So if you know me or you’ve read some of my posts, you know that in the past year, I have come to see in a new light the meditation group that influenced me significantly as a young adult. The understanding I originally had of that group has been turned on its head. Such a process can take one on quite an emotional journey. I’m talking about nothing more than feelings — and nothing less. I am thankful for ALL of my feelings. Putting emotions into “good” and “bad” categories, and trying to avoid “bad” feelings, keeps a person fragmented — alienated from oneself. In contrast, accepting and working with our emotions has integrating power. Naming and processing emotions is the opposite of spiritual bypassing. It is a pathway to authentic healing and wholeness as a human being. So, let’s review some facts, and then dig into the feelings they have generated. New Information In December 2023, I came across material online with shocking allegations against the best-selling author and beloved founder of my old meditation group. Someone born there relayed, on a podcast, that the guru had sexually abused adolescent girls who grew up at the ashram. This was the very place I had worked when I moved cross-country to support the group’s “spiritual” mission in my early 30s. (The founder had been long dead by then, and I had heard no hint of such happenings in the past.) I’d had a mixed experience, at best, when I drew closer to that community myself. I left after a year. And I’d been doing a dance of two-steps-away, one-step-back with that community, psychologically, ever since. The intervening 18 years, for me, have included various phases of moving away from some of the core ideas that the ashram community promoted, as well as adapting practices to my needs. All of which is to say, compared to others who have remained more firmly embedded in the group’s ethos, I probably was much better positioned to be able to receive new information about the founder. It is a portrayal that contradicts everything the ashram presents their teacher to be. Despite my relative distance, the new information shook me to my core. The cognitive dissonance was extreme. When I got beyond shock and confusion, it brought up a jumble of other feelings. Keep Going Difficult as it was to look right at the questions raised, no way was I going to dismiss them out of hand. I started poking around to see if anything else had found its way to the internet. That is, since my Googling of the teacher long ago, which had turned up nothing before my move in 2005. Indeed, other troubling accusations now popped up. About the teacher’s multiple marriages and abandoned offspring in his homeland. About his behavior with young women there. About similar misconduct said to have gotten him ejected from a prestigious program here in the U.S. But wait, there’s more. An old newspaper article, previously behind a paywall, describes a schism that happened at the California ashram in the 80s. Several female students came forward to tell the community about the founder molesting them. Latent doubts among many students then came to the surface, tension grew in the ashram community, and there was an exodus of people. I’d gained a vague awareness of the 80s schism during my year working there, but with no clue about what caused it. The last discovery was a pair of letters buried in a library archive, both from early ashram residents. A man who had lived at the ashram for 19 years before leaving calls himself one of the refugees from that place. After much reading and reflection, he writes, he’s come to realize how harmful the ashram community was, and that the founder betrayed the very ideals he espoused. The refugee wrote in hopes that others might avoid falling into a similar kind of trap. The second letter is the most damning of all. Here are the raw, heartfelt words of a woman betrayed by her so-called spiritual teacher. She asks for an explanation for his sexual abuse of her when she lived at the ashram, and for the pathetic justification he had given at the time (that it was somehow for *her* spiritual advancement) — how could that square with his teachings? She pleads for him to stop using women for his own evident gratification. She expresses her need for a sincere apology. There is just no reading these words without being moved to tears, and knowing in one’s bones that she speaks the truth. An Ocean of Feelings Over the past year, I have talked to so many other people who’ve had ties to that meditation center. Sharing what we’ve learned. Processing together. Trying to make sense of our own experiences in light of this new knowledge. And wondering what to do, in our personal spiritual lives, and as caring people. The community of those who are struggling with this new information is the potential audience that has come to be most often in my heart and mind, as I write online. I need to bear witness to the feelings that I and so many others have experienced (and are still experiencing), as we metabolize what has come to light. Of course, different people will have different feelings. And a single person may have many different feelings at different points in time. Sometimes, I have many different feelings all at once. All of this is so normal. Shock Some version of shock may be one of the first emotions to arise. Confusion, dismay, or disillusionment are all natural responses to learning that someone is not at all who you thought they were — who a whole community of people has, for half a century, presented him to be. A rug-pulled-out-from-under-me sensation fits in here. Because this is not just any ol’ person. This is a person lifted up as a beloved spiritual teacher, a role model, an illumined being. If that fact is wrong, then what else in that community and its teachings is not what it seemed? The implications are so deep and disturbing — demanding so much work to get through — that a person might well just stay in shock. If overwhelmed, one might instinctively push the troubling information away, at least for