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.
​

​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.
​
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.

​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.

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.

​

• 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:
​

• 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

​

​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.