“Trust is critical to progress on a spiritual path,” wrote Sue Ferguson, “but it doesn’t come easily for some of us.” I wonder how many readers can relate to Ferguson’s hesitance to trust.
 
We humans are relational beings, who cannot survive and thrive without caring, cooperative relationships with others. Yet to extend trust, we must expose our soft, vulnerable underbelly. No wonder that when trust is betrayed, the relational wound can go deep.

Instincts
 
For much of my life, I have been someone who instinctively trusted others. I grew up with loving, reliable caregivers, so my foundation of trust was strong as I entered adulthood. Later, though, there was one significant period when trust did not come so easily to me. I was in my 30s by this time, and life had eroded my trusting nature. It showed in my romantic life.
 
I started dating someone I met online – the way so many romances start anymore. Going slow makes sense when a relationship starts from zero, as strangers, and I did go slowly. My nervous system knew pretty quickly, though, that this guy was trustworthy. On our second date, I drove up to his city, and when he greeted me, he gave me an unhurried hug that just felt so safe and grounding. (If you know me, you know I’m a hugger.) I think on some level this is when I knew this was someone I could get serious about. He gave hugs like my trustworthy father.
 
But as our relationship unfolded over weeks, and then months, approaching a year, I continued to take my time. My boyfriend was ready to pick up the pace. He was ready to make long-term plans, to really commit. Neither of us was young – I was 34, he was 43. If parenting was going to be part of our lives there wasn’t much time to waste. He wanted to know where I stood in this relationship. And I was a bit frozen in uncertainty. I continued to move slowly in our couplehood. At one point my partner became impatient with my dawdling. And I thought, is he going to walk away?
 
Maybe you’ve been the person who could trust, and who felt impatient with or hurt by another’s apparent lack of commitment. Or maybe you’ve been the person who found it hard to trust in someone else, or in your own powers of discernment.
 
It takes courage to trust. Because trust means vulnerability. It means risking being let down by those you trust. For someone who has been hurt or betrayed before, it is not only the specific relationship involved which was harmed; that person’s underlying capacity to trust may also be affected.
 
As for me and my younger self’s dating relationship? It’s only in the last couple of years that I have come to understand more deeply what it was that had diminished my capacity to trust.
 
Backstory
 
Here’s the backstory. (There’s always a backstory.)  In my late 20s, I got involved in a community that gave me many reasons to feel safe there – warm people that seemed to genuinely care about me. Spiritual practices that added comfort, grounding, meaning and personal insight to my daily life. Fun times together, talking and laughing over meals or during recreation together.
 
I moved gradually closer to that meditation community over a period of years, in my participation and my identity. It influenced major choices I made in my personal life, including work and relationships. Eventually I moved into the heart of that spiritual community, transplanting myself from the Midwest to the West Coast to work for the meditation center.

But when I got close, my sense of stability within that group quickly began to erode. In fact, I began to feel distinctly unsafe. Things were not as sunny as they had seemed from a distance. Once I was in the thick of things, my experience was that direct communication seemed to be taboo or threatening. And it took so long, mysteriously, to get something done within the structure of the organization. And members of that spiritual community did not in real life consistently exhibit the qualities that they ostensibly taught to others, like an unhurried mind or self-acceptance.
 
I didn’t understand why the community behaved the way it did. But I could feel the toll it was taking on my body, emotions and spirit. People who I thought I was close to displayed a deficit of trust, not only in others around them, but specifically in me. There was a disconnect between what was actually happening around them and how they responded.
 
Eventually the secretive, distrusting, stultifying climate of that meditation community got to me. To the point I realized that for my own well-being, I needed to get out of there.
 
All the signals that community had given me that it was a place of safety, connection, and growth – a place in which I might flourish and make positive contributions – it turned out those signals had been deeply misleading. And so, when I left that California community and returned to the Midwest, one of the lasting effects I brought with me was confusion about whether I could believe what my experience told me about others.
 
Sure, I felt instinctively safe with my new boyfriend – but was this really going to work out? I had been wrong about people before… how could I be sure I was right about this guy?
 
In Community
 
Perhaps you’ve been close to a person or community whose behavior turned out to be inconsistent, confusing, even downright harmful. Rupturing of trust happens in families. It happens in friendships. It happens in communities. It’s happened, sadly, in the body politic of the United States.
 
Betrayal of trust can be devastating in any context. Because trust is the foundation of all human relationships. Without it, those relationships are hampered in their ability to create and sustain authentic connection.
 
Such a betrayal goes especially deep in a place that was supposed to be safe – as when a parent or guardian harms a child in their care, or when a spiritual or religious community fails to protect anyone in it from abuses of power.
 
Relational traumas like these impact not only the person directly affected – the child abused or neglected, the partner assaulted or cheated on, the group member deceived or manipulated. Betrayals of trust can also affect whole communities.
 
What I have come to understand about my old meditation community, twenty years later, is that its capacity for trust, for true reciprocity and straightforward communication, had been damaged long before I arrived on the scene. Just as the trust barrier between me and my boyfriend wasn’t really about him, the meditation community’s slowness to trust me and all the young people of my generation that they drew out there was never about us; it was about the fabric of trust in that community that had been ripped apart decades before, which had never healed.
 
Broken
 
You see, I’ve learned just in the past couple of years that the founder of my old meditation group misused his power. He betrayed the trust that vulnerable people placed in him, using them to gratify himself and bolster his ego. And he was never held accountable for the harm he did. Instead, it was pretended away​ by people who could not face what it meant about their beloved teacher. This was what poisoned the well of trust in that community – betrayals that had been buried.

As can happen in any community disrupted by such relational trauma, not everyone stayed. Before my time, some people who came to terms with the truth left the group, because most people were either unable or unwilling to grapple with what had happened.
 
By the time I got involved with the community, the teacher had died, and there were newer people involved who had never been there for the original breaches of trust. Like me, they had no idea what had happened. New people learned by osmosis – through the social conditioning of others – how to fit in and survive there, in a community built on a shaky foundation of trust.
 
It takes courage to mend old relationships – or to build new ones – when trust has been damaged. It takes courage to face the hurt in the first place.
 
Grief
 
About two months ago, while I was in California, I made the decision to visit the ashram where I had had those confusing experiences that shook my capacity to trust. I felt that it could be healing for me to see the community through the eyes of my new understanding of what had happened long before my time there.
 
I gathered my courage before I reached out about visiting the meditation center. I knew that I could not control how others related to me. I wasn’t trying to mend my relationship with them; experience had suggested that they are unable or unwilling to deal with unsavory truths about their beloved teacher, much less acknowledge how later generations might be harmed by coercive dynamics there.
 
No, my goal was to honor the grief and pain of my younger self. Like so many who had gone there over half a century, I had been used and disillusioned by that community. Anyone whose trust has been betrayed – in whatever kind of relationship – deserves to have that pain recognized and cared for.
 
As I drove onto the ashram grounds for the first time in almost twenty years, I felt grounded in my own values and truth. The strength of other friends who had come and gone from the ashram, like me, was with me. And I needed it. Because returning to the site of ruptured relationships can make a person feel vulnerable all over again.
 
For me, going back was cathartic of my pain and grief. And it was affirming of how much I have healed over the past couple of decades, since I left there. Because after visiting the grounds, and visiting with a leader there, I left feeling in my whole self my own soundness of being.
 
I drove away, knowing in my bones that their distrust of me – and their failure to be worthy of the trust I offered them – those were never really about me. Rather, their failure to trust and failure to be trustworthy reflects that community’s unhealed relational trauma.
 
I am trustworthy, and there are many others who are worthy of my trust as well. Whatever you have been through, I suspect that you are trustworthy too. And I am certain that there are people out there who will live up to your trust.
 
I invite you to take a deep breath if that feels right to you.

Anywhere
 
I’m still a curious person, spiritually. I don’t know, though, if I’ll ever again be moved to check out another meditation group, or go on personal development retreats, or explore anything in the unregulated marketplace of spirituality that exists in our country. I have all I need within the tradition I serve.
 
Not that it has been entirely immune to the sort of dynamics I’ve been talking about. It hasn’t. No tradition is, as these are pitfalls of being human that can show up anywhere. But I do feel good about my chosen faith in this regard. Unitarian Universalists have been doing intentional work at a national level to nurture health in our communities, to delineate clear standards for behavior, to prevent breaches of trust, and when trust is betrayed, to hold people accountable and repair the harm. Healing takes a long time in communities. My sense is that my chosen people are on a constructive course.
 
My own experience of trust betrayed was in an alternative spiritual group. I recognize, though, that many people have been hurt in mainstream religious communities, like congregations. I have tremendous empathy for anyone who has experienced betrayal in a place that was especially supposed to be safe for them – or by a person who was especially supposed to be trustworthy, like a religious leader. And I witness how much courage it takes for such a person, after being hurt, individually or as part of a community, to set foot in a church again. Or to step into leadership in a community with this type of history.
 
So. We humans are relational beings. Trust is the foundation of our relationships. Sometimes our trust is betrayed, in individual relationships or in community. And when that happens, it can re-pattern our relationships away from trust, with far-reaching ripple effects in our lives, be it in how we respond to a helpful stranger on a train station, or to a new significant other, or to a new spiritual community or new religious leader.
 
Healing
 
The big question then is, how do we heal from damaged trust?  How do we re-weave this webbing that makes all relationships possible?
 
We can develop the conditions for recovery by finding or creating pockets of safety and care. That’s one step.
 
When I left the meditation community in 2006 and returned to the Midwest, I mostly returned to existing relationships that felt safe for me. Being with my UU church community, and with my old friends, in my familiar city – that provided the conditions for healing for me. And when I was stable again, I summoned the courage to try to find someone who could be my life partner.
 
Working with a professional can be very helpful in restoring our capacity to trust. The relationship between a patient and therapist can become the crucible in which the ability to trust is rebuilt. Perhaps this is why the quality of the relationship between a patient and therapist – the trust – is more important for the patient’s progress than the specific therapy philosophies and practices used by the therapist.
 
The hard slow work of rebuilding trust happens in daily life, too. Just as each strand of a braid is woven one cross-over at a time, to form something strong, in our day to day relationships, including those with new people, there is no substitute for repeatedly proving reliable and honest and operating in good faith.

And when a community has suffered tears to the warp and weft of trust that upholds it? What creates healing on a communal level? In the tradition I belong to, one of the central ways of nurturing relational health is by creating covenants of right relations. A covenant conveys what behaviors are appropriate, and what are not.
 
Living into those covenants together is an ongoing practice. We will inevitably make mistakes sometimes. Being in right relationship means continuing to come back into covenant, in good faith, when that happens. Putting those blocks back on when one has fallen. Otherwise, like a little tower of Jenga blocks, the whole thing can become shaky.
 
For a community that was harmed specifically by a leader, broken trust can also be repaired by carefully building a trusting relationship with a new leader. If the new leader proves to be reliable, to have healthy boundaries, to be collaborative and not misuse their power, a community may begin to mend the fabric of trust.
 
As happened in my relationship with my boyfriend, trust grew gradually, through the accumulation of shared experiences. It takes however long it takes. Some communities that are healing, like individuals, find support from people who are trained and skilled in healing relational trauma to be helpful.
 
Some communities are never going to heal because they will not face what happened. Sadly, my old meditation group is one of those. I wonder if, in the history of high control groups, a full-on cult has ever gone from traumatizing to healthy. Seems unlikely to me.
 
Weaving
 
On a personal level, what happened for me, after I left the meditation center, returned to my old friends and community, and started dating?  Well that boyfriend, he of the comforting hugs, was patient. He was sure about me. And, lucky for me, he let me take the time I needed to realize that I could, in fact, trust my instincts about him.
 
He let me take the time I needed to regain confidence in my own powers of judgment. William and I got married in 2009. We did start a family, too – our daughter is almost sixteen and our great joy.
 
I try to remember this personal experience, when I find myself in any kind of relationship with a person or community that finds it hard to trust. There’s always a reason for it. It may not really be about me. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere. And the only way to heal that disconnect, and rebuild confidence for healthy, mutually supportive relationships, is with patience and care.

​Dear reader, I wish you relationships of care and reciprocity that prove worthy of your trust. Day in and day out, may each of us be mindful to weave the strands of trust in our families and friendships, in our communities, and in the wider world. May we act in good faith one to another. And may we be rewarded with relationships that support us, that help us to grow and flourish. So may it be.
 
Contemplation
 
I invite you to recall a time in your life when you have been party to a loss of trust. Perhaps trust was broken in a big, life-changing way. Perhaps it was some small neglect or thoughtless choice that frayed the fabric of trust. You might have been in error, or perhaps someone else hurt you. Trust might have been diminished in a family relationship, a friendship, a workplace, or a community of care like a congregation. Take few moments to pause and reflect on your own experience of trust betrayed – and perhaps any courageous steps that were taken to restore trust.

 
Rebuilding depleted trust takes patience, care and intentionality. Like a braid that has come undone, unraveled trust is re-woven one action at a time, one strand-over-strand weaving at time.

Ritual
 
If you'd like to do a bit of ritual on these themes, gather together three pipe cleaners, three strands of yarn or something similar. For yarn, my suggestion is to gather three strands together, at one end, and tie the ends to each other, or to a paperclip. For pipe cleaners you can simply crimp them together on one end. Then you can braid from there, crossing the left yarn or pipe over the middle one, then the right one over the new middle one, then left again, and continuing like that to complete a braid.
 
When you are finished, you can wear the braid as a bracelet on your wrist. Or loop your braid through the hole in a zipper pull on any bag. The braid can serve as a reminder of the slow process of healing trust – and the progress you are already making.

Video Message
 
This piece is adapted from a sermon I delivered to the congregation I serve as ordained clergy. If you are interested in hearing this piece rather than simply reading, you can watch/listen below, or on YouTube here. The contemplation begins about 23:30 minutes in, the reading at 30:30, and the sermon around 33:25.

As background, I serve in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, a liberal religious denomination which is theologically diverse, small-d democratic, and centered in Love. It is about as far from high demand religion as you can get. Still, trigger warning for those who have experienced harm in churchy settings — the sanctuary does *look* very churchy, in an austere New England sort of way (minus the crosses).
 
I am not trying to convert you, to my tradition or to any form of organized religion. Unitarian Universalism is the right place for me — and I am delighted when others find themselves at home there too — but I do not believe there is one right way or one correct community for everyone. For people who have had high demand experiences, it is especially important to discern for yourself what meets you where you are, and what helps you grow. You do you!

Etcetera

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Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.
Seeking Safely … The Accidental Buddhist ... The Structure of a High Control Group 

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I drove west, toward the Pacific Ocean, the ashram shrinking in my rearview mirror.

I hadn’t been there for almost two decades, since a confusing year as a meditation center employee that ended with my quiet return to the Midwest. At the moment I did not feel stirred up by this visit to the site of spiritual trauma. I wasn’t sure what I felt.

A beach was just ten minutes away. I had planned to let the healing power of the ocean wash over me, as I walked and walked at its edge, and ate my lunch from a high cliff, and let my being settle, after all the feelings and sensations of the visit.

I drove through the small resort town and down the bluff to the beach parking lot. Leaving my shoes in the car, I walked barefoot over the cool sand to the water’s edge.

The cold water on my feet grounded me in my body as I strolled through the surf. Waves crashed rhythmically onto the beach. Ah…

I drank in the sensations of wind and water, my mind quiet for some time.

Wave 1… Purpose

Twisty vines with tiny pink flowers rose out of the sand. They shimmied in the breeze.

So much had gone unspoken during my visit to the ashram. Why had I danced around the tension, been so diplomatic, avoided the elephant in the room?

Learning to lean into conflict, when called for, in healthy ways, has been one of my biggest areas of personal and professional growth over my life. I had been direct and transparent with the organization’s leadership when I first learned startling new-to-me history — sharing what I had uncovered, and asking for answers and accountable action. Yet, I had not done that today.

Would I come to regret this missed opportunity? I wanted them to initiate an independent investigation that took seriously the allegations that I now knew had been made by multiple women over the decades: that the group’s beloved teacher had abused his power monstrously, using others for his own sexual gratification — adolescents as well as young women — gaslighting them all the while, as he told them that it was for their own spiritual advancement.
​

For survivors of sexual abuse: 
RAINN sexual assault hotline / crisis support and more
Helping Survivors - mental health and legal assistance

​The beach narrowed as a bluff rose up to my left. Hardy plants grew over the rocky curves. Resilient succulents matted the ground. Some sections held their red-green color palette, while other sections dried to gray.

After having the courage to speak their truth, it had to have been devastating for the sexual abuse survivors to be dismissed and written off, indeed, regarded as traitors, by their former ashram “family.” A subsequent betrayal like that can rival the original abuse in the pain caused.

Not to mention all the people hurt by the deception of decades of propaganda and cover-ups. It had been a collective project of many in this community to style the founder as a spiritual teacher on the world stage.

I now understood that, whenever reality threatened to dissolve the mirage they had created, they had zealously protected it. They coached public-facing folks, like retreat presenters, on how to steer people away from problematic pieces of the founder’s history. And there was a stream of hagiography about him, too, telling his story just so. That began well before he died in the late 90s, and has never let up.

Up on the bluff, bright yellow flowers popped from corkscrew blades of green. Insects crawled silently among the sunny florets.

Over the half-century since it formed, my old group had lured many soft-hearted seekers into successively deeper layers of the onion structure of the group — including my cohort. As I was reminded by the presence of Shelia (or her mother, whichever it was) on the access road at the ashram today, they are still continuing to ensnare people in their web of half-truths and lies.

Would it have been the perfect time, while Madelyn and I were connecting over the challenges that come with leading an organization, to express my disappointment in the way the leaders responded to my questions? (They basically smeared the victims, and then proactively coached others away from even learning about the allegations, lest they disturb their minds and impede their spiritual progress… classic DARVO and spiritual bypassing.)

I could have spoken from the heart about all this, but I hadn’t. These questions hummed through me, more in the form of swirling feelings than succinct thoughts, as I paced over the sand.

Ancient bits of rock, skeletal remains of marine life, and disintegrated plant matter made up the grains underfoot. The stories they could tell would span eons. The evolution and extinction of species. Ice ages and meteoric events. Human happenings that might or might not still be alive in the oral histories of indigenous peoples. The westward push of colonization that met the ocean here, with its own mythology of manifest destiny, its own economy of extraction, its own hagiography of the cowboy and the pioneer.

No, I did what I came to do. Accountability and truth-telling were not the point of this visit. My own healing was.

Perhaps my escapee-survivor friends and I will find ways, eventually, to prevent the organization from continuing to deceive and harm (as many) people. But that was not why I had asked to set foot on the ashram today.

Long-term, my own aims will likely be broader, fostering healing and prevention in relationship to high control groups in general, not just my old group.

Being a “wounded healer” may bring some gifts to those endeavors, so long as I am sufficiently healed myself. And my journey back to the center of my own spiritual trauma felt quietly powerful in that regard.

Wave 2… Settling

Iridescent purple shells on the sand enticed my eyes and fingers. Across the bay, Point Reyes drew nearer as I progressed down the ocean’s edge.

Would I write about this visit? It had crossed my mind at the ashram to take a picture, if only of my canary’s (approximate) resting place. But I wanted to respect the trust Madelyn had extended to me by letting me come. I doubted the Center’s leaders would want me taking and posting pictures. So I had dismissed the idea as soon as it had occurred to me.

No doubt they’d prefer I not write publicly about the visit, either. While I was at the ashram I didn’t think I would. On the beach, I wasn’t so sure. I could already feel the pull of my preferred mode of processing. For me, writing has always been one of the best ways to make sense of my life experiences.

I had brought my little Yellowstone composition notebook with me. At one point, as gulls glided overhead, I cracked it open and wrote a few paragraphs. That was all I could do on the beach, though. The words weren’t ready to come.
​
As the waves lapped the shore, I was much more in my body than my mind. Settling my nervous system — that was my immediate need. The processing would come gradually, in layers of feeling and reflection. The perceptions grounded in my animal being would integrate in their own time with the verbal and other faculties of my mind.

​Like a Gold Rush prospector panning for precious metals, in the days that followed I would sift through the events and emotions of my ashram visit. I would accept whatever nuggets of insight rose out of the stream of memories.

This process ebbed and flowed during the rest of my week in the Bay Area. It would continue in the background all the way home, as I drove through the Sacramento valley, over the Sierra Nevadas, across sage-covered desert mountain territory from Nevada to Colorado, and back into the plains.

Only later, when I was re-anchored at home, would I be able to put fleshy words on the bones of all that swirled within, as I meandered along the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Wave 3… Idols & Golden Eras

Here and there on the sand, skeletons of tiny creatures caught my eye. What were they? What kind of lives did they live?

One translucent form was so complete, I wondered if it was still alive.

The circle of life was palpable here. Not so at the ashram, frozen in time. Walking through it felt like visiting a museum.

I recalled something a friend observed, that the long-timers looked back to the 60s, 70s, early 80s as the golden era of their experience with this group. Perhaps much as I still remember fondly (though not without mixed feelings) my early retreat experiences. They were full of spiritual exploration, connection, sensory renewal, and peak experiences — what felt like genuine, positive growth. In both cases, the anchoring memories were before things went awry. Or at least, before one’s misgivings demanded real attention.

For the long-timers, the before and after might be marked by the period in the early 80s when doubts and dark experiences began to be shared aloud, and the teacher threatened to abandon them all — they had to shape up (and shut up), or he would ship out. A dozen people departed; others ended up all the more tightly trauma-bonded to the teacher.

I remembered what Liahna told me about pilgrimages to the ashram, and how the center has created sites of homage throughout the compound. As the real, all too flawed man gets farther and farther from them in time, the most fanatical grip all the more tightly to their idealized image of the teacher — and present him to others accordingly.

More marine forms caught out between tide pools appeared between my feet on the sand.

I had collected a few shells, but had no interest in touching the bones of decomposing creatures. Nature would take its course, drawing them back into the sand and the sea. They could nourish new life, no less singular or precious for their anonymity. Let them be.

Scanning to my left, I watched a pair of teens wading into the water with boogie boards. They caught waves as they could.

Wave 4… Control

I passed an unknown object on the sand, a reddish… shellfish? How did such a creature survive, in the ocean swells and scouring sand?

There was another one. I bent to inspect its form. I saw no legs. Was it still alive?

Flashes of my conversation with Madelyn came back to me. The way she responded to my expression of concern for her future, uncomprehending and unphased.

She has been “putting others first,” effacing herself, for so long — what was left? I could only guess what was going on beneath her courteous exterior. How many layers down did she know herself?

I wove between fleshy bulbs and seaweed reeds washed up on the shore. My mind returned to the film I had watched on my tablet the night before. Wicked Little Letters had been in my Netflix queue for some time. As my ashram visit neared, this tale from another time had promised to distract and amuse me.

Wicked Little Letters turned out to be a story of deception, control, betrayal, and survival. Comedy, yes. But on the beach, it struck me that it was also a fitting allegory for the ashram.

          (Spoilers ahead!)

The story centers on Edith Swan, played by Olivia Colman. An upright young woman, Edith has been receiving hostile, profanity-laced letters. The missives upset the pious home she shares with her mother and father. Neighbor Rose Gooding, a single mother and Irish immigrant with a vivid vocabulary and a zest for life — complete with bawdy humor — is suspected of writing them. Thus begins a lighthearted whodunit.

All was not what it seemed. Inspired by a scandal that rocked the seaside town of Littlehamptom in Sussex, England, in the 1920s, the plot twist at the end of the film felt all too familiar to me.

Beneath the laughs, through a slow drip of revelations, the movie illustrates the dynamics of control. Edith was the good daughter, keeping house for her father, exuding modesty and virtue. When she stepped out of line, her father’s anger and entitlement was palpable. He had her copy out Bible verses as punishment/training.

Edith’s mother had learned not to think — in one scene, when asked her opinion on events, she averred with relief that she had none. Edith knew she was supposed to stay on the (subservient) sidelines too. She did her duty at home, and welcomed every opportunity to burnish her saintly image: gracefully enduring, like Christ, as the initial target of the letters; self-effacingly quoting hallowed words (Saint Francis included) as she encouraged others to turn the other cheek with Rose; allowing herself to be persuaded to speak on the matter in church, and to accept compliments in the press for her cheerful forbearance.

Beneath the nicey nice manners in Edith’s home, darkness lurked. Edith’s father, it turns out, was the cause of her called-off engagement some months before the letters began. Locals thought Edith had changed her mind. But her father had actually secretly driven away her suitor, in order to keep his eldest daughter at home, as his domestic servant.

Edith’s family, local law enforcement, and the community at large blithely blamed the colorful character Rose for the letters — easily believing what confirmed their worldview. Meanwhile, an intrepid ‘woman officer’ and a few local women in cahoots with her unraveled the mystery: straight-laced, scripture-quoting, demonstratively humble Edith was the true author of the wicked little letters!
​
Edith had not started out with a plan to frame Rose. It becomes clear to the viewer that Rose’s friendship had actually been good for Edith, helping her to lighten up. Edith’s quashed feelings of resentment and anger at her position in life simply came out sideways, through the letters. While reflexively patronizing toward her moral inferior and foil, Rose, Edith only threw her under the bus — playing up the idea that Rose must be the culprit, after others would not let it go — so that she would not be caught out herself. The betrayal of her friend was a matter of survival.

It was only when her fiancé and new married life mysteriously went *poof* that Edith found anonymous outlets for her unacceptable (for a female) feelings, using the alternate persona to vent her vitriol and provoke her parents.

Her anger at her lost agency and stuckness is perfectly understandable. I empathized with Edith when she explained to Rose late in the movie that she had never meant all this to happen — once she’d started, she just could not stop writing nasty notes. Inadvertently, the person who was controlled herself became a deceiver and manipulator. Her one-time friend Rose was collateral damage to the rage and pain that Edith otherwise had to keep in check behind a decorous façade.

I did get the sense toward the end of the movie that Edith was finally breaking free of the cage of spiritual aspiration and daughterly duty. At Rose’s trial, when cracks began to show in Edith’s story, exposing her, she instinctively insisted to her father that all was well. The smile fixed on her face corresponded to a state of willed denial.

But as she was being hauled away to prison, her father stated that he knew it could not have been her. Now he was in denial. Defiantly, Edith shouted at him that yes, it WAS her! She threw in a few epithets to underscore the point. She then broke out in spontaneous laughter, at her audacity, a genuine smile lighting up her face.

The truth set her free, at least in spirit. Rose applauded Edith’s verbal exploits, and to the audience, too, she was redeemed.

In the days that followed my ashram visit, starting on my beach walk, bits and pieces of the film would echo back to me, resonating with ashram ways.

The passive-aggressive patterns, polite stiffness on the surface, deep currents of tension palpable at the gut level.

The father figure who manipulated others for his own selfish gain.
​
The misappropriation of spiritual words and ideals, used to paper over and avoid what was difficult.

A striving that locked people in, instead of setting them free. Where tools that once helped them cope became part of the trap, limiting what one can see — or be.

How the controlled person may, in desperation, turn to deceit and denial.
​
The “friends” betrayed.

I recognized it all in my own experience with the ashram, and in the stories that others of multiple generations have shared with me.
​
Nearby on the beach, dogs splashed around in the tide pools, tails wagging. Their joy was infectious.

From my body I could feel that in the visit I’d just made, dynamics of control had unfolded once again.

The way I had to get permission to visit, and how grateful I felt after Madelyn said yes, after having first said no. (Ah, intermittent reinforcement, you are such a trickster.)
​
Threading the needle of conversation — staying on “safe” topics, leaving so much unspoken. Hearing party lines from Madelyn and neither agreeing with nor challenging them.

Squashing the impulse to take a picture, or the thought of writing about this later. That came partly from genuine respect for Madelyn, wanting to keep to the terms I had presented for my visit. Eschewing pictures still felt like the right choice on that count.

But mixed in with appropriate boundaries were echoes of the loyalty the group instills in people. For so long it had inhibited me from talking openly about my negative experiences there; I self-censored, as people do in authoritarian systems. Today at the ashram, I had walked among ghosts from my past, and re-absorbed a bit of their unspoken code of silence.
​
I wanted to shake that off, to leave behind that rekindled bit of conditioning. Let it wash energetically back to the ashram, like the water on the sand sliding back into the sea.

Wave 5… Time

As I sat on a grassy ledge of sand, watching the waves crash under a gray ceiling of clouds, another bit of the conversation with Madelyn played back in my mind’s eye.

She had pointed to patience as a source of challenge and growth. As a leader of the group, perhaps Madelyn’s welcome of me was an example of this very principle — an act of prudent patience for the institution.

In the past, the true believers at the ashram had seen trials as a test of loyalty. Did Madelyn and her contemporary counterparts see the recent set of questions and allegations about their teacher similarly? Probably so.
​
And patience might well be a key part of the strategy for dealing with those of us who find the allegations credible. The center had guided people to focus on the purity of their minds, and steer clear of information that might trouble them — rather than actually address that information directly and transparently. This don’t-think-about-it response was both telling and troubling.

Perhaps those currently orchestrating the organization’s course expect to wait us out, the seekers of truth and justice — just let those questions die down, let whoever falls away from the organization fall away, keep cultivating new crops of meditators, and wait to reap a harvest of goodwill and major gifts from those future supporters. There have been so many waves of meditators and retreat-goers and donors already, over the past half a century. They’ve gotten very good at this process.

Perhaps this attitude of patience even helps explain Madelyn’s switch from no to yes, in response to my inquiry about visiting. Once it became clear that I had not come with ill will, or intent on confrontation, but rather was focused on my own healing journey, they might have decided to go with the “catch more flies with honey than vinegar” approach with me. Expecting to be done with me once I left California on this once-in-a-lifetime trip. Which they may well be.

Point Reyes was small in the distance as I turned back to survey the span I had traversed. The ashram, too, would recede in time. Not just in physical distance but in emotional weight.
​
My spirit cleansed, I strode through the sand to my car and headed back east.

Wave 6… Casting Off

On the drive back from the beach to my temporary home base, it dawned on me that there was one item I’d intended to do something symbolic with, which was still waiting for attention.

I owned a bathrobe that I’d received as a hand-me-down from one of the ashram residents when I worked there twenty years ago. The long charcoal robe, made of soft wool, had kept me warm on many winter evenings and mornings. It had come with me back to Indiana when I left my ashram job, and then on subsequent moves to Texas and Nebraska.

Over the past couple of years, though, since I had learned of the deplorable abuses of power by the meditation group’s founder, I had not been able to pull the robe off its peg. I could not put this garment on anymore.

The teacher was credibly accused of sexually abusing adolescent girls — girls my own daughter’s age — specifically, as part of a bedtime ritual. (Multiple adult women had told of his misconduct with them, too.) I could not look at that robe without thinking of this long-hidden history. And even wondering if any such betrayal had happened in proximity to the robe.

I had considered carrying out some ritual action with the robe to vent my feelings about the group and its fallen founder. Shred it with scissors? Burn it?

I had never felt moved to do so at home. While I’d certainly had angry streaks, and considered that a perfectly healthy response, I did not feel like destroying the robe would actually be cathartic for me. It was a mismatch for my healing trajectory.

I had considered taking it to Goodwill instead. But if that robe actually *had* been around for sexual assault at the ashram, did I want someone else to end up with it? No. I really didn’t.

This is why, after ignoring the robe since I learned what I’d learned, no longer using it myself, it still hung on my bathroom door. For a year and a half, it had been a visual reminder of the whole mess at the meditation center. I didn’t want it in my house. But I was stumped as to what to do with it.

So I had tucked the robe in a bag in my car when preparing for this road trip. Perhaps, I’d thought, my friends and I would do something with it as part of our reunion of apostates. But the day of our group hike, already past, it had slipped my mind. All this bubbled up as I drove away from the beach.

What if I gave the robe back to the ashram?! That felt perfect.

I shouldn’t have to figure out what to do with this thing. Give it back where it came from, and let them deal with it. Yes! That was what I wanted to do.

Alas, at this point the bag with the robe was back at the house where I was staying during the Bay Area leg of my road trip. Otherwise I would’ve stopped at the ashram on my way past it, just long enough to drop off the tainted-by-association garment.

When I got back from the beach, I called Madelyn. My voice mail explained that I just wanted this robe off my hands. I would just pop in and set it by her office door, tomorrow on my way to lunch plans in the area; I did not need to see or talk to anyone, no big deal.
​
Madelyn called me back later. In a tight voice, she instructed me NOT to come by the ashram and drop off the robe.

I’m not sure if she was aghast at my line of thinking (which I had glossed over, but still), or if she was annoyed practically at the idea of having to figure out what to do with it herself, or if she was just following orders. But she wasn’t happy about it. I thought my solution was imminently reasonable; she wasn’t having it.

Arg.

More control.

Whatever.

What was I going to do with this thing? It gained more symbolic weight the longer it remained with me. I did NOT want to take it back home to Omaha.

I considered my options again. I still did not feel like destroying it; my overriding feeling toward the ashram at this point was deep sadness, not anger.

I recalled a relevant new tidbit I had just learned during conversations in the area. The woman who gave me the robe was a thrifter. Apparently, picking up nice finds and giving them to others was a pattern of hers. It was a high-quality robe. She might even have been responding kindly to my Midwesterner’s adjustment to the less-robust heating systems of the Bay Area, which left me chilly in the damp winter. In any case, probably neither she nor anyone else at the ashram had ever worn the robe.

I was also surprised to learn that she was not, as I’d thought, one of the “first generation” students — those who had been at the ashram since the founder and his fledgling group settled in there fifty years ago. She had come in the 80s, after the big split (and, I’d heard previously, after insiders started mindfully keeping the teacher from being alone with women). Ergo, nothing horrible would’ve happened in that robe. Whew!

With this new information in mind, I decided to donate the robe to a local thrift store. I dropped it off on my way to a lunch visit the next morning.

California, you can keep your culty crap. I give it back.

​As I walked out of the Goodwill, through the parking lot, and drove away, I felt lighter.

Wave 7… Home

​Back home after my 3-week road trip, I was reunited with my people and place. Between unpacking, laundry, being with my beloveds, going through photos, re-anchoring in my home and habits, and mentally preparing for the end of my sabbatical, I began to write about the trip.

Yes, I would write about my visit to the ashram. I stopped ceding my power to them a long time ago. I will not censor myself now.

I will continue to share my processing, because other ex-associates of that place have told me how helpful it has been to them.

And because it may be helpful to others too, loved ones of those who’ve had ties to that meditation center, and people involved in other groups with high demand dynamics.

A few days ago, as I was decluttering some surface in my house, I came across a passage on patience. Madelyn’s voice from the ashram visit floated back to me, wondering aloud what patience really is.

​The pushpin-sized hole at the top of the page tells me I once had it posted on a bulletin board. I don’t remember how or when it came to me, or what it meant to me then. It feels full of fresh meaning to me now.

Patient Trust
​
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability --
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually — let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

​       ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There is no need to be complete, or perpetually relieved of oneself, or “established in God.”

Accept being imperfect and incomplete. Accept the stages of instability as potentially a part of some greater good.
​
Let ideas shape themselves, let all unfold in its own time. Savor the journey.
​
It is enough, and enough, and more than enough.

Thanks for reading. You can use the RSS feed on this blog, or subscribe to get each of my new Medium articles sent directly to your inbox via that platform.

Note that in the future, I may write there on a range of subjects; if you are only interested in articles on high control groups, safe seeking, and related topics, you can subscribe to the Savvy Seeker newsletter. I also post on Bluesky and on Facebook when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.
​Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher … A Year of Getting Free … The Roots of Control … Seeking Safely: Tips for Meditators … Teaching Safely

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Surreal. That's the best word I can come up with for finding myself, a couple weeks ago, visiting the meditation center / ashram at which I had worked twenty years earlier - a community I now understand to be the heart of a high control group.

As I pulled into the parking lot, Madelyn (I'll call her here) glided down the steps from the meditation hall, like a ghost or a figure in a dream. Madelyn is the current leader of the organization, by title at least. She is also the only one remaining there from my old "young adult" cohort of the early 2000s.

Deciding

I had called a couple days before to express my interest in visiting the ashram - something I'd had no plan to do when I started the big road trip that brought me to the area.

Not that it had never occurred to me that I might go back there. Indeed, over the past couple of years, since learning of the founder's misdeeds and the organization's deception, a friend and I had occasionally rage-fantasized about going to the ashram and putting posters along the adjoining county road, saying something like "We believe the women."

We want truth. We want accountability and reparation. We want an end to the deception and subtle psychological re-conditioning the group continues to enact as it draws new waves of people into involvement.

Despite the draw of decrying the group's cruel denial in some public way, as I began to plan an actual trip to the area this fall, I'd dismissed the idea. It might sound personally empowering for me and any friends who joined me. But it promised to be unproductive in terms of engaging the institution. History - mine and others before me - had shown that confrontation led to the meditation center and its residential community doubling down on denial and spiritual bypassing.

It had not occurred to me previously that I might come on quieter terms. I was surely persona non grata there, after I stumbled onto new revelations about the founder, and helped to share it widely with others who had ties to the group. Thus, I did not expect to be welcome. And I did not care to impose myself.

Anyway, the prospect of setting foot on the ashram was unsettling. For while my intellect might know I'm long gone from that place and its dynamics of social-emotional captivity, my intellect is not in control.

Trauma resides in the body, in the nervous system - which does not distinguish between past and present. Instinctively I feared that returning to the site of dysregulation and confusion would be destabilizing in the present.

However, while talking to friends after arriving in the area, and hearing that some of them might like to make such a visit, given the chance, it dawned on me that perhaps I could do so. And maybe it would be beneficial. If not now, when?

I was here - I had driven through six states, all the way from Omaha to the San Francisco Bay Area. This was a rare opportunity for me to return to the origin point of the spiritual trauma which I had been carrying for two decades, since I had moved cross-country to work there. I felt a surprising pull to go, if I could.

I mulled it over for a day. On balance, I felt such a visit was more likely to help than hinder my healing. In therapy before the trip, using somatic experiencing to explore my relationship to the meditation community, I had received messages from my subconscious about:

• taking my power back
• experiencing that I am not stuck anymore
• hearing my grief
• protecting myself

What better way to live out these messages - to reassure my amygdala and nervous system that I am free and safe - than to waltz in, and back out, of that ashram?

I did leave once, already. But I know so much more now, about who the founder really was and what the community really is and why I had the supremely confusing experience I did. Seeing that place again firsthand, with the understanding I now possess, could be powerful.

Asking

As Madelyn approached me getting out of my car, I greeted her with a warm hug. She leaned in obligingly. Yet her ginger touch, and the space maintained between our bodies, gave the embrace a distant, antiseptic feel.

I had initially explained my motivation to Madelyn in a voice mail: I wanted to visit the place on the ashram grounds where I had buried my canary. I felt there might be something healing for me in that act.

She returned my call the next morning to say "it's not going to work out."

Well. This was what I had expected.

I acknowledged and accepted this decision, while making the most of the opportunity to speak directly with Madelyn on the phone.

As the last of my group stuck there, I have worried about her since I left. Particularly when others left too, over a decade plus, and especially since I'd come more recently to view the group as a harmful cult. I hoped to get a sense of Madelyn's well-being in this live conversation.