a while. More than one person has uttered “I just can’t…” The mind, the heart, cannot take it in. Alternately, to begin with, one might avoid exposure to any information that could put one in a precarious state. (That is just what the ashram leaders are advocating… but who does that really protect, in the long run?) I have cycled in and out of shock, blankness, and confusion since I first heard that podcast last December. Anger When the allegations began to penetrate, when I could move beyond shock, I was so angry. The podcast described molestation beginning when ashram girls turned 14. My own daughter was a few weeks shy of that age as I listened to it. The Mama Bear in me — who is fierce — reared back on her hind legs and prepared to lunge at the threat to any precious, vulnerable young teen. How dare he!!! NO. YOU. DON’T. But he already had. It happened long ago, and he’d been dead for decades. When I was centered enough to take constructive action, I wrote to the organization’s Board of Trustees to share what I had learned, and invite their response. (How about that — direct communication!) I received brief acknowledgment. Then silence, and more silence. Frustration mounted as they stalled on any real communication. Then exasperation, when they finally provided a response that might kindly be called tone-deaf. (Picture a child putting their fingers in their ears and calling out “la la la la la — I can’t hear you…” when they Do Not Like what they hear. Kind of an adult version of that.) Are you freakin’ kidding me?! Determination set in when it became clear that denial — with a dash of victim-blaming — would remain the official line. Trustees have shown that they would rather question the integrity of sincere questioners than actually answer the questions. One friend, who had been involved longer than I, and had a student-teacher relationship with the guru while he was alive, reached out to the trustees some weeks after I did. His questions and concerns to the leaders have gone completely unanswered — not even acknowledged. Given not only the shocking concerns that had arisen, but also the radio silence, my friend was so hurt and furious that he eliminated from his home all possessions associated with the meditation center. First, he put his entire collection of books by the prolific meditation teacher into a giant garbage bag and set it out, with great delight, on trash pick-up day. (This friend is an academic and a book-lover, so dumping books is not a step he would take lightly; but he did not want anyone else to read THESE books.) Then into his outdoor stove, in batches, went handwritten letters exchanged with the teacher and other representatives… and keepsakes the community had sent over the years (oh, they knew how to nurture the illusion of connection, to make it feel anything but transactional)... in went newsletters and journals… and files of notes taken at retreats… It all went up in glorious flame. My friend found this quite cathartic. As for me, my initial anger about the harm done to vulnerable people came in waves. Later I would experience anger again, as I read up on high control groups. Slowly I was able to recognize some of those dynamics in my own direct experience with that community. Others with whom I was processing started connecting the dots too. What began as anger at the teacher’s sexual and spiritual abuse of girls and women, expanded into anger at the ashram long-timers for their participation in a wider pattern of deception and coercive control. I began to see that all of us who had come into their orbit were survivors of spiritual abuse. We had all trusted them. And we had all been betrayed. Vulnerability & Vigilance (Fear) In my first 3 or 4 months of processing, a feeling of vulnerability sometimes surged through me. I would get embodied flashbacks — from the year I lived nearby and worked at the ashram — of feeling trapped, confused, stuck. I can only imagine that if I had overlapped with the founder’s tenure, I would have been squeezed into an even smaller and smaller area of permissible thought and feeling. (Janja Lalich calls this bounded choice.) If my cohort had arrived a decade or two earlier, would some of my peers have been targeted sexually by the meditation teacher? What might I myself have been subjected to? Would I have been able to make any sense of what was happening? Would I have been able to break free? It’s a feeling of having narrowly escaped harm. With echoes of — do I still need to be vigilant? Is the coast really clear now? As I write this, my adrenaline spikes. I can name this emotion, but that did not immediately move it from my body to my mind. It is visceral. I left the ashram almost two decades ago, but this vigilance is still alive in me. It has been stoked by the recent revelations of wrongdoing and systemic deception. Sadness The more light was thrown on the teacher’s and group’s dubious history, the more I read from the literature on high control groups and recovery, the more time I spent in the land of sadness. I am heartbroken at the depth of harm done to the girls and women who were sexually molested by the teacher. I can only imagine the despair they have known. They went through successive betrayals, as the community disbelieved and shunned those who dared to speak up — which it continues to do. When I consider the wider community of people who have regarded this teacher as a central influence on them — a man who skillfully drew upon the spiritual wisdom of many traditions, in ways relatable today, who spoke eloquently, wrote beautifully, who oozed humble charisma, and yet who was, at heart, it turns out, a charlatan — well, it’s depressing. It’s depressing to consider the cumulative spiritual harm done to thousands of people who were misled and manipulated by this manufactured mystic. Under the umbrella of sadness, another primal emotion that can arise is shame. How did I not know? How was I taken in by this spiritual con artist and his twisted minions? What’s wrong with me, that I