Bad Yogi: San Clemente Insurrectionist Alan Hostetter back in the news!

Six views of the enigmatic wacko Alan Hostetter.

Vern here. A lotta crazy OC people heeded President Trump’s call last year and went out to DC on January 6 to try and overthrow our election; we wrote about several of them in our “Insane Coup Posse.” Some were weirder and more flamboyant than others, and of those you may remember Alan Hostetter – a former infantryman and La Habra Police Chief who moved down to San Clemente and became a YOGA INSTRUCTOR, until the stresses of 2020 and Covid drove him to rightwing extremism and the creation of the anti-lockdown (but profitable) American Phoenix Project.

Here is Alan in DC on January 5, whipping up the crowd the day before the insurrection, and calling for the execution of Democrats, with HB’s nutty former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher nodding along:

    Well, some of the January 6 insurrectionists have gotten off with misdemeanor slaps on the wrists but not Alan – our south County guru is in HOT WATER, looking at a possible FORTY YEARS IN PRISON. The authorities claim he is one of six members of a Three-Percenters militia group who conspired to bring HATCHETS AND BODY ARMOR to DC on January 6. On top of that he’s in trouble for using his tax-exempt “charitable organization” APP to oppose COVID restrictions and spread The Big Lie of a Stolen 2020 Presidential Election.

    So the latest: Alan is one of several insurrectionists who’s insisting on representing himself, against the advice of the Federal Judge as well as his former attorney, who he felt would eventually bankrupt him. Alan WILL accept a legal ADVISOR, with the caveat that this advisor must have no association with Skull & Bones, the Freemasons, “or any other organizations that require oaths or vows of secrecy.”

    Aside from that, Alan says he’s being framed by corrupt FBI agents and informants, and he has demanded a swift jury trial. As he crowed in a recent video, “I have never been more SANE, more HAPPY, more OPTIMISTIC and more EXCITED about what I’m about embark on defending myself and exposing these crimes against me and those crimes against this country.”

    All of this you may have read in recent news reports, but that’s not why you come to the Orange Juice Blog. You come here because you’re puzzled about how this unhinged guy coulda been a very popular south County Yoga instructor for a decade, and maybe you also heard through the grapevine that we have a new commentator who knows a shitload about yoga (and prefers not to be named for now.) So without further ado, behold:

    Bad Yogi, Alan Hostetter.

    “The so called enlightened gurus who don’t abide by the scriptures are more dangerous to humanity. The people following scriptures can never damage you. But the so called enlightened masters who don’t abide by the scriptures are more dangerous than the pundits and parrots, who repeat from the scriptures directly.”

    Paramahamsa Nithyananda, International Yoga Day, Varanasi, 21 Jun 2016

    Alan Hostetter is back in the news and drawing national attention to the SoCal yoga and spirituality community due to the seemingly incongruous mash-up of how a yoga-teaching, sound-healing, Reiki-practicing ‘guru’ could end up advocating for violence and radicalizing his supporters to attack his perceived enemies.

    In every way Alan is the “Boghi Yogi”, a yoga teacher with knowledge of yoga practices, but not a living embodiment, aka a fake, a phony, a huckster. (Boghi translates as ‘snake’ in Hindi. Other famous Boghi Yogi’s have included Bikram and K. Pattabhi Jois but their transgressions fall heavily on the sexual abuse side.)

    The fact that Alan was welcomed into the SoCal yoga ‘community’ with open arms is indicative of the ‘scene’ here: The OC Yoga scene is completely whitewashed, stripped of its spiritual underpinnings, a place where suburban moms are radicalized to Qanon.

    Yoga without intention and adherence to the 8-fold path is just exercise or, worse, cultural appropriation. The Yoga in SoCal is almost always stripped of intention: see “Holy” yoga, Buns of Steel yoga etc. The local studios are a joke and reflect a broader movement in SoCal toward corrupting yoga, Reiki, sound healing… just look at the people who flocked to Alan Hostetter’s classes.

    Alan represents the pinnacle of our society’s desire to cherry-pick spiritual practices like Yoga and Reiki, while ignoring the foundations which were put in place to stop people from hurting themselves with these practices.

    Like any good Boghi Yogi teacher, there is a compelling origin story: the teacher was successful to use Yoga for self-healing. He found quick, powerful results, and believes that his trauma and physical improvements found in his practice qualifies him to teach yoga. Being ‘good’ at Yoga means nothing. Of course, the Boghi yogi is unaware of their danger to self and others and believes they are qualified to teach.

    Instead of helping his mental illness, Alan’s path to becoming a “Reiki Master,” yoga teacher and sound healing practitioner no doubt exacerbated his already well-known mental health issues that preceded his medical retirement from La Habra Police Chief.

    Reiki, Yoga, sound healing, meditation now become the agents of disturbance in the untrained and impure of heart. Stripped of intention and the rules put in place for thousands of year to prevent illness, yoga and associated energy healing can be absolutely destabilizing…especially to the schizoid character.

    Let’s step back and state the obvious: Alan Hostetter is a very disturbed individual. His ‘dead behind the eyes” empty stare that evokes the shell-shocked warrior or PTSD trauma victim, definitely does not signal someone you should look to for spiritual guidance and healing.

    That most of the OC yoga community embraced Hostetter is an indictment of that very community. Flocks of Boghi-yogis-in-training being radicalized by a dangerous man. This should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of sentience.

    That ‘look’ in Alan’s eye is a manifestation of some very real disturbance and the famous healer Barbara Ann Brennan gives us the structure and framework to understand the schizoid character:

    “The low energy in the frontal area can be seen as the blank, gone look often seen in the schizoid. He usually directs his energy up the spine and out the back of his head in the occipital region, creating the energy bulge towards the back of the head. This is the way of avoiding contact with the here-and-now in the physical plane.”

    from “Hands of Light” by Barbara Brennan

    It is without question that Hostetter’s practice of these mystical healing arts made his condition worse. Yoga, Sound Healing, Reiki…can all be harmful when practiced wrong. But the ‘right’ way to do these things is not hard, you just need a good teacher, the proper intention and an open heart.

    If Alan really wanted to find healing, he should have started with the lowest chakras and worked his way up only when ready. Kinda like strengthening the core to help your neck pain. As opposed to Alan’s no-doubt top-down practice which forces the body’s natural energy flow into a counter-flow that manifests in the “dead behind the eyes” look.

    Evan scarier would be anyone that received Reiki from Alan. Reiki is perhaps the simplest form of energy healing, in which the healer channels pure white light and does not mingle their own energy with that flow into the recipient. But the schizoid character will not be content to allow this stillness, so will interject and intermingle their own discordant energy into the session. The idea of a true Reiki master calling for violence against others is patently absurd.

    As Alan continues his descent into madness, the best we can hope for is a lengthy sentence before the man snaps. Yes, the SoCal yoga scene has a Q-anon problem, and a lot more, because the people paying for these classes are ignorant of the real practice.

    Let this be a cautionary tale for anyone seeking to heal from mental illness with yoga and energy healing. Beware the Boghi Yogi.

    Postscript

    It should be recognized that there are some good Orange County studios out there that have pushed back on the rise of white supremacy in the local yoga scene.


    Reference:
    Hands of Light, A Guide to Healing through the Human Energy Field, Barbara Ann Brennan 

    About Admin

    "Admin" is just editors Vern Nelson, Greg Diamond, or Ryan Cantor sharing something that they mostly didn't write themselves, but think you should see. Before December 2010, "Admin" may have been former blog owner Art Pedroza.