"How are you doing?" I asked. After a succinct, positive reply, she inquired about my family and so on.

Before long, the thing I'd most wanted to express to her bubbled up - my sorrow and empathy for the loss of her husband, too young, just a few years after I left my ashram job and returned to the Midwest.

I had worked closely with him, and felt his loss keenly when I heard the news. Further, it increased my concern for Madelyn. To be lured into the web of that place by the promise of a life partner, only to lose him a few short years later, left her wholly isolated within that alienating 'community.'

In response to my heartfelt words, ashram platitudes tripped from her tongue. Death teaches of the preciousness of life, she told me; he inspired them all to carry on in their spiritual work; etc. Despite the rote response, I think she felt the sincerity of my care and empathy for her. I hope so.

As the conversation continued, I reiterated my motive for visiting the ashram: to stop at the burial site of my canary.

To my surprise, Madelyn remembered about me having a bird. Apparently my roommate during that time, who had also moved from the Midwest to California to work for the meditation center, had recounted to her how Kokopele would start singing, unfailingly, several minutes before I arrived home. They both marveled over that.

At some point in this relatively short phone conversation, I also mentioned that had I had the opportunity to stop by the ashram, I would also have hoped to visit with Madelyn in person. The time spent with our cohort of young adult meditators had been a special time in my life, I explained, the people important to me - though I realized it might be different for her, since she's been there so long now, living and working with many others.

Madelyn wanted me to know that she, too, feels a special bond to our "YA" cohort. The quickness and feeling with which she spoke surprised me.

Sensing some degree of genuine connection between us, another thing that came up for me was to repeat that, though ashram leaders and I have some significant differences in perspective related to this organization and its founder (understatement), that does not change that I care about the people there that I knew. I meant it and I think she could feel that.

I may not be remembering the pieces of the conversation in the order in which they occurred. But these are the highlights that stand out for me. I ended the call with Madelyn out of respect for her time. She wished me well.

Later that morning, Madelyn called me again. Her voice was light: "Why don't you come." I was welcome to visit after all, to pay my respects at Kokopele's resting place.

Gratefully, I thanked Madelyn and we settled on a time. She left open the possibility of a personal visit too. Wow! This was going to happen!

Later that day, wanting to make some further gesture of friendship and goodwill, I went downtown to pick up some flowers to bring to the ashram. I came across a little shop featuring a variety of houseplants and pots; customers select one of each and the shop pots it for you. Lovely!

Such a plant in Madelyn's office could not only add beauty, but also purify the air she breathed. I chose a pretty plant and pot, adding a ceramic heart on top of the soil next to the green stems.

Returning

The next day, when I arrived at the ashram and met Madelyn, she agreed to chat for a bit. She led me into her office. Below an image of St. Francis in the entryway, she set down the plant I had given her.

(I wonder if the plant will stay there, or as I later learned is common practice, will be regifted to a random other person at the ashram. God forbid a sadhak keep such a token of care, and feel connected to anyone outside. Sigh.)

As the visit unfolded, much seemed the same as when I had been there all those years ago. The friendly questions about my family and work - a two-step of courteous interest and deflected inquiries.

The inside of the old bindery, where those on site used to visit over lunch together when I worked there, was just as I remembered. Only it looked a little more worn and flat to me, now, as we made tea to take back to Madelyn's office.

The buildings on the campus in general appeared the same, as we walked. Well, one small change: Madelyn pointed out that the old trailer in which she and I had once had our offices, which had outlived useability, was presently being replaced with a new (used) trailer.

Orange-yellow poppies brightened the roadside under an overcast sky, as they always had.

The place continued to feel unusually still, out of time. Only now, that set-apartness did not coincide with the humming energy of a plentiful, multi-generational meditator-staff, as I remembered from 2005. Instead, it felt empty and stagnant.

Back in Madelyn's office, our conversation meandered from small talk to common ground to heartfelt words.

In response to her polite inquiries, I shared some updates about my family and life in the Midwest. When I asked her to remind me where she was originally from, Madelyn noted that before the ashram she had lived in a lot of places (none of which she mentioned now) - this was probably why no association stood out in my mind.

When I asked about her family and how they were doing, she said "they're good" and quickly moved on. Perhaps she is just a private person by nature. She and I were never especially close, never had a relationship beyond the shared experience in the young adult group and as newbie workers.

Still, in her non-answer, I couldn't help wondering if, as was the case for many in earlier generations, the ashram has coached her to distance herself from her family. You know, lest her family of origin (as they might frame it) distract her from her spiritual path and goal.

We commiserated over leading institutions through the pandemic. We'd both gone through the process of pivoting to manage risk, adapting what we did to new conditions, and renewing programs after emerging. Tending neglected infrastructure had subsequently preoccupied both organizations too. Another point of common experience was the need to set and hold boundaries as part of leadership.

At one point I asked Madelyn about how she had grown through her years of leadership experiences. She pondered this for a bit, and spoke to learning what virtues really are.

Like patience - "what is patience, really?" she said thoughtfully. I could certainly relate to that; "the pace of church" is legendarily slow, for example. Any sort of institution-building is a long game, in which the progress may only be clear when one is looking back, years later.

When the conversation turned to the future, words of concern tumbled out of my mouth. Madelyn was the last of our cohort still here, decades younger than other ashram residents, having outlived many long-timers already; I shared that I was uneasy about what the future might hold for her. Carrying the burden of leadership for an aging community, as its population dwindles down to someday, perhaps, just her.

"You mean, what will happen to the Center?" she clarified. To the mission? To Founder's work?

"No, you Madelyn... I worry about you."

Blink, blink. The pause, her face, communicated that this was a foreign thought.
Then gently, encouragingly, she spoke into the silence: "I don't worry about that."

I felt the truth of that. She did not think about it. She was unconcerned about her future.

Grieving

Whatever the reason I was allowed in, I appreciated the opportunity to visit the Center. To talk to Madelyn in person. To experience the ashram with the new insights I've gained over the past two years of learning about high control groups. And yes, to make pilgrimage to the place where I buried my sweet canary.

I asked Madelyn if she would like to walk with me as I wandered the property, intuiting my way to Kokopele's resting place. Yes, sure. She offered me some red-orange flowers to take to the site, and we set off over the grounds.

My memory of the bird's burial was dream-like in both its emotional potency and its visual fuzziness. I remembered going over a footbridge. There are only a few of those at the ashram, so we picked one and wandered into the trees, continuing to talk.

I was unable to identify the exact spot where I had dug a hole and placed my feathered friend's soft body in the earth, almost two decades ago. But for my purposes of remembrance, a similar great pine on a similar hillside would be close enough.

Madelyn gave me some space as I chose such a tree and paused there. I knelt down, as I had when I rolled the dead bird into the soil. Instinctively I lowered my head and my eyelids, clasping my hands. In the damp air, I was brought back viscerally to the low point of my year there, and to deep loss. The ritual act of burying my bird was indelibly etched in my being.

Gently I placed the bright flowers on the dull ground. A quiet wave of grief arose, of sorrow for the sweet little friend who had made the journey with me to this place, and who had absorbed the malaise that it passed onto me.

Lament rippled through me. Lament for my trusting young self, and for all the others similarly wooed in and used - including the ones still there.

As I rose, my throat constricted and my eyes welled with tears. Nothing about my wanting to protect others from deception and harm had changed. But I felt a welling up of forgiveness, too.

In seminary, I learned that hurt people hurt people. In my study of high control groups, I learned that when emotionally traumatized people create circles of adoration around them, an attempt to stave off their own endless insecurity - a charitable explanation for what my old group's founder did - they end up replicating harm. They make others as hollow as they themselves have felt. Tragedy upon tragedy, to which the only effective answer is harm reduction, and genuine love.

I turned away from that tree, my cheeks damp, a sense of release in my chest. I was struck by the heartbreaking turn of this community from haven of flower child idealism to vortex of isolation and sorrow. (So much for "the end of sorrow.")

Seeing it clearly, accepting it for what it was, was good medicine. My step felt lighter as I walked down the hillside

My attention shifted to the practical question of locating Madelyn, who was not visible from my current spot. I called out her name; she stepped out from some trees a ways down the hillside. We returned to the road, passing by an old barn that had once housed goats.

Other than the goats - who turned out to be more work than they were help to the pioneering first generation here, Madelyn told me - I don't remember our conversation topics as we walked out. I surely expressed how good it was to see her, and meaningful to be there, and hugged her farewell as we neared the parking lot.

Parting

This might have been when Madelyn remarked on the period of our cohort's arrival as a second wave of workers. I had reflected that my year working there had been a difficult period for me, and that it was meaningful to me to come back with the distance of the intervening years. I was a bit raw, and appreciative for the closure of this visit.

Madelyn commented that that time had been one of hope and new energy for the long-timers, who were then only a few years into grief over the teacher's "shedding the body."

Perhaps she meant to reassure me that some good had come of our cohort's migration to the ashram area. Good for some of the long-timers, perhaps. Good for the organization, perhaps. Good for me and other "escapees" of my generation - not so much. Perhaps members and leaders of this community did not know they were using us. Not consciously, anyway. All of this went unvoiced.

Back in my car, I started down the access road. I saw a couple of figures walking, each striding alone, too far away to recognize. The access road was a common walking spot for the people who lived and worked here. Doubtless each was repeating a sacred formula in the mind while in motion.

We had spotted one of the walkers before I got in my car. When I wondered aloud who it might be, Madelyn had guessed 'Sheila' - someone who had participated a bit in the young adult program back when Madelyn and I were newly involved. I had barely crossed paths with Sheila, and doubted she would recognize me if she saw me.

I recalled having heard, more recently, that Sheila's mother had moved into the cottage by the retreat house. This was after one couple who had long resided there were abruptly asked to leave, not long after I started asking questions of the group's leaders.

As I drew nearer to one of the walkers on the narrow road, I slowed my car to a crawl. The person came into clear view. Liahna! This was one of the leaders of my old YA program, who was, by this point, the de facto leader of the organization. (She might not be at the top of the org chart, but she pulls the strings.)

Without thinking, I hopped out of the car, saying hello and reaching for a hug. 'Liahna' greeted me and we spoke briefly. Her sky-bright eyes and ruddy cheeks were much as I remembered, though something in her manner felt troubling. Perhaps she was uncomfortable with me - angry or determined, or deep-down vulnerable - given recent history.

We did not speak of any of that, of course. My impulse to connect with her was rooted in positive memories of my early involvement with the group - ah, don't we all want to go back to the good old days? So human.

My instinctive care reflects, too, my belief at this point that Liahna is likely a tortured soul. Why had she latched onto the father figure of the founder the way she had, fawning like a supplicant, when she arrived here in the 80s? What personal history played into that? And what might she have experienced with the founder, as his personal caregiver? Given his misconduct history, it was an open question with any female who had been in close proximity to him.

Through a swirl of emotions, after the side-hug she gave me back, I exchanged pleasantries with Liahna.

"You probably have a lot of pilgrims these days," I said, reaching for some bit of conversation that would be neither too direct nor disingenuous.

I wasn't the type of pilgrim they were cultivating. The memorial garden for the teacher, and rooms in the complex that had more recently been turned into sacred sites in his honor, reflected a very different worldview and purpose, as pilgrimage sites, than the bit of woods in which I had buried my bird and an innocent piece of my soul. But on the surface, special visits were a safe conversation topic.

As Liahna told me about pilgrimages people now made to the center, she was all ashram-speak. She delivered the messaging that anyone who has been close to the group for long could channel, as I could when I was there.

On the surface Liahna was friendly, but there was also a brittleness to the brief exchange. Again, that could have to do with me in particular, as a figure who had recently come to be perceived as threatening to the group's interests.

I suspect, though, that it also reflects a deep level of indoctrination, of adaptation to living in a traumatized system. The deeper in a person gets, and the longer they stay, the farther out of touch they are, I believe, from anything real - from real relationships with other people, from the real world beyond the group, but also from their own authentic self. It all becomes distant, out of reach, almost unreal.

So the visit ended with the same feeling with which it began - surreal. Apropos for a place that is built on illusions.

I drove silently past the fences and poppies that border the access road. Turning onto the county road, and past the humble wooden sign bearing the organization's initials, I felt strangely normal.

Bleached hills rose and fell around me as I left the ashram behind.

What happened next? In a subsequent piece, I'll share how I settled my nervous system (ah... ocean waves), and what feelings and insights have come up for me, in the several weeks following my visit to the ashram.

Thanks for reading. You can use the RSS feed on this blog, or subscribe to get each of my new Medium articles sent directly to your inbox via that platform. Note that in the future, I may write there on a range of subjects; if you are only interested in articles on high control groups, safe seeking, and related topics, you can subscribe to the Savvy Seeker newsletter. I also post on Bluesky and on Facebook when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you. How Cults Hijack Our Body-Minds ... What About My Beloved Meditation Passages?! ... Why Do Westerners Turn to the East? ... Who Joins Cults?

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

One of the key ways high control groups capture people for the long haul — regardless of the intelligence, the social supports, and other resources people have when they first get involved — is by creating disorganized attachment in participants. Trapping people socially, emotionally, and biologically, disorganized attachment is the secret weapon of a cult.

The Illusion of Safety

How does a cult deploy this psychological weapon? The three elements that must be present to spur disorganized attachment, according to Alexandra Stein, are isolation, engulfment, and the arousal of fear.[1]

This begins in early stages of someone’s involvement with a cult (or totalist group, as Stein calls them, since they provide total answers for all of life, and colonize a person’s total life). Leaders create the conditions for positive experiences. The aim is for a participant to come to feel that the group is a place of safety, comfort and possibility — what Stein calls a “safe haven.”[2]

This process of developing trust and a sense of safety can go on for weeks, months, or as it did for me, years. If a participant is then coaxed to increase their level of involvement with the group — and perhaps, in time, to step back from old ties — they may become engulfed socially, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes physically, with the group.
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Arousing Fear

Once a person has come to relate to their group as a safe haven, a place of love and security, the next step is to arouse fear. If a person has been successfully isolated from past relationships and immersed in the group and its world, the arousal of fear can lead to what attachment researchers call “fright without solution.”

The fear-stimulus may take the form of physical threats, actual physical abuse, sleep deprivation, over-stimulation of the senses, or emotional abuse, including ostracism before others.[3] After I moved cross-country to work for my old meditation group, it came in the form of more subtle environmental factors. That included immersion in a pervasive, quietly judgmental culture, being (mysteriously) stymied in my job for the group (which eroded my sense of agency and effectiveness), and the effects of the deep insecurity of the long-time students, and the attendant mistrust and control they aimed at others — a pattern of feelings and behaviors which had been cultivated in them by the founder, and which outlasted him.

What’s more, long before I moved to work for the group, negative seeds had been sown — like coming to think in the binaries of selfish/selfless and to regard the ego / self as the enemy… to aim for perfection and be hyper-aware of all the ways one was (inevitably) falling short. What had started out as an idealistic viewpoint that had a largely positive impact on me grew into a pernicious force. That was only exacerbated when I relocated to the community.

Further, my mind-body had started doing unexpected (to me), unpredictable, sometimes painful things when I tried to meditate. (I detailed this in a post on my kundalini experience​.) Meditation had ceased to be a reliable means to settle my emotions and nervous system; indeed, it more often seemed to create agitation instead. My group neither prepared me for these adverse effects, nor had anything useful to offer to address them.

All of this had the cumulative effect of making me feel not-safe in a visceral, primal way. I believe this contributed to my weird meditation experiences and to, first, vigilance, and later, shutdown of my nervous system. I was not isolated and engulfed fully, and left within a year of my arrival — so I was not successfully captured socially. Still, the effect on my nervous system and well-being were deep and long-lasting.

The Dilemma of Mixed Signals

Kindness plays a role in the process too, perhaps counter-intuitively. Stein explains that “Once in this state of terror or fright without solution, even small gestures on the part of the group begin to feel benevolent and caring, increasing the sense that it is the group that will protect one, the group that will save one from the threat.”[4] Reassurance is exactly what one is looking for when under threat, so it makes sense that when it comes under those circumstances, it carries even greater weight than in ordinary life.

Others who study human social dynamics have pointed to this pattern, too — not just in moments of difficulty, but as an ongoing part of group life. What Judith Hermann calls “capricious granting of small indulgences” can reinforce the story that a person/group is the source of care, and create inner confusion, since the group sometimes causes stress or harm too. Benjamin Zablocki similarly writes of a “cycle of assault and leniency”; the alteration scrambles people’s ability to understand what is happening to them and to make choices on a rational basis.[5]

In my old group, during the formative first few decades of the ashram community, I suspect the control mechanism in operation most often was disapproval or withdrawal of positive attention. Undesired behavior resulted in less access to and affirmation from the charismatic teacher, and negative evaluations by him. This would result in a downgraded social position in the group as a whole, as the community followed suit.
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In my own experience, positive messages, such as a spiritual belief in our inherent goodness as persons, were the teachings emphasized out loud; (self) assessments of all the ways we fell short of our perfect potential were cultivated subtly. For the first generation, my hunch is that the alteration of compliments and criticism, direct from the guru, were more overt. Always framed, of course, as for one’s own edification and spiritual progress. I’m reminded of this feeling wheel that caught my eye last year. There at the intersection of trust and fear — of support and threat — is submission.

When I worked at a women’s shelter and rape crisis center in my twenties, I was trained to recognize this as a common cycle in domestic abuse. In a relationship that starts with love bombing, intense connection, and tender attention, the boundaries are stretched over time to include small indignities, insults delivered in honeyed tones as “jokes,” inconsiderate demands, shoves, and eventually much worse. After a violent incident that makes the victim consider bolting — perhaps even in the act of doing so — the abuser circles back around to the flowers-and-candy behavior. He may have sprinkled some of that in along the way, too.
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Whether it is in a controlling relationship or a high control group, the key to trapping a victim is the alteration of love and fear. This is what keeps alive the hope that the loving person is the real one, and that the hurtful behavior will end. But conditional love is not love at all. Love that is unreliable is a set-up.

Run to Me

So a person has found a wonderful group, accumulated good experiences, and developed a felt sense of safety with the group. Then things start happening that pose some type of threat, be it emotional, social, or physical.

What do humans do when we are afraid? Like other mammals, our instinct is not just to run away from the threat, but to run to a source of safety.[6] It’s what Whitney Houston sang about in the song “Run to You,” from the 1992 film The Bodyguard:
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The teacher’s response? He threatened to return to India. When his people were already frightened and confused, the guru, like a hyena pack on the prowl, cornered his prey (emotionally, that is). The idea of losing their teacher, their father-figure, forever, triggered existential fear in many of his students.

Most in that generation had cut themselves off from their families, convinced by the teacher that this was in their own best interests for their progress on the spiritual path. Thus, they had no one else to turn to, no other safe havens waiting to shelter them. Many of those who did leave as a result of the shake-up were those who had managed to surreptitiously form genuine emotional bonds with another member of the group — a new, alternate safe haven — and they left in pairs together.

As I interpret it now, the threat of the guru’s departure had flipped some sort of biological switch in the loyalists that defined the “traitors” as an existential threat to them. Their attachment to the teacher was so strong and defining in their lives, that they could not face the reality of his harmful behavior. And they had no one else to turn to.

So, instead of holding the teacher accountable for his own behavior, they blamed the truth-tellers and truth-believers for the panic and terror they felt. By threatening to abandon his loyal students, the guru increased the fear factor and cemented their submission to him.

Frozen Bodies

Normally, the attachment mechanism built into our biology works well — the arousal system and comfort system balance each other out. Under threat, one returns to the attachment figure (or group) for comfort and/or tangible help, more successfully survives the threat, and then can separate again after the threat has passed and arousal dissipates.

The biochemistry behind this process is significant. Arousal stimulates the production of cortisol, while the “felt security” from the attachment figure leads to a reduction in cortisol and a rise in opiates produced by the body. That’s what makes an upset toddler feel better after Mommy or Daddy has given them a cuddle. Upon completion of this cycle, the individual who sought the grounding attachment can now disengage and go on with life.[8]

Alas, if the one you turn to for support under stress is also the source of stress — if there is no resolution available to the threat — the cortisol keeps on coming, and you cannot break away from your “safe” (or not-so-safe) haven. Both the approach and the avoidance systems remain on.[9] Your attachment instincts have been used to trap you.

One might wonder, if the impulse to attach and the impulse to flee are both present, why does the attachment instinct tend to prevail for so many? In babies, the need for support outweighs the avoidance drive. A baby cannot survive without their caregiver, even if that caregiver might harm them. That baby is likely to grow into an adult with disorganized attachment — someone who never stops looking for reassurance, but who also has a hard time believing that anyone will prove worthy of their trust.

Stein observes that adults in extremist groups appear to experience something similar. When threatened, staying with the group is usually perceived as the safer course by group members; without somewhere else to turn, the idea of leaving the group terrifies people.[10]
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Thus, when the attachment system is hijacked, people can become stuck not only socially, with the group, but biologically. “The structure of totalist isolation prevents alternate attachments, thus setting in place a feedback loop of unresolvable anxiety and need for proximity,” writes Stein. “It is this process of unresolved fear arousal — chronic anxiety and hyperarousal of cortisols — that causes the strengthening of the bond to the group.”[11]

Learning about disorganized attachment, and realizing that almost anyone with a long-time association as an ashram resident / worker would develop disorganized attachment patterns through their association there, goes a long way to helping me make sense of what happened. This is why the long-timers, the students who lived so long with the teacher, didn’t trust anyone — us newbies, themselves, each other, probably not even the guru (given his unpredictable behavior patterns), even though it appeared to me like he was the only person they trusted.

Because the teacher had not proven to actually be a reliable safe haven, they had learned not to expect anyone to be. They would not be able to verbalize that, or even acknowledge it internally. But that is what their behavior told me. That was how the well of that community’s culture was poisoned.

I managed to get out of my group relatively quickly, within a year. Most of my peers got stuck at the ashram much longer. A substantial number of the teacher’s original students — also largely young adults when they first joined him — lived out the rest of their lives in the purview of the guru and his community, still members there when they died in the 2000s or 2010s. That is the likely fate of those who yet remain at the ashram now.

Fragmented Brains

So, in a typical cult scenario, a person will, at some point, be aroused to fear. She will turn to a (presumed) safe haven — the group or leader. As the source of threat, however, the group or leader cannot provide the grounding to the person that would allow them to exit the biochemical cycle. Instead, the gas pedal is still pressed to the floor, so to speak, the cortisol flooding them.” What happens next inside the person?

Normally, when a person is under threat, in addition to following the instinct to seek comfort and support from an attachment figure or group, they will also fight or run away to protect themselves. But in the situation of “fright without solution,” that is exactly what they cannot do. So instead, like a cornered animal, they freeze.
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Their bodies shut down metabolically, saving resources for a moment when something might shift in the situation and fighting or fleeing becomes possible. When no such opportunity arises, they become fixed in the frozen state, with both arousal and comfort systems stuck “on.”[12]

If this goes on long enough, they will eventually dissociate. Brain science has brought increasing insights into what is happening during dissociation. It particularly affects the right brain and that part of us that integrates the holistic and emotional right side with the rational, thinking left side.
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In the absence of this cross-hemisphere communication, a person is no longer able to think about their feelings and to use the information provided by their feelings to make sound decisions for their own well-being. As a result, the person becomes passive.[13]

This helps me understand what happened to me after I had been at the ashram for half a year. I remember being in a state with almost no feelings. It was hard to sleep, but neither was I motivated to get out of bed. The minutes ticked by slowly. I wasn’t exactly miserable — misery, after all, is a feeling. I had no goals, no hopes, no purpose. The world was drained of meaning. This was not me at all, and I knew that something was wrong. But I didn’t understand it. And I had no idea what to do about it.

I shudder to think how long I might have stayed in that state, had I not gotten a call from a board member at my previous employer in Indiana, telling me a position there had opened up, and encouraging me to apply. That is what broke through my frozen shell and got some movement happening internally again. (That, and the death of my pet.) As I began to explore one way out, I gained back energy, and agency, and clarity of thought. And I determined that one way or another, I would be leaving.

When I was saying my goodbyes some months later, a friend who was considering making the move to the ashram area asked me what I had experienced — why was I leaving? The words that pop up over and over again in my emailed reply to him are STUCK and TRAPPED. I described how that was true socially, financially, spiritually, emotionally, and cognitively. I felt immobilized. I literally had been stuck and trapped, biologically.

Sadly, while I shared what I could with my inquiring friend, I did not understand enough at the time to be able to tip him off that this was not just my unique experience, but rather, it was likely to be the experience of anyone who spent long enough in such a place.
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If the sense of being trapped and the dissociation continue in such an environment — what Stein describes as a situation of “chronic relational-induced trauma and the consequent cognitive paralysis and inability to advocate” for themselves — a person may go on to develop complex PTSD.[14]

Blind Spot

Consider that in a state of dissociation, a person becomes unable to interpret what is happening around them, and inside them.[15] Furthermore, into this vacuum comes the group or leader, who will tell the paralyzed follower how to understand what is going on, and how to behave henceforth.

The expectations of groups vary as to whether people should put on a happy face or be stalwart and solemn. Stein’s political cult was like the latter; in my old group, smiles are pasted onto otherwise frozen (and vaguely irritable) people.[16]

​Notably, people retain their previous capabilities in all areas other than the disorganized relationship to the leader/group. Stein shares that she served as a skilled machinist and then a senior computer analyst, even while she was emotionally shuttered in her old group.[17]

I may not have been able to find words for what was happening inside me, before I broke free, but I still functioned quite capably in my job at the ashram. I was like a shell of a person, inside. But my professional skills were intact. The friend who moved there around the time I was leaving progressed in an impressive high-tech career, before and during his seven years living at the ashram — in peak entrapment.

This helps me understand how my old group could be full of people with PhDs, who wrote book after book and published in respected journals and even started a non-profit doing good work on nonviolence education (as did one whose work drew me in), while being rooted in life at the ashram. There were hints that something was not quite right emotionally, and that the long timers did not turn their critical thinking skills — which they obviously had — onto the group or its leader.

In the Struggle
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In earlier stages people are fed propaganda — the palatable, even genuinely helpful, ideas and practices that draw them in and make the group seem trustworthy. But once dissociation has been induced and cognitive faculties handicapped, a deeper indoctrination can begin. The cult will tell people what to think.

I actually remember one of the leaders of my group coaching us not to think except when necessary. (I think I was pretty deep in by that point.) It was couched as a spiritual practice, to conserve energy for where you want to focus it, rather than, for example, frittering away energy in anxious rumination.
There may be something to that, if you are living in a healthy context. But below that surface level, in the context of ashram life, is a message and practice that would actually make a follower more manipulable. If you are not even trying to do your own thinking, dissociation may be locked in, and you may uncritically receive whatever ideas are imparted to you by the group.

In the most severe situations, Stein explains, “the follower accepts (or is forced to accept) … more extreme, and often incoherent, ideas as a kind of lifeline through the dissociated confusion that the group has induced.”[19] This helps make sense of the behavior of people in the extreme groups Stein often looked at — how a child plucked from a war zone can be turned into a soldier himself, or how an ISIS recruit might eventually override their own survival instincts and become a suicide bomber.

This is not to say that people don’t try to resist ideas that don’t seem correct to them, or actions that they deep down know are morally wrong. They do. But the cult leaders that succeed are excellent at pacing people and overcoming resistance. Unless they get out first, eventually a person’s resilience wears down, and they surrender.[20]

One of the examples Stein gives is of a young woman, Helen, who has several children after she is put into an arranged marriage in a Bible-based cult. The leader made her act against her own maternal instincts and literally kick her children away. It felt wrong, but Helen also felt compelled to comply, and did.
It was only after she escaped the group that she was able to have a healthy, loving relationship with her children. That capacity had always been within Helen. But it had been overridden by the demands of the cult while she was kept in the “fright without solution” state of disorganized attachment there.[21]

Getting Free

There can be life after a high control group; people do escape. Notably, if not all previous relationships have been severed, a person can return to those. This is why isolation and engulfment are so important to the cult. Stein believes that an alternate, secure attachment is the most common way out of such groups — with comfort provided, the arousal system can calm down, and the frontal cortex comes back online.

In other cases — but usually only “after many, many years” — members may start to see through the failed promises of the leader after they have pushed past the point of exhaustion.[22]

In my old group, it was more than a decade after the formation of the community when a significant exodus occurred. Public accusations of abusive behavior by the teacher came first; that appears to have broken the spell of dissociation, allowing some people to reintegrate their brains and think critically about the leader — or to voice aloud for the first time doubts that had been accumulating privately for some years.

Some recognized that the leader had continually moved the goal posts on what his meditation program was supposed to do for them — increasing the length of time they could expect it take for them to reach enlightenment, always somewhere in the future. They began to see through the manipulation and induced dependence.[23]

In times of extreme stress, the most powerful, comforting attachment may be our “actual attachment relationships.” Here Stein seems to mean one’s caregivers from childhood or other pivotal figures from one’s life, ties that pre-date the group, if they are positive, secure attachments. She also observes that getting out of the group’s orbit, even if temporarily, and into the company of other caring people, sometimes makes it possible for a person to realize, in contrast, that something is not right in their usual milieu with the group.[24]

Such a situation played a role in my own story. During my year working at the ashram, I went home to Iowa over Christmas. There, in the safe haven of my family and childhood home, I realized that I had been “putting on a happy face” at the ashram, while inwardly I had been growing deeply agitated and depressed. I recall noticing more things that didn’t add up, after that, when I returned to the ashram. Re-anchored in my family of origin, I regained some trust in my own powers of observation and assessment.

Subsequent events that I have already referred to here — the death of my canary, and encouragement from an old contact to apply for a job where I used to live — finally spurred the realization that I needed to leave. I knew the ashram wasn’t healthy for me, and once I saw one concrete escape hatch, I began to get energy and brainpower back to make a concrete plan. Which I did, secretly over months, until I could announce my departure with details set.

Most of the people in my cohort got free eventually, at least physically. Only one person from my generation remains at the ashram. But leaving physically does not guarantee that one fully wakes up or heals. In the years after I left, I was successful in reestablishing a life of my own away from the ashram, with various safe havens among my friends, church, and later, the family I created with my husband. I stabilized myself physiologically to a certain degree with those solid relationships. Body work, private ritual, and a lot of time with the ultimate attachment — Mother Nature and Spirit — were vital to me, too. I have been in a process of intermittent deconstruction of spiritual ideas for many years.

But while I did a lot to recover from my ashram year, it was only in 2023–2024, when I learned about the sexual abuse by the guru — and dug deeper and began to find other details that did not add up — that I realized I had been deeply deceived. We all had.

Learning the truth has changed my perspective dramatically. With a flurry of study around high control groups, and much reflection, it has made a greater degree of freedom possible for me. At this point, I have spent many more years getting free — cleansing the traces of trauma from my body-mind, and sifting through implanted ideas — than I did drawing close to the group in the first place.

The Upshot

Isolation and engulfment are critical steps for a high control group to turn recruits into long-term members. This is what sets the trap, separating people from alternate safe havens. But the most crucial weapon in a cult’s psychological arsenal is — mixed with apparent care — the arousal of fear. The disorganized attachment that results keeps a person frozen and dissociated in the group.
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They are then malleable to deeper indoctrination, and can be manipulated to further the real, hidden purpose of the cult — the glorification of the founder or group. In the worst situations, people may be deployed in ways that contradict their own previous moral code, that undermine their own well-being, that override their parental instincts, and that can even threaten their own survival.

People can get free from such situations. Most often, they do so through the escape hatch of a relationship that functions as a (truly) safe haven. Survivors can heal the harms done to their bodies, minds, spirits, and capacity to trust.

My hope is that society will not only provide support and resources, rather than stigma and judgment, to survivors. My hope is that we will also start to routinely educate the public about high control groups — including the secret weapon of disorganized attachment, and how it is created. This is how we can equip more people to avoid getting entrapped in the first place.

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.
​
Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇

Seeking Safely: Tips for Meditators and Other Seekers … How Cults Are Concealed (part 1) … How Cults Are Concealed (Part 2)

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

​[1] Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (London: Routledge, 2021), 76.
[2] Stein, 39. The concept comes from attachment theory, where the caregiver is the safe haven for a child.
[3] Stein, 83–85.
[4] Stein, 85.
[5] Stein, 85–86.
[6] Stein, 85. Stein is building on the work of John Bowlby and others who developed attachment theory.
[7] Stein, 85.
[8] Stein, 87.
[9] Stein, 87.
[10] Stein, 89.
[11] Stein, 88.
[12] Stein, 89.
[13] Stein, 92.
[14] Stein, 90.
[15] Stein, 93.
[16] Stein, 94
[17] Stein, 94.
[18] Stein, 95.
[19] Stein, 95.
[20] Stein, 98.
[21] Stein, 98.
[22] Stein, 99–100.
[23] See John Hubner, “A Split at the Razor’s Edge,” San Jose Mercury News, April 30, 1989.
[24] Stein, 100.

This is a new moment for me. Since Dec. 2023, when I first heard damning allegations against the founder of the meditation center with which I was once closely affiliated, my relationship to meditation has become fraught. I mean, it was fraught previously due to Kundalini Syndrome (aka adverse effects of meditation), as well as to my confusing and destabilizing experience during a year working at the ashram in my early 30s (2005–2006).

Meditation had never been quite the same for me since that period. But learning a couple years ago that the seemingly gentle teacher whose meditation method I’d long used, and whose community I had been close to, was (I’ve been convinced) both a cult leader and a criminal — well, that made meditation along his lines feel tainted to me, no matter what inspirational passages I used. I’ve hardly been able to sit down to meditate since.

Yet, some of these passages are so dear to me. They are bound up in my own spiritual journey in beautiful and liberating ways. Though curated by the master and his minions at the ashram, they were penned by mystics and scripture-writers around the globe and across the ages. I’m not sure I’d call myself a perennialist anymore, but — to use a horrible expression (where does this come from?!) — I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I cannot allow one bad actor to poison the river of spirituality for me. I do not have to — and I choose not to — give up all of my beloved inspirational passages. It’s not the fault of Rabi’a or Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, of Meera or Chief Yellow Lark, that someone misused their sublime words for his own gain. And I won’t let them all go.

I am going through these passages with a discerning eye — perhaps not for the last time — because I know they were used to cultivate ideals that can be, and were, used in a harmful way. There are definitely some I will never put back in circulation. (Ramdas, you can keep your Unshakable Faith; for me it was too caught up in a slow and damaging process of surrender not just to God, but to that group.)

But there are others I refuse to let go of. The first passage I memorized, from the Tao te Ching, remains a touchstone for life and leadership:
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​And I’m not letting Ramdas go entirely. I’m hanging onto his hymns to the Divine Mother:

​​When I started looking through my binder of page-protected meditation passages a few days ago, it was as a way to jog my memory. I was trying to trace my conversion from more of a jñāna yoga person — and a karma yoga person, inspired as I was by Gandhi — to bhakti yoga.

Meditation passages, taken deep into my consciousness, repeatedly and in a (self-) hypnotized state, were a big part of that conversion to bhakti for me.

When I first started meditating, and then going to retreats, I considered myself agnostic. I had definite allergies to God-language and Christ-language. The Big-Daddy-in-the-Sky version of theology from Sunday School had never made sense to me intellectually, nor connected for me emotionally.

So I first learned Taoist and Buddhist passages for use in meditation; they pushed no buttons for me. But it wasn’t long before Hindu and Sufi passages with their own sort of divine language made their way into my collection of inspirational passages. And then Jewish passages, and Christian mystics too. As the meaning of the words changed for me, became more expansive, so did my relationship to them.

My conversion to bhakti was bad in that it was, I believe, cultivated for a nefarious reason, and used to that end — to get me to surrender, ultimately, not to a higher/deeper power, but to a particular guru. My old meditation group was sneaky and masterful about conflating the two. I may write more on that another time.

But my conversion to bhakti was good insofar as it put me in touch with a depth of feeling and ardent spirit within myself that I had not previously been tuned into. It connected me more deeply with myself, and my deepest Self. So, while I’ve experienced the gamut of feelings about the getting-used part — and I still feel, well, pretty much all of that, if not quite as fiercely much of the time — I have no regrets about discovering a vein of devotion deep within me.

That earnest yearning and sense of intimacy with the Source is pure. It is good. It is true. It is the wellspring of my ministry and the bedrock of my life.
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And like the passages I choose to hang onto, they can’t take that away from me. Gershwin’s songbird lover gets to keep her memories, and I get to keep my water-table-level connection to the Spirit of Life.

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.

Meanwhile, perhaps one of these will intrigue you? 👇

Moving On From Your Spiritual Teacher … Seeking Safely (Tips for Meditators) … Who Joins Cults (and why why why)who-joins-cults-and-why-why-why.html

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Eastern spirituality has been hip and cool in the U.S. since the counter-cultural era of the 1960s.

(It had earlier phases of appeal too, particularly to educated and elite populations — from Transcendentalists getting their hands on the first English translations of Eastern scriptures, their writing and perspectives infused with these influences, to Swami Vivekananda being the first to wow people in person, at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.)

These days, blooming lotus paintings and statues of meditating Buddhas are as likely to be found in the décor of a massage studio or therapy office as are feeling wheels and herbal tea stations.

On a visit to a chiropractor or physical therapist, posters of chakras and energy meridians may hang nonchalantly alongside those of the skeletal or fascia systems.
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​And depending on the neighborhood, Buddha statues may be more or less numerous in people’s gardens than ceramic gnomes or Virgin Mary and St. Francis figures.

What’s going on here?

Six Explanations for the Ascendance of Eastern Spirituality

The cultural position of Buddhist, Hindu, and other Eastern symbolism is NOT primarily due to the presence of ordinary people who have immigrated here from Asia, carrying Eastern religious heritages with them.

No, exposure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Eastern perspectives to gain popularity in the West.

Rather, the following six factors help account for the prominent place of Eastern spirituality in American pop culture today.

Intrinsic Appeal

To state the obvious, people can respond to ideas that make sense to them, rituals or practices that are effective for them, religious stories or art that move them, etc., from any source, because of the thing itself.

​When I studied “world religions” for the first time in college, I felt a natural affinity with the Tao te Ching. I carried a pocket edition around campus with me, pausing between classes to read a passage or two.

The book’s imagery, drawn from nature and daily life, its elegant wisdom, and the natural yet ineffable concept of the Tao itself — all these connected with me in an intuitive way.
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Whether it’s an idea like a cyclical sort of cosmology (and at the individual level, reincarnation), an orientation like seeking illumination, a practice like meditation, or an aesthetic sensibility, aspects of Eastern spiritual traditions can genuinely appeal to people on their own merits.

Clean Slate

When I see a stranger, I tend to assume the best of them — or at least, to be open to who they may reveal themselves to be.

But with someone I know, the better I know them, the more I know not only their finest qualities, but also their most frustrating ones.

That’s true of religious traditions too. One can more readily recognize the flaws in the thing we know more intimately.

Whether it’s through direct experience, or through exposure to the Christian-dominant culture of our country, many Americans know well one or another expression of Christianity (or Judaism). Thus we are familiar with the pitfalls in the particular ways these traditions have taken shape and been practiced around us.

​I grew up attending a United Methodist church with my family. There is plenty to admire in the Jesus tradition (which I still claim, in my own way). I benefited from my participation in that Methodist church, and still appreciate what I learned about religious community, the biblical literacy I acquired, and the introduction to the prophetic figure of Jesus.

