My husband left me for a cult final

When I tell people that my husband left me for a woman 25 years older, they wonder just who this intriguing seductress might be.

In fact, it was a four-foot tall Indian woman in a white sari who spirited him away from me in 1981 and to whom he has been in thrall ever since. She was – and is –Dadi Janki, the now 101-year old head of the female-led Brahma Kumaris spiritual movement and she has achieved what nobody else could, which was to turn my husband from a militant, religion-hating atheist into a God-fearing yogi who gets up at 4am every morning to meditate, and who leads a life of monk-like asceticism and austerity.

It all began in the late 1970s when Neville, then an (apparently) completely normal medical correspondent on a national newspaper, was invited to a conference at Westminster Abbey. During the meditation session that followed the talk, Neville experienced a sensation of never-before 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 that were springing up at the time, but found nothing to interest him. Then, fatefully, he came across the Brahma Kumaris (BKs).

At the time, they had a little centre near where we lived in Richmond, and 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 forever.

Although initially maintaining that the BKs were talking complete nonsense with their beliefs in reincarnation and the world endlessly repeating itself every 5000 years, something kept him going back for more. Before long, he accepted what they were saying as divinely-revealed truth and he fell passionately in love with the whole package.

Uptil then we were, I should say, a typically upwardly mobile family of the time, living in a large suburban house and with two children at private schools. We were career parents, enjoying holidays abroad, driving a Morgan sports car, and leading busy social lives as well.

That life came to a juddering halt. Neville no longer wanted to drink wine or eat meat. He became celibate. Even going to the cinema was out, in case negative vibrations from a film might interfere with his meditation. He gave up his job and started making regular pilgrimages to the BKs' headquarters in India.

How did we, his family, feel about all this? Initially we were bewildered, and we waited for the madness to pass. Instead of this, it grew ever stronger. Before long, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that Neville and I could do together, except argue.

We were leading completely separate lives and there was no way we could ever get together again, unless I, too, became a BK. But although I appreciated the atmosphere of stillness and calm that they radiated, I remained bored and fidgety in meditation and ever caught even a modicum of divine bliss. I also continued to enjoy my wine, books and social engagements.

Not wanting at first to split the family up, we bought a house where Neville could have his own self-contained flat. I joked about having a mad husband in the basement, but it was all too real. Yogis were coming to the house every morning for meditation and on one evening a week, hordes of them would troop into our living room for more meditation and a talk.

There were now dozens of us in the marriage and I was crowded out. The BKS did try to involve me but when they came round for evening meditation, I would run away and hide.

It soon became clear that this arrangement of living separately but under the same roof was not working. I was uneasy with the house being full of yogis all the time, and eventually we had to part. There was no contest; Neville preferred his yogi way of life to anything I could offer. The old, wicked world held no attraction for him any more.

We sold the house and moved into our own London flats. Once freed from the remaining family ties and with our sons now at university, there was now nothing standing in Neville's way of becoming a fully-fledged yogi. He turned his flat into a meditation centre and although he went back to work, as a highly successful medical and science correspondent at the Sunday Times, it was only a matter of time before he would surrender completely.

In 1994, unable to resist the pull of Dadi Janki and the BKs any more, Neville sold his flat, gave up his job and the last vestiges of his former life to become a full time yogi. He went to live in their newly-acquired residential retreat centre, a stately home just outside Oxford.

He has been there ever since. He has no home of his own, no income, no external status. I, meanwhile, although remaining friendly with the BKS, even to the extent of writing a biography of the remarkable Dadi Janki, who introduced the BKs to the West, have remained on the periphery, still not quite understanding what has captivated my ex for so many years, and continues to do so.


Watch out for us on the small screen! Our son Will Hodgkinson's family memoir, The House is Full of Yogis (HarperCollins, £8.99) is now being adapted for a TV comedy drama series in a joint Potboiler/Entertainment One production.


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