice that (the psychologist) was wearing a long orange robe and had a string of beads around his neck," she writes. He became her mentor, and in 1978 Stork followed his footsteps, and those of many other Australians, to Pune. She was later joined by her husband and children, Peter, 10, and Kylie, 8.

Stork says she was attracted to the Bhagwan as a reaction to the guilt of her Catholic upbringing and because of the lack of rules and regulations in his teachings.

But she soon found that the ashram was not all it was cracked up to be. Stork felt uncomfortable with many aspects of life there, including the group sex and partner swapping, as well as deliberate moves to fragment families and drive a wedge between husbands and wives, parents and children.

About 87 per cent of residents had a sexually transmitted disease and women who became pregnant were told by the Bhagwan to abort and sterilize, Stork says. She and her teenage daughter were both sterilized.... Continued

• Books by Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh (a.k.a. "Osho")
• Discourses by Bhagwan