Yet, the more I learned about that religion — particularly through two years of confirmation classes in junior high — the more I began to chafe and question.

The patriarchy in the Bible was stifling. In the church sometimes, too.

Some of the practices and the debates around them seemed arcane to me. Should Holy Communion be done by intinction? What does this rite mean? Who is allowed to take communion? (To their credit, Methodists welcomed anyone to do so. That wasn’t true at my neighbors’ Catholic church.)

For baptism, should babies be sprinkled or should people old enough to choose for themselves be dunked? Is a non-baptized person at a cosmic disadvantage — or even bound for hell — regardless of whether they had exposure and access to this tradition?

I had difficulty with various ideas of The Way Things Are. What’s up with atonement theology — why so much focus on sin and death? What kind of God would sacrifice his child?

​And the dogmatism in general rubbed me the wrong way. Why was Right Belief the main thing? Isn’t it more important how a person actually treats other people? It didn’t make sense to me.

I did not get confirmed, as I did not feel I could stand before the congregation with integrity and publicly confirm all the things that one must confirm at Confirmation.

I had more questions than answers. I found other questions more relevant to spiritual living than the ones the church emphasized in its membership process.

​The adage “better the devil you know” suggests that people often prefer to deal with a problematic, but familiar and predictable, person or thing, rather than encounter something new and unknown. That may be true for a sizable portion of any population, when it comes to religion.

But I’d guess there is at least a significant minority who are more like I was, with the opposite tendency — knowing all too well what I find problematic in my native religion… wondering if some other spiritual tradition or group has managed to hold onto the kernels of goodness, and steer clear of the accidents of history that plague my own religious heritage.
​
Emerging into adulthood with such an attitude, it’s no surprise that Eastern traditions would pique my interest, when I had occasion to encounter them.

Personality Differences

Humans are born with a variety of temperaments, and we are socialized in particular ways. Regardless of the religious experience or exposure one has as a result of family and culture, some of our personality traits are, at least to a degree, inborn.

One of the Big Five or Five Factor personality traits, Openness, could help explain why some people are more adventurous about religion than others. The Big Five model names — you guessed it — five traits that vary across humans. This model has shown high scientific validity.

The trait of Openness to Experiences refers to a curious attitude toward life. People who score high on Openness are more likely to be creative, to try new things, and to enjoy playing with abstract ideas. Such a person’s brain will show more interconnections across certain, disparate brain regions.

In contrast, those who score low on Openness are more focused on the concrete. They tend to be traditional, practical people. Their brains exhibit fewer connections across different brain regions.

The trait of Openness is inherited to a certain degree. At an estimated 61%, Openness actually showed the highest genetic component of all five traits in one study. [i]

Along with nature, nurture must play a role too. If we have a genetic predisposition toward Openness AND are raised by curious, creative, intellectual people, it’s a double whammy — one might have a particularly robust trait of Openness in that case.

Neither of these ways of being in the world — with high or low Openness — is right or wrong, better or worse. Human communities probably benefit by having people of both types in them.

Which type of person would you expect to be more likely to be spiritually inquisitive?

Savvy Marketing

When describing something perceived as foreign or exotic, the marketer enters the marketplace with a distinct advantage over the consumer. It’s harder to be a shrewd consumer when you lack a frame of reference upon which to make reasoned judgments. Such is the situation with cross-cultural contact.

In Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, Gita Mehta chronicles an era of spiritual tourism that began in the counter-culture of the 1960s, when “the West adopted India as its newest spiritual resort.” [ii]

Mehta describes the peculiar collision of cultures:

“We were Indians but we had caught the contagions of the American Age. Speed was the essence of action, and America proved it daily… [Western spiritual tourists to India] thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong. Then the real action began.”

What was this “real action”? As American mass marketing penetrated the Indian countryside, “the unthinkable happened. The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi.” [iii]

When the Beatles embraced meditation and mysticism via an Indian guru, Mehta indicates, “the East” was able to turn the tables. Suddenly the spiritual heritage of the East was a hot commodity for Westerners.

“Eventually we succumbed to the fantasy that Indian goods routed through America were no longer boringly ethnic, but new and exciting accessories for the Aquarian Age. From accepting the fantasies it was a very short haul to buying them and, later and more successfully, to manufacturing them. As our home industry expands on every front, at last it is our turn to mass market.” ~Gita Mehta [iv]

​Of course, plenty of Eastern teachers — and not just from India — have migrated westward, publishing books, teaching meditation in classes and retreats, building audiences and ashrams.

I have described elsewhere how the religious roots of meditation practices were often softened when presented to Western audiences (see How Was Meditation Mainstreamed?). That may be true, to some degree, for these religious traditions generally — and whether introduced by cultural ambassadors of the East or the West.

Esoteric elements may be downplayed, and universalizing vocabulary adopted. The language of science, in particular, may be used to communicate that this Eastern wisdom is not at odds with modern metaphysics.

The Orientalism that is a legacy of European colonialism may be leaned into, as intangible qualities associated with the East are sold to Western audiences weary of materialism.

Om-washing may cue people to relax the reasoning, monkey mind. To lean into imagery, into intuition, into mystery — into be-ing rather than do-ing.

Ah, that’s better…

​(Or is it?)

The Questioning Stage of Faith Development

If you’ve heard about the six stages of faith development, you might guess where I’m going with this. When people reach the fourth stage (if they do), they’ve moved from a conventional faith to a reflexive or individual one. [v]

In the synthetic-conventional stage (stage 3), people move beyond the literalism that previously guided their relationship to myth and symbols — engaging more abstract thinking — and synthesize the different areas of their life into a single whole. People in this stage are strongly rooted in relationships and community. They may find it hard to think outside the parameters of their inherited tradition, looking strongly to authority figures to guide them in their beliefs.

​In the individual-reflective stage (stage 4), people bring critical reasoning to their faith. They think carefully about what they believe, often questioning previously taken-for-granted ideas, and take responsibility for their faith on an individual level. Self-identity becomes more integrated with one’s values and worldview.
​
There is no universal pace for moving through the stages. A person can remain indefinitely at any stage. But stage 3 is typically associated with adolescence. Stage 4 may begin in late adolescence, young adulthood, later, or not at all.

Those in stage 4 sometimes become critical of the faith they inherited. They may even reject it. I expect it is at this stage that many people may become open to wisdom from other traditions — particularly ones that do not exhibit the same flaws now perceived in one’s own first faith.

Other religious traditions may be of interest to people in later stages too.

Stage 5 is called the conjunctive stage. This is when people find balance in the contradictions in their religion, and in reality. They develop a new appreciation for paradox, recognize their own finiteness (including of mind and perception), and are open to multiple meanings that may be found in faith symbols. This stage is typically not reached until mid-life, if at all.

Stage 6 is called universalizing faith. People at this stage exhibit deep openness and understanding, having been transformed and possessing a holistic kind of faith. They recognize wisdom from many sources. Often spiritual leaders and mentors to others of all stages, they typically lead lives of service. This stage is considered rare, most likely occurring later in life.

I hypothesize that in a society that is predominantly Judeo-Christian, interest in Eastern traditions is especially likely to develop, when it does, around stage 4 — particularly if it is readily accessible to the person at that time.

​People in stages 5 and 6 may also take an interest in traditions other than the one they grew up with. This may be enriching to them, and be part of the process of developing a greater awareness of one’s own and others’ perspectives, and integrating that knowledge.
​
If not brought into contact with other traditions, though, I suspect people at these more developed stages would not feel a need to search outside their own native tradition. They could resolve the contradictions of their own tradition from within it, and access deeper levels of wisdom that are available in every major religious tradition — including their own.

In today’s interconnected, multicultural world, many people will gain exposure to diverse religious traditions, and need to decide how to relate to them.

Still, I see stage 4 as the stage when the greatest numbers of people are likely to both analyze and come to personal terms with their own faith tradition — warts and all — as well as go into seeking mode, becoming curious about diverse sources of wisdom.

Intercultural & Racial Identity Development

How can we understand Westerners’ relationships to Eastern spirituality? Another type of developmental approach that may offer some insight into this question comes from models of racial or cultural development.

Let’s start with the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) created by Milton J. Bennett. [vi]

“Each orientation of the DMIS is indicative of a particular worldview structure, with certain kinds of cognition, affect, and behavior vis-à-vis cultural difference typically associated with each configuration… it is a model of how the assumed underlying worldview moves from an ethnocentric to a more ethnorelative condition, thus generating greater intercultural sensitivity and the potential for more intercultural competence.” ~ Milton Bennett [vii]

Once people have enough exposure to get beyond Denial that different cultures exist, they move into the stage of Defense.

Defense describes well the emotional tone of this stage, which is defensive. The cognitive structure here includes mental categories that can recognize cultural difference; however, the original world view is protected by poor integration of the new categories. This may lead to a hardening of categories.

Initially, a person might respond by focusing on what is good — in fact, better — about one’s own culture, and evaluating the differences in another culture in a negative fashion. A person in this situation may be most comfortable staying in bubbles where their own culture is dominant. At the extreme, they might embrace supremacist attitudes and even behaviors.

An alternate response in this stage is to regard the other’s culture as superior, and see one’s own as inferior. The dynamic is the same — only one can be “right” or “good” — this position just flips which culture is regarded as right/best and which as wrong/lesser. This version of the stage is called Reversal.
​

​The DMIS was developed in relation to whole cultures. My sense is that it was intended to speak to situations of cross-cultural contact such as occurs in the context of international business, or prolonged immersion in a new culture, such as for a Peace Corps volunteer or a person who immigrates to a new country.
​
To me the DMIS seems useful for understanding religious differences. Religion is, at least in part, a cultural phenomenon. Religious perspectives are part and parcel of what makes “the West” or “the East” or specific countries (the U.S. or Canada, India or Japan) what they are, culturally.

The stage of Defense, alternately called Polarization, can be seen in how people orient themselves when they encounter a religion that is foreign to their culture.
A non-Asian Westerner who engages with Asian religion and worldviews, and chooses to continue to do so, if still in the Defense stage would most logically come to it from the point of view of Reversal — seeing the other’s religious culture as superior to one’s own religious heritage.

I say that because a person at the other pole of polarization, Supremacy, would have little motive to remain deeply engaged in Asian religion, while regarding it as inferior, and in a stand of cognitively and emotionally defending one’s own, Western religious upbringing.

It’s hard for me to remember now, but I might have been at this stage in college. As I’ve indicated, I was very much interrogating my own, Protestant Christian heritage. At the same time, I was curious about other traditions, and especially drawn to Taoism.

My engagement with Eastern religions was not very deep then — it was largely intellectual, through college coursework and independent reading. It did not bring me significantly into contact with the baggage that one encounters in an embodied expression of any tradition, as practiced by real people and woven into institutions.

So it would have been easy for me to remain discriminating and critical with the devil I knew (Protestant Christianity), and have a sunnier disposition toward very different traditions (such as Taoism).

Even once a person begins to develop a deeper exposure to a new-to-you tradition, I suspect it often takes a while to see its shadow side. Especially if its emissaries have taken pains to make it appealing to Westerners (as indeed, plenty have).

It strikes me that an Asian Westerner is in a more complex situation. I think of the person who introduced me to the meditation teacher whose community I would one day move to. (I describe the beginnings of our connection, while we were both in India, here.)

She was (is) Chinese American, from San Francisco. I don’t know if her family were practicing Buddhists (or Confucian or Taoist), or Christian converts, or identified as non-religious. But there was surely some influence of the religious worldview of her Chinese ancestors, carried over into her family and their ethnic enclave in San Francisco.

Yet, Linda (I’ll call her) would also have grown up very much an American, socialized by American schools, friends, business, culture in general. She may be several generations away from the immigration experience — when it is common for people to reclaim their cultural heritage, as I remember from sociology classes.

I don’t know what brought Linda to take up the method of meditation taught by an Indian guru, and become close to his ashram community, and grow so enthusiastic that she evangelized me. Any or all of the other motives I describe in this piece may have been alive for her.

But I suspect it is more than coincidence that of all the people with whom I have shared the shocking new things I have learned about that guru recently, she is the only one who has cut off contact with me. She doesn’t want to be exposed to this information — she has said as much to me. It seems to be threatening to her in a way that it isn’t, or to a degree that it isn’t, to all of the other people that I knew personally through this group and with whom I have shared information over the past 15 months.

It’s possible that Linda is, or at some point was, in a developmental stage where it is important to honor one’s heritage. And that part of the draw to Sri Acharya (I’ll call him) was the way he affirmed the wisdom of the East. He was complimentary to Western religions too, and drew on all traditions in his teachings. But at heart, he viewed everything through the lens of his own heritage. And he encouraged all people to see the East as the purest source of spiritual wisdom.

I could be wrong about Linda. I acknowledge this is mere speculation. Either way, it illustrates how the dynamics may be different for a person in the West, who has Eastern heritage themselves, when relating to Eastern spirituality. Their own identity is caught up in it in a different way than for a person who is white or black, Latina or indigenous American.

Another developmental model, this one focused on racial identity, speaks to this. Beverly Daniel Tatum indicates that for a person of color in a white-dominant society, the stage of Immersion / Emersion — which comes after a person has recognized the impact of racism on their life — is a time of removing oneself from symbols of whiteness and immersing oneself in symbols of one’s own racial identity.
​

​“Individuals in this stage [Immersion] actively seek out opportunities to explore aspects of their own history and culture with the support of peers from their own racial background.” [viii]
​
Besides Linda, I also wonder how these dynamics affected other Asian or Asian-American people who developed ties with the ashram community of Sri Acharya. There were several Indian or Indian American young adults in my cohort of meditators.

There are many reasons they may have been drawn to this teacher and his particular way of teaching, and likely more than one at play for any person (as is true for his students of any other background). But for people with Indian heritage, the respect and gravitas Sri Acharya ascribed to India and its spiritual treasures may have been very healthy, even needed, at certain points of personal development.

Other stages from the DMIS no doubt also pertained to people involved with this group. Our meditation teacher’s approach was in essence congruent with the next stage after Defense, which is called Minimization.

In this stage, the polarization of the Defense stage is overcome by focusing on the common humanity of all people, and other kinds of commonalities that bridge cultures. In religion, this could show up as acknowledging that there is wisdom in every tradition; no one faith has a monopoly on virtue or insight.

But as the name Minimization signals, the down side of this stage is that it downplays and underestimates the real differences between cultures. While focusing on physiological similarities (“we all bleed red,” “we all want our children to be safe”), or subsuming difference into generalities (“the basic need to communicate is the same everywhere,” “we are all children of God, whether we know it or not”), minimization remains ethnocentric to one’s own culture.

People in Minimization actively support principles they regard as universal, whether they are religious, moral, or political. Niceness prevails — definitely an improvement over the antagonism of defense! But the institutionalized privilege of dominant groups may go unrecognized.

​Milton’s model indicates that the developmental task for those in Minimization is to develop cultural self-awareness. To learn to see all the things about one’s own culture which are so taken for granted they are not visible to a person as being culturally specific, but are instead taken as universal.

For someone like me with ties to Acharya’s ashram community (a white American), that would require engaging more deeply with my own (Western) religious heritage, instead of ignoring it in favor of Eastern sources.

To his credit, whatever else may be said of Acharya (and I’ve said much!), he did encourage his North American audience not to discard their own heritage, but to find the treasure that is there, too.

(That said, he still looked at that treasure through his own Hindu lens, himself. So perhaps he himself was in Minimization, with a tail in Superiority of his own Indian heritage. When I first took the DMIS, many years ago now, I was in Minimization with a tail in Reversal — still more acutely aware of the drawbacks of my American culture than of its strengths. I see the fingerprints there of the ashram’s conditioning!)

This review of some of the pertinent stages of development in cross-cultural sensitivity and racial identity provides helpful context for understanding some of the observations of Gita Mehta, who wrote insightfully and cleverly about the marketing of the mystic East to the West. Consider this one:

“The trick to being a successful guru is to be an Indian, but to surround yourself with increasing numbers of non-Indians. If this is impossible, then separate your Indian followers from your Western followers in mutually exclusive camps. That way, one group accepts the orgies of self-indulgence as revealed mysticism and the other group feels superior for not have been invited to attend.” ~ Gita Mehta

Wondering what comes after Minimization? That’s the stage most people are in, by the way, at least in the U.S. The next stage is Acceptance.

In Acceptance, a person fully recognizes their own, rich cultural identity. They also accept that other cultures have differences that are more than superficial. And they are curious about those differences.

​A person in the Acceptance stage holds onto their own core values, while acknowledging that their ways are not necessarily better or worse than those of other cultures — they are just different. And those differences make a difference in how people of different cultures work, and could work together.
​
In Acceptance, curiosity is the predominant feeling. Cognitively, a person is gaining knowledge and developing a more complex understanding of cultural differences. The developmental challenge is to refine one’s analysis of cultural contrasts, between one’s own and others’ cultures.

This can lead to Adaptation, in which a person has gained the skills to behave sensitively in other cultural contexts. A person at this stage can communicate more effectively cross-culturally, and see the world from the point-of-view of other cultures. This person may be gaining skills at code-switching.

For ex-pats, global nomads, and world citizens — people with deep and prolonged cross-cultural immersion — continued development of knowledge and skills may lead to the final stage, Integration.

The racial identity model is fascinating too. I won’t sketch out the other stages for people of color here, other than to mention that after Immersion comes Internalization. At that stage, a person is secure in their own racial identity, and their affirming attitudes to their own ethnic or cultural identity “become more expansive, open and less defensive.” [ix]

While those in Immersion may prefer to remain among people of shared identity, those in Internalization are ready to be in meaningful relationships with white folks who respect their identity, as well as to build coalitions with people who have other kinds of marginalized identities.

My Chinese American acquaintance, Linda, might well have been (or by now be in) this stage. That’s true also of the Indian and Indian American folks affiliated with Sri Acharya and his community.
​
There’s a separate, somewhat different set of stages for racial development in white people. All of these models — the DMIS, and the racial identity development schema for both people of color and white people — are well worth learning more about. But for purposes of this article, I’ll stop here.

It’s Complicated

There are many reasons Westerners turn to Eastern spirituality. I have introduced six of them here:

1. The intrinsic appeal of Eastern traditions and their content — concepts, practices, stories, scriptures, etc.

2. The ability to encounter a tradition afresh, with a clean slate — in contrast to the baggage one may carry from one’s own tradition, and the particular, intimate history one has with it

3. Personality traits like high Openness to new experiences and cultures, which may predispose a person to be a seeker spiritually

4. The savvy marketing of Eastern traditions to Westerners, which may use Orientalism to the benefit of particular Eastern teachers or communities

5. Being in the questioning stage of faith development, often with some degree of rejection of or distancing from one’s faith of origin

6. Being in a stage of development that leads one to be open to — or even needful of — Eastern perspectives, in terms of cross-cultural contact and personal racial identity

There may well be other reasons that I have not touched on here. If you see one I missed, feel free to name it in the comments!

For any particular person, one, several, or all of these could be in play.

If you are a Westerner who has had some level of involvement with Eastern religions or spiritual practices, which of the above factors resonate with your own experience?

What I Am NOT Saying

To be clear, I am not saying that Westerners should or should not turn to the East. I’m simply saying that why and how that happens is complex.

I believe there is value in understanding why we do the things we do. Both for the individual in their personal journey, as well as for recognizing patterns across groups.

Wherever your journey takes you, I wish you insight, growth, and well-being.

​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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
How A Cult Is Like An Onion … The End of Silence — On Spiritual Bypassing and the Costs of Denial … Is This Normal? Meditation Surprises

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study” by K.L. Jang, W.J. Livesely, and P.A. Vernon, September 1996 in The Journal of Personality. Accessed at PubMed March 2025.

[ii] Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta, 1979.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] This section draws on Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning by James W. Fowler, 1981.

[vi] I was introduced to this model in training sessions offered in October 2013 by Adam Robersmith and Jill McAllister, as part of the fall retreat of the Heartland Chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. In this section, I draw on understanding developed there, as well as on Bennett directly.

[vii] “Intercultural Competence for Global Leadership” by Milton J. Bennett, as provided by the Intercultural Development Research Institute, with this note:This reading is an edited compilation of two articles by Milton J.

• Bennett: “Developing Intercultural Competence for Global Managers” in Reineke, Rolf-Dieter (Editor) (June, 2001)
• Interkulturelles Managment. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, ISBN: 3–409–11794–6 and “An Intercultural Mindset and Skillset for Global Leadership” from Conference Proceedings of Leadership Without Borders: Developing Global Leaders. Adelphi, MD: National leadership Institute and the Center for Creative Leadership, University of Maryland University College, 2001.

[viii] From a handout on Racial Identity Development drawn from “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial identity Development Theory in the Classroom” by Beverly Daniel Tatum, in the Harvard Educational Review, 1992.

[ix] Ibid

I recently rediscovered something I wrote a few years after leaving a group that affected me deeply as a young adult — the meditation group I now understand to be a high control group.

With the new insight that has come from a deep dive into the literature on cultic studies, trauma and recovery, the piece now carries even greater resonance for me.

Burying my sweet canary, Kokopele, was the low point of my year working at the ashram. I felt then — and still do — that his death, at least in part, was due to his absorbing the malaise that had descended on ME after working at the inscrutable ashram for half a year.

It is no accident that this is the scene I chose to describe, when I took a writing class during my period of processing and stabilization after I left. I experimented with different voices and tenses while writing. In the end I opted for first person, present tense telling for immediacy.

​I share the piece here, unchanged except to swap out some names. (I do this not to protect that deeply troubled community, but to protect myself from them.)
​

Burying Kokopele

(written March 2009, describing a moment in February 2006)

I hold the shoebox gently at my hip as I slip inside the garden gate and into the shed for a trowel. Processing through the blackberry hedge with a leaden heart, I see blue-tailed swallows swooping below the eaves of the old bindery. My breath flutters in my chest at the sight of their easy grace, their beauty and freedom.

Later I will truly see the wild birds as I had not seen them before. In the flitting of a sparrow, the turning of a finch’s head, the hop-hopping of a robin in the grass, I will recognize their familiar birdness. It will be intimate, not unlike the way I sometimes feel my mother’s gait, my father’s reaction, moving through me. I will share a certain friendship with all birds, sometimes disappearing into tremulous songbird spirit myself, like Meera: “You are the tree, Krishna, and I the bird that sits on its branches, singing.”

But not yet. At this moment, though friends lunching inside the former bindery are oblivious to my ritual of release, I know what I need to do. Continuing on, I pass the meditation hall, Sukham, as quietly as an aspirant might glide through the blanket room inside, cross the dais where Sri Acharya had taught, and sit to enter into sacred words.

I walk beyond the memorial fountain behind Sukham. Lines from the Gita, inscribed on the stone there beneath the bubbling water and fragrant blossoms, echo in my head: “Be aware of me always, adore me, make every act an offering to me, and you shall come to me; this I promise, for you are dear to me.” I remember the times I have stood there in gratitude and affirmation, candle in hand, after the annual memorial program. Will I ever feel that way again, ever be so sourced from my own pure longing and fullness, as ardent as a courting songbird?

When I had been but a retreatant, the drive up from the airport to the meditation compound was like a pilgrimage, a regular spiritual migration: the eucalyptus of a public park cleansed my breath through the open car windows, the mist enshrouded me as I crossed the bright bridge, the sparse golden hills of California exposed me to the clear sky, laid bare my spirit.

It was a fitting preparation for the deep rest and spiritual nourishment that awaited at the retreat house in town. The retreat house is special, with its waves of real world sadhaks diving deep together, through the workshops and fellowship, darshan and meditation that take place there. Somehow, the retreat house is still sacred space to me, even after I have been working for six months in the damp office at Premadari Ashram.

​Even when I am on the verge of imploding out here, among the dairy cows and the normative humility, the culture of indirect communication, the taut relationships of long-timers and the stagnant community routines, the atrophy of my skills and the lack of any meaningful role for me at the headquarters of Acharya’s organization — the ashram community swallows me up, but the retreat house remains a haven.

The ashram grounds, too, still have a holy vibration for me, out in the trees and pastures and hills. Beyond the cluster of buildings at the center where the publishing, retreat planning and other work takes place, the wild creatures roam a temperate Eden.

But it isn’t just the natural beauty of the land that touches me. As my roommate observed, Premadari is a spiritual vortex. I can feel the energy from the soles of my feet to my crown. Is that why I want to bury Kokopele here? (Or was it, I will wonder later, that my gut knew I would be leaving soon, and leaving a hungry, tender part of myself behind with him?)

​Walking into the trees cradling the shoebox, I scan the terrain with my eyes and heart, sensing for the right spot. Koko would like being out here in the open hills.

He had loved his freedom at the old house in Bloomington, where I had hand-tamed him — a rare feat with a wild, skittish creature like a canary. He was slow to trust me, but through many bribes of lettuce and cucumber, through crooning and fluting and sweet talk, we had bonded.

He would come out on my finger and have the fly of the house, winging from the kitchen windowsill to the drapery tops of the adjacent great room, sometimes circling around the utility closet, through the hallway that linked to all other rooms in the house.
​
Sometimes he would perch on my shoulder for company, and rest contented there; sometimes, on the rim of my salad bowl (helping himself), or the edge of my open laptop. Sometimes he made scratchy chicken-like sounds, no mating song that, chiding me for my inattention. This always made me laugh. How could a songbird make such a racket?

​Kokopele’s cheerful presence brought life to a house that had sometimes otherwise felt too big for one. He joined the household at a time of tense possibility: I had just left my sociology program ABD, had just divorced my ladder-climbing high school sweetheart, and was not only trying to “follow my bliss,” but was ignoring, for now, the question of how I’d pay the mortgage on my own while seeking my first real job. People always thought canaries were kept for their song, and I did enjoy his singing.

But it was his personality that added dynamics to the space: his many different calls (short-re to long-ti, or triplet-mi followed by triplet-so); the crescendoing of his beak sharpening against his perches; the joyful splashing of a bath (the bowl placed into the recess of the kitchen sink to give him the illusion of privacy, lest he be too shy to bathe); his head diving voraciously into his seed cup, shells ricocheting to the bottom of his cage; the subtle fluffing sound, quieter than leaves rustling in a soft breeze, when he puffed up for sleep, retracted one foot into his feather-ball, and tucked his head in.

The “rebound” boyfriend, with whom the bird and I would spend a passionate and conflicted five years, had coaxed me to stop haunting pet stores and “go ahead and buy one already!” As a composer, he was taken as much with the canary’s ability to mimic his whistles, or match the pitch of the refrigerator hum, as with Koko’s trills and warbles. When I went off for two weeks to India on a “reality tour” about Gandhian-style grassroots democracy, the boyfriend was gleeful. Kokopele normally reserved his affections for me, but would take treats and play with my substitute when I was gone.

Across the globe, I repressed my bird-talking habits, imbibed the foreign landscape, pondered the Mahatma’s path, and listened for a dissertation topic, or a public policy mission, or a vision for a Constructive Programme through which I could re-pattern the U.S., or some other purpose worthy of my life. I had no “aha” moments about any such outward path.

But a way opened inwardly. Upon my return, I had to inform the boyfriend that no, the bird could not be allowed to fly into the study and land on my shoulder, nor could he kiss my forehead as he was leaving in the morning — not if I was in the midst of this new meditation practice, which I had picked up from a fellow traveling seeker.

​Kokopele had been my solace during the tumultuous break-up year that eventually, inevitably came. He was my continued companion during the year of searching that came after that. He had even been good humored about not being let out while I worked on my Discernment Collage; his landings and take-offs would send clippings and carefully positioned images skittering, breaking my focus, and so he had to be constrained for several weeks. Neither did he stress out later when I allowed realtors and other strangers to come into our house while I was gone — at least, he didn’t complain to me after such visits. He was blissfully ignorant of what lay ahead.
​

​When I packed up the house, feathers floated out from every corner and crevice. The soft accumulation of six years’ molting was more than one vacuum bag could hold. (Several residences later, when long-untouched boxes will finally be opened again, the short downy feathers from his breast, curled into ornate yellow-white C’s, will drift out with retrieved items, invoking my previous life.)

Kokopele had done remarkably well on the drive from Indiana to California. This was one of my biggest anxieties about the move — more worrisome than selling my house, leaving my professional identity behind, and working for peanuts at what my grandmother needlessly feared was a cult in earthquake country. I had followed the vet’s advice and avoided trains (too much vibration) and planes (too much air pressure), instead caravanning across the country with my parents in a Ryder truck and their SUV-and-camper.

I sat in the passenger seat of the Explorer the first few days so that I could hold the covered birdcage in my lap, talk soothingly to Kokopele, and peek at him now and then. By the third day he was clearly getting used to the routine and I began to take regular shifts in the Ryder. We canary lovers managed never to leave the bird in a warm car for more than ten minutes despite rest stops, meal stops, and delayed motel check-ins.
​
For most lunches we ate camping food out of the cooler, leaning on top of the pop-up in shifts while the car was still on with the AC for Koko; but somewhere in Big Sky Country, when we had run out of sandwiches and kidney bean salad and it was too hot to dash into Wendy’s for even ten minutes with the AC off, we brought the bird in with us. Underneath his cage cover, with my familiar voice and occasional eye contact, he did just fine. He made it to the Golden State relatively unruffled, and behaving normally.

​In our apartment in the burg nearest the ashram, however, we have both been too enclosed. We are not monastics, Koko and I. We never aspired to a cloistered life. But, limited, out of financial necessity, by the comings and goings of our ascetic roommate, a co-worker from the meditation center, Kokopele has not been able to leave his cage downstairs.

The one hundred square feet of my bedroom have represented a serious downsizing from the house in Bloomington, and there have been no high spots for him to perch on securely, as small birds prefer. So Kokopele has sat at the chest-high window ledge, listening to the wild birds on the other side of the screen, to the rumbling of engines and calls of children in the parking lot below, loving me anyway.

He had lost his song completely by Thanksgiving.

I have been singing for both of us. I found a choir one city over, and often lead the chanting of sacred songs at the retreats. I even recorded some songs in the studio of a fellow ashram worker and meditator. (The ex-pothead music producer and self-described Gopi recently transplanted himself from L.A. to the dairy country, for the love of his guru and the need of skilled help to archive Sri Acharya’s talks — though he will soon enough be honored at the same going away party as me.)

​But though I found musical outlets, my neck continues to throb and jerk and disrupt my meditation, and I cannot hear my inner voice. Still, how could I regret taking a leap of faith to join a wave of other young professionals here? We are meant to be the “next generation” to sustain the work, apprenticed to Sri Acharya’s long-time students, to continue offering to the world his universal program of spiritual practices, and the inspiration of this most gentle modern-day teacher.

The call to come and help “quietly change the world” was so compelling that I cannot doubt its authenticity. Yet, there is no safe space for me here, beyond my small cage of a bedroom.
​
These memories and body-knowings echoed through me as I look around for a place to bury Koko, look for somewhere safe enough, free enough, to satisfy his spirit.
​
The scrub trees in the gully are not majestic enough for him. Up the hill, over a footbridge and through meadow, I spot a stand of pines and head for them. Layer upon layer of needles make a soft carpet underfoot. The tall trees reach quietly toward the endless sky. I stop for a moment, fingering the shoebox, and gaze upward, rooted as a tree myself.

Words of William Law, lines from a much-loved mystic passage, float through my mind: “Though God be everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. Thy natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will, and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth in thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre or as branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called the Centre, the Fund or Bottom of thy soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity, I had almost said the infinity of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest but the infinity of God.”

The words still ring true within me. Yet I feel that the restless energy that had once drawn me to them, needing to dissolve in the stillness of infinity, has been buried deep within. Trapped like steam far beneath a geyser.

I find a particularly large pine with soft ground underneath and kneel to dig a resting place. Opening the box, I roll the softly feathered corpse into my cupped hand and hold him for some time. I hang onto my mantram in my mind as emotion surges through me. Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum.

In this moment, set apart from the cultural dysfunctions of Premadari Ashram by merciful nature, my motives and longings are not drowned out; rather, my spirit is clear and unified again in the practice. No ambivalence, no pressure, no confusion. Just the meaning vibrating through my heart. Repeating the mantram becomes, again, as instinctive as breathing, as natural as the respiration of the plants oxygenating the air around me.

Later I will need my altar with its symbolic objects — the fossils from a southern Indiana creek bed, the flaming chalice made by a potter in my church, yes, a waxy scarlet leaf from Premadari, and several long, gray-white tail feathers Koko had shed — but there is no need for props out here. All of nature is our shrine.
​

​I place Kokopele gently in the earth, returning him to the Source. As I sprinkle cool, damp soil into the hole and pat it level, I feel a darkness close over me as well. Kokopele, my trusting trickster spirit, is gone. Perhaps some of my own fertile magic is dead too.

Or maybe it is just now stirring back to life. Though this afternoon I will sit alone in Sukham for a while, wracked with quiet sobs, and confide my grief in one of the designated “mentors,” at that moment by the tree, I feel something shifting.
I cannot stay in these shadows with Koko, whatever that might mean. I don’t know what I should do, but I can’t stay stuck like this.
​
I will heed Lao Tzu, and “let the mud settle until your water is clear” — I will create the space to tune inward, to feel my own key, meter, and tempo. Somehow, I will remake my life again. This I know as I kneel over Kokopele’s resting place in silence among the trees.

​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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
Who Joins Cults? (and WHY?) … Five Systemic Meditation Mistakes … My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong … What Is A High Control Group?

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Similarly, high control groups often move among us, unrecognized for what they are. I have written elsewhere about the Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance that allow cunning cults to stay hidden in plain sight, as well as how they remain concealed through Surprises, Blinders and Lies.

Let’s look at another aspect of a high control group, its onion-like structure. This structure does two things:

1 — The layers create a pathway for pacing people through successively deeper levels of indoctrination and submission over time.

2 — The structure also facilitates the creation and maintenance of the illusions that are so critical to the group’s functioning. With tight information control, only those closest to the center may have access to unsavory truths about the founder or group — and they are unlikely to be able to see those truths directly for what they are, as it would blow up their world in every way. Instead, they have become adept at denial and rationalization as a matter of survival.

Layer by Layer

To illustrate the onion concept, I will flesh out the layers of my old meditation group. My understanding comes from the particular period of my peak involvement (~2001–2006), with insights gained from publications and conversations that speak to earlier eras, as well as tidbits shared by others (all included with permission). The layers might look a little different during various eras of the group; that is typical for any group, which will be fluid as it builds its empire and adapts to circumstances.

Keep in mind that other groups may parse the layers differently. They may have fewer, or more, layers. They may have front groups more disconnected from activity at the core. They may have more or less churn of members or lieutenants.

Regardless, a layered structure following similar principles will be found in a high control group of any kind, be it Eastern, Christian, New Age, commercial, therapeutic, political, etc.

This structure also appears in extremist groups — think ISIS — and political totalitarian regimes. The onion concept actually originates with Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish and American political philosopher who theorized on the origins of totalitarianism, after herself fleeing Nazi Germany.

At the Heart

The leader / founder / teacher / guru sits here, at the heart of it all. This person is the driver of the entire enterprise. They are the source of charisma and authority that grows and controls the group. Arendt writes:

“In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his ‘intangible preponderance.’ His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel.” [i]

Relationship Zero

Social psychologist and cult survivor Alexandra Stein uses the term Relationship Zero to indicate the first person captured in the thrall of the leader. This first relationship creates the model for the leader-follower relationship generally; any subsequent followers will replicate those patterns established in the original dyad.

For the founder of my old group, Relationship Zero was a young southern woman. I’ll call her Katarina here. She had already been dabbling in occult and mystical circles for several years when the future founder of my group appeared on the scene. She had a more enduring appetite for meditation than most of the other young people who first attended his lectures and meditation sessions in the Bay Area.

​I imagine Katarina in those early years as demure and malleable, the perfect devoted helpmate to a man who needed continuous affirmation (and perhaps visa help too). Katarina was his everything, from wife to chauffeur to business manager. At first, she worked full-time in the city, while the itinerant guru gave talks at no charge.

Before they had barely begun to get organized in the U.S., the couple returned to his native India together for several years. He supposedly became more “established” in illumination during that time. There may have been practical, immigration and bureaucracy- related reasons for this detour from building a proper following in the fertile fields of flower-child California.

In any case, this sojourn on the other side of the globe surely isolated Katarina more completely from her family, friends, and culture, engulfing her in his world and worldview. These years in a foreign land would have made her completely dependent upon her husband, the aspiring guru.

One could only speculate as to whether, in addition to isolation, other elements of the Power and Control wheels associated with controlling 1:1 relationship or similarly controlling religious groups came into play (religious wheel featured here).

I imagine she embraced the teacher with the same idealism that later students would, feeling privileged to be part of bringing the sacred science of meditation to the West. Her own personal history and psychology may also have influenced in meaningful ways how she responded to the attention of this charismatic figure, and why she attached herself to the particular person she did.

(Notably, women who suffered sexual abuse as children are far more likely to be revictimized later. I wonder if a similar parallel exists for those who have grown up in the shadow of narcissists or psychopaths.)

Given the era and their backgrounds, the couple probably largely shared ideas around gender roles that worked in his favor. While they built his public image as a teacher of Eastern wisdom, Katarina was content to stay behind the scenes. To what extent she deferred to his goals and decisions, and gradually lost faith in her own intuition and critical thinking abilities, I could only speculate.

Katarina did wield considerable power in the group they built — and seemed to those who later left to have relished all the perks of power, and been complicit in the abuses of power on the part of the teacher that went unchecked. This kind of both/and reality — she was both a victim and a perpetrator of harm to others — is common in a high control group.

Whether the teacher’s control over Katarina was subtle and largely voluntary, or more dramatic and deftly orchestrated, the result was the same — her agency and individuality were subsumed to him as she became, first, his helpmate, and later, his most trusted surrogate within the cult.

Altogether the couple spent four years in India. During this time, as his group would later tell it, they lived with his ancestral family. Without the need to earn a living or attend to practical matters, they focused on immersion in meditation and other spiritual disciplines.

Geographic isolation, cultural-religious engulfment, and long hours every day of mind-altering practices — all of this would have made for a potent setting for Katarina’s indoctrination.

Surely, by the time the obstacles that had prevented their earlier return to California “fell away,” Katarina’s conversion was complete. From this cult of one, the guru would soon expand his reach.

Ring Around the Ruler

When the couple came back to California — now a more consolidated unit — the would-be spiritual teacher picked back up with his efforts to gather a community.

He had a handful of supporters from his earlier campaign in the Bay Area who had kept the faith. Most notable was a woman I’ll call Carrie, who provided the home that would shelter not only the guru and his wife, but additional early students.
​
As the guru’s audience grew, an inner circle of close students and housemates developed. Eventually the group would obtain a rural property on which to establish a commune. The idealistic young adults who surrounded him there built the compound with their own hard labor.

​While the teacher continued to commute to the city to give public talks, he carved out a traditional guru-student role for himself with the young residents of his new ashram. There was a bait-and-switch tactic here that could make a used car salesperson proud.

