Have you ever tried a new yoga class, checked out a new-to-you church, or signed up for a retreat — after someone you already know and trust encouraged you to do so?

That’s leveraged trust in action. I was intrigued by this term, which I don’t remember coming across before in my readings on coercive persuasion. It popped up in the just-out book A Little Bit Culty: Navigating Cults, Control and Coercion by Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames. Edmondson & Ames host the A Little Bit Culty podcast and are themselves survivors — and whistleblowers — of the NXIVM self-help group.

As they explain, “leveraged trust itself isn’t inherently bad — it simply means using existing trust, credibility, or authority to influence others.” I’ve been influenced positively through leveraged trust many times, including by the friend who introduced me to the tradition that has been my spiritual home for three decades.

But when such credibility is borrowed and exploited deceptively for control or profit, that’s when leveraged trust morphs into a means of manipulation. 

Indeed, people who stay on the outer perimeter of a high control group may get nothing but genuine benefits.

Though I had just met Linda, as I got to know her, she lent credibility to this meditation teacher. She was (is) an accomplished person who came across as grounded, generous, and caring. She espoused progressive social ideals, like me. A generation older than me, she was from cosmopolitan San Francisco and made a career in Silicon Valley. She volunteered with the SF-based non-profit that put together our program in Kerala, serving as their representative on the trip.

While my acquaintance with Linda never got that deep, the connection between her meditation teacher and Gandhi continued to be prominent in the story of his work — and it continued to be a hook for idealistic young me. A few years later I would lead a book study group in my church using the biography on Gandhi put out by the meditation group’s press.

And my first close connection with the meditation center was a scholar of Gandhi who was one of the teacher’s students going back to the 60s. He led the regional meditation retreats in Chicago — the first retreats I went to — and had written on Gandhian nonviolence and its relevance to solving contemporary social problems. I brought the study of that book to my local community, too.

​Linda and Gandhi were just the beginning. There was a whole sea of legitimization for the meditation teacher, supplied by people and traditions that engendered trust.

The teacher’s books had blurbs on the back from the likes of Huston Smith, renowned scholar and premier teacher of world religions, and Henri Nouwen, mainstream religious leader and prolific spiritual writer. I admired Smith’s work, which I had read during college; his support encouraged me to regard this meditation teacher as an authentic one.

NXIVM’s Keith Raniere didn’t publish books, that I know of, but he managed a similar feat. Raniere and his worker bees engineered a visit to their headquarters in Albany, NY, by the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Raniere elicited a positive exchange with His Holiness, burnishing his own image as trustworthy by association.

In my old group, the teacher’s books, articles and talks (which in time I saw via DVDs) draw from scriptures of all the world’s religions, and from mystics and interpreters of every major tradition too. The mantrams he promoted draw from hallowed traditions East and West. As do the passages suggested for use in his method of meditation. Implicitly that meditation center builds on the legitimacy of all those established traditions and voices.

As I got onto the meditation center’s mailing list, I received periodic journals and newsletters that featured not only words of the meditation teacher, but stories of everyday people following the program of spiritual practices his center promoted. They always testified to meaningful benefits resulting from those efforts.

Later I started going to retreats at the center, in the Bay Area. Then I met more of the teacher’s long-time students. The teacher died in 1999, the year before I encountered his work. So I knew him only through these other people, and what they and their press shared of him.

I worked my way through the many, many books that press had put out over the decades, while establishing a regular meditation practice, and in time, trying meditation retreats. The Gandhi scholar was not the only student of the teacher to write on adjacent topics. Several ashram dwellers had written a bestselling vegetarian cookbook, which I happily added to my kitchen shelf.

Another of the long-timers took a particular interest in women mystics; her books piqued my curiosity too. She tussled with questions around women in religion, with the sensibilities of a hippie-era S.F.-area woman. Many of the other women who lived at the ashram worked there too, and played more traditional female roles, providing administrative support for the center, and preparing food for the residents. Among the women of the group, it was the writer’s support of the teacher that lent a veneer of feminist credibility.