was so easily duped? (Note: If you were involved in this or a similar group, NOTHING is wrong with you. People like him — groups like that — figure out how to hook people through natural, deep human needs. Like the needs for belonging, for meaning, for peace, and for beliefs that make sense of the world. And usually, the people they hook happen to be then in a moment of particular vulnerability, such as all humans have at some time in their lives.) Another feeling in this family is grief. One may wonder: if I process this new information, and all the feelings it brings up, what will I have to let go of? Will I drift apart from a dear community, with which I had so many positive associations before? Am I going to lose my precious practice, my rock? Will I have a crisis of faith? Will I be afloat in a sea of uncertainty about what is real and true? For me, new grief reverberates through old grief. I’ve been through phases before of grieving my losses with this community. The loss of the reliable grounding and deep peace I had found in the early years of my meditation practice, which has never been the same since the kundalini syndrome began. There’s no going backward. The loss of the ashram and retreat house as places of refuge, after I moved there and had a very different set of experiences and associations in that place. (Existential losses explored here.) The loss of relationships that had been important to me, which could never be the same in the After as the Before — a loss of belonging and identity. These losses were complicated by the sense that I could not speak openly, plainly, about my experiences in the meditation community, even with the peers I had met there. Eventually I did have some frank conversations with a few of the others who came and went like I did. And I wrote extensively a couple years after I left — voicing and clarifying my experiences at least to myself, privately. But my socialization by the group was still deep enough in me that, even once I found some words for it, I censored myself from any wider or public naming of what I’d experienced. Speaking negatively of the group was implicitly a form of disloyalty, and loyalty was a defining value of the community. So there was no public acknowledgment of my grief. Taking in this new, heartbreaking information about the founder, and receiving a wholly inadequate response from current leadership, has added new ouches. It’s like someone is pushing on my old bruises. Though, in another way, I feel old scars healing more completely, thanks to the new perspective I’ve gained this past year. I now know, more clearly than ever, that the difficulties I experienced when I worked there were not on me. That community WAS deeply troubled, as I’d sensed. And now, I have a more precise understanding of why. Now, I am not the only one who sees it. In reality, I never was — so many people had come and gone from the ashram, before my cohort was cultivated, and while we were there, and since. Guilt I have long felt concerned about the friends who stayed behind at the ashram when I left, or who came after me. The one that particularly worries me is my former office-mate, who I remember hearing crying through the thin wall between us. ‘Madelyn’ is the only one left, at this point, of my cohort. And she is in sooo deep. A couple of decades in, her indoctrination seems to be complete. Though she is ostensibly their leader now, I get the sense that someone else is really pulling the strings. If I still have echoes of that stuck feeling, almost 20 years later, how trapped must Madelyn be at this point? So trapped she doesn’t even know what she genuinely feels, is my guess. So hemmed in by the culture, so behaviorally modified and bounded in choice that she is the perfect yes woman. Is the real Madelyn still in there somewhere? Will she ever get to come out again? Can she heal and know joy? I’m not sure how best to express what I feel about Madelyn’s situation. There’s an element of something like survivor’s guilt. To my good fortune, I’m the-one-that-got-away. I was the first of my cohort to leave. She is the last one still stuck. And she may never get free. Even if the group dissolves, she may never extirpate what has been inculcated in her, which is not really her. Intellectually I know I am not responsible for other people. But the friend and Mama Bear in me yearns to save Madelyn, or help her save herself. Regret is perhaps a lighter form of guilt. For me, regret comes from knowing that, as a result of my earlier enthusiasm for the meditation practice and the programs of the group, I introduced it to many other people. I gave away so many books published by the group — the teacher’s main claim to fame. I encouraged other members of my local meditation group to consider retreats, to come closer. At the church I belonged to at the time, I initiated and co-taught a workshop on the group’s spiritual practices. I nurtured relationships on behalf of the organization, and raised money, and represented the aspirations of the group to other people, first as a volunteer and then as a staff member. Even after I left my job there and began my long slow dance away, internally, I still believed there was wisdom in the founder’s words. After I entered the ministry, I quoted him from the pulpit numerous times, and introduced his books to congregants. No more! Have others suffered in any measure because I brought them into contact with this teacher, this community — this group that turns out to have been a Trojan horse? I hope not. I didn’t influence anyone to come as close to the group as I had. Well, other than my cohort of young adult peers; by design, we all influenced each other, culminating in a wave of YA migration to live and/or work at the ashram. I will never know fully just how my role with that meditation center affected others. I am left with whisps of moral injury. In this light, my writing publicly about my experiences, and my time spent talking to other meditators who are processing, is not only a part of