In public talks previously, the eminently humble teacher had told eager meditators that he merely pointed the way to enlightenment; each person would have to do their own traveling. Once the young seekers were firmly ensconced as residents at the ashram, however — increasingly isolated from their families and the outside world, increasingly immersed in mind-altering spiritual practices, increasingly talking and thinking in the loaded language he supplied them — the teacher changed his tune.

Now he beseeched the eager seekers to surrender to him as their guru, if they truly wanted to attain enlightenment. The students had been acclimated over years of life with the guru before this pronouncement emerged. As one escapee told me emphatically, “I never would have joined a group where the leader said, devotion to the teacher IS the path.”

The guru’s inner circle at that time would have been drawn from this group of communalists, made up of those who were most loyal, deferential and compliant. At a later stage of his life, when he struggled with the health challenges brought by age, this inner circle would include his direct caregivers.

Within that inner circle, closest to the guru and his wife were lieutenants that enforced norms on their behalf. In some groups, these positions would have formal titles (like lieutenant). I don’t think that was the case in my old group; but the function was the same, carrying out the will of the leader within the group.

It probably made the holder of such a position feel special to be so trusted. Alas, there is typically higher turnover in these positions, who are exposed to more of the ugliness at the heart of the onion, and more at risk for disillusionment, burnout and misconduct, or grabbing power for themselves, any of which would make them a threat to the leader — and thus get them removed. No one but the teacher is irreplaceable.

Among those who were enforcers for the couple at the heart of the onion, one man got into trouble with the law when — repeating patterns of the founder, only outside the group — he attempted to serve his own sexual needs with an underage girl.

As I saw myself when I worked at the ashram, and have consistently observed from afar in the twenty years since, the Board of Trustees for the organization has always been stacked with loyalists. The organization scores poorly with external bodies on things like the independence of its governing board and the transparency of its financials. This kind of insularity is a red flag that a group is likely controlling in nature. It shows that even when the leader is gone, the onion remains intact, inner ring and all.

Residents & Workers

While the inner circle would, I expect, have drawn primarily from those who lived and/or worked at the ashram, not everyone there is equally on the inside. This larger pool of people created a community that could engage with the wider world.

Some resided at the ashram, worked in the nearby community, and helped the ashram run through their contributions of labor in the kitchen or the gardens, or in maintaining the buildings and grounds.

Others took up specialized roles to support the mission of the outward-facing organization. The founder was their brand — when I was there, they even went through a rebranding phase where the web site, emails and everything else consisted of his name. That felt uncomfortable to me at the time, as I was still holding to the “he only points the way” side of the group’s propaganda.

No doubt the young enthusiasts over the decades were lauded for giving selflessly (largely anonymously, to the public) to the group’s work. Ultimately the group’s real function was to serve as a vehicle for glorifying the founder.

Students of the guru worked as volunteers or low-paid employees for public-facing programs. It began with his talks and lectures throughout the Bay Area; expanded to include a press that published a journal, and later books; special projects, such as those in the fields of health and conservation; and in time, overnight meditation retreats.

This ashram layer includes a group that doesn’t fit neatly into the schema — people who show up strictly as employees, live locally, may develop friendly relationships with the residents over time, may interact somewhat with the wider public served by the organization, but are not themselves meditators or students of the teacher. They are not exposed directly to the programs and teachings of the group.

I’m not sure how many there are in that category currently, or when it started. During my peak involvement, it included a local woman who cooked meals for the retreats, and perhaps some people who helped ship books from the press’s warehouse. This in-but-not-really-in group is depicted in my graphic as a shoot that touches all the layers from meditator-workers through the public.

Ashram Associates
​
The next layer out was created later, sometime after a program of meditation retreats was well-established. What I’ll call here the Ashram Associates program was geared toward young adults when I started going to retreats. I’m not sure if it existed in some other form before that.

It used the social lever of scarcity — we have a limited number of spots, and you must apply and make your case for why you should be included. It offered the opportunity for a greater sense of intimacy within the participating cohort, and between those participants and the ashram long-timers. And it promised spiritual rewards for the deeper exploration in which we would be guided, over six months of intermittent in-person retreats, at-home work, and online connection among participants.

I participated in this program, along with many other young adults of my cohort. It proved an effective means of deeper indoctrination into the community. And it was a gateway to the next layer in — most of us ended up, sooner or later, moving to the area and living and/or working at the ashram.

For some this was a move from southern to northern California. For others, like me, it was from another region of the U.S. to the Bay Area. Still others came from other countries, even another continent.

Later a similar model was used, with the same name, but minus the focus on young adults. I suspect not enough of us “stuck” — young adults, after all, tend to be in a time of transition. Easy come, easy go. (I mean, not *really* easy — it upended my life! But we childless, early-career YAs were less tied down elsewhere.)

Subsequent cohorts included folks who were later in their careers, or even retired. Well-established and, I think, largely past the child-rearing stage. The ones I know of were professionals who had the resources, of money and time and skills, to be able to help carry out the work of the group. Most of the married ones seem to have been in relationships with people also practicing the group’s methods; they progressed inward in the onion structure together.

Participation in this program promised mature adults a sense of purpose and closer relationships, similar to the appeal for YAs. Only these folks would not soon conclude, as I had, that there was no way they could save for retirement adequately while working for the group. No, they already had that taken care of.

An overlapping category here may be those who would become program presenters. This is a structure that was developed after I left the group. The aging first-generation students were looking for ways to sustain retreats, while reducing reliance on themselves. For those offered the opportunity to serve in this way, it would have seemed a great honor to be so trusted. I gather their training was quite controlled, with scripts that required strict adherence.

Similarly, some people would come closer in other kinds of volunteer capacities, such as serving on the editorial team. They would work closely with — and be closely guided by — loyalists who were deeper/longer in.

Some of those later associates and presenters did end up moving to live near or at the ashram. As with my YA cohort, however, there was plenty of “leakage.” People who moved back outward again are seen in outer layers of the onion, or are made invisible beyond it.

The group was left with a challenge at the opposite end of the age spectrum from the one at which I entered — how to prevent older ashram associates, ones who had taken the leap to living on group property, from becoming a net drain on resources as they aged out of their productive years. I understand that some years ago, leadership adopted a rule — “voluntarily” embraced by all to whom it would one day apply — that associates would retire, and cease to live on group property, when they hit 70 years of age.

I wonder how many waves of these special programs there have actually been over the decades. Each time, the organization netted some short-term free or cheap labor and donations. Each time, one or a few people may have stuck and become long-term residents / workers, replenishing the heart of the onion that would keep it all going.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t seem to be enough. I don’t see the ashram community or the 501(c)(3) program provider surviving past the dwindling population of current residents. The remaining stalwarts may themselves have come to terms with this; those who fully embrace the teacher’s story of reality may expect that they will be reunited with him in future lifetimes, when all are reincarnated and can pick back up with the work in same way.

Retreatants

The guru expanded from public talks to overnight meditation retreats sometime in the mid-80s. These began in an existing retreat center in the Bay Area. Over a decade later, the group would establish its own retreat house, much closer to the ashram.

The guru was aging by this time, and was purposeful in training hand-picked students to learn to present his program of meditation and related practices. (When the long-timers did likewise with non-residents, they were simply replicating the train-the-trainer model.)

You can get pretty deeply indoctrinated just from retreats, which provide a focused period in a controlled environment, a closed community. Meditating together in person seems to amplify the effects of the practice. That in turn makes one more suggestible to teachings presented in that time.

(If they haven’t already, I expect someday scientists will measure how our minds affect each other. We know that our nervous systems can do this — children cue off their parents’ responses to surprising events, to know whether to respond with alertness or calm. Perhaps our alpha-states are somewhat contagious, just as emotions of various kinds can spread between us humans, who are such social creatures.)

Over time, a variety of options were developed in the retreat program. In person near the ashram, for a weekend, or a whole week. Special pilgrimages of one’s own to this sacred site of the guru. Regional retreats, held for many years in major cities throughout the U.S., and even overseas. More recently, especially since the pandemic, online retreats.
​
After the guru’s death, the retreats continued, with his long-time students facilitating workshops, and playing recordings of his talks. As a retreat-goer, after all the talks viewed, not to mention books read, and stories shared around the retreat house dining table by long-time students, it felt like I knew the teacher myself.
​​

​I was taking in his words daily in one form or another, even at home. Within a couple of years, I could reel off any of the spiels on various spiritual topics myself, using the group’s own language, as if it were second nature. Such restricted use of language is a sign of increasing control over one’s mind.

Satsangs

A program more recent even than retreats are satsangs, local groups of people that meet weekly in their city to meditate together, based on the methods of the teacher. Coordinators follow guidelines provided by the ashram, and focus on the teachings of its founder. I remember my old satsang sometimes watching and discussing videos together, too, of the teacher’s recorded talks.

In retrospect, I see how the organization tried to establish boundaries, keeping satsangs only for those who were faithfully doing their method of meditation. In practice, some folks just interested in reading or viewing the materials, and sharing fellowship with others who have spiritual interests, could turn up too, depending on how rigorously the coordinator of that particular group enforced the intended boundaries.

The satsangs were framed as a way to provide fellowship and support where you live for your meditation practice. And they did do that. Along with nightly reading of the founder’s books and journal articles, frequent home viewing of his videos (via a DVD of the month program, or later, an online video archive), periodic retreat attendance, and volunteer work for the ashram, the weekly satsang in one’s own community added yet another touchpoint in one’s life that reinforced the practices, the identity, and the relationships tied up with the founder and his ashram.

The result is a category of people that I see as in a gray zone of indoctrination. They might never identify themselves as having been part of a high control group, even if they someday learn how such groups work, and learn previously-withheld hard truths about its founder. Because they didn’t get in *that* deep. From the outside, they would seem to be leading normal lives in their communities, with work and families and friends.

However, on the inside, it is quite possible to be plenty indoctrinated while living far from the ashram. It’s all a spectrum.

Someone who just read some books, took to the meditation practice, and perhaps plugged into a local satsang might recover relatively quickly from the shock of contradictory new information about the founder. In contrast, it might be much more world-shaking for someone who had become more deeply enmeshed relationally and spiritually with the group, through years of retreats, perhaps personal acquaintance with the guru or core first-gen students, perhaps going through an ashram associate program or serving as a presenter or getting in deep as a skilled volunteer who is virtual staff, and being deeply invested in one’s own identity.

Readers

It’s been over a half century since the founder of my old group started teaching meditation in this country, and building an organization to further that work. And the most common way people come into contact with his work now is his books. (I say “his” books, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say books published in his name, since virtually all of them were, I now understand, ghost written.)

Perhaps a hundred people have resided at the ashram over these 50+ years.
Thousands have surely come to public talks and retreats. And who knows how many have watched the videos of the founder’s talks that are, by now, available online.

But books and other publications bring the teacher’s exposure exponentially higher.
​

Millions have read the books or translations published in the founder’s name (or read e-books or listened to audio-books). The translations in particular, I’ve heard, are on the shelves of yoga studios hither and yon.

This is the most common point of entry into the onion. Many people will stop at that layer. But without the books, some who end up deep inside might never have even heard of this particular teacher and meditation practice.

What the Onion Structure Accomplishes

The layers of my old group illustrate fairly well how these onion structures tend to work for high control groups generally.

Moving Down the Pipeline

The layers provide the group a means of cult-ivating people into deepening levels of involvement.

The books are a feeder for the retreats — I recall postcards that came in them, by which one could be added to the mailing list and indicate interest in learning about programs. The retreats further funnel some people into special programs, volunteering, and even, eventually, living and/or working at the ashram. This may have been true of other programs that came and went before my time in the group. Human resources are drawn from the periphery in toward the center of the onion.

​​All publications and programs also provide some level of income to support the ashram. I suspect, though, that such income might be a wash, financially, if not for the charitable donations of the most committed supporters. Especially, the estate gifts that are surely “maturing” with increasing frequency in this decade.

There is an element of choice in this process. Individuals are encouraged and/or self-select to go deeper — or not. As I explored in Who Joins Cults?, this process is akin to a non-profit’s systematic cultivation of donors. If done with full transparency for mutual benefit, such a process is ethically sound. Transparency, alas, is usually spotty at best in a high control group.

The self-selection part of the process is evident. I chose to try out this particular method of meditation after I learned about it from a fellow traveler. Later I chose to read book after book by that meditation teacher, and eventually to go to a regional retreat. Later still, I decided to attend a weeklong retreat at the headquarters. Further down the line, I applied to participate in the Ashram Associate program. This is part of how the illusion of choice is created — this is the part we know about.

A high control group quietly influences participants throughout the process (part 1 ​part 2), not least by withholding critical information for individual’s decision-making. I certainly would have made different choices if I had known the truth about the founder and his community.

In addition, puppet-masters in the group are making unseen choices about who gets to go deeper — and who doesn’t.

Any steps the group takes to encourage or bar participation may only be visible to the individual involved. I remember interactions with several different long-timers from the ashram who encouraged me to feel that I had something valuable to offer as a potential employee, should I choose to draw closer in that way. These were private conversations. No doubt others who made the move had their own experiences of love-bombing or gentle nudging.

On the other hand, the group could quietly decide who to prevent from moving further inside the onion. The Ashram Associate program I participated in seemed open to anyone with a genuine interest and ability to make the commitment. However, I now understand that there were other criteria applied to admission decisions.

I recently learned that one woman who had gotten involved with the community was barred from participating in young adult programs, despite falling within the indicated age range. She was told that she was not eligible because she was married. She was crushed! It really hurt. She didn’t understand what her marital status had to do with why she should or should not have access to this opportunity for spiritual growth.

I would guess that had her spouse been a fellow meditator, and had they both applied to participate together, the outcome would have been different. As it was, her relationship with her uninvolved spouse would have made her harder to indoctrinate into the group. So they chose not to invest in her. That piece of the process was not publicized, of course.

​Similar gatekeeping between layers may have been carried out, based on whether particular individuals had skills needed by the organization. For example, desirable skills in my old group, at certain points in time, included everything to do with publishing (copywriting, editing, graphic design, translation, marketing); fundraising (annual fund, grants, major donor development); digital editing of the teacher’s old talks, administrative and HR skills, web site management, presenting, and so on.

And of course, closer to the center of the onion, going back to the guru’s lifetime, those admitted to the innermost circle would’ve been those who most met his needs, be they practical, psychological, or otherwise.

Gradual Conditioning

The more time passes, and the deeper into the onion one goes, the more one’s whole life becomes colonized, from the inside, by the group and its worldview.
First, the way they behave becomes the way you behave — doing the practices, whatever they may be in a given a group.
​
Through this immediate experience brought on by behavior, as well as through instruction, the way they think becomes the way you think. (Or the way you don’t think — the suspension of thought is a big part of the process.)

Likewise, you learn what are appropriate ways to feel and you perform accordingly, restricting and denying even to yourself feelings that are outside the bounds of permissibility. Janja Lalich calls this bounded choice. [ii]

The concept of bounded choice helps me greatly to understand the apparent blindness of the long-timers in my group to what it has become, from its promising beginnings as a group of idealistic young people, to a community riddled with shameful secrets that no one signed up for — and no one still left seems willing or able to look at.

While I understand there are groups that quickly isolate and strip away the identities of new recruits, my experience in my old group was much more gradual. It happened as I came closer, layer by layer.

One of my old friends from my YA cohort observed something that illustrates a deliberate aspect of this process. The information shared by the group is geared to the particular layer you are in — and perhaps even, at times, what they read you as an individual to be ready for, open to.

For example, the videos of the teacher’s talks are curated and calibrated to meet a person where they are at, in their particular layer of the onion. When he was alive, he would have done this calibration himself, of course. Now those exerting leadership in his absence continue to do the same with his videos and writings.

Some talks viewed by ashram die-hards would never be shown at an introductory retreat — only a fraction of the talks archived would be considered suitable for the public. Potential recruits and newbies are kept on a diet of palatable propaganda, until moved deeper into the onion.

The spiritual practices and ideas which draw them in can be found in various teachers and traditions, and are artfully expressed by this particular teacher who speaks charmingly to their time. No one says at the outset: “Once you come to trust this teacher, this community, the message will slowly change. Loyalty will start to mean something different.” No, that has to be worked up to over a long period of time.

Alexandra Stein explains, “propaganda plays an important role in what we might call ‘voluntary’ recruitment.” These are “the ideas, messages, images and narratives that are used specifically to communicate with the outside world… those to whom propaganda is directed are not yet isolated or only partially so… Propaganda can be seen as the softening up process that gets the recruit to the point where indoctrination processes can start to be implemented… As recruits enter more fully into the life of the group the language and messages change.” [iii]

I have described elsewhere an evening ritual after meditation that was orchestrated at the end of the Ashram Associate program for my cohort. In our highly-suggestible post-meditation state, within the shared circle of identity of the cohort, we were invited to ACT OUT a kind of reverence and submission toward the guru (see the end of The Roots of Control).

This is something I would NEVER have imagined myself going along with before I took up this method of meditation. I was not someone who had started down this path seeking a guru, nor a devotional relationship, much less SURRENDER. I barely remember the experience, which may be partly because of the twilight mental state (and literal darkness in that garden — it feels like a dream). But that may also be because it’s not consistent with my self-understanding, so I didn’t let it up to the surface. That whole cognitive dissonance thing.

I guess that was my generation’s version of the bait-and-switch that the guru’s early students had experienced regarding the role of the teacher.

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

At the innermost layers of the onion, in my old group, the real world is not regarded as terribly real. This is not the highest reality; no, from the plane of enlightenment, where the guru presumably is and everyone else has been conditioned to want to be, this reality is no more real than a dream is to waking consciousness.

Perhaps it is more than coincidence that illusion plays such an important metaphysical role. It certainly plays an important practical one in the group.

​Consider Hannah Arendt’s concept that each layer in a totalitarian movement (or in my case, small, non-political cult) serves a double function. It protects the inner core from too much contact with the real world, from which they have grown disconnected and out of touch.

And it protects the outer layers from the weirdness at the heart of the onion. Including the truth underneath the mythology of the founder, and his less-than-morally-exemplary behavior.

Alexandra Stein puts it this way:  “the deeper you go toward the center of the system, the more distant from reality you become … The life and beliefs of the innermost circle are so extreme that the outer circles must be protected from it until they are ready and have moved through the intervening layers, becoming sufficiently conditioned along the way. On the other hand, the inner circle must also be protected from the reality that might burst their fictional bubble… the group employs secrecy and deception to maintain the separation between layers.” [iv]

At this point, I’d guess the long-timers still remaining at the ashram are so deeply embedded in the guru’s story of the world — and so far entrenched in betrayal blindness, if they’ve made it this long — that there’s little risk of their bubble being burst. They can hole up on their ashram, in their insular community, reinforcing these illusions for one another, until their dying days.
​
That is, as long as they push away knowledge of the people who have left and WHY they have really left.

So I suspect that in my old group, it was the guru himself, at the very heart of it all, who most needed to be buffered by his inner circle. Once he created that community, he was surrounded by devotees always. This meant he was never confronted by normal people without his most enthralled supporters there to reinforce his positive self-conception, and shield him from anything that might disturb it.
​
The books and retreats of my old group serve an important function for both sides. Stein explains, “Front groups allow rank-and-file members [ashram residents] to feel ‘normal’ as they have channels to interact with the outside world — although these interactions are rigidly scripted and controlled. They also present a benign face of the group to the outside world while nonetheless being a way in, a wide-open entry point into the no-exit lobster pot of the group.”

Any Way You Slice It

Any way you slice it, the onion structure of a high-control group reveals layers of conditioning and control.

In sum, “The attributes of the structure — its closed nature, the fluctuating hierarchy, the highly centralized, onion-like layers, the secrecy and deception, internal and external isolation, duplication, and endless motion — ensure power and control remains in the hands of the leader.” ~ Alexandra Stein [v]

The leader of my old meditation group has been dead for decades, yet thanks to this onion structure, he is still somehow calling the shots. The group continues to glorify him and cement the legacy of his teachings. No inconvenient truths about his dark deeds of the past — or their own complicity in manipulating people and information — will be allowed to change that.

I hope, though, that if the truth gets out more widely, fewer new people will get drawn in, unawares.
​

​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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
Seeking Safely … What I Found … What Is A High Control Group?

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] From The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, as quoted in Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[ii] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich (University of California Press, 2004).
[iii] Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.

I started writing online in January 2024, on the Medium blogging platform. After reflecting on that experience one year out, and realizing that having to sign up for a Medium account (albeit free) was a barrier to some readers who were interested, I decided to migrate all my posts here. I anticipate cross-posting going forward.  What's here, at a glance:

Disclaimer   About liability, copyright and so on. Applies to all articles.

I started blogging a year ago, on my 50th birthday. I was processing what were, to me, foundation-shaking new insights, about the founder of the meditation center I had been deeply involved with as a young adult, and the (culty) nature of that group.

Now on my 51st birthday, I take a step back to reflect on what I’ve learned from this process — and to consider what might come next.

In this post I take a look at distribution, who is reading (and how they are finding me), what readers are interested in, what I’ve learned about myself, and what I’m considering doing next. I would appreciate any feedback!
​

Distribution

Who did I envision serving as readers? Initially, just anyone who was interested in learning about high control groups, meditation malpractice, and savvy seeking.

Actually, The Savvy Seeker is what I initially titled this project for myself — it would have had that name if I had gone the route of a standalone blog, or figured out how to do that on Medium. But I didn’t want to get bogged down in mechanics. I wanted to jump right into writing.

After researching several platforms, I chose Medium because of its “discoverability.” It takes care of the search engine optimization side of things for the writer, drawing in people using search engines to research questions, when their questions relate to my content. Medium also has an established membership of readers who might take an interest in my pieces.

As I had more conversations with other people with ties to my old group, and then learned that some of them were finding my pieces helpful, that increasingly became an audience I was particularly thinking of and aiming to serve.

Each time I published a new piece, I shared links and blurbs on social media. I started with Facebook. Then I thought to start doing LinkedIn too. Most recently I’ve established a Blue Sky account and begun posting links to pieces there as well.

I have included article links in individual correspondence with some folks too. And let the congregation I serve know that I was writing and how they could read if interested. (I generally work on this stuff on my time off from church work, and have come to think of this writing and organizing related to my old group as my side quest. But it’s not unrelated to my ministry.)

One year on, I feel good about my choice of Medium. And it’s nice to be able to share via networks I have built over the years on social media.

Who Is Reading, and How Are They Finding Me?

It took me almost a year to get to 100 followers, and about a quarter as many subscribers.

Granted, my topic is a pretty niche one — at least, in terms of peoples’ perceptions of how relevant it is to them. I’m firmly convinced that *everyone* should be educated about high control groups, because they are ubiquitous. And almost everyone will be vulnerable at some point in their life, if the right group should intersect with them.

But you have to know something about these kinds of groups to even realize that that is the case. And most people know very little. You don’t know what you don’t know. You know?
​

[Note:  all of the below analysis is based on Medium, which is the sole place I published posts in my first year of blogging.]

My subscribers — who automatically receive an email with each new article I post — are a mix of congregants (current and past), people with ties to the (intentionally unnamed) meditation group I’ve primarily been writing about, friends from various parts of my life, and Medium members who are otherwise unknown to me.

Metrics for individual articles include a breakdown of traffic sources. Some stories skew more toward internal traffic, others toward external. So far, my stories are ranging from

• 27%-75% internal (people who are already paying members active in Medium’s eco-system)
• 30%-73% external (everyone else — people who have learned of the piece from me, including from subscribing to emails of my articles previously, or from a search engine, or when someone else shared it with them).

The external traffic further breaks down to include, in order from most to least (though on some articles the order is different):

1. Email (which I believe includes subscribers who click the link in the email to read it online), IM (chat/messenger apps), and direct (bookmarks / not traceable)
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Search engines (Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing etc.)

What it looks like for individual articles is search engines being the least common source of traffic when I first post, but then gaining over time as more people organically find the piece through poking around online. In some earlier articles, search engines are now the top source. Similarly, the portion of traffic that comes from external referral vs. internal on Medium typically increases over time.

Reader Interests

After the initial push when I published my first couple of pieces last January, the biggest jump in followers came in April. That’s when I wrote the most concrete, biographical pieces on my experiences with my old group — a before / during / after retrospective on moving out to work at the ashram / meditation center. (What I Wanted — What I Found — What I Lost) That last one — about what my group involvement ultimately cost me — got 50% more reads than the first two parts.
​

Notably, the most-read pieces overall are the ones related to adverse effects of meditation. Far and away my most read piece is Calming the Kundalini Fire (how I recovered from adverse effects), with The Shadow Side of Meditation & Mindfulness and Is This Normal? tying for a distant second. How I Was Primed, one of my earliest pieces, trails not too far behind in 3rd place.

Of course, the longer a piece has been up, the more reads and views it tends to accumulate. So the above list is tilted toward older pieces. Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher, one of my most recent pieces, has generated a lot of reads and views in a short time. I believe folks from my old group have shared amongst each other. Perhaps people with ties to other spiritual teachers have found it relevant too.

Readers have clapped, highlighted and commented on various articles. I appreciate the engagement and have tried to respond in a relatively timely way.

​Especially heartening to me has been feedback I have gotten from people who are processing the same discoveries I have been about my old group, and who have shared that my pieces have helped them better understand the group and their experience with it. In many cases, that article sharing has dovetailed with 1:1 phone and email conversations I’ve had with people.

There has also been an unexpected outcome of this online writing on unhealthy religion — and of a modest amount of sharing about it in the congregation I serve. (A key example is my sermon last summer on Cults, Control and YoUU, in which attendees used my top ten list of culty qualities to rate the cultyness of the church. Anyone can use the rating sheet I shared than — it can be found on the back of the 7–26–24 Order of Service, available on this page).
​

​That unexpected outcome is more people showing up at the church who have had controlling experiences — most often, in fundamentalist organized religion. Such folks, perhaps with a member-friend’s encouragement, arrive feeling hopeful that I, the minister, may understand because of my own familiarity with and concern about high control spirituality — and with the hope that they may have a different kind of experience, a positive, healing experience, in this church.

This makes me very happy. Because the needs people were trying to meet with their old group (before things went sour) are legitimate human needs that remain. And if the church I serve can be a good, *healthy* place for people to meet those needs — which I believe it can — well, we are serving our purpose in the community. We can be part of the healing for people who have been through church hurt.

(None of the above changes the caveat I give in my Medium bio that I am not here to convert anyone to my particular tradition, or to organized religion in general — truly, I’m not. You do you. Different strokes for different folks. But it’s good when there are a variety of healthy, life-giving options out there for growing spiritual roots and building community.)

What I’ve Learned About Me

I like writing. It helps me to integrate learning — especially when I am voraciously learning in a new area, as I have been with high control groups.

There are things about writing for reading — vs. writing for preaching and hearing — that I enjoy. (I also enjoy preaching. Each kind of sharing is its own thing with its own gifts. The mediums have different parameters which bring out creativity in different ways.)

Writing for a wider audience, beyond my congregation or even my particular tradition, feels balancing to me. It gives me a sense of purpose beyond my local church, and gives me another place to channel my “intense” energy (as one lay leader I respect has characterized me).

That is particularly helpful in times when I am at risk of getting ahead of lay leadership where I serve, wanting to move faster than they are ready to, or in directions that they aren’t ready to.

So, though it might be counter-intuitive to others, having this outlet with a wider audience is good for my longevity and effectiveness in my parish role. It makes me more patient and content here.

I especially like feeling useful. When I hear that my writing has made a difference to someone else, it makes all the time and effort feel worthwhile. I’ve had that feedback from a variety of people with different kinds of connections to me, and from strangers.
​

I also enjoy the visual aspect of Medium. Choosing images that deepen or complement the written content is satisfying to me. Making memes that bring a little levity to tough material is fun. Who knows, in the future I might even create a few more of my own custom images, like the cult continuum graphic I drew that debuted in Who Joins Cults?.

(I admire the work of David Hayward, who communicates powerfully about healthy and unhealthy religion via visual art. I lack his artistic talent. But I have ideas in my head inspired by the kind of stuff he does — the way an image can convey a concept succinctly — only for Eastern or New Age crowds more like my old group, rather than the ex-vangelical Christian crowd that are Hayward’s people.)

My years of writing sermons have made me a better writer. I notice that I gravitate to shorter sentences and plainer language, more than I used to. And from the get go, not just in the editing stage. Writing for Medium has further enhanced this. I’ve written for the eye with more white space, subheaders, quotes and bullets.

I have also learned that it is a relief to speak openly about experiences that, for so long, I held close to my chest. Let the sun shine in! It’s not only helpful to other people, it’s healing for me.

That’s a small number of words for a big impact, that piece about unstopping the dam of unspoken things. As I discovered with my therapist in the past year, I have too many things-I-had-to-hold-back on my chronology of life events. (Also, too many betrayals. It’s a wonder my ability to trust has survived as well as it has.)

I thank my colleague and one-time spiritual director, Mary Grigolia, for modeling this openness and the greater ease it brings into one’s life. All channels open.

On a nuts and bolts level, this article is my 27th published in a year’s time (not counting the disclaimer). So I’ve averaged more than 2 pieces per month. I have learned I can fit this into my life.

I wish I didn’t need to spend my days off and vacation time in order to write here, though. Multiple colleagues have made the case to me that this writing is *part* of my ministry and I could do it on church time. Perhaps I will a bit more in the future.

That said, I’m finding the learning and writing I’m doing on these topics more sustainable than the D.Min. coursework I was doing in fall 2023. The time spent may not be that different, but this project is driven by my own internal, intuitive process, not an external structure imposed by someone else. I can pace myself as feels right for me. (Or as I feel impelled — that’s really it.)

The structure had been part of the appeal of the D.Min. (Doctor of Ministry). But now that I have this platform, and a topic I am so passionate about that I can’t not do it, and a likely publisher if I decide to pursue a book at some point (perhaps when my sabbatical rolls around?) — well, I don’t need the D.Min. program.

I took a leave of absence from the doctoral program after I heard that fateful podcast in Dec. 2023, with allegations of criminal misconduct against the founder of my old group. I was dramatically reoriented in that moment.

It now seems unlikely to me I’ll ever return to the D.Min. program. I’m doing a doctorate’s worth of independent study on high control groups and related topics. The need for an outlet and for a certain kind of vocational growth is being met in this way.

I mentioned above what people have most read. What they have least read are the pieces that I actually most want folks to read, the prevention-oriented ones: Seeking Safely for spiritual seekers and Safely Teaching Meditation & Mindfulness, for those who teach and mentor.

​I have learned, once again, that my personal pull is toward prevention and building effective systems, building the world we dream of. If I pursue a book, it’ll likely be along those lines — not just another cult survivor memoir, but a guide to savvy seeking in the Wild, Wild West of our current spiritual landscape.

I also have creativity to give to experimenting toward the spiritual community of the future. The old model of church, the one we’ve known for decades, centuries, is slowly dying. Well actually, it’s dying faster as time goes on.

What will come next? I want to play with that. And that is what it is to me, play. Very real and not without effort, but full of joy and juice and buoyancy. Happily, I am able to do some of that in the congregation I serve.

What’s Next?

I have quite a few topics left on my running list of things to write about here. The ones that feel most immediate are:

• Beware the Mystic East — a catalogue of fallen gurus (the one from my old group is no anomaly… the pattern is stark!)
• Why Did He Do It? (explaining the founder of my old group, my best educated hypothesis about why and how he became a guru and cult leader, falling into the traps that so many of them do)
• Why They Stay — and Why I Forgive Them (explaining the long-timers who are sticking it out… this will have to be a series, as there is so much to say — a review, really, of the core models in the social science cult literature)
• What I Keep & What I Release (exploring where I am now in my deconstruction process… which I hope will be a useful model to others disaffiliating from my old group, or from similar groups — or for that matter from fundamentalist church — who are at an earlier point in the looooong process of unpacking what you absorbed, consciously choosing what to take forward and what not, and reclaiming agency)

I am also considering whether I might, in the future, like to write about other topics. Particularly related to chronic illness; after the consciousness-raising I’ve had from a stack of books read in the past 3–4 years, I have Things To Say. I have energy that could use a constructive outlet, as well as some life wisdom to share.
​
The chronic illness topic actually ties back to my cultic experience. My sensitive nervous system fared poorly in that socially dangerous environment, leaving a lasting imprint on me physiologically.

However. I’m torn between my desire to continue shedding light on topics that were previously off the table for me, which includes chronic illness. Torn between that desire, and my inherently private nature — particularly when it comes to what congregants might know about me… and how those things can play out in family systems… it is SO FRAUGHT.

​I probably won’t go beyond the vague admission here, and if I do it would probably be behind a Medium members-only paywall.

If you’re curious, the books I’m referring to are, in the order I read them:

• Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn;
• The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke;
• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon; and
• The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir by Sarah Ramey.

There is also a small part of me that occasionally feels like opining about trends in my particular faith tradition or organized religion in general. I have the impulse to share and cross fertilize ideas in an area that one rubric of ministry labels leading-the-faith-into-the-future…. like the joyful juicy experimentation with programs and ways of connecting people.

I’m curious to know whether YOU, dear reader, would be interested in any of the above topics — more high control group topics, the light and shadows of meditation, chronic illness, and/or the future of church (from my particular, Unitarian Universalist minister’s, perspective). If there are specific topics under those themes that you’d particularly like to read about, please let me know!

There are also some ways of publishing online that I might try for the first time in future. Publishing in (Medium) publications is a possibility. In this past year, I have just wanted to get my writing out there, and keep it free, as I got going on the cult stuff. But I know that publications might help stuff reach more people, so it may be worth taking some time to explore that.

The other thing I’m considering is publishing in member-only ways… besides publications on Medium (which I believe are mostly members-only access), I could also put some articles behind a paywall when I publish directly.
​
For cult and meditation-related stuff, I anticipate sticking with free articles. But I’ll consider this for other topics. After all, Baby Bear’s college fund is sitting there, waiting for contributions.

Relatedly, it has crossed my mind that I could create my own publication [within Medium], to separate the savvy seeking stuff (like what I’ve been writing so far) from any new territory I might venture into. Because people following or subscribing so far may only be interested in the sort of thing I’ve been writing so far.

And/or, I could cross-publish the spirituality-related pieces on my ministry web site. Weebly surely has a blog feature.  [If you are reading here, you know it does, and I have!]

So many options…

I welcome any feedback from readers — on what you’d be interested to read about, and/or how you would like to access it. You can chime in via the comments here, email me, etc.

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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Seeking Safely … What’s A High Control Group? … The Accidental Buddhist

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Millions of U.S. Americans have been involved in cultic groups, with ~500,000 belonging to high control groups at any one time, and something like 85,000 entering and leaving cultic groups each year.[i]
​

​These numbers are likely underestimates. That’s because people are often unaware of the nature of such a group while they are in it. Plus, once they become aware (if they do), group-instilled fears and societal stigma may deter people from naming their cultic involvement as such.[ii]

The point is, getting involved with a high demand group is a common occurrence. Sticking with Americans for comparison, a similar number of people are likely involved with culty groups each year as the number of people who experience a stroke.[iii]

Having gotten engulfed in a high demand group, how — and why — does a person get out?

Opting Out

The most common way people exit cults is by leaving on their own.
These Walkouts, as they are sometimes called, may realize that something is off with the group, without having enough knowledge about high control groups to realize that they were in one. That describes me and the group I left in 2006. In that way, I was typical.

Janja Lalich explains, “Some people leave the group … knowing only instinctively that for their emotional or physical survival they had to get out.”[iv] Check.
​
A person often reaches the limit of how many contradictions they can hold about the group while continuing to operate within it. They become “disillusioned, fed up, or burnt out, or they realize the cult is not what it said it was,” explains Margaret Singer.[v]

​In the early years of my old group — long before my time — the teacher encouraged students to believe they would reach enlightenment in twelve years, a typical expectation in spiritual settings in his homeland. Residents gradually increased their sitting time until they were meditating four hours per day.[vi]

Yet, no one attained samadhi. Twelve years came and went, and little changed. Except, so slowly it wasn’t noticed, an escalating level of dependence cultivated by the teacher.

The teacher — who never outright said he was illumined himself, though it was everywhere implied and assumed — eventually modified expectations. In the West, he now said, it would likely take them more like 25 years to reach enlightenment.
​
Later, the goal posts were moved again, to 50 years. Finally, the teacher began to convey that it could take lifetimes — and his true students would return for as many lifetimes as it took to reach the goal.

The carrot held out by the ashram would forever dangle just ahead of them, never to be obtained.

When accusations of sexual impropriety by the founder emerged, a group of his early students could no longer repress their doubts or suspend their disbelief. After fifteen devoted years at the ashram, a dozen people left.

They all cited the same reason. The founder had become stifling. “He degenerated from a teacher to a father figure they neither needed nor wanted, and ultimately evolved into a guru whose authority was not to be questioned.”[vii]

Fizzling Out

If a group’s core charismatic figure disappears from the scene, participation may fizzle out.

The leader may choose to leave the group. (Cult leadership can get boring after a decade or two.)[viii] He or she may be convicted of a crime and jailed or deported. Mutinous ex-followers may kick him out of the community. Or, like the founder of my old group, the leader may die.

Some explanation will have to be made for this departure. Whether the leader left voluntarily, was jailed, faced a coup, or perished, the community will need a story to make meaning of this turn of events.

In a group where all allegiance flowed to the leader — and all power ultimately flowed from him — his disappearance is a major destabilizing force. Some groups don’t make it.

My old group was in this stage when I moved cross-country to work for them. For years I chalked up much of the confusion and dysfunction I witnessed (and experienced) there to a haze of grief and disorientation. I now understand there was much more to the story. But that was a piece of it.
​
They have made it several more decades. An early pronouncement that there would be no successor teachers — and the presence of the founder’s widow as heir-apparent — prevented a struggle for rights of succession. There would be no factions, no split, and no large-scale drifting apart.

By the time the widow died, remaining true believers had articulated a series of principles the group would follow to ensure it remained true to the founder’s blueprint. A friend jokingly calls this The Purity Wars.

I suspect the group’s increasing rigidity in retreats and teachings alienated more than a few people who had started coming closer to the group’s orbit — and decided, instead, to back away while still on the outer perimeter.

While there is no named successor to take the place of the founder, just a legal entity and its board, this simply means that soft power prevailed. And thus, those who effectively use soft power have positioned themselves at the top of the hierarchical culture, which continues on.

Some groups simply dissolve and disperse after the core charismatic figure is gone, in however short or long a time.

Though my group has continued on, I have heard about individuals who chose to leave once the teacher was no longer there in the flesh. I suspect some, at least, have gone looking for sources of charismatic authority elsewhere, to replace the lost supply. I have heard stories of several who wound up in other groups with enthralling teachers.

Back in my old group, the remaining true believers may well be following a pattern that is not uncommon in Eastern religious groups when a cult leader dies — waiting for him to reincarnate so they can return to their former way of life, with him at the center.[ix]

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if the group meets “success” by worldly criteria. In the fullness of time, its purpose can still be met. If the few remaining true believers slowly die off, until no one is left, they can still sustain themselves with this story that all will be united again in cosmic time.

Dying Out

In other situations, it is not (only) the founder, but one or more followers in a high control group, who leave the group through death.