​Meeting long-time students of the teacher in person, at their retreat center in Marin County, provided a more human, firsthand impression than one can get from books. At the time of my involvement in the early 2000s, the retreat presenters were all long-time students who lived at the ashram. Other residents would sometimes join us at mealtime, when more informal stories might be shared of life with the teacher.

The warm fellowship of mealtimes at retreats was conducive to trust-building. The long-time students functioned as character witnesses. They testified to not only the promise of the spiritual practices they taught, but the authenticity of the teacher.

Edmondson & Ames describe the function of the inner circle of devotees in several ways. They “amplify and reinforce the leader’s authority and agenda.” They are “trained to sing the leader’s praises and affirm the leader’s words and actions, creating an echo chamber that amplifies the leader’s authority.” Additionally, they act “as intermediaries between the leader and regular members, controlling access and information flow; this enhances the leader’s mystique.”

By the time I turned up at the retreat house and ashram, the mystique was being transferred to the teacher’s wife, who was his named successor in leadership. Access to her was controlled, bestowed as an honor on retreat-goers — though nothing seemed particularly special about her, on the face of it. I think group photos may have been a longstanding practice; those became in no small part about getting a photo of the group with the cherished mother-figure.

And let’s not forget the most mythical mother-figure of this group, the teacher’s grandmother. Said to be a spontaneously illumined figure in their village, she is quoted as beseeching her grandson to become like a character from Indian scripture — to become enlightened and inspire others. I don’t doubt there was a Granny, and some of the stories about her are probably true. Whether she purposely planted the seeds for her grandson to become a guru is (conveniently) unverifiable.

Granny also fits into the story-line that the group’s teacher not only grew up in “Gandhi’s India” (c’mon, he only met Gandhi like once?, probably among a huge throng) — but that his society was a matriarchal one. The teacher’s students use that language, matriarchal. But as a trained social scientist and one who learned specifically about Kerala, it’s actually matrilineal — tracing ancestry through the mother-line — which is not precisely the same thing. (People hear matriarchy and think it’s the opposite of patriarchy, with women in a superior position and men in an inferior position, power-wise; but that’s incorrect.)

In Kerala, matrilineal practices were ended by the British starting in 1925, and likely began eroding culturally far earlier than that, with the arrival of Christian missionaries (who came quite early to Kerala… the tour Linda and I went on included time in Cochin, which St. Thomas is said to have visited). Increased contact with other, patriarchal parts of India would also have diluted the egalitarian aspects of Kerala culture prior to colonization.

​Stories I heard about Granny, the head of the guru’s elite family, have her spending her time sweeping the veranda, cooking, and caring for the family; she comes off as content to toil in relative obscurity, despite being a supposedly illumined person, while her grandson’s destiny was to become a spiritual teacher touching untold lives. To me the way the teacher was pitched as coming from a matriarchal society — and implicitly, above the sexism and objectification of women present in our own, Western culture — was never terribly convincing.

There was a special subset of books put out by the group’s press that were about the teacher, rather than the teachings. I don’t think I acquired any of them until I had worked my way through most of the dozens of spiritual books ostensibly by the meditation teacher.

Through this hagiography, the meditation center could tell the story of the teacher and group in the best possible light, controlling the narrative: including what they wanted to include, omitting what they preferred to omit, and crafting it to serve their goals. These were the books I came to last.
​
Close associates of a teacher of this sort typically play not only a proactive role, but a defensive one. As Edmondson & Ames put it,

I look back in hindsight, and see how they got ahead of information that might have led newer meditators to question the teacher’s legitimacy. This may account in part for the emphasis on the “matriarchal” society, explaining away the wife and child(ren?) abandoned in India. (I believe it’s true that in Kerala of old, the role of uncle, not husband, would be the more important one. But not the Kerala of the mid- to late 1900s… and almost certainly not the parts of India the teacher went to after he finished his education and became a university professor in a different region of India. The University of Nagpur, for example, is in an area that was long patrilineal.)

The inner circle folks in my group were also ready for questions about the long-time student whose criminal behavior could undermine the credibility of the group or its teacher. He did not follow the teacher’s example or teachings, they assured us. He was a bad apple. Naturally, he was ejected from the ashram, never to return — distancing the community and teacher from his tainted reputation, and the damage he might do by association.