my own healing journey, and in the hope of preventing others from enduring similar experiences. It is also reparation for any harm in which I may have unwittingly participated. Compassion This is the underlying source of much of my anger — compassion for the sexual assault victims whose humanity was violated, and compassion for all those who have been spiritually harmed by this group, which turns out to be a high control group. (You can disagree, of course; that’s my assessment, after a deep dive of study, and drawing on my own direct experience.) I also feel compassion for the long-timers. Who knows why they got stuck there, when so many others came and went. The ones who are left may have vulnerabilities that others didn’t have. In any case, they are among the most harmed. Some are so bamboozled they cannot even consider the evidence of their teacher’s behavior — and its implications for who he really was — not even when it is plainly presented to them by people who genuinely care about them. The emotional and social captivity of the ringleaders appears to be absolute. As they have been for decades, they are trapped within the assumptions, the habitus, and the relational system of the group. I’ll write more in the future about how I try to make sense of the long-timers — and why I have largely forgiven them. Freedom As I move through the many feelings brought up by the allegations and by the current leadership’s response to them (or lack thereof), I experience greater freedom within myself. Others have commented on this too. On the other side of the shock, the hurt, and the anger, beyond the sadness and confusion, a lightness often seems to emerge. The flip side of losing trust in the meditation teacher and his community is regaining some trust in oneself and one’s own judgment. The ashram cultivates dependence. So it makes sense that when one gets greater distance from that community, and all its expectations and strictures, one emerges into greater liberty. Remember my friend who burned all his meditation center memorabilia? Up to that point, his longstanding identity as a student of that particular teacher, the warmth and belonging he had experienced in the community of meditators — and I’d guess, the compulsory loyalty that the group subtly instills in participants — all this had previously made it hard for him to fully move forward on a different spiritual path, the one that best helps him to grow and thrive now. The new knowledge of the teacher’s misdeeds, and the ritual burning, helped him finally make a clean break from the group — one that he realized he’d actually been ready for for quite some time. Other people I have talked to are also feeling, in time, more able to trust their own experience, and their own needs — even if it contradicts what the meditation teacher and his community have long taught them to consider correct understanding or practice. We are freer to know natural joy and not just discipline. Each person can follow their own goals for their spiritual life, instead of an impossible goal implanted by others. Beyond the striving for Purity that the ashram now teaches and embodies, there is freedom to notice what practices work for you, and which people speak to you. There is freedom also to enjoy the gifts of life — not to waste them in the doomed pursuit of perfection. We have not come into this exquisite world To hold ourselves hostage from love… But to experience ever and ever more deeply Our divine courage, freedom, and Light! ~Daniel Ladinsky (inspired by Hafiz) More on Anger I have had to work long and hard to be able to claim my own anger. As a female socialized to be “nice,” ditto as a Midwesterner, as a thinker (enneagram 5w4) who takes refuge in my mind, and as a child of an alcoholic with a deep aversion to angry adults, anger is something I avoided, unconsciously, for a very long time. This doesn’t mean I never felt it, of course. Anger is a basic human emotion, a built-in biological reality. But I didn’t know how to fully FEEL it, or how to EXPRESS it. Anger often stayed below the surface in me, fermenting sometimes into sadness or helplessness. Ironically, words that first came to me through the meditation center — words of Gandhi — were one of the ways that anger has been helpfully reframed for me. “I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.” ~Mohandas Gandhi My life partner has also modeled for me the positive power of anger. I’m not saying every expression of fury is welcome — my first instinct is still to leave the room, because my sensitive nervous system will pay a price for hostile energy discharged in my presence. But the one who has the capacity for intense, instinctive anger — and who trusts these natural feelings — also has the capacity for tremendous joy and resilience. I see these twin powers come to life in my husband. They are two sides of the same energy, the same vibrancy. To cut oneself off from any feeling is to cut oneself off from all feeling. So these days, I honor my anger. It keeps open my access to joy. And it provides the energy for taking constructive action — something I want to keep doing. Coming next: resources for healing and moving forward — for individuals and potentially, for groups who want to continue together. Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up. Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇 Seeking Safely …….. My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong …….. The Roots of Control Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.
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Article ListA list of all articles by title and date, grouped by topics. - Go to list - About ShariUU minister, high control group survivor, and mama bear on savvy ways to seek meaning, belonging, purpose, and well-being in these turbulent times. More SubscribeWant to get an email in your in-box every time I post? To subscribe, you can go here and follow the instructions at bottom. Archives
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