Cults whose violence risks, and sometimes takes, lives may be among the better-known examples of high control groups.
​

You’ve probably heard about the 1978 murder-suicide of almost a thousand people in Jonestown, British Guyana, at the behest of Jim Jones, founder of the Pentecostal-leaning People’s Temple. Almost the entire commune died from cyanide-poisoned fruit punch, or like Jones himself, gunshot.

I remember well coverage on Waco, Texas, in 1993. In a showdown between the feds and David Koresh at his Branch Davidian compound, he and eighty followers lost their lives. Government actors made poor decisions that contributed to the tragedy, but one cannot help but wonder why Koresh didn’t let his people go. It seems that cult leaders tend to prefer martyrdom to surrender.

Another headline-grabber was the apparent mass suicide, in 1997, by members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate in San Diego, California.
​

Another group with violent events in this same time period, though one I don’t recall hearing about then, was The Order of the Solar Temple (OTS). It was noteworthy for ritualistic murders and suicides of 69 people in Canada, Switzerland, and France in 1994 and 1995. A fringe New Age group, OTS members believed they were on earth to fulfill a cosmic mission. When the group self-destructed, two leaders talked about their desire for a “departure … even more spectacular” than in Waco.

These and other examples of headline cult news — with in-depth attention to Heaven’s Gate and the Democratic Worker’s Party — are explored in Bounded Choice, which endeavors to understand how true believers become motivated to take such drastic actions.[x]

Departure by death need not always be dramatic. In my old group, now 50-some years after the ashram’s founding, a number of long-time residents have met their natural death. This may be the ultimate exit for the remaining true believers there.
​

​And some of the tragic deaths that end cult members’ lives happen on a smaller scale. For example, 38-year-old Ian Thorson died in the Arizona desert after being ejected from Diamond Mountain University, a neo-Buddhist organization then led by Michael Roach. At this point in 2012, Thorson and his wife appeared to suffer from mental health issues and be mutually dangerous to each other.[xi]

​But a high control group does not invite scrutiny from law enforcement or mental health providers, not even when lives are at risk. A cult will always put organizational interests over those of individuals.

So at the behest of university trustees, instead the couple with a known history of domestic violence was — together! — banished from the community, with nowhere to go and no one to help them.

Thorson’s death was attributed to dehydration. But it reads to me like it might more accurately be described as the result of being squeezed out from the group, as soon as he became more liability than resource to the organization.[xii]

Which brings us to those who leave because they are …

Squeezed Out

A high control group always places its own needs first, above those of individual participants. Anyone who is deemed as a threat to the organization — or fails to contribute enough time, money, obeisance, or prestige to the group — may simply be pushed out.

These Castaways, as they are sometimes called in the cult literature, may struggle with guilt and shame, taking at face value the rationale given for their ejection — which is likely to blame them for not measuring up. Without sensitive support from someone who understands cultic dynamics, they may be gripped by grief and loneliness. They may even develop suicidal impulses.[xiii]

My old group provides several illustrations of different ways people can be squeezed out.

There was one troubling incident related to my group that I learned about when I researched them online, before moving there. A long-time ashram resident had been arrested, while traveling, for indecent solicitation of a child — a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl.

The group treated this as an aberration completely unrelated to the community’s culture. They responded by banning the offender from the ashram.

​When I learned about this illegal and immoral behavior, I had heard no other concerns tied to the ashram. So, to my later regret, I accepted the organization’s explanation that this was one bad apple, not reflective of the group’s ethics.

This man had strayed badly from the founder’s teachings, they said. I now believe that this student was actually repeating behaviors of the founder. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as the expression goes. The relevant point here is that the group had to kick out the person who had so publicly offended, who might besmirch their reputation.

More recently, since people have begun learning about gutting allegations against the founder — and his own transgressions with females at the ashram, including adolescents — those who ask questions or express concern have been squeezed out.

A woman — I’ll call her Theresa — had been living at the commune for some years. She loyally participated in its lifestyle of spiritual practices, group meals and so on. When Theresa learned about the allegations, she took them very seriously. She personally knew one of the victims and believed what she had conveyed about her experience as a young teen.

Before long, ashram leaders asked Theresa to meet with them. They informed her that she was being “relieved of kitchen duties.” (The implication — she was impure and should not touch their food. You can’t make this stuff up!)
​
Theresa suggested to them that they were deliberately shunning her in hopes that she would choose to leave. The leaders did not deny this. Instead, they piled on — accusing Theresa of dishonoring their spiritual practice, their beloved teacher and so on.

​A student of nonviolence, Theresa clung to the truth as she understood it in that situation. She told the leaders that she cared about them, and that how they are responding is not spiritual and only reinforces the concerns that people have.

The kicker: the leaders did not show any sign of caring. Theresa shared that they “just nodded at me like I was full of [crap].” She went on, “I wished them both well and then told them the meeting felt really creepy to me.”
​
(Theresa also tried to find out, while in the process of moving out, if she could still meditate in the group’s meditation hall. The response that came back was, “Only [teacher’s] students may meditate [there]” — meaning, not Theresa anymore! She gently asked to have this guidance put in writing. But the leader, looking nervous, declined and scooted away.)

People in not-so-inner circles have also been cut off — without notice.

When they learned of concerns about the founder, members of a nearby meditation group affiliated with the ashram started discussing them together. The simple act of reading materials, trying to understand what is true and considering together what to do, was evidently reported back to the ashram by someone tied to the group who also works for the organization. That person indicated she and her spouse would not remain in the group unless it decided to continue working strictly with teachings of the ashram, its founder and spiritual program.

Only one person in the group (other than the employee) had any contact directly with an ashram representative. In the course of a brief phone conversation — basically friendly chit chat after addressing a practical question — this person mentioned she was aware of some controversy going on at the ashram. The representative flatly denied anything was happening that was affecting ashram folks at all, and he promptly ended the call.

Soon after, the caller discovered she had been omitted from a special mailing that she normally would have received; it appeared she had been dropped from a circle she’d previously been part of, simply for having used the word “controversy.”

Subsequently, the entire local group — with one traveling member now back in the area — concluded their discussion about the allegations. They made the decision to disaffiliate from the ashram, and turn to other spiritual resources.
This was shared with the person in the group who worked for the organization, for her own decision-making. No other contact took place with the ashram.

A week later, many members of the group (now minus the employee and spouse) were left out of a mailing about upcoming retreats. Some stopped receiving print publications or emails they routinely received from the meditation center before, too. It appears a number of changes were made to the meditation center’s contact lists, reducing or eliminating communication for some group members — though on what basis is not entirely clear.

This is nothing new for the organization. People who left in an 80s exodus were more overtly shunned, when they would later come across ashram residents in town. Loyalists would cross to the other side of the street to avoid the the defectors, averting their eyes. So much for family-like bonds.

Shunning is a serious issue in high-control groups. It is “a silent form of bullying and rejection.” Psychology tell us that “the brain registers exclusion as physical pain that cuts deeper and lasts longer than bodily injury.” For innately social creatures like human beings, shunning can cause long-term mental health difficulties.[xiv]

Counseled Out [xv]

​The other way people may leave a controlling group is through an intervention. Just as loved ones may gather around a person to express concerns about drinking, drug use, or hoarding, they can observe how group involvement has negatively affected a person, and ask them to learn and reflect on this.

An intervention is typically arranged by family members who are working with a team of professionals, or at least an exit counselor — someone experienced in educating group members and their families about cultic dynamics and the methods of influence they systematically use.

The aim is to provide factual information about the specific group, how such groups work in general, and to provide a safe, supportive space apart from the controlling group where the member can re-evaluate their involvement.

The presence of someone else who has successfully left the group can be extremely helpful as “proof of life” after cult involvement. Groups often implant fears about what happens to those who leave, so a counter-example can be freeing.
​

​There was a time when some interventions were conducted without the person’s consent. That was a response to some groups’ increased vigilance against letting members out of their grip even temporarily, lest they be presented — and choose to take — the opportunity to engage in an educational process and reassessment of their membership.
​
If coercion is the very thing you want to combat, you should not use it yourself. Forcibly removing someone from what they consider their home and family can cause trauma, no matter how well intended.

Fortunately newer, cooperative ways of working with members and families have been developed. A mutually-agreed process of learning and consultation has now long been the standard for exit counseling.

While a small percentage of people leave cultic groups this way, it is a valuable option for friends and family concerned about a loved one.

The Official Story

In its telling of its own history, a group can choose to acknowledge former members — or not.

If it does acknowledge them, it can offer its own story about why they left. One former member — who I now understand to have been a sexual abuse victim of the founder — was sometimes written off as having been mentally unbalanced, and having to leave the group on that account.

Trusting meditators, of course, might not think to ask which came first — the group involvement or the mental illness.

It seems quite likely to me now that, like someone in a violent domestic relationship, it was the situation that was crazy-making — not the person who was, on her own, off-balance. Sexual and spiritual abuse by your supposed spiritual teacher, and institutional betrayal by the community you had considered your family, would do a number on anyone.

Some past walkouts from my group were described by long-timers who stayed as simply not committed enough to stick with it. In other words, if there was any fault to be found, it would be attributed to those who left, not to the group.

​I suspect for others of us who came and went — many in my cohort of young adults — that pattern was publicly chalked up to being “on a family path,” in contrast to the monastic lifestyle that became the norm at the ashram.

(Notably, it hadn’t originally been the norm — many of the founder’s first generation students had families and raised children at the commune. The founder probably felt he couldn’t get around at least some among original young adult students — the critical mass that made it possible to establish the ashram — having that inescapable desire. But that first generation certainly steered later ones away from doing likewise there. For more on the control of sexuality, including reproduction, see The Roots of Control.)

Mostly, I don’t remember my group talking about those who had come and gone in the past. Official publications barely acknowledge this fact. Explanations would only be offered if asked. Thus, silence on the subject of past members may be the norm.

If I had known, prior to moving out there, how many people had come and gone before me, I would’ve asked a lot of questions about that before making my own decision.

So, omissions that are part of a cult’s deception are not just about the teacher(s) or group and its history. The (deliberately) missing information is also about past participants.

Upshot

Most people opt out of cults — walking away when they realize something’s not right, or that the group isn’t delivering on its promises.
Others fizzle out when the leader is gone and a group disintegrates.

Some members are squeezed out, while yet others remain members until they die — be it a natural death at the end of a long life, or a premature one in which the cult had a hand.

Finally, a few have the opportunity of a supportive intervention, and manage to wake up and choose to leave at that time.

If you are in a group, and considering any kind of change that would put you significantly more in the group’s field of influence, I will give you the advice I wish someone had give me before I took such a step:

Find out who has already come and gone, and how, and why.

And don’t just take the group’s word for it. Look for neutral third-party sources, or better yet, locate and ask the ex-members themselves.

The only way to know for sure what led people to leave a group — and what they experienced while they were in it — is to ask them directly.

​Endnotes

[i] Per Michael Langone, former executive director of the International Cultic Studies Association, in Prevalence, accessed 1–2–25.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] According to Stroke Facts from the Centers for Disease Control, accessed 1–2–25, almost 800,000 people per year experience a stroke.
[iv] Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships by Janja Lalich (1994, 2006, 2023).
[v] Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace by Margaret Thaler Singer (1995, 2003).
[vi] The events I’m recapping here are described in a news feature published by a California newspaper, chronicling events from the mid-80s: “A Split at the Razor’s Edge” by John Hubner, San Jose Mercury News (April 30, 1989; accessible to subscribers of the newspaper).
[vii] Ibid. Ironically, I understand it was ashram officials who had taken the initiative to invite this coverage — perhaps having expected they could shape the story consistent with their own aims.
[viii] The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad (1993).
[ix] Take Back Your Life, Lalich.
[x] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich (2004).
[xi] “Psychosis, Stabbing, Secrecy & Death at a Neo-Buddhist University in Arizona” by Matthew Remski, in Elephant Journal (May 4, 2012). Accessed 1–2–25 at https://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/05/psychosis-stabbing-secrecy-and-death-at-a-neo-buddhist-university-in-arizona/.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Take Back Your Life, Lalich.
[xiv] “How Religious Shunning Ruins Lives” by Fern Schumer Chapman, 3–27–24, Psychology Today (article online here).
[xv] This section draws from two previously cited works — Lalich, Take Back Your Life and Singer, Cults In Our Midst.

When one learns how commonplace cultish behavior is among humans, it can make a person feel a bit … guarded. Over the past year, as I’ve come to see my old meditation group in a new light, that’s really been brought home to me.
​
I have literally had dreams about creating a cult-proofing curriculum for young people. Similar to programs on healthy individual relationships, training on healthy vs. unhealthy group dynamics ought to be available and used in mainstream religious organizations, high schools and colleges.

Let’s start with what kind of group we are talking about, before getting into how to know what you are looking at.

Defining The Cult-iverse

My group happened to be spiritual in nature (Eastern / syncretic). But high control dynamics can develop in almost any human institution or arena. Such groups can be religious, political, therapeutic, or even commercial. Spiritual ones can be Christian, Eastern, New Age, etc.

They are often seen as existing on a continuum of influence and control. As depicted in the continuum below (debuted in Who Joins Cults), the early, mild stages of influence may seem quite positive — group experiences that make you feel good and want to come back for more.

Potential harm increases as you move down the continuum of cultiness. Tongue in cheek, these are my stages:

• “Wait, is this love bombing?”
• “Perfection, here I come”
• “Leader, I’m not worthy!”
• Beware of Zombies
• Crime Zone
• Resistance Is Futile (borg cube — you WILL be assimilated, and perhaps disposed of at the will of the hive leader)

​

​At one end of the continuum are nearly benign groups. No one seems to put a 100% benign group on the continuum. But add a shade or two of omission and coercive influence, and you are getting into concerning territory.

At the other extreme are groups that so fully indoctrinate their members — and so rationalize their actions based on their particular transcendent ideology — that they may routinely engage in criminal behavior, or end in a blaze of violence.

On the Continuum

The word “cult” is often reserved for those at the extremes.Since “cult” has become associated with sensationalized cases and media coverage, people may be more likely to automatically dismiss the possibility that they could be vulnerable to recruitment, when the subject is cults.

But keep in mind that cultishness comes in many degrees and flavors. And even groups that end in apocalyptic imagery — think the Jonestown massacre — didn’t necessarily start out sounding nutso. (Jim Jones first drew people through his charismatic preaching on community responsibility and the imperative of racial integration. What’s not to like?)

More descriptive, neutral-sounding synonyms for cults are high control groups or high demand groups.

These groups do not (necessarily) overtly mistreat people in the way that prisoners of war in totalistic systems may be treated — literally imprisoned, like in Robert Jay Lifton’s classic study of “brainwashing” in China. (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China by Robert Jay Lifton, 1961)

Instead, the kind of influence they wield over people is subtle — at least at the beginning. And influence or pressure is increased gradually, once people are hooked on the belonging and other benefits.

​Depending on the particular group and how deeply involved a person gets, their experience could be purely positive… a mix (there is always some good, otherwise people would not be attracted and stick with it)… mildly damaging… or deeply harmful.

Keep in mind that for some people in some groups, it takes many years before any negative effects are observed. One can also experience harm without realizing it; participants may be taught to interpret negative effects as positive signs of their progress, for example, or simply to deny them.

It is common, too, for people at different levels of closeness to the same group — or who are involved at different points in time — to have different kinds of experiences.

Once you understand that almost anyone can be hooked by a controlling group at some point in their life — especially those who believe themselves to be invulnerable — it’s natural to want to protect yourself and those you love from potential harm.
​
The needs that drive people to seek and explore do not go away; so how does one go about trying to meet valid needs, while managing the risks of culty close encounters?

What to Watch For

Following are some of the characteristics of high control groups often found on lists. If you are considering whether a group with which you are involved — or considering getting involved — might be controlling, you can check off any criteria that sound like the group, as you go through this list.

• Espouses high ideals; attract people who are spiritually hungry or want to make a difference, who seek belonging, or who are dissatisfied with mainstream culture.
• Usually replicate family-like bonds among participants. The closer into the inner circle you get, the tighter the bonds. But even those on the outside may be attracted by this experience of warm community.

• Inside language is taught and used. Sharing the lingo may contribute to people feeling a sense of belonging and specialness. Group jargon and slogans can short circuit critical thinking, as well, constricting how members think and talk.​
• Single-minded about spreading the teachings to more and more people — bringing in new participants (and funds), whether via print or digital communications, in-person experiences, or online experiences.
• Creation of controlled environments, whether on a temporary basis during instruction (e.g., camps or retreats) or full-time, living together in groups such as in a shared home, ashram or compound.
• Zealous commitment to the leader/founder, whether alive or dead; his teachings and practices are regarded as Truth, as law; she may be regarded not simply as a teacher but as an object of veneration; others may seem incapable of exercising their own judgment, but rather always cite the founder’s teachings/example to make decisions.

(Note that the zeal can be directed instead to the group’s ideology; the absence of an elevated teacher does not guarantee that a group is free from cultic dynamics.)
​

• Questioning and dissent are discouraged, whether overtly or subtly.
• All good things a person has gained from their involvement are attributed to the leader / group / practice / higher power. All problems are assigned to the individual practitioner. Likewise, at the societal level, the group’s program is regarded as the root solution to all problems.
• Dependence is cultivated — people become progressively more dependent on the group the longer they are involved or the closer they come. This dependence may be emotional (group meets connection needs), spiritual (group provides foundation for one’s spirituality), financial (a resident may not be able to make it outside), etc.
• Leadership dictates how people should behave; this may flow from the teachings/practices, with greater degrees of control exerted as one moves closer in.
• Impression management — the leader/founder’s or group’s image is carefully developed and protected. Lying by omission is common, as are other forms of deception. Triangulation (indirect communication), shunning of ex-members, minimizing concerns, and questioning of others’ motives are also common.
• Lack of informed consent. A person does not know at the outset where their involvement with the group could take them in time — where it is designed to take at least some of those who get involved. People are carefully paced through the group’s process of learning the teachings and practices, imbibing the belief system, building relationships within the community, and devoting more and more of their lives to the teachings / organization.
• Authoritarian style of leadership. The leader or a cabal at the top makes the real decisions, whatever the org chart might say. Genuine democracy is antithetical to cults. Ditto for true transparency. The chief virtue of followers is unquestioning loyalty.

• The leader/founder or successors are not accountable to any external authorities (unlike clergy in mainstream denominations, teachers, licensed mental health professionals, etc.). Misconduct of various kinds by leaders of such groups is common. This includes sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and other abuses of power.

While the above list is geared toward spiritual or self-help oriented groups, core attributes will show up in other kinds of high demand groups too.

Is a group a high control group if it only checks a few boxes? Not necessarily.
Many religious groups have charismatic leaders, attract idealistic people who are seeking belonging, and may use language not used in secular society.
​
These things alone do not make a group cultish. But if indoctrination, isolation, and emotional contagion are used systematically to trap people in the group and control their behavior — generally for the glory of a particular leader, ideology or goal — well, beware. You have entered the continuum!

Interested in more resources on how to identify a high control group? Matthew Remski provides a good summary of the most widely known frameworks.

For more on how cults camouflage their true nature, check out Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance and Surprises, Blinders & Lies.

An earlier, 3-part series describes ways that controlling groups have similar dynamics to 1:1 controlling relationships, drawing on my experience with my old meditation group: Power & Control in Collectives — Reading Between the Power Moves — The Roots of Control.

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Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

I started going through this process myself about a year ago, and during this time, have had many conversations with others with ties to the same organization. I share some ideas here in case any of them are helpful to others. But first, a couple of caveats.

Caveat 1: I’m not a psychologist or a social worker. I do have some life experience and professional background that informs what I’ll share, and have been kinda obsessed with learning about exposed gurus, high control groups, recovery and the like over the past year.

However, I’m still in the midst of my own processing. And I don’t pretend that my understanding or ideas will serve everyone else who might find themselves in a similar position. (See disclaimer.)

I invite you to add any of your own insights or suggestions in the comments, if you are so moved.

Caveat 2: Each person’s process — and pace — may be different.

Absorbing and adjusting to stunning new information about a significant figure in one’s spiritual life is not a one-and-done event. It is an ongoing process.
It may stretch over months, or years — just as the process of integrating the practices, community, and zeitgeist of your group into your life and being was likely a long, gradual process.

That said, following are a series of principles I offer for your consideration. In practice, all of these realms intertwine; adapting is an iterative and holistic process, not a linear one made up of discrete steps.

Befriend Your Feelings

The new information about the leader / teacher, and its implications, are likely to generate a great variety of feelings in you. Emotions are a normal, healthy, human response to our experiences.

No feeling is bad. And no feeling is final.
​

​Whether you prefer talking aloud to others, or writing in a journal, putting words to your feelings can help you recognize and accept what you are going through. It may also help your loved ones to understand how big of a deal the new revelations are.
​
My previous post, All the Feels, is an example of naming feelings (mine). That post includes a handful of feeling wheels. You may find one or more of these feeling wheels useful as tools for exploring your own emotions.

Another one I like, the Emotion-Sensation wheel, helps make connections between what is happening in your brain and what is happening in your body. If you find it easier to notice your physical symptoms than to zero in on your thoughts and feelings, this wheel may be helpful.

Having trouble accepting all of your feelings as okay? In the first couple of years after I left my job at the ashram and moved back to my previous life, a book that helped me a great deal was Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Brach had been through a betrayal by a spiritual teacher earlier in her life. Hmmm.) She has some guided meditations online that promote this kind of radical acceptance of oneself and one’s feelings.

Seek Support

If you have a long or deep association with the fallen teacher / group / practice, you will need support to work through this upending of your inner world.

A friend or partner who is a good, nonjudgmental listener may be helpful. While you are feeling tender, this is probably not the best time to bring in that pal who was skeptical of your spiritual group all along; “I told you so” vibes may only add to your feeling of vulnerability. Who from your life do you trust as a caring witness?

There’s nothing quite like talking with other peers who share the same spiritual practice and affiliation. They can “get it” like no one else can. (Not that everyone will have identical reactions.) If you have a local or online practice group, can you connect with those folks, either altogether, or 1:1? Or perhaps you know people from retreats that you could reach out to.

A therapist can also be an indispensable partner in your processing. My therapist has gotten an earful from me over the past year. She is a consummate listener; she doesn’t even have to say much for me to feel seen and validated.
​
My therapist has also seen how my involvement with this group/practice, and the wrenching new revelations, fits in with the rest of my life history and post-traumatic growth.

It may help your therapist help you if they are familiar with betrayal trauma.

Better still if they know something about high control groups. Most therapists have not received education on such groups as part of their training. This article from Shelly Rosen, likening experiences with such groups/leaders to natural disasters, can be shared with your mental health provider. Mine found it helpful.

To the extent that other people associated with my old group have formed a strong attachment to the founder/teacher, they may experience some degree of betrayal trauma in relation to the teacher proving unworthy of the trust they’ve given him.

Separately, they may experience betrayal by the institution. The meditation center has, so far, remained in adamant denial of any possible misdeed by the founder, despite multiple credible allegations. The organization’s failure to act with integrity, when confronted about his misconduct, constitutes an additional betrayal.

For anyone who had much of a relationship with the teacher (live or spiritual-psychological), and with the community that has offered programs and built relationships in his name, such betrayals are substantial. You need and deserve support as you deal with them.

What About My Practice?

This is an area for ongoing discernment for each person. There’s no one right answer.

(That is, assuming that the practices one has carried on are harmless at worst. Sometimes the devil is in the details of how one implements a particular discipline — and that can be tweaked, if desired.)

I found myself leery of meditation and other practices associated with my group, after I learned about the serious allegations against its founder (summarized in previous post).

Ironically, the disorientation the new information prompted in me led me to want the steadying power of my old practices. But after sitting down to meditate several times without being able to actually get the peace I craved — my mind would just spin around on the new learnings, feelings, and questions I had — I realized I couldn’t force it.

Anyway, there are many other things I can do to regulate my emotions and my nervous system — which I did instead. Walking in nature, taking it all in with my senses, is my favorite of all self-regulating activities. Good for body, mind and spirit. And working on myself with massage balls, doing self-myofascial release on a yoga mat, has become a go-to as well.
​

At later points, I have come back to meditation and other practices. More when it welled up instinctively in me, reaching for a familiar tool, than when I made a conscious choice to do it.
​
For me it has been important to choose any practice for my own reasons, and to do it on my own terms — including how, how long, and how often I meditate. When I do them, I am motivated by the benefits I directly experience in doing my old group’s method of meditation, or other practices.

But I think it’s equally legit to choose to forego any of the practices indefinitely, while doing the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual work brought up by the new knowledge of the teacher and group. One can always pick back up with a practice later.

One person mentioned to me that yoga and pouring himself into music have been his go-to activities lately, instead of meditation. He has recognized what will best meet his needs for centering and emotional processing right now. The old method of meditation is too fraught to be that thing for him right now — and perhaps he’ll never choose it again.

I know some people affiliated with my old group who have chosen to stick with their spiritual practices. The only thing they have changed is to stop reading the teacher’s writings or listening to his recorded talks; they favor original sources for inspirational material (e.g., reading the Upanishads or the Dhammapada), rather than commentaries or other teachings by the meditation center’s founder. They still largely follow the program of spiritual practices he outlined; but they no longer consider him their spiritual teacher.

Others have pursued new spiritual practices, finding that the long-used methods had ceased to help them meet their goals, even before they learned about the teacher’s past transgressions. That new knowledge has helped them feel freer now to try something else.

All of these choices and more are available to a person who is integrating new information about the founder/group, and reassessing their relationship to all of it.

You might even make one choice now, and a different choice later. What feels right for you?

Making Sense of It

I remember when I left my job at the ashram and moved back “home” years ago. I had a LOT to process from my journey with the group.

But I wondered if this was self-indulgent somehow. Was I just navel-gazing if I spent time writing or talking about those experiences? I even confessed to one of my fellow meditator YAs, who had left after I did, “at times I wondered if this was a rather narcissistic exercise … the hours I spent on it.”
​

​My best friend — who had been through A LOT of therapy herself, and was better for it — said something very wise to me. It helped me then, and it has come back to me many times since. “It’s important to make sense of your experience,” she observed.
​
And indeed, that was exactly what prompted me to reflect and chew on my California year. I needed to understand what I had been through. I needed to find words for what I’d felt. And I wanted explanations for why the community had behaved the way it did. I didn’t want confusion to be my final feeling.
​
I had written a five-page email explaining my experience, after my last day of work. This was after a friend from my cohort of young adult meditators, who was considering making a cross-country move to be closer, asked me why I was leaving. Was there anything he should know? he wondered. I’m so glad I wrote to him, instinctively, while it was fresh.

A year and a half later, when I was safely re-established in my old city, returned to my old career and my long-time friends, choir and church community — and having the sense of groundedness, again at last, that having bought a house can bring — I was ready for a deeper dive.

At that time (16 years ago to the day as I type this), I wrote a “letter” to the then-head of the meditation center; I’ll call her Katarina. One of the reasons I wrote, as I told her, was that “I believe naming these things will help me to integrate my experiences and continue to grow spiritually.”

My “letter” to Katarina turned into an almost 60-page missive. There are sections on my path to that community, on what I experienced in the year I spent working there, on the “inscrutable ashram” (yep yep, inscrutable, though I did my best as an applied sociologist to make a case study of it), and on my “stabilization and realignment” (how I made my way forward after leaving).

If the depth of my processing and the length of my writing were a good indication (and I believe they were), my friend had been quite right — it was important for me to make sense of my experiences!

​I started that tome with stating the things about which I felt gratitude — what I had learned from that community that I would carry forward with me.
That felt kind of compulsory, as I recall. Partly, in order to be heard in the ashram’s culture of conspicuous humility and bubbling gratitude; if I didn’t demonstrate appreciation first, she might not be open to what I had to say next.
​
Partly, it was simply that those values and behaviors were still so internalized in me that it was second nature for me to start with an extensive write-up expressing my gratitude. Otherwise, I would have felt myself to be selfishly unappreciative.

Those dynamics aside, I suspect something like the gratitude list IS an important piece for many people in a time of integration or reassessment. It’s a cognitive and emotional part of the process of sorting through the meaning of one’s experiences. No one wants to feel their time was simply wasted. (And it rarely is.)

If you are now in a similar period of taking stock, you might ask yourself — for what am I grateful? What do I choose to keep? What is of lasting value to me from this set of experiences?

I did put that “letter” to Katarina in the mail. I hoped that it might be helpful to the community she led, to understand what one person experienced there and why I ultimately left. Perhaps, I thought, it would help them make their community more effective in the future.

(You see how my pure, trusting heart survived my dark-year-of-the-soul there, intact?! Nothing changed, alas. From what others have shared, it seems the organization became only more rigid and unhealthy as the years rolled on. But I was still operating with a generous spirit and best-case thinking then — ever holding out hope for them.)

Katarina wasn’t capable of really hearing what I shared. I hadn’t asked for any response beyond acknowledgment that she had received it.

She did answer me, though. She suggested I must have misunderstood the support structures the community had created for its new YA employees. It wasn’t paternalism. Oh, no. If I had communicated more clearly, they would have helped me. She said she hoped that I might draw closer to the organization again some day.

I remember reading her response in bewilderment. Um, did you read what I so painstakingly wrote, Katarina? I mean, I was not unkind, but I described some really deep problems that I found not only confounding, but fundamentally unhealthy. For anyone, but certainly, for me. How could you think I would ever come back to that? Not happening.

So my heartfelt reflection did not appear to have been received in a constructive way by the organization. They couldn’t really hear it. (Hmm, feels familiar.)

But it had served its purpose as part of my own integration and moving forward. Indeed, it was important to make sense of my experience. And for me, writing has always been one of the most effective ways to do that.

I would go through later cycles of revisiting my experiences with that community, and seeing new layers of meaning in it. Particularly, when I was in theological school.

But until recently, I was missing a critical insight. The new information that has emerged about the founder has finally allowed me to understand more fully the nature of the organization. And that, in turn, has released me more fully to move forward in my own spirituality and vocation.

If you are in a similar time of reckoning, what kinds of activities, what modes of expression, help you to process emotionally, to sort things out cognitively, to integrate past experiences and allow your understanding to evolve?

Such activities might include talking, prose, or poetry… music, collage, or painting… or ___ [ your thing here ] ___ .

If your mind works in images, but you don’t like to make art yourself, you might try working with something like Soul Cards. The cards feature evocative imagery by artist Deborah Koff-Chapin.

I have both sets, and I find them a good way to listen for my deepest self / intuitive mind / image-oriented part of me. They come with a variety of suggestions for use. I choose one or a few that speak to me and live with them for a while. They have proved meaningful to others in small group spiritual direction. This might be a way to listen to your inner child or your inner teacher as you are processing your feelings around your old group, and discerning what is next for you.

Seeking Safely

For anyone who no longer considers an old group’s founder as their spiritual teacher, or the program as their (exclusive) program, the world is your oyster.

​It’s also a bit of a wild, wild West of teachers, groups and programs promising spiritual growth, personal development, healing and so on — with plenty of grifters and opportunists mixed in with sincere folks.

The internet has created new ways of connecting — YouTube, for example, is crowded with self-proclaimed teachers, coaches, channelers, and shamans. And there are still plenty of brick-and-mortar retreat centers out there too.

If you decide to explore new teachers / programs / groups, I encourage you to be intentional about seeking safely, to avoid having a problematic experience (again) in the future. Alas, it is not uncommon for a person to leave one group that turned out to have been manipulative or dishonest, only to end up in another one. As the proverb goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I shared some suggestions for safe seeking here. If you have additional suggestions, I welcome you to mention them in the comments.

What Are Local Groups Doing?

A lot of people with ties to my old meditation center participate(d) weekly in a local meditation group. Some even had retreats put on in their area periodically.

I’m aware of a number of local meditation groups that have grappled with the shocking allegations about the founder, and the organization’s non-response to it. Almost all of the ones I have heard about have eventually decided to disaffiliate from the organization, due to its failure to take credible allegations seriously and act accordingly.

Some of those groups are dissolving; individuals are making their own decisions about their meditation practices.

Other local meditation groups have decided to keep meeting, but change up what inspirational material they are working with together. They are taking the focus off of the old meditation teacher.

One group in New York has even created a new regional collaboration, and is offering their first retreat (online) this month. They aim to continue providing spiritual support and companionship to participants, just no longer focused on the old meditation center and its teacher.

Online study groups have a similar choice of whether to disband or simply change focus, drawing on materials beyond the old founder-teacher.

In the resources section that follows, I mention some books and other materials that may be of interest to either individuals or groups who are broadening their source material.

Resources

Looking for SPIRITUAL READING for yourself or a group? Here are some suggestions:

Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Spiritual Wholeness by Marsha Sinetar. I don’t remember how I came across this book. But I read it after I left my ashram job, as I was integrating what I’d experienced there and seeking my own path, with a greater sense of freedom and self-trust. I have re-read it several times. Part of why I put this title at the top of this list as that it encourages people to find their own way — there is no one-size-fits-all program for spiritual growth or living.

I also loved some autobiographical stuff I read: those of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork), Karen Armstrong (post-ashram, I read The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, she has two earlier ones also), and as I’ve mentioned already, Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, which draws from painful personal experience and held important messages for me in my recovery.

I had previously read Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, which a friend from my former local meditation group had recommended to me. (I think I ordered it from the foundation created by friends of Peace Pilgrim, https://www.peacepilgrim.org/ … probably also available used.)

All four of these have in common that they were by and about women. That felt especially important to me, for reasons I understand more fully now! The first three were also people who had flawed teachers and who found their own way forward.

A few other random thoughts:

• David Whyte’s writings, such as Consolations, might meet a group well. Consolations has short entries of a few pages on different terms. Whyte also writes poetry. To me he has a spiritual sensibility about him. I don’t remember a specific tradition.
• John O’Donohue is a Celtic Christian writer with books of both moving, lyrical prose and blessings or written meditations.
• Several books of Quaker writer Parker Palmer have spoken to me too, including Let Your Life Speak.
• Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters. Toward a healthy, mature spirituality.

Want to learn about HIGH CONTROL GROUPS, and inoculate yourself against future manipulation?

Many of my online pieces address this:

• High control group primer: Who Joins Cults — What Is A High Control Group — Leaving A High Control Group
• How cults keep their true nature hidden:  Hidden Levers & Dissolving Dissonance — Surprises, Blinders & Lies
• This 3-part series traces parallels between 1:1 abusive relationships and high control groups: Power & Control in Collectives — Reading Between the Power Moves — The Roots of Control
• Chronicling my experience in THAT group (other groups are likely to have parallels to this journey): What I Wanted — What I Found — What I Lost — My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong

Book suggestions:

• Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich — best general introduction, accessible and practical, from a sociologist and cult survivor. (Interesting tidbit: rumor has it the original publisher of this book had ties to my same group, decades ago — and that was the motivation for publishing it.) This helped me start to identify controlling elements in my group’s modus operandus.

• ​Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse: A Workbook for Recovery and Growth by Gillie Jenkinson. By a psychotherapist in the UK who has specialized for decades in supporting people who’ve had these kinds of experiences. Can be used on one’s own, or in conjunction with therapy.

 

• The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad. It’s so good. And so very relevant to my old group. Topics include: authority, hierarchy, and power; the seductions of surrender; gurus and sexual manipulation; the traps of being a guru; healing crippled self-trust; oneness, enlightenment, and the mystical experience. Helped me understand why scandal, particularly sex scandals, are so commonplace among gurus, why the guru-student model is inherently fraught, and why rebuilding self-trust is the key to healing from such an environment. This could be a very potent conversation-starter for a group — IF members are open to major deconstruction.

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• When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura E. Anderson. Written from the perspective of a recovered Christian fundamentalist-turned-trauma-therapist. There’s a lot that carries over to Eastern or other spiritual settings too. She brings in the latest understandings about the nervous system and how trauma, including religious or spiritual trauma, affects us. Emotionally intelligent and accessibly written.

Podcasts — There are many podcasts out there on high control groups aka cults. The ones I have listened to the most are:
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• IndoctriNation, hosted by therapist Rachel Bernstein, who has focused on survivors of high control groups for 30-some years, and has seen it all. She is a superb listener to her guests and the most sensitive, supportive, informative host for listeners who have had their own brush with controlling groups. On YouTube or wherever you get audio podcasts.

 

• A Little Bit Culty, hosted by a pair of amiable actors who are survivors of the ‘human potential’ group and in-the-inner-circle sex cult NXIVM (sounds like Nexium). I haven’t liked every episode I’ve heard, but there’s a lot of good stuff — including good high control group 101 episodes in the first season or two, like interviews with Janja Lalich, Daniel Shaw, and Alexandra Stein. The two-part Eckhart Tolle interview in Season 5 on The Ego Trap was thought-provoking to me re: where the founder of my old group may have gone off the rails.

 

• Conspirituality, hosted by three journalist guys, including two-time cult survivor Matthew Remski. They cover New Age cults, wellness grifters, conspiracy spreaders, and other stuff at the intersection of cons and spirituality. This is where, on a bonus episode, I first heard the criminal allegations against the founder of my old meditation group. The podcast and their book of the same name trace how pseudoscience, New Age ideas, the wellness industry, and rightwing extremism converged during COVID — leading to widespread vaccine hesitancy — and are continuing to create strange bedfellows, and infiltrate U.S. politics.

 

• Speaking of Cults, hosted by ex-Scientologist Chris Shelton, is also good.

Lastly, SUPPORT GROUPS & WEBINARS for survivors of high control environments.

These may be most helpful for people who have been in deep (such as living or working at the ashram). Although one can be psychologically “in deep” even from a geographic distance. Some resources on my radar:

• The Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, founded by Janja Lalich, a sociologist specializing in cults, and herself the survivor of a political high-control group.
• Rachel Bernstein is a therapist in L.A. who has focused largely on cult survivors for 3 decades. She has a Zoom-based support group for survivors of coercion that meets on Wednesdays.
• Another resource from Rachel is recorded webinars/videos that you can access for a modest fee. Living In Freedom
• Other resources listed for survivors via the International Cultic Studies Association: Support Groups — Counseling Resources — Articles & Books

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​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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The End of Silence … A Spiral Season … How I Was Primed

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

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.

I cocked my head away from my computer screen, rubbing my sock feet together for warmth in the cold dampness of a Bay Area morning. Leaning toward the thin trailer wall that separated my office from my co-worker’s, I listened intently. Was she…? Yes, Madelyn (I’ll call her) was crying again. The sound was muffled but unmistakable.

Should I try to connect with her after lunch? I had made overtures of support before, offering a hug or a listening ear. But to no avail.
​
So I could only guess what she might be struggling with: some old grief welling up — perhaps the very grief that had made this place seem to her like a haven, from afar? The loneliness of life at the ashram, which was in equal measure insular, and yet also lacking in genuine emotional intimacy? The accumulated frustration of trying to figure out how to accomplish something in her job, in the opaque culture of this community?

​The memory is frozen, the questions still unanswered for me almost twenty years later. Because Madelyn, it seems, learned to do something that I ultimately did not want to do: to turn her attention away from the feelings that troubled her, and as we’d been taught, lean into a spiritual practice instead.

Perhaps she mantramed her way through it. Or maybe she used the powers of concentration she had honed through years of meditation, and focused her attention back on some work task, as the untended tears dried on her face.