In recent years, multiple allegations have resurfaced of sexual abuse of females, both adults and minors, at the ashram, by the teacher himself. (The allegations are not new, though I didn’t know about them previously — as by design few later meditators did.) Blanket denial and spiritual bypassing have loomed large in the official response.

​For me, this broken trust can never be repaired. For the teacher is not who he said he was. And the group is not the safe haven it presents itself to be. Which explains why they need a sea of legitimization to buoy them up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Etcetera

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.
Seeking Safely … The Accidental Buddhist ... The Structure of a High Control Group 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 1… Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 2… Settling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 3… Idols & Golden Eras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 4… Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

          (Spoilers ahead!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 5… Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 6… Casting Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arg.

More control.

Whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wave 7… Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​       ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deciding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking

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

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

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

Well. This was what I had expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grieving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusion of Safety

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

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

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

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]
​
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.
​
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.
​
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.
​
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
​
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Burying Kokopele

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had lost his song completely by Thanksgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layer by Layer

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

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

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

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

At the Heart

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

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

Relationship Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring Around the Ruler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Residents & Workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreatants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satsangs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers

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

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

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

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

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

What the Onion Structure Accomplishes

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

Moving Down the Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gradual Conditioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Way You Slice It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

So if you know me or you’ve read some of my posts, you know that in the past year, I have come to see in a new light the meditation group that influenced me significantly as a young adult. The understanding I originally had of that group has been turned on its head.

Such a process can take one on quite an emotional journey. I’m talking about nothing more than feelings — and nothing less. I am thankful for ALL of my feelings.

Putting emotions into “good” and “bad” categories, and trying to avoid “bad” feelings, keeps a person fragmented — alienated from oneself. In contrast, accepting and working with our emotions has integrating power.
​

​Naming and processing emotions is the opposite of spiritual bypassing. It is a pathway to authentic healing and wholeness as a human being.

So, let’s review some facts, and then dig into the feelings they have generated.

New Information

In December 2023, I came across material online with shocking allegations against the best-selling author and beloved founder of my old meditation group.
Someone born there relayed, on a podcast, that the guru had sexually abused adolescent girls who grew up at the ashram. This was the very place I had worked when I moved cross-country to support the group’s “spiritual” mission in my early 30s. (The founder had been long dead by then, and I had heard no hint of such happenings in the past.)

I’d had a mixed experience, at best, when I drew closer to that community myself. I left after a year. And I’d been doing a dance of two-steps-away, one-step-back with that community, psychologically, ever since.

The intervening 18 years, for me, have included various phases of moving away from some of the core ideas that the ashram community promoted, as well as adapting practices to my needs.

All of which is to say, compared to others who have remained more firmly embedded in the group’s ethos, I probably was much better positioned to be able to receive new information about the founder. It is a portrayal that contradicts everything the ashram presents their teacher to be.

​Despite my relative distance, the new information shook me to my core. The cognitive dissonance was extreme. When I got beyond shock and confusion, it brought up a jumble of other feelings.

Keep Going

Difficult as it was to look right at the questions raised, no way was I going to dismiss them out of hand. I started poking around to see if anything else had found its way to the internet. That is, since my Googling of the teacher long ago, which had turned up nothing before my move in 2005.

Indeed, other troubling accusations now popped up. About the teacher’s multiple marriages and abandoned offspring in his homeland. About his behavior with young women there. About similar misconduct said to have gotten him ejected from a prestigious program here in the U.S.

But wait, there’s more. An old newspaper article, previously behind a paywall, describes a schism that happened at the California ashram in the 80s. Several female students came forward to tell the community about the founder molesting them.

Latent doubts among many students then came to the surface, tension grew in the ashram community, and there was an exodus of people. I’d gained a vague awareness of the 80s schism during my year working there, but with no clue about what caused it.

The last discovery was a pair of letters buried in a library archive, both from early ashram residents.

