Over six years, after a group of 5C students moved into the Denver House — an off-campus residence housing a spiritual group that would later face cult allegations — former member Isabel Kelly PO ’20 shared her experience during a visit to Pitzer College. On March 8, she spoke about her two years in the house, reflecting on spiritual practice, community and control.
Formed in the fall of 2018, the Denver House began as a private residence for some Pomona and Pitzer students interested in meditation and spirituality. The house was not affiliated with either college.
While members originally practiced separate spiritualities, they eventually joined together in following the teachings of their leader, Satguruyogiprabhu Jnandamokshabrahmananda, who goes by Jnanda.
Today, members of the Denver House and Jnanda live on a plot of farmland in Virginia. Kelly said that one of the students bought the land with trust funds and that the land is legally incorporated as an LLC.
“I really, really believe that he and his followers believe everything he says,” she said. “Which is scary because more and more they’re just doing whatever he tells them to.”
Kelly, raised in the Pacific Palisades, said that her atheist upbringing stimulated her interest in philosophy and spirituality. She sought to become a part of a community in college that shared this interest.
“And then appears this person and this group that can give you everything you need,” she said. “There was something beautiful about the level of care that we all [had] for one another.”
Jnanda’s practices ranged from what Kelly described as sending different energies to different chakras, controlling qualities of souls, blessing food, doing inner child work and fighting bad energies, among others.
“He essentially believes that he is solely responsible for saving the cosmos from energetic destruction,” Kelly said. “He allows certain energies into the universe and kills different dark spirits that are coming into it.”
Kelly added that at the Denver House, Jnanda changed his students’ names to ones he picked out himself. Her name became Sundara Shakta Vinyasa Ananda.
“This is how to get you,” she said. “They make you give away these other parts of your identity, and everyone’s doing it, so it’s hard to really see it happening at the moment.”
Kelly said she realized the amount of control Jnada had over her when she started dating another member of the house.
“Every single thing had to be run by the teacher,” Kelly said. “‘Can we go on a date? Can we kiss? Can we go further than that?’”
During this time, the Denver House gained attention from multiple campus newspapers.
“When the articles were published, I was so bitter, my high school friends stopped talking to me because of those articles,” she said. “So many people completely dropped me.”
Phil Zuckerman, a professor of secular studies and sociology at Pitzer who moderated the talk, discussed his immediate response to the articles at the time. He said that he found himself defending the cult.
“What do you mean a ‘cult’? They’re adults living off campus?” Zuckerman said. “They have a spiritual practice; what’s the problem? I took this position that I’m not going to condemn them.”
Zuckerman’s perspective is representative of a common skepticism toward labeling the group as a cult, according to Pomona College religious studies professor Steven Quach.
“Religiously inspired movements are often seen as cults from the outside, but are actually doing very common religious practices from a social historical perspective,” he said. “A lot of cults at the margins at first will end up becoming institutionalized religion.”
Still, Kelly said that she began to feel uneasy about the group while living at the Denver House, with her anxieties manifesting physically in her health, citing a development of digestive issues. Looking back, she added that she regrets how much she gave to the group and wishes she had left sooner.
While few people have experiences with alleged cults, Kelly said that leaving them can be hard in the same way that leaving an unhealthy or abusive relationship might be.
“You built a life, you have all these shared rituals, that person means so much to you, it’s not as simple as just trying to leave,” she said.
Talk attendee Flynn Rorty PZ ’28 later reflected on Kelly’s presentation in an interview with TSL, saying that her perspective was “really powerful.”
“Isabel [Kelly] is not in very different shoes than me or any other student here,” he said.
After two years in the Denver House, Kelly left the group despite resistance from other members, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to step away.
“I canceled my calls with the teacher,” she said. “I started working with a therapist. And I think most important of all is that I was just finally honest with someone about how weird things were getting in the house.”
While the Denver House group is still operating, Kelly said that she is not the only one who has left it or questioned its practices.
After she left, Kelly received a message from two female members saying that they had left after a decade of practicing. They told her that Jnanda had used his bad health to try and convince one of them to incubate his offspring.
“He says it’s because he’s carrying all of the karma of the world, and he’s using it as an opportunity to try to get his female students to carry his children now,” Kelly said.
After years of reflection and having time away from the influences of the Denver House, Kelly has been able to reflect on how her experience affected her sense of self.
“How could I ever trust myself again if I was so misguided?”
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