She certainly would not have done what I sometimes did when struggling through my dark year of the soul there — console myself with a sweet treat. No, sense training had never seemed like a challenge for my waifish peer. She was adept at self-denial.

Sidestepping Reality

Instinctively, my young adult self at that meditation center knew that feelings provide information. And that to cut oneself off from difficult feelings would be to cut oneself off also from important insight — from the very reality of one’s own experience.

When a person pushes away reality, they may well end up living in illusion.
I didn’t have this vocabulary then, but now I recognize that I witnessed a good deal of spiritual bypassing at that ashram.

Psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing to refer to a frequent phenomenon in spiritual spaces. It means

using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” [i]

My old group promotes the use of a sacred phrase, or holy name, throughout the day. With enough repetition, the phrase becomes embedded deep in one’s psyche. The goal was to do it so often, for so long, that eventually it would go on repeating itself in the mind effortlessly.

Such a practice appears in many different religious traditions, and I have no bone to pick with it generally. However, I believe it can be misused.

If the holy name is repeated to displace difficult emotions — instead of actually feeling them, and finding out what they have to teach you — the practice becomes a method for spiritual bypassing.

My old group did advocate repeating this kind of sacred phrase as a way to cope with strong emotions, such as jealousy or anger. Retreat leaders assured students that was not about suppressing emotions.

Instead, they said, practitioners would *transform* difficult emotions through this discipline. What could that even mean — transform them into what?

Granted, sometimes we need to pace ourselves to metabolize strong feelings. If a person uses their mantram just long enough to get grounded again, so they can then genuinely experience and deal with their emotions, well, I can see the utility in that.

But I suspect that Madelyn — and many of her role models at the ashram — are just as apt to use spiritual disciplines to perpetually avoid “negative” things.

To avoid grief, to skirt around cognitive dissonance, to veer away from anger that actually needs to be heard… to divert the mind from unwelcome questions, to postpone maturation of various kinds… suppress, suppress, suppress.

Avert Thine Eyes!

The current de facto leader of the group has gone all in on spiritual bypassing. In response to a series of credible allegations of wrongdoing by their founder, she is coaching meditators to push away information that might make cracks appear in their image of the organization and its founder.

She urges them, instead, to focus on maintaining the purity of their consciousness.

The chart below popped up on my social media feed recently. It captures very well the approach the leadership of my old group is taking.
​

​My old organization’s message to meditators is something like: Avoid exposure to ‘baseless rumors’ that could cause you turmoil; just do your practice and keep your mind steady.

In other words, nothing to see here. Keep Calm and Meditate On.

The organization appears to be largely ignoring sincere questions and concerns expressed by long-time practitioners who *have* reviewed the allegations.

Emails simply go unanswered. Except perhaps by the silent repetitions of sacred words in leaders’ minds. Rama rama rama rama…

Something’s Rotten in Denmark

When an institution works to silence questions and maintain the status quo, even in the face of legitimate concerns, that tells me that something is broken in the institution.

It’s a common enough pattern, sadly. I was sensitized to it as I completed seminary and started out as a congregational minister.

My tradition was then going through a time of reckoning over ministerial misconduct, and the long-term harm it does not only to individuals who are targeted, but to whole communities whose ability to trust leaders is damaged.

Shortly after I accepted my first call to serve a congregation, a major address at the national level powerfully broke silence on this issue. (The speech is not available from the sponsor organization Because Threat of Lawsuits, but it can be accessed from the speaker herself here.)

The upshot: secrecy harms individuals and groups, while honesty is the beginning of healing. Let’s get real, people.

“The [group’s] growth as religious people began by telling a secret. It continued with an analysis of power that our faith calls shared ministry — the priesthood and prophethood of all in covenant.” ~ Gail S. Seavey [ii]

​There had been voices crying in the wilderness for years. But a critical mass seemed finally to have been reached — in no small part, I believe, because of the preponderance of women now in the ministry in my tradition.

It has been a period of breaking silences, clarifying codes of conduct, making training in healthy boundaries a core part of professional development, strengthening systems of accountability, and increasing transparency about all of it. It remains a work in progress.

These are the kinds of things my old meditation group needs to do, if they are sincere about serving people. Start with the truth. Apologize to those harmed. Ask what will help them heal. Then, if the organization is to continue, get to work on building preventive systems.

Alas, so far, my old group’s leaders seem bent on staying in denial. They’ve been telling their story a particular way for decades, and they’re sticking to it.

The Sound of Silence

Another of my colleagues, whose ministry began in the early 2000s, wrote powerfully from her own experience of the dynamics of silence. As Erika was on the verge of being deemed ready to serve — but before she had passed that major milestone — a senior colleague propositioned her.

This mentor had all the power in the relationship. Including the ability, if he so chose, to derail her nascent vocation. Erika could hardly believe what was happening. She froze.
​
What cut even deeper was the silence of the system. For while one faithful female colleague, when taken into confidence, protected Erika, the man who misused his position was largely, quietly, shielded from accountability.

“When silence becomes a living character in our personal narratives, it’s often an accomplice to power.” ~ Erika Hewitt [iii]

Gosh, that tale sounds familiar.

In the stories I’ve heard about the founder of my old meditation group, the real kicker for victim-survivors was that the ashram community, who revered this man, largely did not — would not — believe them.

Instead, those who stayed have been complicit in the silence. Complicit in letting the harsh truth fade into obscurity within the larger mythology of the group.

So it wasn’t just one person, the supposedly most enlightened person, who betrayed the victim-survivors. In the end it was the whole community of those who participated in the silence-keeping.

And for as long as they continue to deny the truth — to perpetrate their own Big Lie — the organization fails everyone they purport to serve.

A Turning Tide?

Now, more people once affiliated with the group are learning about the allegations. Person by person and city by city, the extended community of meditators are considering the evidence and consulting our consciences.

Almost everyone who reviews the information finds the allegations credible, the pattern un-ignorable. Most are deciding that we will not be part of an organization more committed to maintaining its illusions than to caring for real people.

We will not be secret keepers, or truth deniers. No. This is where the silence ends.

Perhaps, as in the community Gail Seavey served, this is also where the spiritual growth deepens.
​

​​If you’ve had your own journey with spiritual bypassing — or with breaking oppressive silence — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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.

Up next… probably a piece that’s been brewing about All The Feelings I and others I know have cycled through, upon realizing that A) our meditation teacher did Very Bad Things and B) it was (is) a high-control group. Expect at least one feeling wheel.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The Shadow Side of Meditation & Mindfulness … How Cults Are Concealed

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

[ii] 2016 Berry Street Essay by Gail S. Seavey, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, presented at UUA General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, in June 2016. Essay available in writing and via video at https://www.gailseavey.com/2016-berry-street-lecture. Response available at https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/2016-response-to-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-david-pyle/.
​
[iii] “The Dynamics of Silence” by Erika Hewitt, in Braver/Wiser, November 15, 2017. Available at https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/dynamics-silence.

Say you have benefited from a spiritual practice. Now you want to share this goodness with others — perhaps even make it your vocation, at least in part.

But, say you also want to avoid common errors that can undermine your good intentions. You want to steer clear of meditation malpractice, and reduce the chances that those you support will end up experiencing adverse effects, instead of (just) the good stuff.

If this is you, what can you do to help ensure that your actual impact reflects your best intentions?

I offer the following tips for teachers, drawing on my experience as an ordained spiritual leader, survivor of a meditation-based high control group, and as one who has been through the fire of bizarre suffering stemming from my meditation practice, and made my own way to stabilization and integration.
​

​Understand That You Are Treading on Sacred Ground

People explore contemplative practices for all sorts of reasons. Calming emotional turbulence. Following a vague spiritual longing. Seeking greater peace. Finding social support. Moving through grief. Improving focus. Gaining healthy detachment. Reaching for a connection to something greater. However well or poorly recognized, people turn to meditation to meet specific need(s).

Any person you work with as a teacher of spiritual practices may be vulnerable in some way. In addition to the specific goals they may have for their practice, they may carry childhood trauma with them, or more recent betrayals.

Into their experience of meditation — and their relationship with you — each person comes as a whole being, with their particular identities, their histories, their hurts, their hopes.

​The medical model can provide some useful insights for meditation pedagogy. And secular frameworks may be right for some people or some settings.

Yet, mindfulness and meditation engage with the whole person: body, heart, mind and spirit. Such practices, sooner or later, may raise existential questions inside practitioners. About who they are. What life is. How to make sense of their experiences. What is the point of this human be-ing.

The trust people place in you as a guide is precious and fragile. How will you earn that trust? How will you remain worthy of it over the course of a teaching relationship?

A good place to start is by remembering that you tread on sacred ground. Take it seriously. Pledge to first, do no harm. Consider how you will stay clear on these First Things of teaching.

              “Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.”
                                          ~ Howard Thurman

Empower Others

If your commitment is first and foremost to the well-being of the people you teach, then your baseline aim with every student — regardless of what brings them to you — is to empower them. There can be no lasting growth without this.

​Empowering people is the opposite of creating dependence. Empowered students learn to know themselves, to trust themselves, and to do what is right for themselves.

How does an empowering teacher behave? Consider these DOs and DON’Ts.

DOs:
1. DO coach and model listening to the teacher within

2. DO use open-ended language and check your hunches with others (favor dialogue as a communication method, including when trouble-shooting)

3. DO invite students to listen to their own bodies, feelings, and reasoning, and to share their observations

4. DO believe this personal testimony — real experience trumps theory

5. DO encourage adaptation of practices to meet individual needs and circumstances

6. DO offer resources and options that the student can consider

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

8. DO respect the needs and goals that drive participants’ interest — there is no one right or best reason to do the practice(s)

9. DO be mindful of group dynamics such as people-pleasing and social contagion

10. DO take a balanced approach to recognizing the potential benefits — and drawbacks — of the method(s) you teach

DON’Ts:
1. DON’T assume that one size fits all

2. DON’T withhold important information about the group or practice

3. DON’T mold them in your own image, or that of anyone else

4. DON’T “correct” students when they use their own words instead of group jargon

5. DON’T reward “good” students with your attention and punish “difficult” students by withdrawing your time or regard
​
6. DON’T make individuals’ belonging in the practice group contingent upon conforming to rigid expectations

7. DON’T, under any circumstances, instill shame or use shame to generate compliance

8. DON’T discourage people from doing their own due diligence

9. DON’T reflexively just tell people to dig in and do the practice more — or assume they must be doing something wrong — when they encounter difficulties

10. DON’T treat meditation/mindfulness as a panacea

What would you add to your list of DOs and DON’Ts, based on your own experience as a practitioner and teacher?

Know Your Limits

No matter how long you have been teaching, you are a regular human. You do not have to be all-knowing; you do not have to be perfect; no one can be.

Learn about your own shadow side. There are many ways to do this.

If you journal, what shadow material comes up there? What insight have friends and family offered you about yourself? (If you haven’t asked, now’s your chance.) Working with a mental health professional is another way to zero in on your growing edges.

​Do you know your enneagram type? This can be helpful for understanding your own motivations, insecurities and blind spots.

Do you know your Myers-Briggs type? It reflects cognitive functions favored by different people for processing information, making decisions, and connecting with people. What strengths and challenges are common for people with your preferences?

These are just some of the resources that may support you in knowing yourself and functioning at your best with others.

Hone your practice of self-differentiation. This means being firmly grounded in your own values and personhood, so that others’ anxious or insecure behavior will not influence you (as much). When you are differentiated, you are able to stay connected to other people without absorbing their thoughts and feelings — or needing them to share yours.

Relatedly, be aware that projection can occur with anyone, including students. And to the extent that others relate to you as an authority figure (even unconsciously), transference might pop up too. You don’t have to be and do everything people want from you. And you need not take responsibility for that which is not yours — in fact, you shouldn’t.

The upshot? You can’t control how other people behave, including how they interpret what you say or do. But you can improve your own self-understanding and your own functioning within the relationship. You can effectively stay connected to others, while remaining grounded in your own beliefs and values, and respecting other people’s.

Get Trained on Safety & Support

You should be familiar with adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness, ways to reduce the chances of them occurring, and how to respond supportively when you or your students do experience them.

Doing so will not undercut your effort to bring the benefits of meditation to others; on the contrary, it will help maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

Are you getting rigorous, unbiased information about these topics through the program or tradition with which you are associated? If not, you should take it upon yourself to find external resources. (You can also encourage your program to beef up their training for the future.)

This may all sound a bit abstract. So let me share one concrete, useful thing that researchers have come to understand: many of the same mechanisms that account for the benefits people receive also account for some of the problems that can occur. As it turns out, the inverted U-shaped curve that scientists encounter regularly applies to meditation and mindfulness programs as well.
Researcher Willoughby Britton puts it this way:

“everything has an optimal level beyond which you … start to get trade-offs or negative effects… That’s true of any physiological process or psychological process… so [mindfulness] is just like everything else” in that way. [i]

Some examples: [ii]

• Concentration practices improve executive functioning and downregulate emotions — helping bring you back from strong emotion to a steadier state. However, if you “overtrain your cortical limbic system” you may end up with neither negative emotions, nor positive ones. I recall one heartbreaking example I heard, of a parent who no longer felt love for their child as a result of this dynamic; they were just going through the motions of parenting.
• Contemplative practices can help one achieve equanimity, able to accept feelings as they are, or see thoughts as passing weather systems. This may feel better than getting hooked by thoughts or feelings that are unpleasant. But if you have “learned to systematically disregard emotions and thoughts” that provides “fertile ground for gaslighting.”
• Training your attention can be calming, as mental clutter falls away. However, if you overdo it, it can lead to panic. If you keep going, “eventually your system can only get so aroused before you either end up in the emergency room, because you haven’t gotten sleep for a week” or your body shuts down and you dissociate.
• Detachment from emotions can help you get a healthy distance. But pushed too far, the practice may lead to a person no longer feeling like they are in their body. They might feel like they are far away from everyone and everything, isolated and separate.

If you get sound training, and adapt your practices accordingly, you should be able to avoid making common mistakes that increase the risk of harm to students of meditation and mindfulness.

Cheetah House is a non-profit, science-based organization offering training on a variety of topics relating to safety and support. They also provide professional consultation to teachers and teaching organizations focused on meditation and mindfulness. There are lots of free resources on their web site too.
Know of other good resources? Please share details in the comments.

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

The role of teaching contemplative practices in medical, secular, or non-church contexts is a relatively new one in countries like the United States. Anyone can throw up a shingle (or a web site) and declare themselves a meditation teacher.

This contrasts sharply with more established fields of service. Longstanding religious traditions, at their best, provide significant infrastructure to support the effectiveness of religious communities and those that serve them. Similarly, governments regulate fields like law, medicine, counseling, education, and social work.

​Wherever people are vulnerable and need to know if they can trust a provider to put their needs first, resources like these prove valuable:

• Training systems that equip people to take on a professional role — degree programs, apprenticeship models, credentialing processes
• Mentoring relationships and networks of peers
• Codes of Conduct and systems of accountability
• Continuing education, including training and support for professional ethics and healthy boundaries, as well as keeping up with new needs and evolving knowledge in the field

Look for these kinds of professional resources for meditation teachers, and make the most of them. If they don’t exist yet, support their creation. Everyone will be better off.

Make No Idols

Want to avoid inadvertently slipping into insularity, rigidness, and aggrandizement of a particular practice or person? If you abide by the DOs and DON’Ts above, that will take you a long way toward that goal.

Alas, it is all too human for a group or program to start out healthy, and slowly slide into cultish-ness over time. In a more decentralized arena like the mindfulness movement, this might seem less likely than in a religious context, or one with a clear leader and hierarchical structure.

But mindfulness groups are far from immune to cultic dynamics. As mindfulness practitioner and researcher Willoughby Britton observes, “often the systems are set up to not allow people to do whatever they want; there is a right goal, there’s a right way to do things, certainly no allowance for criticizing the system.” [iii]

Beware of treating meditation and mindfulness as the solution to every problem. Watch out for too-high goals like perfect peace or unending detachment. Don’t put anyone, or anything, on a pedestal.

Absolutely welcome the benefits that spiritual practices can offer, and celebrate when they happen. But never put practices above people and their real experiences and needs.

In sum:

• understand that you are treading on sacred ground
• empower others
• know your limits
• get trained on safety and support
• embrace professionalization
• make no idols

So long as what you are doing helps people to gain deeper trust in themselves — rather than making them dependent on a person, program, or ideology outside of them — you will be sharing the treasures of meditation with them in good faith.
​

​For more about how groups behave when they become unhealthy, check out What Is A High Control Group?

Did I miss something important in this article? Please chime in to share your perspective or resource in the comments.

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.

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[ii] Ibid. All references in this post are to those two podcast episodes.
[iii] Ibid.

Yet, there are serious problems with the way meditation has spread. In a field that is newer — and which some governments, like mine in the freedom-of-religion U.S., are loathe to regulate — those who teach these practices are not systematically held accountable for doing so in responsible ways.
​
Financial pressures, social dynamics, and ideological commitments can further obscure the truth about various practices. Programs with a veneer of secularity can be just as susceptible to these pressures as overtly religious ones.

The result? People who turn to meditation looking for peace or better health sometimes end up experiencing, instead, a variety of adverse effects. These can range from moderate physiological and psychological problems clear through to psychotic breaks.

Undesired effects tend to be interpreted by teachers as positive signs, or downplayed, when they are talked about openly at all. And there is often little real support when they occur — as they predictably will, for some portion of practitioners. (I have elsewhere described my own dark night, and my recovery process.)

On top of all this, some opportunities to learn and practice meditation operate as doorways into high control groups. Vulnerable people may be drawn into deeper levels of involvement, where the risk of coercion and harm increases. Such teachers or groups will always present themselves as there to serve YOU — even when they will actually cannibalize your time, energy, money, reverence and idealism for their own benefit.

What can be done? Here, I offer suggestions for seekers.

Know Thyself

Reflect on what you are looking for, and how you would know if you found it — ideally, before you check out a new group or program. You might journal or talk to a friend, using prompts such as these:

1. What needs are you seeking to meet? Write or speak of the ones that are most top of mind for you. Next, it may be helpful to go through a list, such as the needs list here from the nonviolent communications model. Identify any more subtle needs that might well lead you to respond to a group or program that speaks to those needs.

2. What sources of authority do you find credible? For some people, direct experience or scientific study might be most credible. For others, a particular scriptural source or lineage provides assurance. What role does the testimony of others play for you? Peers or role models? Other sources of authority you rely upon?

It may be helpful to rank trusted sources in order of importance to you. Likewise, you can explore how you will evaluate the validity of each kind of authority that you trust. For example, if a particular program or group is promoted through science, how can you discern the independence of the researchers, the quality of study design, and the rigor of the analysis?

3. Identify your internal red flags. How do concerns or gut feelings show up in your mind or body? When has this internal warning system proven reliable for you before — accurately telling you whether a person, group, or activity is problematic for you? If this is an area you want/need to strengthen, you can ask a friend, therapist or other trusted person to be your gut-check buddy.

​4. What do you believe to be the appropriate role of a teacher or leader? Explore this on paper, or with a friend. If you are later exposed to other ideas of how a teacher or leader should function in relation to you, you’ll have a baseline to return to for comparison. This doesn’t mean you can never change your mind. But you’ll be less likely to shift your understanding imperceptibly, without even realizing it, and without pondering the implications.

Thinking through these core questions early on in your engagement with a practice or group is akin to getting a vaccine — it primes your system to recognize what is foreign or dangerous to you, and be ready to respond swiftly and effectively if/when that happens.

Use Your Guardrails

As you get involved — or get more deeply involved — with a particular meditation group, practice or program, observe how it functions, and how it is (or isn’t) working for you.

Periodically reflect on what you witness, and how it fits with your inner compass:
Is this group/program meeting the needs you originally set out to meet? Has it made you aware of any other needs that you now realize you have? What keeps you coming back? (see needs list)

What sources of authority does the group/program draw upon in support of its approach? How does this square with those sources of authority that you find credible? Is there any gap between what is officially communicated vs. what is actually practiced? Are you reoriented toward particular sources of authority over time?

Is anything tripping your inner warning system? Keep a record of any such instances. Pay attention to any patterns. Do NOT dismiss your spidey sense.
Reflecting on these questions is like giving yourself a booster shot against groups or practices that would be unhealthy for you. It’s a good idea to do it annually, just like you might for the flu.

Do Some Digging

Ask teaching individuals or entities questions like these:

1 — What should I know before I take up this practice?

2 — What kind of training have you received to teach it?

3 — What adverse effects may arise as a result of this practice? (Are there side effects, beyond the results you are aiming for, that a practitioner might find concerning or that might negatively impact their daily functioning? What are they? How can I reduce the risk of that happening?)

4 — Are there any people who would be better suited to a different practice? If so, what are the criteria for determining that?

5 — What kind of training do you have to support people who do experience adverse effects?

6 — Who would you turn to for support if you realized you were out of your depth in a particular situation?

7 — What systems of accountability are in place in this tradition or for this practice?

There should be real answers to these questions.
​​

​​In addition to the substance of the answers, pay attention to how the questions are received. Does the teacher or organizational representative respond with warmth and thoughtfulness? Do they become irritated or flustered? Do they deflect, or blow you off?

Does the person seem aware of their own limits? Do they exhibit humility — are they able to say, “I don’t know, but I have some ideas of where I would go to find out”?

You can also do some digging online. Web sites like Charity Navigator provide some organizational accountability metrics — you can see how your group scores on things like the independence of its governing board, and reviews or audits of its financial statements.

Your favorite search engine is also your friend in research. See if anything noteworthy turns up when you combine the name of the organization, teacher, or meditation method with words like scandal, abuse, suicide, and misconduct. One bad review shouldn’t necessarily taint the whole enterprise, but if serious allegations arise — and especially if there’s a pattern — pay attention.

Gauge Group Health on Key Criteria

Go slowly, and watch for where the group or program falls in terms of its degree of health or risk. Along with whatever else seems noteworthy to you, following are some things to watch for. (A group could fall anywhere on the spectrum between each set of poles.)

Encourages OR discourages awareness of your own feelings, use of your own critical thinking, and trust in your own direct experience and judgment. This can be subtle. My old group instructed that “strong emotions create a false self” (from retreat notes), with the founder consistently teaching that you are not the body, you are not the mind, but the timeless Self within.

The metaphysics of being not (just) body or mind appealed to me at the time, but I see now how such teaching could be used on a practical level to encourage people to ignore what their own bodies and emotions tell them. Similarly, the idea that “every movement in the mind is insecurity,” also taught at that retreat, could easily be applied in ways that stifle legitimate questions and doubts.

Promotes reasonable goals VERSUS sky-high aspirations. Sometimes a group will emphasize practical benefits at first, but eventually shift the focus to much loftier — perhaps impossible — goals. Illumination, nirvana, perfect peace that never leaves you, the end of sorrow, the cessation of suffering.
​

​Mere mortals may get exhilarating glimpses of these, with or without a spiritual practice. But if someone coaxes you to believe that you must keep going until (and that you have failed unless) you abide in spiritual perfection — well, they are setting a trap for you that isn’t about what’s best for you. It’s about keeping you dependent on them.
​
Points to ponder VERSUS indoctrination. Are participants free to adopt only some of the teachings offered or practices taught, or must it all go together as a package? It’s helpful to be familiar with subtle forms of persuasion, social pressure, and positive or negative reinforcement that controlling groups use to guide people toward the correct behaviors, and by extension, the correct beliefs. (Here’s a brief primer on invisible levers of influence, and how cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved.)

Supports development of community in ways that affirm the whole person, VERSUS supports relationships only on the basis of the shared practice/doctrine/etc. — and conditional upon adhering to group culture. “Love-bombing” is a classic red flag for high control groups, but I think it can be hard to distinguish healthy from unhealthy groups based solely on the behaviors that welcome and affirm people. Almost all human social groups, including sound ones, will try to give participants a positive sense of community and caring as they get involved. (Why would one return otherwise?)

The trick with a controlling group is that positive attention is especially strong for newer people, and attention may become more scarce depending on whether the teacher/group is getting what they want from you, and has hope of getting more. If you waver in your compliance with the group’s belief system, spiritual practices, inside language and so on — or they discover you have little time, money, leadership to give to the group — a problematic group will get stingier with its attention to you. They may become cooler when you do connect.

One clue as to the group’s real relational bent is how the group speaks of people who have come and gone from their orbit. Do they trust that each person will find the right path for them — meaning, people who left simply discerned for themselves that this wasn’t the best fit for them? Or do group representatives indicate, however blatantly or subtly, that anyone who left THIS path is to be pitied (bless their hearts)?

Some groups actively shun ex-members, and speak ill of them to current members. Others barely speak of such people at all, as if they didn’t exist. My old meditation group literally air-brushed former ashram members out of photos after the first big exodus. Interesting choice, eh?

Has a balanced approach toward ego, encouraging healthy humility, along with self-acceptance and self-love VERSUS cultivating self-abnegation, and a humility that may be either performative, or so sincerely extreme as to undermine self-worth and well-being. Other points from my group’s retreats illustrate this one: “humiliation helps dissolve ego”; “if you are agitated, a samskara is involved” (samskara = a well-established way of thinking/being, generally pointing to patterns like anger, fear, and greed, which the group regards as negative; the root of all samskaras was said to be ego).

Actually, humiliation is NEVER constructive. Humiliation is a form of social-psychological violence. And one can be agitated for very good reasons, that need to be recognized and acted upon — such as being mistreated by a person or group.

Permeability VERSUS purity and policing boundaries. A healthy group/teacher/program acknowledges that there are many sources of wisdom in the world, and that it does not have a monopoly on spiritual treasure. It does not try to control whether or how people engage with other practices or other inspirational materials.

At the other extreme, a cultish group will guide people toward exclusive loyalty to its particular teacher / teachings. It will concern itself much with maintaining the purity of its own programs. It may not even trust its own leaders to lead, without falling back on the words or example of its founder(s).

To what degree does a group or program function as an open system, interconnected with a wider web of wisdom, vs. a closed system, that has all the answers unto itself — and even sees the outside as a distraction or a threat?

Light and limber VERSUS tight and rigid. A healthy organization may be serious about its mindfulness mission, but it will also create a community in which joy, laughter, and authentic connection can flourish. Spirituality need not be the enemy of fun!
​
If you realize that you are overly constrained by the group — or by the norms you have internalized, and which you especially know to follow when together — that’s a red flag. One way this might show up is by feeling more free, more able to breathe deep and be spontaneously yourself, when you leave a retreat or sangha session and return to your own safe space.

It can also be telling to compare long-timers with newer folks. And not just the ones that the organization selects to represent the program to newcomers in retreats and workshops — those are likely to be polished people who can smile and chat winningly over meals or down time.

Instead, if you have the chance to get to know people who have been involved for years, and who are *not* presenters or teachers, their demeanor may tell you more about the heart of the organization. It’s a bad sign when people become more colorless and zombie-like the longer they are involved, or the closer to the inner circle they get.
​

Transparency and truthfulness VERSUS opaqueness and deception. Is the practice secular or religious? (Personally, when it comes to claims that mindfulness programs are secular vs. patently or latently Buddhist, I consider a dose of skepticism healthy. More in The Accidental Buddhist.) Is the program genuinely inter-spiritual, or are all traditions filtered through the worldview of the founder’s tradition?

Is the group honest and forthcoming about the founder’s past, and the organization’s? Are they aware and up front about the risks of adverse effects associated with the practices they teach? What about priorities, finances, and decision-making structures? (If you haven’t already checked them out online, it doesn’t take long.)

This one can be tricky to suss out, because you only know what is shown to you, or what you can readily find. If it turns out that a teacher or group has omitted significant, problematic information from its story, that’s a big red flag. A healthy group can learn from its trials and tribulations, and share openly how it has grown as a result. Unless it is focused on perfection, and lifts up teacher(s) as examples of such, it will not need to cover up a one-off past lapse of its founder(s).

A classic culty behavior is not only to gloss over or suppress troubling information, but to tell followers that ignoring concerns is actually in their own best (spiritual) interests. Think about that, though. Can the truth ever be against a participant’s long-term, deepest interests? Certainly, investigating the truth could be threatening to a group — which would be telling.
​

​Real-world accountability VERSUS internal ethics alone. Another dimension of open vs. closed systems is structures of accountability.
​
Consider well-regulated fields like education, law, medicine, counseling and social work. These are open systems with healthy boundaries. Each has structures that provide such essential safeguards as credentialing processes, codes of conduct, continuing education, training specifically in ethics and boundaries, mentoring and peer support, bodies charged with intervening when a professional goes off the rails, and perhaps even resources to support those harmed.

Such structures and processes benefit professionals and their institutions, as well as those they serve. They are win-win.

Religious denominations may fulfill similar functions for clergy, other religious professionals, lay leaders and congregations. I have watched my own tradition — among the most radical to grow out of the Protestant Reformation — develop clearer boundary expectations for professionals, and more/better institutional support for misconduct victims, just over the past couple of decades.

However, even among many long-established traditions, prevention and accountability remain growing edges when it comes to misconduct by those in positions of authority. Surely every Catholic, Southern Baptist, and news-consuming American knows this by now.

Traditions that are hierarchical in their structure and culture may carry a particularly high risk of papering over problems, as the good old boys’ network lingers on. People in non-denominational churches are at higher risk still — there is not even the pretense of protective practices. Also at higher risk are those in cultures that place a high value on charisma and on traditional, alpha-male models of leadership.

It strikes me that many meditation retreat centers may be in a similar position to charismatic, nondenominational churches. The meditation center I once worked for certainly was (and still is, it appears). However egalitarian their messaging or philosophy, a group that lionizes certain teacher(s), evangelizes their meditation program, and lacks any higher or external authority beyond the center and its leader(s), is ripe for misconduct — and for cover-ups in the name of protecting the mission.

​The counter-argument would be that a true teacher — perhaps an illumined person — has all the moral compass that is needed inside, or from God. But a long string of guru scandals tells me that spiritual teachers of meditation and yoga are no more immune to the corruptions of power than have been the countless priests and pastors who have been exposed as wrongdoers in this century.

If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s time for meditation centers and groups to come together and develop the type of infrastructure that religious denominations at their best have provided. (If that *has* happened, I’d love to hear about it!)

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.

I will write separately for teachers or teaching organizations, with suggestions for those that want to maximize potential benefits, and reduce the risk of potential harms, that are associated with meditation and mindfulness practices. The question of external regulation deserves attention too.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How Was Meditation Mainstreamed? … The Accidental Buddhist

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

In recent posts, I’ve looked at

• HOW meditation and mindfulness have historically reached new audiences (religious roots have often been downplayed, with practices frequently taught in universalizing, Orientalist, and/or science-washed ways)
• WHAT the consequences have been for some converts to these practices (59 adverse effects in 9 domains that are distressing or functionally impairing), including my own dark night and my recovery, and
• WHY so many meditators have been unprepared for what they eventually experienced (thanks to lack of informed consent, lack of screening, lack of skilled support for those who suffer, promoting practices that increase risk, and deflecting responsibility away from practices/teachers)

​

​Streams of Influence

Let’s explore four overlapping reasons that the shadow side of meditation largely flies under the radar. The first two are specific to a U.S. context.

1 — American Religiosity

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Hence, a competitive marketplace of spirituality has been the norm since early in this nation’s history.
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The self-improvement culture of the country, its rugged individualism, and its waves of religious refugees have guaranteed that lots of people turn to religion or spirituality in their search for a good and meaningful life. Religious community is also one of the go-to balms for the excesses of individualism. We are a society of people seeking fulfillment, with a history of religious fervor — and weakened social safety nets, too.
​

​The Constitutional separation of church and state also means that the government treads lightly in the realm of religion. Religious groups can do a lot here, while being exempt from taxes, and subject to far less scrutiny than groups not identified as religious. No one wants to be accused of interfering with others’ religious freedom.
If you’re objecting that Americans aren’t as religious as they used to be — all the “nones” and “spiritual but not religious folks” — that seems to me a distinction without a difference. What we are seeing isn’t the end of seeking so much as it is a turning away from traditional institutions like churches and denominations. And a turning toward all sorts of alternative sources of answers, practices, community. These trends feed right into the problem of meditation malpractice.

2 — The Almighty Dollar
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Spirituality and wellness — two categories with blurry boundaries — are big business in America. When I describe religion in the U.S. as a competitive marketplace, I am not speaking metaphorically. Religion has long been the top category for philanthropic giving in this country.

What about church alternatives and the “spiritual but not religious” arena?Meditation centers may be registered as 501(c)3 non-profits and show up in philanthropy reports — that was true of the one I once worked for. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is taught in institutions like hospitals that are also often non-profit.

Other services, like yoga and meditation studios, operate openly as capitalist enterprises. As of 2023, over 36 million Americans practiced yoga, and the U.S. yoga industry earned over $9 billion annually.[i] The US “meditation industry” (you read that right) is said to be worth over $1 billion, with 14% of Americans and growing having tried meditation. [ii]

Regardless of how the tax code treats the entities where meditation is taught, the people doing the teaching are making a living at it. When Jon Kabat-Zinn first experienced a calling to make (Buddhist) meditation available to people who would never go to the Zen Center or to an insight meditation retreat, what he calls a secondary motivation was to establish “a form of right livelihood” for himself, and possibly for many others.[iii] That certainly has happened. Whatever other motivations and ideals might be associated with teaching meditation, for some it becomes a career that supports themselves and their families.
Journalist Tomas Rocha, probing these issues a decade ago, wrote:

“Given the juggernaut — economic and otherwise — behind the mindfulness movement, there is a lot at stake in exploring the shadow side of meditation. Upton Sinclair once observed how difficult it is to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” [iv]

The research sector is not immune from financial pressures, either. Like non-profit organizations, researchers compete for funding dollars.

What gets funded? Research that focuses on the things people want to know about. In the United States, that includes benefits like managing stress, helping one get along well with others, and enhancing focus and productivity in the workplace — the sort of things that are valued by American culture.

As Rocha observed,

“When the time comes to develop hypotheses around the effects of meditation, the only acceptable — and fundable — research questions are the ones that promise to deliver the answers we want to hear.” [v]

This may be one of the reasons that research that asks about adverse effects of meditation — or even shares with funders and the public whatever happens to be self-reported by subjects — has been in the minority.

Whether the beneficiaries of the meditation boom are individual teachers, researchers, or teaching entities of any tax status, once an income stream is established — and perhaps a reputation too — there is a vested interest in preserving it.

Other factors beyond financial ones may be in play, but if someone has written a book or developed a program or makes a living teaching mindfulness, consciously or unconsciously, their interpretation of results may be filtered through their biases. Britton has found that people who have a declared, financial conflict of interest “statistically find fewer adverse effects in their studies.” [vi]

3 — Social Dynamics

No matter how steeped we are in individualism, humans are social creatures. We need community, places and people with whom we feel belonging. And we are deeply influenced by the people around us.

If I move in church circles, people espouse certain beliefs, which are embodied in shared practices. These beliefs are expressed in a particular vocabulary, and are even associated with a tangible material culture. For example, beliefs in the divinity of Christ and atonement theology show up in hymns and the act of communion (the Eucharist), and the ubiquity of crosses on building and necklaces.

If I move in meditation circles, people are devoted to certain practices, which are built on tacit beliefs. The language participants speak is almost as much the glue of such groups as the meditation practice. And it’s all associated with a material culture too.

The kind of meditation I long practiced, for example, slowly nurtured in me certain ideas about the nature of the human being, the conundrum of life on earth, and the way to overcome that challenge. These ideas were threaded through the meditation passages I took deep into my being, the books and talks I consumed, the retreats I attended, the satsang sessions.

There was an associated material culture, too; my meditation chair and altar; my case full of sacred books that I collected together, and cherished no less than a devout Christian treasures their Bible; the necklace I wore with an image that could be interpreted as either a flaming chalice (its original and continued meaning to me) or as an oil lamp, a significant symbol of my meditation group.
​

​In the case of a typical church or a meditation group, it’s likely that there are people in the group who aren’t 100% on board with everything, but who don’t want to lose the community. So they fake it, or just try to shake off the parts that don’t fit them.

Their friends, their family are part of the community. They may be at church multiple times per week. This is where the casseroles come from during a health crisis. This is where the kids have unrelated adults who know them and care about them. That’s hard to walk away from.

I know this because some of those church folks who finally couldn’t take the rub anymore find their way to my non-creedal tradition, where they don’t have to pretend. They are relieved to find a community where it’s okay to be there FOR the community, and to have freedom to explore different beliefs or practices. I’m one of those people too; I left the mainline Protestant church as a teenager, when the dissonance was too much for me. Many people hang on longer, feeling pressure from their family or peers.

This dynamic happens in meditation and mindfulness groups too. If a long-time meditator has a spiritual crisis and finds that meditation becomes problematic for them — or perhaps they are newer and the kind of meditation their group does just doesn’t prove sustainable for them (how many people with ADHD can maintain a meditation practice that trains attention?) — they may want to keep coming to sangha even if they aren’t meditating. Because it’s their community. “The one membership card to a sangha is that you meditate,” Britton notes. [vii] No need to mention the fact of their lapsed practice…

Besides the powerful human need to belong, uglier kinds of social pressure can come into play.
​
Willoughby Britton describes how she has been treated differently at different points in her research career. She chose to research mindfulness and meditation because she had benefited from it herself, and was a self-named “evangelist” for the practice. When she was promoting it in the way that others wanted, Britton was “venerated for that and given all sorts of opportunities and stroked and lauded.”

Britton held off for years on publishing her first set of findings, on meditation’s impact on sleep. It went against the positive narrative of meditation as an all-good panacea. She hadn’t expected that. She knew it wouldn’t go over well.

When Britton finally began sharing not only the positive findings of her research, but also the legitimate negative findings about meditation — the adverse effects hardly anyone was talking about — she reports that “the love bombing disappeared.” She receives threats and vitriol from meditation advocates on a regular basis. Including, from other researchers.

​One wonders how many researchers might be sitting on negative data — or choosing not even to ask questions about adverse effects — because they do not want to be on the receiving end of such treatment.
​
4 — Transcendent Ideology and Personal Purpose

When people experience the benefits of a practice and community, commitment may develop to the tradition or worldview that has given them those positive experiences. Taking part in the community and the practices becomes not just a way of belonging and of continuing to reap practical benefits — it can also become a source of personal identity.

Take the following attitude:
I am a meditator. I have a disciplined practice. My life is made meaningful by my practices and by the ideas that undergird it.

That was core to my own identity for a long time, so I get how this can develop for many people — even if it wasn’t something they (consciously) started out seeking. As concepts like vocation and right livelihood suggest, personal purpose and career can become anchored in the spiritual framework.

This may happen in part out of a desire to share with others the same benefits one has experienced oneself — an altruistic motive. As someone who gave away dozens of books written by my (then) meditation teacher, and organized a meditation workshop in my local area, and eventually went to work for the teaching organization with a motive to help others, I understand how powerful the drive can be to share spiritual riches with others. It can offer a deep sense of purpose.

Developing a strong identity tied to one’s spiritual practice can also lead one to want to protect the precious source of the goodness in one’s own life. You don’t want your spiritual practice or community to betray you, to cease to provide the peace, the connection, the clarity you’ve come to expect from it.