A man who had lived at the ashram for 19 years before leaving calls himself one of the refugees from that place. After much reading and reflection, he writes, he’s come to realize how harmful the ashram community was, and that the founder betrayed the very ideals he espoused. The refugee wrote in hopes that others might avoid falling into a similar kind of trap.

The second letter is the most damning of all. Here are the raw, heartfelt words of a woman betrayed by her so-called spiritual teacher. She asks for an explanation for his sexual abuse of her when she lived at the ashram, and for the pathetic justification he had given at the time (that it was somehow for *her* spiritual advancement) — how could that square with his teachings? She pleads for him to stop using women for his own evident gratification. She expresses her need for a sincere apology.

There is just no reading these words without being moved to tears, and knowing in one’s bones that she speaks the truth.

An Ocean of Feelings

Over the past year, I have talked to so many other people who’ve had ties to that meditation center. Sharing what we’ve learned. Processing together. Trying to make sense of our own experiences in light of this new knowledge. And wondering what to do, in our personal spiritual lives, and as caring people.

The community of those who are struggling with this new information is the potential audience that has come to be most often in my heart and mind, as I write online.

I need to bear witness to the feelings that I and so many others have experienced (and are still experiencing), as we metabolize what has come to light.
​

​Of course, different people will have different feelings. And a single person may have many different feelings at different points in time. Sometimes, I have many different feelings all at once. All of this is so normal.

Shock

Some version of shock may be one of the first emotions to arise. Confusion, dismay, or disillusionment are all natural responses to learning that someone is not at all who you thought they were — who a whole community of people has, for half a century, presented him to be.

A rug-pulled-out-from-under-me sensation fits in here. Because this is not just any ol’ person. This is a person lifted up as a beloved spiritual teacher, a role model, an illumined being.

If that fact is wrong, then what else in that community and its teachings is not what it seemed? The implications are so deep and disturbing — demanding so much work to get through — that a person might well just stay in shock.

If overwhelmed, one might instinctively push the troubling information away, at least for a while. More than one person has uttered “I just can’t…” The mind, the heart, cannot take it in.

​Alternately, to begin with, one might avoid exposure to any information that could put one in a precarious state. (That is just what the ashram leaders are advocating… but who does that really protect, in the long run?)

I have cycled in and out of shock, blankness, and confusion since I first heard that podcast last December.

Anger

When the allegations began to penetrate, when I could move beyond shock, I was so angry.

The podcast described molestation beginning when ashram girls turned 14. My own daughter was a few weeks shy of that age as I listened to it.

The Mama Bear in me — who is fierce — reared back on her hind legs and prepared to lunge at the threat to any precious, vulnerable young teen. How dare he!!!
​
NO. YOU. DON’T.

​But he already had. It happened long ago, and he’d been dead for decades.
When I was centered enough to take constructive action, I wrote to the organization’s Board of Trustees to share what I had learned, and invite their response. (How about that — direct communication!)

I received brief acknowledgment. Then silence, and more silence. Frustration mounted as they stalled on any real communication.
​
Then exasperation, when they finally provided a response that might kindly be called tone-deaf. (Picture a child putting their fingers in their ears and calling out “la la la la la — I can’t hear you…” when they Do Not Like what they hear. Kind of an adult version of that.)

Are you freakin’ kidding me?!

Determination set in when it became clear that denial — with a dash of victim-blaming — would remain the official line.

Trustees have shown that they would rather question the integrity of sincere questioners than actually answer the questions.

One friend, who had been involved longer than I, and had a student-teacher relationship with the guru while he was alive, reached out to the trustees some weeks after I did.

His questions and concerns to the leaders have gone completely unanswered — not even acknowledged. Given not only the shocking concerns that had arisen, but also the radio silence, my friend was so hurt and furious that he eliminated from his home all possessions associated with the meditation center.

First, he put his entire collection of books by the prolific meditation teacher into a giant garbage bag and set it out, with great delight, on trash pick-up day. (This friend is an academic and a book-lover, so dumping books is not a step he would take lightly; but he did not want anyone else to read THESE books.)

