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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 1… Purpose

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

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

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

Would I come to regret this missed opportunity? I wanted them to initiate an independent investigation that took seriously the allegations that I now knew had been made by multiple women over the decades: that the group’s beloved teacher had abused his power monstrously, using others for his own sexual gratification — adolescents as well as young women — gaslighting them all the while, as he told them that it was for their own spiritual advancement.
​
The beach narrowed as a bluff rose up to my left. Hardy plants grew over the rocky curves. Resilient succulents matted the ground. Some sections held their red-green color palette, while other sections dried to gray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 2… Settling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 3… Idols & Golden Eras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 4… Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

          (Spoilers ahead!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 5… Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 6… Casting Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arg.

More control.

Whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 7… Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​       ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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

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

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

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

Deciding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking

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

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

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

Well. This was what I had expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grieving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusion of Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dilemma of Mixed Signals

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

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

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

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

Run to Me

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

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

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

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

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

Frozen Bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragmented Brains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blind Spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Upshot

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

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

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

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.
​
Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are others I refuse to let go of. The first passage I memorized, from the Tao te Ching, remains a touchstone for life and leadership:
​

​And I’m not letting Ramdas go entirely. I’m hanging onto his hymns to the Divine Mother:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, perhaps one of these will intrigue you? 👇

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

Six Explanations for the Ascendance of Eastern Spirituality

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

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

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

Intrinsic Appeal

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

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

The book’s imagery, drawn from nature and daily life, its elegant wisdom, and the natural yet ineffable concept of the Tao itself — all these connected with me in an intuitive way.
​
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
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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.
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​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles 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.