When Diane Asay Died, Shoemaker Was Silent as the Grave

In Richard Read’s series in the Grip of the Guru, we read the name, Diane Asay.

The guru he referred to is J. Michael Shoemaker, AKA Swami Chetanananda.

In Richard Read’s series in the Grip of the Guru, we read the name Diane Asay.

The guru he referred to is J. Michael Shoemaker, AKA Swami Chetanananda.

Diane Asay

Here is what Read wrote in 2001.

Diane Asay, a current disciple, said students bear responsibility for choosing to have sex with the guru.

I’ve watched people climb all over people to get into his bed,” Asay said.

She says jealous former lovers are going public to hurt the swami, who is helping to lead a grand spiritual reformation that will make their complaints appear trivial a century from now.

Diane Asay died January 20, 2021.

Asay defended Shoemaker in the Read article. Twenty years later, she died outside the “community.”

A few of her fellow students paid tribute to her decades of work for Shoemaker.

In 2001, Diane speculated how people would remember Shoemaker in a century.

How did Shoemaker remember her?

Diane Asay passed away on January 20, 2021, in Portland, Oregon. She was 77.

Her brother, William L. Asay, and sister-in-law, Lisbeth Asay, of Portland, also came to Portland for unknown reasons.

Diane was born in Los Angeles County in 1943. She attended Hollywood High School and studied at UCLA and UC Berkeley. She graduated with a major in English. Diane was the co-author of “Body, Self and Soul: Sustaining Integration.” In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a senior acquisitions editor for Productivity Press, in Boston and Portland. [These are two cities where the Swami lived during those decades].

She was a Reiki practitioner and was known to have Pyrenees dogs. It appears Diane may have been the reason why the Kreiger family  became part of the Shoemaker enterprise.

Karen Kreiger

Kristin’s daughter Karen left Shoemaker under curious conditions, while Gretchen is President of the Church of Divine Energy, a Shoemaker enterprise.

Here is a tribute to DIane written by Kristin Kreiger.

It is unclear if Kristin is still under the grip of the guru, but here is what she wrote.

Kristin Kreiger 
February 18, 2021

When I first saw [Diane Asay], she walked tilted slightly backward, with her long legs lengthening out – first thigh, then lower leg and finally foot, one large step after another. Her entire body seemed long: her torso long and lean, her arms and legs relaxed, and moving from the most proximal bone to the most distal, which gave her a unique gait, almost as if she were unfolding forward. She was compelling to watch.

Diane Asay

The boy I liked decided he liked her better, so I was quite interested to see who she was. I didn’t like her then. I was fifteen.

She lived with her parents and younger brother, Bill, in Studio City.

She went to Hollywood High. For college, she moved north to Berkeley, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had become a dancer. She married Rick, a man I never met. The marriage didn’t last.

We became friends later.

Diane had returned to LA and become a therapist using movement.

Since she wanted to learn to play the ‘cello, we traded. Often, she came to our house. She loved our daughters [Karen and Gretchen] too, and they loved her back. She had a number of splendid enormous dogs. Patch was the first one I knew. He looked like a bear, his nickname, with very long, shaggy black hair interspersed with brown here and there. He was fierce and smart. He never forgot anyone, friend or foe.

Living alone in a tiny house in a slightly dicey area in those days, he was her perfect companion and protector. Over all our years, our intimacy ballooned and deflated over and over again. When things were going well, we had a wonderful time. This pattern repeated all our lives together. She had power in her being, and she wasn’t shy about sharing it.

At one point, with her permission, I gave her phone number to a brilliant, quirky cello student. He’d studied architecture and music at Harvard and said he’d played all the instruments except ‘cello, saving the best for last. They had fun and moved in together for a while.

They each had wrinkles the other couldn’t unwrinkle and ultimately couldn’t stand. She went to Boston to meet him once when he was working. His colleague took her to Bloomington, Indiana the next day to meet his meditation teacher. She returned to LA and announced she was moving out, into the Bloomington ashram.

I was flabbergasted.

Ultimately, I also studied with that teacher [Shoemaker] for 30 years.

The Bloomington ashram moved to Boston for more than a decade, and then to Portland, Oregon. She moved with them. She later moved into her own house, working in business, traveling widely, and continued writing, which was her real love.

In all our time together, she never gave me anything to read that she had written.

We met once or twice a year, every year or two, and had a long meal, usually three hours, and talked most intimately. Her liver died. No reason was ever discovered. She got a transplant from a young man who’d died in a motor accident. She could feel much about him inside herself. So sensitive, she could also feel each of her organs separately and checked in on them daily. Last year, we spoke long and deeply and rarely. Then she died. Total organ failure. It was fast. We loved each other. It’s a great hole where we’d been.

Gretchen Kreiger.

This is fascinating because Kristin seems to be the architect of her meeting with Chet.

They knew each other in LA as teens. Kristin introduced Diane to a cello player. She went to Boston to meet him, and his roommate introduced her to Chet in Indiana. Diane decides to leave LA and move to Bloomington.

Somehow she, it seems, introduced Kristin to Chet – who introduced her family.

Only three other members of Shoemaker’s group wrote tributes for Diane:

Rio Hibler, Karen Sutherland and Rachel Dyer (a “second generation” member, daughter of Connie Dyer).

Rachel wrote, “With so much love for our beautiful girl, I am deeply grateful to have known her and to have been blessed by her dazzling being!”

Nothing from Shoemaker.

Shoemaker calls his students his “loved ones.”

Fair enough.

What loved ones has Shoemakier harmed, exploited, abused, and thrown under the bus?

Who else has given so much to him and gotten so little back?

Frank Parlato