Then into his outdoor stove, in batches, went handwritten letters exchanged with the teacher and other representatives… and keepsakes the community had sent over the years (oh, they knew how to nurture the illusion of connection, to make it feel anything but transactional)... in went newsletters and journals… and files of notes taken at retreats…

It all went up in glorious flame.

​My friend found this quite cathartic.

As for me, my initial anger about the harm done to vulnerable people came in waves.

Later I would experience anger again, as I read up on high control groups. Slowly I was able to recognize some of those dynamics in my own direct experience with that community. Others with whom I was processing started connecting the dots too.

What began as anger at the teacher’s sexual and spiritual abuse of girls and women, expanded into anger at the ashram long-timers for their participation in a wider pattern of deception and coercive control.

I began to see that all of us who had come into their orbit were survivors of spiritual abuse. We had all trusted them. And we had all been betrayed.

Vulnerability & Vigilance (Fear)

In my first 3 or 4 months of processing, a feeling of vulnerability sometimes surged through me.

I would get embodied flashbacks — from the year I lived nearby and worked at the ashram — of feeling trapped, confused, stuck.

I can only imagine that if I had overlapped with the founder’s tenure, I would have been squeezed into an even smaller and smaller area of permissible thought and feeling. (Janja Lalich calls this bounded choice.)

If my cohort had arrived a decade or two earlier, would some of my peers have been targeted sexually by the meditation teacher? What might I myself have been subjected to?

Would I have been able to make any sense of what was happening? Would I have been able to break free?

It’s a feeling of having narrowly escaped harm. With echoes of — do I still need to be vigilant? Is the coast really clear now? As I write this, my adrenaline spikes.

I can name this emotion, but that did not immediately move it from my body to my mind. It is visceral.
​
I left the ashram almost two decades ago, but this vigilance is still alive in me. It has been stoked by the recent revelations of wrongdoing and systemic deception.

Sadness

The more light was thrown on the teacher’s and group’s dubious history, the more I read from the literature on high control groups and recovery, the more time I spent in the land of sadness.

I am heartbroken at the depth of harm done to the girls and women who were sexually molested by the teacher.

I can only imagine the despair they have known. They went through successive betrayals, as the community disbelieved and shunned those who dared to speak up — which it continues to do.

When I consider the wider community of people who have regarded this teacher as a central influence on them — a man who skillfully drew upon the spiritual wisdom of many traditions, in ways relatable today, who spoke eloquently, wrote beautifully, who oozed humble charisma, and yet who was, at heart, it turns out, a charlatan — well, it’s depressing.

It’s depressing to consider the cumulative spiritual harm done to thousands of people who were misled and manipulated by this manufactured mystic.
​
Under the umbrella of sadness, another primal emotion that can arise is shame. How did I not know? How was I taken in by this spiritual con artist and his twisted minions? What’s wrong with me, that I was so easily duped?

(Note: If you were involved in this or a similar group, NOTHING is wrong with you. People like him — groups like that — figure out how to hook people through natural, deep human needs. Like the needs for belonging, for meaning, for peace, and for beliefs that make sense of the world. And usually, the people they hook happen to be then in a moment of particular vulnerability, such as all humans have at some time in their lives.)

Another feeling in this family is grief. One may wonder: if I process this new information, and all the feelings it brings up, what will I have to let go of?

Will I drift apart from a dear community, with which I had so many positive associations before? Am I going to lose my precious practice, my rock? Will I have a crisis of faith? Will I be afloat in a sea of uncertainty about what is real and true?

​​For me, new grief reverberates through old grief. I’ve been through phases before of grieving my losses with this community.

The loss of the reliable grounding and deep peace I had found in the early years of my meditation practice, which has never been the same since the kundalini syndrome began. There’s no going backward.

The loss of the ashram and retreat house as places of refuge, after I moved there and had a very different set of experiences and associations in that place. (Existential losses explored here.)

The loss of relationships that had been important to me, which could never be the same in the After as the Before — a loss of belonging and identity.

These losses were complicated by the sense that I could not speak openly, plainly, about my experiences in the meditation community, even with the peers I had met there.

Eventually I did have some frank conversations with a few of the others who came and went like I did. And I wrote extensively a couple years after I left — voicing and clarifying my experiences at least to myself, privately.