A Perfect Storm

When all of these forces converge — spiritual seeking… individual and collective economic pressures… the need to belong and group social dynamics… personal identity, existential security, and ideological commitments — it must create tremendous pressure on how meditation data is interpreted, from the sangha to the science lab.

One type of meditation that has received enormous funding and research attention is Transcendental Meditation (TM). Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars from National Institutes of Health have been funneled to Maharishi University for such studies — but the money dried up by the 2010s. Similarly, a dearth of current TM studies at ClinicalTrials.gov suggests that the scientific community has lost interest in the potential of this practice.

Writing in depth on the TM movement, former practitioner Aryeh Siegel summarizes the research landscape this way:

“There are many reasons for TM’s precipitous fall from grace in the research world, including: poorly designed studies that rarely include a randomized active control group, often biased researchers who are affiliated with TM institutions and/or practice TM, and a history of exaggerated findings.” [viii]

What about mainstream forms of spiritual practice? After learning how resistant many teachers and meditators are to information about adverse effects of meditation — including practitioner-researchers — it seems obvious to me that research on mindfulness meditation should be scrutinized as to whether it is riddled with flaws similar to those found in the body of research on TM.

Willoughby Britton came to wonder whether it is “a basic human drive… to have this pristine category [of something that is] perfect and that we can love unconditionally.” She speculated it might be an attachment-driven process — a deep-seated human need for something you can rely upon as an anchor.

​Therapist Rachel Bernstein, who has spent decades working with cult survivors, found this confirmed in her practice. People “need to have this space that has that quiet, that makes sense, that is their retreat, and where they feel safe, and they don’t want anything to take it away,” she agreed. “We deify things so that we can feel like” we have the formula we need. Some people, “left without that,.. feel like they’re on this precipice, like they’re just going to fall off a cliff.” Bernstein finds that it can reflect a basic attachment need, at least for some people.

Those are yet more motives for seeing only the up side of meditation and mindfulness, and rationalizing away any disconfirming evidence.

Looked at through the lens of medicine — the context in which many people are learning mindfulness practices these days — this makes little sense. No clinician would hesitate to list the side effects of a medication, and treat them as undesired and potentially problematic effects; “nothing in medicine is unassailable and everything has side effects,” says Britton.

Yet, she has observed that when meditation is the treatment discussed,

“suddenly people are coming out of the woodwork and doing the most bizarre gymnastics to make it anything other than harm — including researchers … upstanding scientists and clinicians and people who recommend policy to governments … are actually doing these weird mental gymnastics.”

​Watching these reactions over the years is what has led Britton to look increasingly at the social dynamics playing out in the teaching and practice of meditation and mindfulness. Her big “aha” was recognizing, not only that cult dynamics might be at play in the mindfulness movement, but that “cult dynamics might be the default” for humans. She suggests that “unless you really go out of your way to learn about the dynamics and put yourself through the rigor in your organization to not repeat them, you’re gonna repeat them.”

As a meditation cult survivor, ordained religious leader, and sociologist by training and disposition, I believe Britton is spot on.

Next, I’ll delve further into what culty stuff can look like when it creeps into a meditation group or practice — how do you know it when you see it? And most importantly, I’ll explore constructive approaches to guard against those dynamics, to keep your meditation group and practice healthy.

You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.
​
Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How I Was Primed … At the Inscrutable Ashram … Lost in Transmission

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] Yoga Industry Statistics published June 2023, accessed at https://www.zippia.com/advice/yoga-industry-statistics/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20pilates%20and%20yoga,2017%20to%2048%2C547%20in%202023.
[ii] “What’s Next For The Mindfulness Industry?” at Fitt Insider, accessed August 2024.
[iii] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[iv] “The Dark Knight of the Soul” by Tomas Rocha, in The Atlantic, June 2014.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[vii] Ibid. This is the source of Britton (and Bernstein) quotes in this post.
[viii] Siegel, Aryeh. Transcendental Deception. Janreg Press, 2018.

Adverse effects of spiritual practices were well-known within the religious contexts in which those practices originated. Yet as meditation and mindfulness moved from monastics to the masses, this essential information has been increasingly withheld.

Why?

I believe it has everything to do with attempting to separate the practice from its religious roots, to sell it to a secular public.

You Can Take Meditation Out of the Religion, But…… can you take the religion out of meditation? If you present it in a lay-friendly, pseudo-secular, science-sounding way?

I don’t think so. Not entirely.

The Buddhist monk in colonial Burma who first started teaching meditation to laypeople wasn’t trying to take the religion out of it. Quite the contrary. Amid all the Christian missionaries running around, he was trying to keep his people Buddhist.

My old meditation group presented its method as universal and inter-spiritual, suitable for a person of any religious background, or none. That was a good part of the draw for me, along with the promised practical benefits of the spiritual practices.

But when it came right down to it, the program was rooted in a universalized form of Hinduism. Other traditions of East and West were incorporated in and interpreted through the Hindu lens of the founder. It’s no coincidence that the loaded language of that group (a high-control group, I finally realized) was heavy on Sanskrit.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), acknowledges his aim to remove the religious clothing — if not the actual religious worldview behind it — from mindfulness meditation.

He believes that mindfulness ultimately does not belong to Buddhism, but speaks to “universal qualities of being human.” He was also well aware that science, not spirituality, was the key to getting mindfulness accepted into the medical model and secular settings. [i]

“Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism”..? [ii]

Kabat-Zinn intentionally developed and described mindfulness practices in ways that would downplay its Buddhist origins, so as not to undermine “our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.” He pitched his program to medical colleagues as a way to offer “relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga.”
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Yet, his efforts were inspired by a vision he had at a meditation retreat, at the Insight Meditation Society. He realized that his “karmic assignment” or personal dharma was to “share the essence of meditation and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them .., with those who would never come to” a religious retreat center.
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His ultimate goal? To relieve the suffering of individuals, to foster awakening, and even to help bring about a spiritual Renaissance that would enable the whole planet to flourish.

Quite noble. Also pretty darn religious. Specifically, Buddhist.

Mindfulness has many meanings. It’s used as a catch-all term, understood by Kabat-Zinn to be explicitly tied to “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddadharma.” Mindfulness can be used “as a place-holder for the entire dharma,… [carrying] multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously.” Early papers on MBSR recognized its roots in Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism, as well as “yogic traditions” like Vedanta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ramana Maharshi.

“Mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one,” Kabat-Zinn writes. He lifts up the need for advocates like himself to embody loyalty and vision “in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership, education, etc.”

In other words, it’s not enough to have integrated an essentially spiritual practice with “important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances” (which are made invisible) into mainstream medicine — champions of mindfulness want to penetrate all other major social institutions, too.

While Kabat-Zinn’s most immediate hope in his clinic teaching MBSR has been to ease the suffering of people in pain, he notes that what people learn in the clinic can take hold in their lives. Indeed, for many, formal meditation becomes “an ongoing feature of one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.” He’s pleased when clinic participants learning MBSR exclaim, “This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life.”
​

Kabat-Zinn knows that in the freedom-of-religion U.S., Buddhism must be extracted from mindfulness — at least in its language and presentation — in a setting that serves the general public.
​
But he still believes that the teachers of mindfulness in such settings should have their own fervent practice. They should sit long meditation retreats at centers (“a laboratory requirement” for teacher training), study with teachers from (usually) Buddhist traditions with well-defined lineages, and be firmly rooted in what sounds to me like Buddhist cosmology or theology.

In turn, these teachers in secular settings will be capable of offering “direct transmission” to the people they teach in any group course. The student group in such a class, he suggests, is functionally a sangha.

Such teachers, Kabat-Zinn writes, should not rely explicitly on Buddhist frameworks or vocabulary in teaching. Instead, they should cite scientific evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness, draw from direct experience with the practice, and help students accumulate and learn from their own direct experience.

In sum, Kabat-Zinn stresses the importance of “embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development.”

Sounds to me like a well-intentioned, humanitarian, culturally astute, and deeply religious endeavor. Sounds like stealth evangelism, 21st-century U.S. Western Buddhist style.
​

​~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thought experiment: How would decision-makers and end-users respond if a movement grew to take Christian contemplative practices, deeply rooted in Christian theology and culture, into secular settings? Would heart-centered prayer (or whatever was chosen, and however it was renamed) be threaded throughout American institutions and culture within a few decades? Would the same sorts of people who have championed Buddhist-style meditation regard quietly Christian practices as equally appropriate?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Buddhism and yoga seem to get a pass among many Westerners who are otherwise indifferent or averse to religious influence. Most Americans are familiar with Christian culture; whatever their own relationship (or lack of relationship) to Christianity, Abrahamic religion forms the basis of many people’s ideas of what religion is. Just because Buddhism — at least, as presented to Westerners — avoids god-talk, and offers a different diagnosis of and solution to the human predicament than Judeo-Christian faiths, does not mean that its worldview and practices are not religious.

What happens when a person turns to (quietly Buddhist-rooted) mindfulness practices for purely practical reasons? If one just wants to manage anxiety, develop the skill of detachment, or improve patience, can they keep it at that?

The Accidental Buddhist (or Hindu)

Let’s return to Dan Lawton, a young mindfulness teacher whose spiritual crisis I described in a piece on the adverse effects of meditation.

A “firm secularist” when he attended his first 10-day meditation intensive as a young man, Lawton did a breathing practice and an attending-to-your-bodily-feelings practice as a part of the retreat. It got intense. A lot of suffering came up; he remembers letting out a blood-curdling scream. He kept going through it, and got to the other side.

“And then I spent the next three months in uninterrupted bliss,” Lawton told Rachel Bernstein. “And so this was the experience that really made me convert. And I didn’t have a context and I didn’t understand that experience at all.” [iii]
Lawton explains that that experience

“reorganized my entire reality. And it essentially made me reliant upon Buddhist ideas, because there was no other framework that I had at that point to explain what happened to me.” [emphasis mine]
​

​Over a decade of practicing mindfulness, and teaching it for several years too, Lawton reaped “extraordinary benefits.”

Gradually, he absorbed much Buddhist doctrine. The idea that craving or desire is the source of all suffering particularly made sense to him.

“I was also impressed,” Lawton writes, “by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.” [iv] [emphasis mine]

Then, a decade or more after his first experience, at another meditation retreat, Dan experienced a deep crisis. The distinction between himself and the world dissolved, and he “was basically unable to turn the mindfulness off,” which was debilitating and distressing. He was later diagnosed with PTSD, stemming directly from his spiritual practice.

Lawton reflects on how this experience affected him:

“It led to a deep re-examination of my own involvement with American Buddhism, with the mindfulness movement in the context of wellness…. [and] a deep examination of many of the other actors in this movement… their various motivations, different power structures that were there, the history, a lot of the confusion.

“I sometimes say that I’m not sure what was more unsettling to me, the symptoms that I experienced in the aftermath of this retreat, or the fact that I started to realize that I had been part of an organized religion, which I had never really comprehended during the time that I was in it. It was kind of like the floor fell out from under me in some ways.” [v] [emphasis mine]

Lawton felt betrayed by the practices that had previously served him so well. And he felt betrayed by the community of teachers who had talked up the positives of meditation, treated negative experiences (when mentioned at all) as normal parts of spiritual progression, never offered guardrails, nor indicated that meditation could do real harm — and had only “keep plugging” platitudes to offer when adverse effects rocked his world. [vi]

Intention vs. Impact

I assume that people who have helped popularize mindfulness, in both Buddhist and secular contexts, have done so with a desire to help other people. I doubt anyone set out to cause suffering.

Yet, what has happened has been a kind of lying by omission on the part of authorities —those who treat spiritual practices as if they can be severed from their religious roots, who downplay adverse effects if they acknowledge them at all, and who more often than not advise doubling down on a practice, even when it is not serving someone well — or blame the meditator for difficulties that are predictable.

Indeed, it appears many of the people who become teachers of meditation and mindfulness are not themselves well-trained to understand adverse effects, or to know how to support people who experience them. Is it any wonder they are unprepared to help?

Whatever the original reasons for softening the religious basis of contemplative practices —to benefit a public skittish of organized religion, to make meditation acceptable in neutral settings like hospitals and schools, or simply as a result of looking through the saffron-colored glasses of a true believer — the outcome is the same. Some people end up seeing their suffering INCREASE, in ways they never bargained for.
​

​Unless we change how we talk about, teach, and practice powerful disciplines like meditation, stories like Dan’s (and mine) will keep happening. Meditation advocates need to get real with themselves and others about the full spectrum of possibilities in these practices.

It won’t be easy. Next time I’ll explore some of the forces stacked against the meditation teacher or organization that aspires to transparency and skillful support.

You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Power and Control in Groups … Into the Culti-verse ... Calming the Kundalini Fire

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Endnotes

[i] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[ii] Ibid. All quotes and paraphrasing in the section “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism” are from Kabat-Zinn’s 2011 article.
[iii] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice.
[iv] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.
[v] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. Except where otherwise indicated, the source of material in the section The Accidental Buddhist is this podcast conversation.
[vi] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.

​Out of the Cloister

The founder of my old group spoke poetically about taking meditation out of the cloister and bringing it into the community. Swami Vivekananda had done that, going from wandering sadhu and disciple of Ramakrishna — a monk — to becoming an ambassador of Hinduism to the West. Beginning with the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago, and continuing over several years of lecturing on the continent, as well as in his writing, Vivekananda introduced the West to meditation.

He called it the science of mind. He also preached a message of tolerance and acceptance for the truth in all religions, making him the undisputed star of the 1893 interfaith conference — though representatives of other faiths, including Buddhism, also connected with Euro-American audiences then.

Even before that seminal gathering in 1893, interest in Eastern scriptures and practices had been sparked in a certain segment of society. A group of intellectuals got their hands on the earliest English translations of works like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada in the mid-1800s.

Already predisposed toward universal ideals, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott and the rest came to be known as Transcendentalists. Despite the lack of teachers on hand to learn from directly, they started experimenting with putting these ideas into practice. Thoreau built a special bookcase for his “nest of Indian books” and took some of them with him to his cabin at Walden Pond — a venture inspired by the forest monks of India. [i]

​Most meditators in the U.S. today, of course, are “householders” — people practicing in the home and community, not in an isolated setting. And Buddhism has particularly made inroads among Americans of non-Asian descent, in no small part thanks to interest in meditation.

But the widespread teaching and learning of contemplative practices turns fifteen centuries of culture on its head.

Whether in Himalayan caves, monasteries in southeast Asia, or the Egyptian desert sought out by early Christian contemplatives, interior spiritual disciplines were traditionally taken up by people set apart from ordinary society — people who had left behind comfort, social station, and striving for material success.
​
Monks and nuns did not adopt ascetic practices to relieve stress, improve concentration, manage anxiety, or help one find one’s place in society. They did not practice mindfulness in order to appreciate the beauty in the everyday.
Instead, they were looking for union with God. Or they wanted to get off the wheel of karma and achieve an end to suffering. They were seeking spiritual perfection, however they understood it.

​Ascetics and their communities learned firsthand about the “adverse effects” of contemplative practices. They, of course, interpreted them within their respective religious frameworks. Meditation sickness, corruptions of insight, dark nights of the soul — whatever a particular tradition called it, they were well familiar with the sort of symptoms appearing in Cheetah House’s list of 59 adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness.

This is why, as researcher Willoughby Britton and colleagues have observed, records of these effects — along with religious interpretations — are littered throughout texts of various traditions: key branches of Buddhism as well as Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism. [ii] And of course, Hinduism, from which I gained the language of kundalini phenomenon to describe my own experience.

Into the Community

Let’s go back before the many strands of Eastern teaching were introduced directly by teachers in North America, in the 1900s. Before D.T. Suzuki and Zen Buddhism. Before Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other bridges to Tibetan Buddhism. Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and various and sundry other Hindu teachers. Before Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and other advocates of insight meditation. Before Thich Nhat Hanh and mindfulness. Not to mention various forms of yoga and martial arts.

Recall those New England Transcendentalists in search of literary and spiritual adventure in the 1800s. Not satisfied merely to stretch Protestant Christianity beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, these seekers — most of them moving in Unitarian circles, a few, like Emerson, even ordained — wanted “Contact! Contact!” and to know “Who are we? where are we?”[iii] They wanted direct experience of transcendence. They wanted mysticism.

​The “Boston Brahmins” were not the only householders in the 1800s drawn to Eastern contemplative traditions. Around the globe, in British-occupied Burma, Buddhist monks answered the efforts of Christian missionaries with their own mission to the masses: they took vipassana meditation out of the monastery and into the villages. The practice of meditation, once limited to ascetics, spread among the laity over the next seven decades. [iv]

Lost in Transmission

As meditation met a wider audience — and especially a Western audience — its religious roots were often softened.

Going Universal

​One cross-cultural strategy is to downplay the esoteric elements — those parts of a practice and the worldview in which it is based, that would not connect with a new audience — and favor universalistic language and framings, instead. I have the sense that Indian ambassadors of meditation, in particular, often followed in Vivekananda’s footsteps in this way. But the example of S.N. Goenka shows this has happened with Buddhists too.

​Goenka was one of the first to teach meditation to people from another culture. The “religious lineaments and rituals” disappeared; “gone was the cosmology of hell realms and hungry ghosts and karma and rebirth. Gone was the promise of miraculous healing and mind-reading and flying that meditation was believed to enable. Gone, too,” writes David Kortava, “was the open acknowledgment of the sundry mental and physical tribulations that might surface in the course of a serious meditation practice.” [v]

Omwashing

Another common dynamic is to coast on the imperial logic of what Edward Said called Orientalism. The founder of my group epitomized this in his talks and books, emphasizing the timeless spiritual treasure of the East — in contrast to the West’s (Enlightenment) cultural strengths in science and logic. He would often speak of the spiritual heritage of the East as one that belongs to the whole world.
​
In other words, my one-time teacher, an Indian who came of age in colonized India, was saying, here, Westerners, help yourself to my culture, and don’t worry about misappropriation — not only can you trust me as a guide, but you have as much right to this treasure of the East as I do.

He had internalized Orientalist logic. While he was able to use it to become a self-styled guru, I can’t help but think there was some compensation going on inside him, as a colonized person labeled inferior by the colonizing culture. On the surface, the use of Orientalism combatted that message — he had something very valuable to offer, to fill the void left by Western materialism— although deep down, it could also reinforce the stereotypes, and the unequal positions.

​Writing about yoga and omwashing, Sheena Sood observes that

“‘Orientalism’ continues to find relevance and application to contemporary imaginings of the East. It conditions people who study and become immersed in Eastern culture to uncritically revere and accept ancient and mystical wisdom as objective truth.” [vi]

Sood notes that Orientalism also leads people to assume there is a pure origin story for Eastern practices, like yoga — or, I would add, meditation — and to focus on faithfulness to its origins rather than on “the ethics of how and for what purpose yoga is deployed to various populations.” For example, yoga and spirituality can be used “to divert attention away from the inherent structural violence” of social institutions like prisons, with the result that “these programs cooperate quite neatly with a racist, classist system.” [vii]

Speaking Science

Yet another strategy to make meditation palatable to contemporary Westerners is what we might call science-washing. If you can speak to those enduring Enlightenment values — draw upon the scientific method to show evidence for something’s beneficial effects, make a logical case, even a common-sense one — you can reach a wider audience.

Groups that research meditation fit the bill. That’s true whether they have their roots in an Eastern tradition, like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, or whether they are Western scientists speaking their professional language of science, like Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Of course, a group need not be limited to one strategy. My group utilized all three of the above-mentioned methods of promoting its form of meditation. As a smaller group, it had fewer scientists to take up a research program than the legions of researchers studying some other forms. But the group made the most of every opportunity to preach the gospel of meditation.

Untethered

The end result? We have a lot of people teaching and practicing spiritual technologies, often with as much fervor as a religious convert — but often with an absence of awareness about the potential down sides of meditation, and lack of preparedness to respond effectively when things go south.

​Whether intended or not, I see this as a bait and switch situation: Come for the anxiety reduction, stay for the underlying worldview you may quietly absorb — and perhaps the meditation sickness, too.

There’s more to explore about the social, psychological, and economic dynamics at play. Stay tuned for upcoming post(s) where I’ll address evangelism, indoctrination, group belonging, funding pressures, demographics, identity, research bias, accountability and more.

Endnotes appear at the bottom of this post.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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 👇
When Meditation Hurts … Surprises, Blinders & Lies … Seeking Safely

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Endnotes

[i] “The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism” by Todd Lewis and Kent Bicknell in Education About Asia, Volume 16:2 (Fall 2011): U.S., Asia, and the World: 1620–1914
[ii] “The Dark Knight of the Soul” by Tomas Rocha, in The Atlantic, 6–25–2014
[iii] The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
[iv] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, in Harper’s Magazine, April 2021
[v] Ibid.
[vi] “Introducing Omwashing” by Sheena Sood, in The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide, edited by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, 2024
[vii] Ibid.

In recent posts, I’ve shared my experience with Kundalini Syndrome (as I initially learned to call it), relayed how I stabilized myself and integrated these experiences, and reviewed the adverse effects of meditation that scientists have begun to document and explore.

What Goes Unsaid

I’ve mentioned before the German government’s study of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which found widespread adverse effects. Similar observations have been made at the group’s headquarters in the U.S. For example, Anthony DeNaro, a law and economics professor and one-time legal counsel for Maharishi International University (affiliated with TM), provided a sworn affirmation in 1986 testifying to the bizarre and impairing effects of TM that he observed while working at the university.

He wrote “that many of his students were spaced-out, unfocused, zombie-like automatons who were incapable of critical thinking. The consequences of regular and intensive meditations were so damaging and disruptive to the nervous system that students could not complete assignments.”

Further, in his role at the university, he was included in internal deliberations of high-ranking TM officials, including the Maharishi himself. DeNaro

“witnessed a system of denial and avoidance, as well as outright lies and deception, to cover up or sanitize serious problems on campus. These included nervous breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre behavior, threats of and actual attempted suicide and homicidal ideation, psychotic episodes, crime, depression, and manic behavior that accompanied rounding (intensive group meditations).” [i]

Dan Lawton, whose story I shared previously, and who went on to work for a time with Cheetah House, underscores the widespread problem in meditation circles of important information that is too closely held by organizations and leaders. In an April 2022 podcast interview, Dan says:

“This is from Jack Kornfield’s 1979 doctoral thesis … Jack Kornfield, arguably the most famous and influential Buddhist teacher in the US right now. And he’s describing the normal experience that people will have on meditation retreat centers. He says, unusual experiences, visual or auditory aberrations, hallucinations, unusual somatic experiences, and so on are the norm among practiced meditation students. He describes things like heavy sadness, screaming mind trips, incredibly strong hate, violent crying, loss of body awareness, loss of perceptions of hands, body disappearing, the head detaching itself.

“You’re never going to see this when you go to Spirit Rock where Jack Kornfield teaches. Nobody’s ever going to talk about this. But what Jack is saying in 1979 is not that this is just something that occasionally happens. This is the norm. This is the normal progression of meditators. And it’s interesting because in ’79 he’s pushing back against the idea that this is pathology. He’s saying this is a normal part of the spiritual practice. Years later, this has been completely obfuscated and hidden in a lot of places.” [ii]

That certainly squares with my experience.

Bliss, or Obliviousness?

When I started meditating, I had no idea that those kinds of things (or other commonly occurring symptoms) could happen to me. I was a restless idealist, hungry for greater spiritual depth and a sense of purpose — that was the hook for me.

I was curious, open-minded, non-dogmatic. Based on my childhood experience of Christianity — not even a particularly rigid variety as that goes — I did not expect that tradition to meet me where I was. Spiritual practices with ties to Eastern traditions, or multi-spiritual / interfaith practices, or secular / science-backed practices were the ones most likely to appeal to me at that time in my life. I suspect this could be said for a significant portion of Westerners who end up taking up a meditation practice.

​My first impression of meditation came in college, when one of my favorite college professors was a meditator. I read glowing descriptions about the form he practiced (Transcendental Meditation) and how it could benefit a person. Besides, he was kind and cool. (I could not have known, then, how sadly his story would end.)

Almost a decade later, when I began to meditate myself, I learned about the method I took up by reading the meditation book given to me by a fellow traveler. A short book inspired by Gandhi, it gave directions for meditating in the appendix. So, while I was in India learning about Gandhian-style community development, I began meditating Gandhi’s way, using sacred writing as a focal point. The instructions provided for this method of meditation were brief and straightforward. There was no mention of adverse effects.

When I read the same teacher’s book that gave a fuller treatment of meditation, the program was presented as one with a great variety of benefits. According to the book, meditation could help me discover my calling, love more fully, concentrate better, manage stress, overcome anger, live in the present, prevent depression, and “release deep reserves of energy.” (That latter phrase takes on a whole new meaning after my wild kundalini ride!)

Only two of the over two hundred pages of this meditation handbook address dangers in meditation. The writer acknowledges that strong emotions (positive or negative) may arise, that some people may experience unusual inward stimuli, like bright lights, and that those who descend deep into consciousness may have tantalizing experiences, or disorienting ones.

That’s it. No mention of headaches, startling energy sensations, involuntary movements, dissociation, panic, impaired concentration, feeling disembodied, depression, psychosis or any of the dozens of other potentially distressing or impairing symptoms that are absolutely known to occur.

The main guidance offered was to just keep bringing my attention back to the focal point of my meditation; it would be my guide rope as I scaled the mountain of consciousness. In case of fear arising, having a picture of a saint or inspiring person on hand might help too, I read.

Going Deeper

What about the retreat experience? I don’t remember any communication that would prompt people to self-select out of retreats based on risk factors for adverse effects, or put leaders in a position to recognize people better served by other practices. Nor were there any acknowledgment statements or waivers that let you know that there was any risk of experiencing adverse effects.

Instead, as I went deeper into the practice and community, I got these messages: [iii]

• “if meditation feels difficult, that could be a sign of progress (!)”
• The path requires training the mind, training the senses, training the will, training one’s desires; implicitly, outcomes are in your control (with caveat that advancement takes patience and grace)
• Consult established meditators at the ashram for personalized guidance if issues or questions come up in your practice
• This teacher’s method of meditation was deliberately designed to be gentle and gradual. Keeping meditation to 30 minutes was also intentional.
• Adding a second 30-min period of meditation in the evening will move you more swiftly toward your spiritual desires.
• “No matter what, get your meditation in”
• Keep the duration of meditation sessions to the amount prescribed by [center] mentors, no more and no less”
• The takeaways communicated included these:· Interpret any “difficulty” in meditation (whatever that might mean) as positive.
• Know that you can get what you want from the practice — it’s on you.
• The retreat leaders have the necessary knowledge to guide you. First and foremost, you should listen to them. (Don’t make decisions independently based on your own experience).
• Implicit also is that other meditation teachers and forms of meditation — ones that are not so carefully graduated and contained — may create problems you’d prefer to avoid. But not this practice. It was designed to be safe.

Underlying Problems

As it turns out, the problems I encountered were not unique to my meditation group. My experience illustrates some of the ways that numerous teachers / programs fall short of offering transparent information and skilled guidance:

1. Lack of informed consent about potential adverse effects. Not on the web site of my group, nor in the books, nor at the retreats, nor in the periodicals was I meaningfully informed of potential adverse effects. Neither before I started meditating — as it should have been — nor after my practice was well established.

​Alas, this seems to be a common pattern among teachers and retreat centers. Ex-TM teacher Aryeh Siegel remembers that adverse effects were not brought up in introductory lectures on the method — even though the organization is clearly aware that things like pain and disconcerting things occur, as teachers are taught how to respond when those concerns are raised. [iv]
​
If you are a meditator or have gone on retreats, did you hear any of this? And if so, at what point in your involvement?

2. Lack of screening. Unless it was done strictly one-to-one, on the basis of what meditators shared privately with mentors, there was no screening done in my group. That level of connection did not occur until one was pretty embedded with the group. Certainly at the outset, upon registering for my first retreat, there was no systematic gathering of information by which they might assess individual risk.

I haven’t come across any examples of meditation programs that actively screen participants — not in the health / mental health fields, much less in meditation centers. (I mean, you’d have to acknowledge adverse effects before it would make sense to screen people for risk…)

Willoughby Britton, the clinical psychologist researching effects of meditation, noted that

“no one has been asking if there are any potential difficulties or adverse effects, and whether there are some practices that may be better or worse-suited [for] some people over others… [even though] the main delivery system for Buddhist meditation in America is actually medicine and science, not Buddhism.”  [v]

Not that screening could remove all risk. Most of the meditators interviewed for the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study had no pre-existing psychiatric conditions, yet almost all of them experienced adverse effects.

“Adverse effects routinely occur,” Britton observed, “even under optimal conditions, with healthy people meditating correctly under supervision.”  [vi]

3. Lack of skilled support for people who do experience adverse effects. As I described in Is This Normal?, I was referred to someone outside the ashram community for support. Even though I faithfully followed his recommendations, I didn’t see any substantial change in my kundalini symptoms. And although I later learned that some of my peers had at times been told by mentors to stop meditating for a period, no one ever told me this. They absolutely should have!

Aryeh Siegel relays that Transcendental Meditation teachers were trained in a checking procedure, which they used systematically to guide meditators in correct practice.

“Major sections of the process were designed to deal with the meditator’s reporting any of a wide variety of experiences that could be deemed distressing,” writes Siegel. “Shaking and body movements, as well as overpowering thoughts, while rare, are common enough even during the first few meditations that an entire section of TM’s checking procedure is devoted to these severe symptoms.”

Siegel was taught to downplay anything disconcerting meditators might bring up from their experience. “Something good is happening” was the party line. (Sounds familiar to me.)  [vii]

Alas, Siegel notes, this rote approach often did little to help. “If a person was having problems, the proper intervention was to use the checking notes to enable them to have a correct experience of meditation. Period.” In the most severe cases, the teacher could ask the meditator if they had seen a doctor. That was all the supposed meditation expert had to offer.

Willoughby Britton not only studies mindfulness and meditation, she is a trained mindfulness teacher herself. Britton recalls, “I was taught how to respond to almost anything [in the same way], which is, well, how are you relating to this?” Though Britton wasn’t taught this one herself, pointing to the meditator’s ego as the source of any problems is a response troubled meditators coming to Cheetah House frequently got from their teachers. Is it any wonder people suffering from adverse effects turn somewhere else for help?  [viii]

4. Promoting practices that increase risk. Longer periods of meditation, longer retreats, and longer tenure as a meditator all seem to correlate with a higher likelihood of adverse effects. While my group avoided the pitfalls of excess meditation periods and drawn-out retreats, many retreat centers and teachers do not. I’m not a Buddhist meditator, but numerous consecutive hours meditating and long retreat periods appear to be common in many of these settings.

My group promoted something else that I believe also increases risk: a devotional approach. It doesn’t matter whether the devotion is to a particular divine/symbolic figure (e.g., Jesus, Krishna, the Divine Mother), or to one’s teacher — the latter certainly turned out to be a theme in my group, once you got close. Following the way of bhakti (devotion / heart-centered), as opposed to jnana (knowledge / mind), or karma (service / action), was lifted up in my group as the fastest and surest way to progress.

“For those who set their hearts on me and worship me with unfailing devotion and faith, the Way of Love leads sure and swift to me.” (so says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita)

Even if one does not have a particular object of devotion, I believe a zealous attitude about one’s practice and spiritual path may increase the risk of adverse effects.

A related multiplier of risk, in my mind, is surrender of agency to the object of one’s devotion, or to one’s practice generally.

“Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender in love, because there follows immediate peace.” (Bhagavad Gita)

By surrender of agency, I mean abandonment of one’s own observations, direct experience, judgment, and critical thinking. In a culty situation, you are likely to be guided toward surrender to your teacher or the organization generally, whether straightforwardly or in subtle ways. (I described a surprise one I experienced here.)

I never meditated for long consecutive periods; I stuck to 30 minute sessions. But I was very earnest. After a while, to my surprise, I also discovered a vein of devotion. And I was a long-term meditator. For me, even without any prior psychological risk factors, these things tipped me over into adverse effects.

5. Pointing fingers (evading responsibility). When I shared my “adverse effects” with mentors in my group, it was implied that this experience was caused by the energy worker, and not directly related to meditation. (I had mentioned that when the spontaneous movements first started up, it was during a session with an energy worker.)
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However, the partner of the meditation center’s founder, who led the center after his death, acknowledged to me that she’d been hearing similar reports from people around the globe following their methods. It came off in an “aw shucks, what a surprise!” way, which strikes me now as false naivete.

The founder surely knew about these “side effects” of meditation that are so common among long-term meditators. Though he did not have a lineage per se (unless you count the supposedly spontaneously illumined grandparent), he had studied up from texts and teachers down the ages in his culture, where the kundalini phenomenon is well known.

​I assume this was why he so carefully designed his program to be gradual and gentle — to reduce the risk of weird stuff. His students would not have been warning retreat-goers not to seek or glom onto strange experiences if they were completely ignorant of them. Yet, the people I was supposed to turn to either acted bewildered, or pointed the finger elsewhere, before passing me onto someone else for support.

Apparently this is not an uncommon occurrence among meditation teachers and centers. As a mindfulness teacher, Britton was taught a limited repertoire of responses to problems.

“All of them,” she says, “are ways of preserving the pristine category of the practice… they all go back to the same source, which is the problem is you [the meditator] — such as you have resistance.”
​

​Britton sees a parallel with rape culture, in the way meditation teachers — and even doctors and therapists — turn meditation problems back on the meditator.

"There’s so much of the victim blaming culture that is woven into all of this,” she observes. “Which of course then just shuts people down. [And] the dangers of whatever practice it is — they’re going to go under reported.” [ix]

These are common ways many meditation teachers respond when students report difficult experiences: reiterating the basic instructions (implying the student has gotten off course in their technique), chalking it up to ego, using thought-terminating phrases (“Why do you think you’re responding that way?”), or asking if the meditator has seen a doctor (implying they have an independent medical or mental health problem).

What’s less likely to happen? Suggesting the practice needs to be adapted to the individual. Or stopped for a while. Or that perhaps it’s not the right practice for them at all, and here are some alternatives they might consider to help them meet their objectives. (Does this ever happen?)

That’s what a helping professional would do if we were talking about medication, or stress management in general, or any number of other things. Why is it different with meditation?

Oblivious Experts

By the way, Britton and her colleagues at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, though the best known, are not the only researchers to have documented adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. In 2020, a Scandinavian psychiatric journal published a meta-analysis of meditation’s adverse effects, based on the research literature then available.

Difficulties like anxiety, depression and cognitive impairments were common, registering in 65% of studies. (I don’t know whether the studies asked proactively about adverse effects, or whether they relied on subjects taking the initiative to self-report them.) The piece echoed what Britton has long said: not only that such effects are common, but that they can occur whether or not someone has prior mental health history. [x]

Is the obliviousness of “experts” around adverse effects of meditation just random? I don’t think so.

In my next piece in this series, I describe how we got here — to the point where meditation is mainstream, but nobody knows the trouble it brings — or at least, few people talk about it openly.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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The End of Silence ... All the Feels ... Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher
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Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i]  Anthony DeNaro as quoted in Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018 (originally from TranceNet online)
[ii] From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice; that was part 2 of Rachel Bernstein’s interview with Dan Lawton on her IndcotriNation podcast; part 1 was on The Messy World of Mindfulness
[iii]  All quotes and paraphrasing in section are taken from my retreat notes, ca. 2002–2003
[iv] Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
 [v]  As quoted in Tomas Rocha’s 2014 piece for The Atlantic on “The Dark Knight of the Soul”
[vi]  As quoted in David Kortava’s 2021 piece for Harper's Magazine on “Lost in Thought”
[vii]  Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
[viii]  From Invisible Virtue, a 2022 episode of the IndoctriNation podcast in which host Rachel Bernstein interviews Britton; that was part 1 of their conversation — part 2 on The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness is also eye-opening
[ix]  Ibid.
[x] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, Harper's Magazine, 2021

I have shared how I calmed the kundalini fire brought on by meditation, and how I began to get more insight into some of my strange experiences.

As it turns out, I was lucky. My experience was relatively mild compared to what could have been.

Four Stories

1 — Kimberley had a series of “other worlds” experiences, after which she became physically ill and exhausted. In this period of spiritual emergency, she was unable to work and lost her home. She moved in with family for a time. Although she eventually established an independent life again, including getting a new job and place to live, she remained unwell emotionally and physically. She ended up collapsing after a few weeks at the new job. (From In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine G Lucas)

2 — Dan Lawton was “an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness” for over a decade. He’d had a regular meditation practice, including attending a dozen silent retreats, and for four years was a full-time teacher of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Dan had experienced a number of significant benefits from his practice.

But then in the midst of a retreat in North Carolina, he “split apart,” experiencing a “hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia.” While the retreat leaders were kind and offered suggestions for altering his meditation practice, as he explained to them, “I couldn’t stop being mindful or aware of everything that was going on within my mind and body, and the awareness felt like it was choking me to death.” The effects of the retreat did not abate as he recuperated at his sister’s for a week, nor when he returned home.

“In the months after the retreat,” Dan writes, “I suffered from symptoms diagnosed by a therapist as post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently experienced involuntary convulsions and simple tasks like cooking a meal induced panic attacks. I was occasionally so overwhelmed by my bodily sensations that I was unable to speak, and sometimes had problems differentiating myself from my surroundings.”

​

​Dan had no history of trauma before the retreat, nor any psychotic episodes. Through a variety of means — including, crucially, stopping his meditation practice — he found his way back to stability in time. He still uses the tools of mindfulness. He also strongly advocates transparency about spiritual practices, including their negative effects. (Dan’s story, When Buddhism Goes Bad)

3 — Seeking a restorative experience, Megan Vogt went to a silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center in Delaware in 2017. A week in, the twenty-five-year-old was experiencing bliss. But soon after, her mental and emotional states began to unravel. As she left the meditation center with her family at the end of the ten day period, she was overcome with a compulsion to end her life. A week in the psych. unit of a hospital seemed to help stabilize her; her psychotic symptoms were receding.

Her family kept a close eye on her when she returned home, and tried to connect her with psychiatrists for continued support. Megan resumed meditating. But things still weren’t right with her. Tragically, a few months after her intensive meditation experience, she was found dead in her truck, a suicide note left behind for her family. (David Kortava relays her story more fully in this 2021 piece in Harper’s.)
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4 — Another young adult, David, told writer Tomas Rocha about a divine experience he had at a meditation retreat, describing the process initially as “the best thing that had ever happened” to him. He turned down a spot at law school while on this high. But over the ensuing months, the meaning drained out of life.

​Trips to Asia seeking guidance made no difference. Still trying to re-center himself, David went to a retreat at a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation center in Washington. It was a wild ride for him — including confusion, terror, and thoughts and feelings he did not want to experience but could not stop. Retreat leaders had only verbal reassurances to offer. For effective support, David wound up at Cheetah House, “a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.” (Rocha’s 2014 piece in The Atlantic)

Not Just Outliers

But those are only anecdotes. Some might suggest they are the outliers, the exception to what usually happens.

As researchers like to say, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a few people who meditated went on to have difficult experiences does not necessarily mean meditation caused those experiences. Such instances are easily dismissed by supposing that the individuals in question had latent psychological problems that happened to come to a head during/after their meditation experience. What about hard data?

I was intrigued to learn of research on Transcendental Meditation (TM). I had some early exposure to TM, and that method of meditation is in some ways similar to the kind I practiced for years.

The German government completed a research project on TM in Germany in 1980, spurred on by ex-meditators (and spouses and parents of meditators) reporting troubling symptoms to authorities that they believed originated with their TM practice. Per Aryeh Siegel, the German study is “the most thorough study of TM regarding the comprehensive study protocols used and the preparation of interviewers who conducted the study” (Transcendental Deception, 2018).

As Siegel relays, “many meditators experienced severe mental disturbances, including disturbed sleep, anguish, problems with concentration, hallucinations, and feelings of isolation, depression, and over-sensitivity… [as well as] detrimental effects on decision-making… Whether they were ordinary meditators who had little contact with [the TM organization] or more committed, many of their complaints were similar.”

The investigators wrote: “The mainly positive experiences in the earlier stages (pictures, feelings of happiness) are replaced in time — according to reports of the ex-meditators — by terrifying images and feelings of fear or anguish.”

​A majority of meditators (63%) noted physical complaints associated with meditating, including digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, and neck pain. Psychological problems were even more prevalent, occurring in 76% of cases.While a small number had pre-existing illnesses — which got worse after starting to meditate — most of the cases were new disorders or illnesses, with 43% of participants requiring psychiatric or medical treatment to address them. The most common issues were fatigue (63%), anxiety (52%), depression (45%), nervousness (39%), and regression (39%). (Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018)

To me this suggests that if a person took up TM for stress relief or emotional support, the cure is liable to be worse than the disease. Yikes!

Dark Nights in Mainstream Meditation

But TM is only one form of meditation, and not among the most prevalent forms practiced in the West. Plus, it is arguably quite culty. (Patrick Ryan says as much here, or check out Aryeh Siegel’s aforementioned, thoroughly researched book to assess from fuller information.)

Mindfulness is all over pop culture these days. It’s not just a thing at Buddhist retreat centers or sanghas anymore — ‘secular’ versions are widely promoted in mainstream health and mental health fields, and the language of mindfulness has filtered into everyday lingo. The meditation and mindfulness revolution could not have gone on this long if it had the same sort of shadow side as TM… could it?

Fortunately, the question of adverse effects is starting to get some attention among researchers. Clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton is a pioneer in this area, investigating the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. Although they look at all kinds of effects, she and her team at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory have become particularly known for their work on adverse effects — likely because attending to undesired effects has been relatively uncommon among researchers.

Britton was herself an avid meditator, leading her to choose a meditation-related topic for her PhD dissertation. She studied the effects of a meditation practice on sleep quality. At that time, it was commonly believed that meditation improved sleep quality. But what Britton found when gathering data in the sleep lab was that people who meditated more than thirty minutes per day slept worse — with less total sleep and lower sleep quality. In fact, the more they meditated, the worse their sleep.

​As an evangelist for meditation, Britton was flummoxed. For years she opted not to publish her data. In 2010 — a few years after a meditation teacher told her at a retreat, “everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough… you stop sleeping” — Britton decided to share her data publicly. (as relayed in Kortava piece)
​
From there, she started talking more to the people who ran retreats, curious about what else she didn’t know about potential adverse effects of meditation. She heard horror stories at every center, with common threads being impairments in cognitive functioning and psychotic breaks — either short-term or long-lasting.

Britton and her colleagues at the lab are best known for their groundbreaking study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (originally the Dark Night project). They surveyed the range of meditation-related effects described by Buddhist practitioners in the West. Their aim was to learn about how these effects impact practitioners’ lives, and to gain insight into the causes, prevention, and integration of experiences that might include unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or functionally impairing effects.

Subjects consisted of meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. People whose challenging experiences could be accounted for by other causes were excluded, as were those with mixed practice histories beyond the three forms of Buddhism named above. Since the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was designed to shed light on the adverse effects that other research may not ask about, and that are often under-reported by practitioners, people with no adverse effects were also excluded. (Notably, only 4 of 73 meditators who initially completed interviews were free of adverse effects to report — this means that 95% of the people in the original pool of meditators and teachers HAD experienced adverse effects.) The final sample size was 60 people.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLUS ONE in 2017. (One lay-friendly article summarizing findings is here.) A key deliverable is a taxonomy of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. Researchers identified seven domains, each including up to 15 symptoms, with a total of 59 symptoms attributable to meditation.

​Some examples within each domain:

1. Affective: flattened emotions, irritability, depression, traumatic flashbacks, dramatic mood swings, fright, suicidality
2. Cognitive: poorer executive functioning (concentration and memory), heightened clarity, vivid imagery, disintegration of conceptual meaning structures
3. Somatic: fatigue, headaches and pressure, involuntary movements, pain, energy sensations, hotness or coldness
4. Perceptual: derealization (the world feels unreal or dreamlike), hallucinations, extreme sensitivity to sound or light
5. Sense of self: feeling disembodied, loss of sense of agency, altered perception of boundary between self and other
6. Conative: loss of ability to experience pleasure, loss of motivation, change of goals
7. Social: difficulty transitioning from intensive practice to normal daily life, increased sociality, impaired ability to work

For a complete list of symptoms in each domain, and narrative summaries, see Cheetah House’s Symptoms List.

Beyond Symptoms

Besides the development of the taxonomy, notable findings include (quotes directly from the study):

• “The vast majority (88%) of participants reported that challenging or difficult meditation experiences bled over into daily life or had an impact on their life beyond a meditation retreat or beyond a formal practice session.”
• “Each category was reported by an average of 20 practitioners and 5 experts, indicating high consistency across participants.”
• Whether people regarded the experience as positive and/or negative varied, depending in part on their frameworks of interpretation.
• “The associated level of distress and functional impairment [ranged] from minimal and transient to severe and lasting.”

• ​“In order to determine what variables affect the valence [positive or negative] and impact of a given experience, the study also identified 26 categories of influencing factors across 4 domains, including factors related to the practitioner, the practice, relationships, and health behaviors.”
• The results challenge “common causal attributions, such as the assumption that meditation-related difficulties only happen to individuals with a pre-existing condition (psychiatric or trauma history), who are on long or intensive retreats, who are poorly supervised, who are practicing incorrectly, or who have inadequate preparation. However, this is not to say that these and other factors do not play a role.”

It’s worth reiterating that 95% of the initial interviewees (not the final subject pool) had experienced adverse effects from meditation.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…

So, adverse experiences are not just rare results of meditation when practiced in extreme ways or by particularly vulnerable people.

Challenging experiences are well-known in traditions with a long history of contemplative practices, where such effects are an expected part of the spiritual journey. Even casual users of meditation apps have been showing up at Cheetah House programs needing crisis support. (Dan Lawton met a number of people who suffered after using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.)

And while more study is needed, adverse effects are now increasingly documented not only anecdotally, but through well-designed research. (That includes the “weird energy stuff” I described from my own experience in previous posts… the researchers call them Energy-Like Somatic Experiences and they were reported by over half of people interviewed.)

​That leaves the question, why is there so much talk about the potential benefits of meditation and other spiritual practices — and so little acknowledgment of the predictable, potentially problematic effects that many people will experience?

Given that adverse effects are common among serious or long-term meditators, why don’t we hear more about them — and before we are in deep? Why don’t meditation programs come with a list of possible side effects and contraindications, similar to prescription medications, so people can make informed choices?
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In the next installment in this series, I explore further five common problems in the ways meditation is often taught.

​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 👇
Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found

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In my last post, I described my experience with kundalini and (as I would come to think of my particular experience) Kundalini Syndrome.

The people who were ostensibly my meditation mentors did not know what to do with this, and the helper they referred me to was primarily helpful not for resolving the underlying symptoms, but for providing someone with whom I could speak freely about this strange kundalini fire. I came to recognize that I needed to change my circumstances — to return to some baseline of basic safety — before I would be able to stabilize myself physiologically.

​I left my job at the meditation center, moving back to my previous community, work, and social support network. There were no more incidents of having to RUN as if my life depended on it. And the depression I’d fallen into lifted with the change of settings. My energy, however, had not evened out.

I would get surges of energy and enthusiasm, pouring it into projects at my new job. Eventually I would hit a wall and be spent. Then after a while the cycle would repeat. I remember describing it to a friend as like bi-polar disorder, except not the emotional content — just ups and downs of energy.

I must’ve said something to my mother about all this, because I remember a point in my first year back when she requested that I see a psychiatrist, to rule out any issues requiring support. Mostly to put Mom at ease, I did that. My minister gave me a referral to a local professional she respected.

I told the psychiatrist about my experiences, and my belief that it traced back to a long-term meditation practice. She went through her usual assessment process. She found no cause for concern. In retrospect, I wonder if she’d seen this sort of thing before. In any case, she sent me on my way.
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So I went about readjusting to a “normal” life. Along with beginning to untangle my ashram experience — and moving outside the spiritual box they had taught people to stay in — I experimented with what felt right to me in my spiritual practice now. And I paid more attention to my body.

​Here are some of the things that seemed to help calm my energy cycles and stabilize me:

• While I still meditated off and on — still grieving the deep peace I used to reach reliably, and wanting access to it again — I came to favor meditating while I was walking, rather than sitting. That way, as the energy rose up to my crown, I could pour myself out into the canopy of trees. Simultaneously, I experienced a feeling of belonging to a larger whole, my sense of personal identity melting into that. I felt more balanced meditating this way than doing just sitting meditation.
• I went to a reiki practitioner off and on for several years. She described opening up restricted places so energy had more room to flow through me.
• She also recommended “grounding” myself in the earth, such as walking on the ground in bare feet, and putting my back against a tree. As a nature lover, this was welcome advice which I put into practice. I also continued my regular nature walks and hikes, which felt more important than ever.
• I used water imagery in a purposeful way, to counter the fiery feelings of the excess energy inside me. Salt baths and other literal contact with water also felt helpful.
• In time I also started eating more animal food. I had been a vegetarian for a decade, and never missed meat — so it was a surprise when I started craving animal flesh. It wigged me out at first; meat had long ago ceased to be appealing to me as food. I had favored “eating low on the food chain” as a choice consistent with my values of care for the planet and the poor. (I was aware of the ashram’s moral stance on vegetarianism as a nonviolent diet, too; this may have influenced me subconsciously, although I had chosen that type of diet for my own reasons, long before I started meditating.) I did feel better when I snuck some chicken into my salad bar salads (Bloomingfoods, I still miss you and your hot bar / salad bar), and had the occasional piece of fish. Besides the messages my own body was giving me that I now needed an omnivorous diet, a B12 deficiency and other medical test results confirmed that shifting my eating habits was a necessity.

Returning to “safe” relationships and community supports was also an important part of stabilizing myself. In addition to old friends, and my church community, I eventually looked for and found a life partner. The instinctive sense of safety I felt with him was a significant influence in my choosing the partner I did. I remember vividly the hug my now-husband gave me at the beginning of our second date, and the visceral feeling of safety and comfort. “Hmm, something’s different about this one. {contented sigh} ”

Within a couple years of returning home to the Midwest, circa 2008, I found resources online, on kundalini awakening and kundalini rising, safety protocols for kundalini activation or treatment, kundalini signs and symptoms, etc. Though the links where they were originally posted no longer work, I saved some articles to my computer. (You can also find plenty out there now — more as time goes on, it seems — if you search on these terms.)

A piece on techniques and pitfalls of kundalini yoga had this to say: “We are treading sacred waters here. To plunge in recklessly is to risk self-annihilation. When Kundalini awakening happens to people who are not on a spiritual path, the experience can leave them fragile and fragmented. As the Kundalini process involves a redefinition and reintegration of self, it adds extra pressure when people wish to suppress the transformation and insist to lead their lives normally.” [emphasis in original]

​I was a person “on a spiritual path.” But I was not one who had been particularly seeking illumination. Nor had anyone warned me, at any point, that a regular meditation practice could eventually lead not only to the positive daily benefits I valued — improved discernment about life decisions, enhanced relationship skills with others, greater patience, emotional stability, etc. — but that regular meditation could also lead to becoming “fragile and fragmented.”

An article on Kundalini Signs and Symptoms, by someone named EL Collie, included the following list:

The following are common manifestations of the risen Kundalini:

• Muscle twitches, cramps or spasms.
• Energy rushes or immense electricity circulating the body.
• Itching, vibrating, prickling, tingling, stinging or crawling sensations.
• Intense heat or cold.
• Involuntary bodily movements (occur more often during meditation, rest or sleep): Jerking, tremors, shaking; feeling an inner force pushing one into postures or moving one’s body in unusual ways. (May be misdiagnosed as epilepsy, restless legs syndrome (RLS), or PLMD.)
• Alterations in eating and sleeping patterns.
• Episodes of extreme hyperactivity or, conversely, overwhelming fatigue.
• Intensified or diminished sexual desires.
• Headaches, pressures within the skull.
• Racing heartbeat, pain in the chest.
• Digestive system problems.
• Numbness or pain in the limbs (particularly the left foot and leg).
• Pains and blockages anywhere; often in the back and neck.
• Emotional outbursts; rapid mood shifts; seemingly unprovoked or excessive episodes of grief, fear, rage, depression.
• Spontaneous vocalisations (including laughing and weeping) are as unintentional and uncontrollable as hiccups.
• Hearing an inner sound or sounds, classically described as a flute, drum, waterfall, birds singing, bees buzzing but which may also sound like roaring, whooshing, or thunderous noises or like ringing in the ears.
• Mental confusion; difficulty in concentrating.
• Altered states of consciousness: heightened awareness; spontaneous trance states; mystical experiences (if the individual’s prior belief system is too threatened by these, they can lead to bouts of psychosis or self-grandiosity).
• Heat, strange activity, and/or blissful sensations in the head, particularly in the crown area.
• Ecstasy, bliss and intervals of tremendous joy, love, peace and compassion.

Psychic experiences:

• extrasensory perception; out-of-body experiences; past life memories; astral travel; direct awareness of auras and chakras; contact with spirit guides through inner voices, dreams or visions; healing powers.
• Increased creativity: New interests in self-expression and spiritual communication through music, art, poetry, etc.
• Intensified understanding and sensitivity: insight into one’s own essence; deeper understanding of spiritual truths; exquisite awareness of one’s environment (including ‘vibes’ from others).
• Enlightenment experiences direct Knowing of a more expansive reality; transcendent awareness.

I had experienced most of the “common manifestations” of risen kundalini, as well as some of that “increased creativity” and “intensified understanding and sensitivity” listed in the second grouping.

Lists like this online supported my sense that this was not just a positive experience of awakened kundalini that I’d been having, but that there was a common, well-known shadow side to it — the headaches and pressure inside my skull, the pain in my neck, the energy cycles. Indeed, these were all a direct result of the spiritual disciplines I had undertaken so faithfully for years.

While any of the above listed symptoms might be “normal” in the context of spiritual development, it would not be normal to most of the people around me. After I left my job at the meditation center, I was no longer bound to silence on these topics due to the subtle pressures of ashram culture.

But treating these experiences as a secret, to be shared with only a trustworthy few, was now a strategy for blending in in mainstream culture. Kundalini awakening was not exactly a topic of conversation at Chamber of Commerce mixers.

It was helpful to have the lens of kundalini rising to make sense of my experiences. I wished I’d had it sooner. I remained curious to learn more, and open to other frameworks for interpreting my experiences. Periodically I came across a new resource that was helpful to me.

I left the ashram and returned home in 2006. Importantly, I found new spiritual companions on the page — not only Peace Pilgrim but Rumi, Karen Armstrong, Etty Hillesum, Tara Brach, and the historic UU spiritual sisterhood, among others. I bought a house in 2007, and met my now-husband in 2008. The process of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering was perhaps the most grounding experience of all (and the most exhausting, too); our daughter was born in 2010.

By 2012, I was starting seminary, as the first step in the process of becoming an ordained minister in the tradition of Unitarian Universalism. That began a second round of life review. I was still trying to make sense of my experiences at the meditation center, in particular.

During that time, I read a 2011 book titled In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening by Catherine G Lucas. I don’t remember how I found it. It pointed me toward other resources, including the 1989 Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (edited by Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof) — indicating that the kind of experience I’d had was recognized, not only by yogis and mystics worldwide down the centuries, but by the field of psychology for at least several decades. I also reached out to the Spiritual Emergence Network in my country; alas, I never heard back.
​
I found it helpful to use a series of writing prompts from Lucas’ book, based on Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey, to take a fresh look at my life’s journey and spiritual journey. I shared it fruitfully with the spiritual director I was working with at that time.

​Reviewing that telling again now, what stands out to me is the repeated lesson of trusting my own needs and my own knowing, rather than too readily adopting others’ advice or perspectives — particularly by learning to listen to my body, including my energy.

This breakthrough started with realizing I needed to leave the ashram, as the insistent kundalini symptoms were telling me to do. My recovery process after I left included much self-care and self-listening that was specifically body-attuned. When it came to childbirth, I felt a deep trust in my body’s innate knowing and capacities. I had a swift, smooth home delivery (6 hours vs. the typical 12–24 hours for a first birth). And what made me trust the “aha” moment of recognizing the call to ministry was the clear, calm, joyful sensation of my crown wide open and buzzing at the idea.
​
A few years ago, when reading up on trauma and somatics, I recognized my urge-to-run experiences in Peter Levine’s descriptions of trauma discharge (In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010). As I recall, in a moment of danger, the fight-or-flight response may turn into freezing instead — because it is not safe to run during the time of actual threat, or in some cases, because playing dead may give the animal a better chance of survival. Later, when a person is safe again, letting this urge run its course (literally) is a healthy way to release the stress of that event, which would otherwise remain embedded in the body. (Shaking it off, again literally, is another method. Animals instinctively do either of these things.)

This is what some animals do when a predator has it cornered: the gazelle freezes, and if the tiger picks off another member of the herd instead, or is distracted by a competing predator, like a hyena, the frozen gazelle can spring back into action and flee. By using the adrenaline for its intended purpose — to fuel the vigorous exertion required to escape danger — the stress energy of that life-or-death encounter is discharged. Aha! At last I had an explanation for those times when I’d just HAD to run.

This still left me with a puzzle, however. I had a happy childhood, with no traumas that would lead to such frozen energy, no date rape in college, or anything else I could point to as an obvious origin for this. Where did the threat come from? When had I ever been prey to a predator?

While the source of my “frozen energy” remained hazy to me, I learned that the phenomenon of spontaneous movement is familiar to some in medicine and body work fields. An occupational therapist, upon hearing me relay the movements that still sometimes happen, and feel therapeutic to me, told me that she had been taught to call this “unwinding.” In myofascial teaching, the fascia, where trauma is held, unwind as a way to move you through that trauma to release it. This is regarded as a natural, self-healing phenomenon with which practitioners can collaborate.

Most recently, as I learned about high control groups — and with no small amount of shock, recognized my old group in the descriptions — I concluded that it was actually the one-size-fits-all meditation practice and the ashram community that my body recognized as unsafe. That passive-aggressive, patronizing, untrusting, judging, not-caring-as-it-first-seemed, not-actually-equipped-to-support-me community was the threat I had cause to run from.

I now consider the meditation center’s founder a predator — a malignant narcissist and serial user of the “gazelles” in his midst. And the organization he founded is one designed, not to accomplish the mission of service it outwardly proclaims, but rather to cannibalize people — their minds, bodies, time, money, labor, skills, and idealistic fervor — for the aggrandizement of the founder. (It doesn’t matter that he’s dead. That’s the cultural DNA and it’s still playing out now, as it was when I was there.)

If only I had known how to listen to my body while I was there working at the ashram. It was telling me — literally — to run away from that group. At another point in my year there, depression communicated the same thing: this place isn’t good for you, you need to GET OUT.

I did get out. I calmed the kundalini fire. I created a life I love. Surely my experience of troubling, unexpected “side effects” is the exception among meditators, right? Surely mainstream champions of meditation effectively guide and safeguard people?

Well, not so much. Next up in this series: adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. Not from spiritual teachers or ancient religious writings, but from contemporary study using the methods of science. Fascinating stuff, offering necessary knowledge for practitioners.
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What I Wanted ... What I Found... What I Lost

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Eventually I would come to know it as Kundalini Syndrome — language I had to go out and find for myself. What I almost didn’t notice at first became as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, and equally solitary.

It started with my head tipping back, imperceptibly, during meditation. This was ~2003ish. I would notice it sometimes when I came out of meditation in my darkened room at home. The topic came up in a retreat workshop — I don’t remember now whether I asked about it, or whether one of the leaders observed it during our group meditation sessions.

In any case, I was encouraged to see this as a positive sign — not something to be concerned about, so long as I did not allow myself to be distracted. No particular framework was shared for understanding why this would happen or what it would mean. At the time, I took that as consistent with the organization’s general attitude of downplaying woo-woo stuff in order to focus on the positive, practical benefits of meditation.

There was also a period, around the same time as I recall, when violent images would frequently arise in my mind during meditation. I wasn’t sure what to make of it — it felt troubling. As I’d been instructed, I just continued to bring my mind back to my meditation focal point whenever it was interrupted by such imagery.
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​My sense of what was happening was that my mind was cleansing itself of all the negative imagery I had taken in over the years through television and movies. A kind of vomiting up and out from consciousness, not pleasant in the moment — but better afterwards.

Again, I don’t recall being offered any particular lens for interpreting this experience. The founder of the meditation center had long taught to take good care of your mind, with healthy recreation and mental inputs, just as one should offer sound nutrition to the body. Eventually it stopped happening. Okay, I thought; the purging is complete.

The head-tipping continued, though. I had been meditating for several years by this time, and completed an intensive six-month program at the meditation center. Not long after I made the decision to move across the country to work for them — but before I had made the move — I also happened to go in for a massage. My massage therapist suggested I might benefit from a session with her fiancé, who practiced reiki and other forms of energy medicine.

Curious, I decided to give it a try. While the body worker was doing something called “energy dowsing,” my head and neck began to move around. It was strange, though not unpleasant. It felt vaguely therapeutic. I wondered what this was all about.

I asked him what he was doing with these movements, only to be told that he was not moving me — my body was doing that on its own. I didn’t know what to make of this; I felt like the receiver of the movement, not like its initiator, similar to receiving a massage. I was not consciously choosing to move my head around. Ummmm… okay?

The body worker encouraged me not to be freaked out by this. “It’s a good thing,” was the message. “You have spiritual energy rising. Trust your body and its knowing.”

Thereafter, when I got into a zone in meditation, my head wasn’t just gently tilting back — it was moving around in all sorts of ways. It was hard to keep my mind on the intended focus of meditation with all this movement. But it felt unkind to suppress it. So, I got up from my meditation chair and let my body do what it wanted. Now it was not just my head/neck, but my whole body moving in and out of various positions, holding certain limbs or muscles taut, swiveling, sounds, emotions sometimes… I went with it, and my breath became deep, coordinating itself to the movements.

​Perhaps, I thought, like the troubling imagery that had come up for a while during meditation, this was a phase that would pass. I felt lighter after I stopped a session. A bit tired, but good. I think it was when I followed up with the body worker to share these bizarre (to me) occurrences that I first heard the phrase “spontaneous movement.” It’s all good, was again the message. Just go with it.

I let the spontaneous movement become part of my life. When I had time and felt the urge, I would go to a quiet room and just allow the energy to do what it wanted. It was like having a flip I could switch — if I told my body it was okay, it would start to go. When it had run its course — or more often, when I just needed to do other things — I flipped that inner switch back to “off” and my body quieted down. How long would this last?

I got through giving notice at my job, selling my house, packing my stuff, saying goodbye to my friends, moving across the country, settling into a new apartment, and starting my new job at the meditation center. Some weeks after the spontaneous movements started, it was still going.
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I talked to my designated “mentor” at the center — I’ll call him Brad — about these and other unusual experiences, which I attributed to the energy released through meditation. What should I do?

Apparently this issue was beyond the long-term meditators at the ashram. And the original teacher at the meditation center was deceased. So Brad referred me to a yoga expert in Berkeley, someone with Himalayan lineage that the center trusted.

In advance of my first visit with him — much like preparing for a doctor’s appointment — I wrote up as complete a description of all my symptoms as I could remember, and sent it to him. (Perhaps I was also giving him a chance to say — um no, you need a psychiatrist or a neurologist, not a yoga specialist. But he took it in stride and scheduled the appointment.)

Here’s what I wrote to him in September of 2005:

It started with neck pain which I attributed to a poor ergonomic situation in my workplace. Seeking relief, I went to a massage therapist I’d been to before and she did something new she’d been learning called “quantum touch,” where she chased the pain around with her hands. It does not involve massage-type touch. I could feel that it was definitely doing something though. She spoke of it more in terms of energy and chakras rather than just something muscular. She referred me to a healer that I ended up going to 3 times over the course of my last month in [Indiana] (July) before moving out to [California].

He also did quantum touch, and Reiki, and something called dowsing. Now my first session with this guy, Chris, ended with the dowsing and my head and neck were kind of rolling around and stretching. He wasn’t actually touching me but I thought it was his doing but not really, he said this was just how my body was responding to the energy thing he was doing, in its own way. This was maybe the last third of what became a 2-hour session.

After that I started having these movements occur at other times spontaneously-first in the state toward falling asleep, and then in meditation it wanted to start going, and then anytime I said the mantram very much [outside of meditation], and then under just about any mundane circumstances, it was like if I just mentally released the brake the movements would go. It was focused on the neck just at first. It will go for a short period of time (5 minutes) or a long period of time (several hours on some occasions until I got too tired), just however long I let it. Chris consulted his teacher and said this was something called “spontaneous movement” and a good thing, releasing energy blockages and maybe tied to emotional stuff too. I am a pretty practically oriented person … but feeling is believing. Stuff has just been happening.

It escalated from my neck to my whole body, rotating movements and yoga-like alignment movements and poses, kicks and flicks of my limbs, and just strange things, breathing things. I have felt things releasing some (muscles?) but also there is pain, especially in my neck but other places too. And some emotions, groans and laughter if I’ve let it go for a while at home, crying at times (some has definitely been grief and release from an old relationship). Anytime I mantram or give it permission it’ll just GO and I’m not doing anything, I just get out of the way and my body is doing these unpredictable movements. Neck especially (“throat chakra”). Chris had pronounced me unblocked at my last session in [Indiana] …

I had consulted Brad because I was concerned about how this was affecting my meditation practice (sometimes it is hard to disallow the movements during meditation, that feels unkind to my body) and I thought he might have advice. Brad thought this sounded like what can happen with Rolfing and similar modalities and that rang true to me from what he described. It feels like layers of muscles or something are getting loosened through these movements and sometimes I end up kneading specific tender spots too and there have been vocalizations and sharp outbreaths and emotions released as well.

I allowed the motions during the last two sessions with Chris and he said it looked like yoga moves, “spontaneous yoga.” I don’t know many yoga poses (I just have these two Rodney Yee tapes I got last year, on Brad’s recommendation to strengthen my back for meditation) but I did recognize Child’s Pose and there have been motions that seem dance-like as well. Other times it is much less graceful! Sometimes the motions have been rather painful at the time, sometimes I feel sore and tired after (not unlike after a deep massage where toxins have been released from muscle tissue?), there have been a few cycles including how it feels just today where it had flared up and been painful but then the same motions after a few days came to feel smoother, still intense but unknotted somehow.

Also by the time I was leaving [Indiana] a frequent modality was just this kind of crunching motion that feels like it’s on nodes around my neck and really under my skull from ear to ear in the back, and shoulder blades and at points all down my spine. And the back of the shoulder above the armpit, right shoulder mostly (I can’t help wondering about mouse hand, back to the work-station situation). It’s like my body is giving itself this internal massage that is working intensely on these spots, kneading them with whatever layers of muscle and tendon and bone are above the nodes.

Another symptom which I think is totally related is just a feeling of great pressure in my neck and head, that same place at the base of my skull in the back, and sometimes in my ears like my Eustachian tubes hurt and it hurts to put in earplugs for meditation, and sometimes on my crown, and even above and around my eyes at the worst. For several of my worst days in [Indiana] I felt like a pop bottle that had been shaken up but not released. Head-neckache and fiery pain that just made me want to cry. I also have had for about a year and a half this thing where my head tilts back in meditation and I feel like energy is moving up and out and that seems somehow related as well, although I had experienced that as positive if anything and not painful.

What else? The face and eyes have had movements that reminded me of Kathakali [dance] I saw in Kerala [India]. And the hands and fingers are really doing things sometimes, some of the same motions I recognize as recurring, like some kind of sign language to which I do not know the code (what does it mean). Also wailing. Wailing coming out of me sometimes.

The most dramatic perhaps was during the weeklong retreat I attended after I first got to CA. It was intense in the usual ways of [meditation center] retreats firing up one’s sadhana, plus personal stuff going on (a challenging unresolved relationship situation, entanglement), plus a kind man who was in our retreat died during the week and it just hit us all. Anyway one night after that driving home from the retreat house the wailing just surged out of me. This was not the first for that kind of thing (there has been breathing stuff and grunts) but the most dramatic.

Also once in the Penske truck on the way here [to California] (one of few times during that week I had any space at all from my parents who helped me move), along with the neck-crunching motions and loosening-breathing things, there were vocalizations that had intonations, like singing. I am actually a singer but this was the purest sound my body has ever produced and I wasn’t doing it, it was just coming through me. It was pretty brief.

Perhaps the other most dramatic thing that has happened besides that grief-filled wailing was earlier on-I think was the peak of excess energy if I had to pin it down… I had been really finding vigorous exercise quite necessary and felt that the energy was just taking over me when I went speedwalking, my body was propelled forward and I wasn’t doing it, and some of the swinging motions would go on and on if I let them, if I was in the woods where no one could see (right shoulder especially, this is still a hot spot).

Anyway sometimes in the evening I would find I just HAD to go out and exercise. This was even though I had done my 45-minutes power-walking in the morning with the hand weights and all. Once it was 11PM and found myself just pacing around my house and I had to go out and my body just ran at top speed, I couldn’t keep doing it for too long and ended up speedwalking but it was this tremendous burst of energy that had to GO, I could not hold it in
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It’s so surprising for stuff like this to happen to ME because I am a practically-oriented person in my sadhana, I have never been chasing after strange experiences, I would have been rather skeptical to hear someone else describe the things I am telling you. I never read about chakras. I was primarily analytical about religion and theology, and had a more materialistic view of the body, for a long time, until [founder of meditation center] brought me to the mystics. He won me over on the idealistic and practical qualities of sadhana, being an instrument of peace in the world, not seeking after unusual states during meditation or whatever. Anyway you’ve probably heard it all, but it’s just ironic if you knew me that this has happened to me.

If I give it permission, the motions and whatever else just come out of me, my body does things and it’s like I’m a third party, I just kind of let it happen in bewilderment and curiosity and eventually weariness. And laugh and look at [teacher’s] picture-what is this all about?! But I have taken folks at their word that I’m “working through” some issues that have gotten woven into my body somehow and are being released and that that’s good. I have a good inkling of what some issues and samskaras might be. But I just wonder how long this is going to last and it bothers me to be not having my evening meditation and to have these burning sensations in my body and this pressure in my head and need to keep accommodating this activity of the body.

Regular, vigorous exercise helps (I speed walk about 45 minutes each day-really power walk; and some occasional Rodney Yee yoga). Dropping evening meditation helps; or more accurately, doing evening meditation increases the pressure and energy and exacerbates it all. I think it helps to allow time and a private setting for the movements to happen. Sometimes mantram singing seems to be a good outlet (letting it get very buzzy like Tibetan monks or something), although other times the mantram seems to egg it on…

But I had the expectation that this was going to “run its course” before too long. I am through my big transitions (pretty much) now, I have let go of [my old city] and my life there, made peace with an older relationship break-up, gotten [other stuff resolved], and settled in here in my job at [the meditation center] and my new life and my intensified sadhana, and though there were quieter periods when I thought maybe it was about over, it keeps resurging.

I am getting the burning sensations in my neck and head and digestive system. I am finding the movements want to go at bedtime every night and in every morning meditation. I just wonder if there are things I can do that will facilitate the positive aspects of this, working through whatever inward stuff I need to work through and letting the energy be released through these body things. And I wonder if there are things I can do that will just help the experience meanwhile be more mellow, the energy be more mellow so it does not require a lot of management and so the need to allow motions and the head-neckaches and build-up of pressure does not interfere with my ability to concentrate at my work. I’d just like to be able to go about life like a normal person.

The yogi gave me some breathing exercises to do. I practiced them diligently for many months, especially on my regular walks. I could not tell if this made any difference in my symptoms; maybe it would’ve been worse without the special breathing?

Meanwhile, the spontaneous movements continued. I specifically remember having a couple more of those my-body-MUST-run experiences, when I left my apartment in the evening and just let my body GO in the dark, until I was spent.

Nothing much changed for the duration of my year working at the meditation center. I found some relief just in having someone I could speak plainly to about these experiences — something I implicitly knew I should not do with other meditators, per ashram culture. He seemed to know what I was talking about and feel confident we could handle it.

However, along with other unsettling experiences, I was still having the movements and the persistent energy-neck-headaches. I remember, after work, carpooling with a couple others from the meditation center, back to the nearby town where we newbies lived. I opted for the back seat, so my companions would not notice me squeezing out tears, the base of my skull feeling on fire, as the others chatted up front.

That spring, while perusing used books in the basement of a local bookstore, I came across a slim volume that immediately caught my eye. It had kundalini in the title — a word I’d heard in retreat workshops, which I knew was associated with spiritual energy — and likely with the strange energy experiences I had been having, though I’d had no such forewarning.
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Sure enough, the chapter on “signs of the arousal of the kundalini” included, among its long list of signs, all of the bizarre experiences I had been having with spontaneous movements (“certain people feel as if a spirit has taken control of their bodies because they can assume various yoga positions involuntarily”), big energy, electric sensations, positive emotions like joy and release, unusual sounds and more. (Kundalini: Discover the Secret Wealth of Energy in Your Body by Vikkar Tagor, 2003.)

​However, the author treated all of this as wholly positive. The only mention made of any potentially painful aspect of the process was that some people get awful headaches on the way to self-realization. This was attributed to new areas of the brain becoming active, beyond the 10–20 percent of utilization that the author said most people use. He likened that to labor pains, “since the yogi is now giving birth to spiritual awareness.”

I didn’t know whether the strange, sometimes painful things I continued to experience with kundalini would run their course on their own. But I had long since come to realize that the spiritual community I was in was not healthy for me — was not healthy, period. I was in the process of creating a way out.

Until I changed my circumstances, I did not expect these symptoms, including the painful ones, to resolve. After all, for a person on fire, what would be the point of dousing the flames on themselves — while still standing in the middle of the bonfire?

Next piece in this series: Calming the Kundalini Fire - How I Stabilized Myself.

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Surprises, Blinders, and Lies ….. My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong

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I have long appreciated Karen Armstrong’s insightful, compassionate writing on religion — in books like A History of God, The Battle for God, and The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions.

But it was Armstrong’s latest autobiography, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, that resonated with me like few other books have. Armstrong had been a Roman Catholic nun, in a particularly strict order, in the years just before the Vatican II reforms — and then had left. Her book found its way into my hands during my own years of post-ashram stabilization.

​At that moment in my own unfolding story, Armstrong’s tale of leaving a cloistered community and reconstructing a life in the ordinary world included words I could have uttered myself:

“I had submitted to other people’s programs and agendas for far too long.”

“I still felt protective of the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal.”
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“I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself.”

As it happens, last fall I read the two biographical works that preceded The Spiral Staircase (2004). Through the Narrow Gate (1981) was Armstrong’s first memoir, chronicling her experience inside her Catholic convent. Beginning the World (1983) was her first attempt to describe her transition back into the world, including the emotional, vocational, social, medical and spiritual aspects of that journey.

While taking a doctoral class on religious leadership last fall, I chose Armstrong as the subject for an Outstanding Leader Profile assignment. I take inspiration from her work on the Charter for Compassion, and more recently, tapping resources that spiritual traditions offer to help us constructively face our ecological crisis.

It was my interest in the latter that led me to take the class. I read all three of Armstrong’s autobiographical works in succession, not so much for the paper as with a renewed sense of kinship. I was struck again by Armstrong’s own hero’s journey — through and beyond a tightly structured religious community — which offered parallels to my experience.

​The timing of this reading was fortuitous. A few weeks later I would learn startling allegations about the founder of the spiritual organization I had been deeply involved with as a young adult; as I reconsidered the group, the scales fell from my eyes. Now that I am familiar with high control groups, I put my former group squarely in that category. Armstrong’s life in a pre-Vatican II Catholic order exhibited many of the same characteristics.

Granted, my experience was far less extreme than Armstrong’s. The program I took to was presented not as an ascetic path but as a sort of Middle Way. Its authoritarianism was cloaked beneath a genteel learnedness and cross-cultural difference. The worldview was a sort of universalized, inter-spiritual mysticism of a Hindu teacher — and one with a supposedly matriarchal lineage.

On the surface, this was all quite a contrast to the orthodox Catholic Christian theology that Karen knew, with its rigid belief system, unapologetic authoritarianism and (to me) suffocating patriarchy.

I had only been at the ashram for a year, and as an employee, not a resident, vs. Karen Armstrong’s six years in her convent. The community I participated in was not my faith of origin — though I thought I had tested and vetted and gone slowly, deepening my meditation practice and getting to know the community over five years, before I moved there at 31. Whereas Karen had grown up Catholic, and joined her order at the tender age of 17.
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So the differences were dramatic.

​Yet, key aspects of her journey resonated with me:

• the discovery, only after arrival, that there’s a lot more going on under the surface than any outsider might guess (and often more than even one embedded could readily decipher or explain while in the midst of it)
• a culture of monasticism and renunciation that was in marked contrast to the message for the masses about what it looks like to practice the tradition
• an institutionalization of Surrender to a degree that could damage one’s sense of self, self-trust, and self-worth
• practices that shut down critical thinking faculties, blunt emotions, and cut one off from the wisdom of the body
• leaders who themselves may have regressed psychologically and spiritually — and whose own capacity for empathy may have been stunted — as a result of this way of life
• mysterious and painful physical and psychological responses to the unhealthy environment and spiritual practices, which led each of us to leave
• a complicated adjustment to “normal” life after the period of going deep into an alternative community and culture
• gradual renegotiation of meanings and identity, over many years
• a busy new outward life of work, friends and recreation, yet “increasingly, that was no longer where the action was… the real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself”
• a recurrence of “that old longing for a more intense existence, shot through with transcendent meaning” — even after the earlier attempt to answer that longing had ended discouragingly; you can take the seeker out of the spiritual community, but the homing beacon within continues to signal and search
• in fact, that persistent religious sensibility became, in time, the basis for a new — no less spiritual or valid — vocation

That’s a lot of common ground. If there’s shared good news in our similar-but-different stories, perhaps it is that a difficult early religious experience does not mean one is doomed to an empty existence as a survivor. There is life after spiritual trauma.

Armstrong found her way to a much healthier life situation. In time she found the companions, created the home, and discovered the vocation that suited her. I did too.

If you’ve been through your own particular trials or hurts in spiritual life, know that healing, joy, purpose and connection are real possibilities for you too.

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How I Was Primed …….. What I Lost ... Who Joins Cults
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Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my online articles for your own life.