But my socialization by the group was still deep enough in me that, even once I found some words for it, I censored myself from any wider or public naming of what I’d experienced. Speaking negatively of the group was implicitly a form of disloyalty, and loyalty was a defining value of the community. So there was no public acknowledgment of my grief.

Taking in this new, heartbreaking information about the founder, and receiving a wholly inadequate response from current leadership, has added new ouches. It’s like someone is pushing on my old bruises.

Though, in another way, I feel old scars healing more completely, thanks to the new perspective I’ve gained this past year. I now know, more clearly than ever, that the difficulties I experienced when I worked there were not on me. That community WAS deeply troubled, as I’d sensed.

And now, I have a more precise understanding of why. Now, I am not the only one who sees it. In reality, I never was — so many people had come and gone from the ashram, before my cohort was cultivated, and while we were there, and since.

Guilt

I have long felt concerned about the friends who stayed behind at the ashram when I left, or who came after me. The one that particularly worries me is my former office-mate, who I remember hearing crying through the thin wall between us.

‘Madelyn’ is the only one left, at this point, of my cohort. And she is in sooo deep. A couple of decades in, her indoctrination seems to be complete. Though she is ostensibly their leader now, I get the sense that someone else is really pulling the strings.

If I still have echoes of that stuck feeling, almost 20 years later, how trapped must Madelyn be at this point? So trapped she doesn’t even know what she genuinely feels, is my guess. So hemmed in by the culture, so behaviorally modified and bounded in choice that she is the perfect yes woman.

Is the real Madelyn still in there somewhere? Will she ever get to come out again? Can she heal and know joy?

I’m not sure how best to express what I feel about Madelyn’s situation. There’s an element of something like survivor’s guilt.
​

​To my good fortune, I’m the-one-that-got-away. I was the first of my cohort to leave. She is the last one still stuck.

And she may never get free. Even if the group dissolves, she may never extirpate what has been inculcated in her, which is not really her.
​
Intellectually I know I am not responsible for other people. But the friend and Mama Bear in me yearns to save Madelyn, or help her save herself.

Regret is perhaps a lighter form of guilt. For me, regret comes from knowing that, as a result of my earlier enthusiasm for the meditation practice and the programs of the group, I introduced it to many other people.

I gave away so many books published by the group — the teacher’s main claim to fame. I encouraged other members of my local meditation group to consider retreats, to come closer. At the church I belonged to at the time, I initiated and co-taught a workshop on the group’s spiritual practices.

I nurtured relationships on behalf of the organization, and raised money, and represented the aspirations of the group to other people, first as a volunteer and then as a staff member.

Even after I left my job there and began my long slow dance away, internally, I still believed there was wisdom in the founder’s words. After I entered the ministry, I quoted him from the pulpit numerous times, and introduced his books to congregants. No more!

Have others suffered in any measure because I brought them into contact with this teacher, this community — this group that turns out to have been a Trojan horse?

I hope not. I didn’t influence anyone to come as close to the group as I had. Well, other than my cohort of young adult peers; by design, we all influenced each other, culminating in a wave of YA migration to live and/or work at the ashram.

I will never know fully just how my role with that meditation center affected others. I am left with whisps of moral injury.

​In this light, my writing publicly about my experiences, and my time spent talking to other meditators who are processing, is not only a part of my own healing journey, and in the hope of preventing others from enduring similar experiences. It is also reparation for any harm in which I may have unwittingly participated.

Compassion

This is the underlying source of much of my anger — compassion for the sexual assault victims whose humanity was violated, and compassion for all those who have been spiritually harmed by this group, which turns out to be a high control group. (You can disagree, of course; that’s my assessment, after a deep dive of study, and drawing on my own direct experience.)

I also feel compassion for the long-timers. Who knows why they got stuck there, when so many others came and went. The ones who are left may have vulnerabilities that others didn’t have.

In any case, they are among the most harmed. Some are so bamboozled they cannot even consider the evidence of their teacher’s behavior — and its implications for who he really was — not even when it is plainly presented to them by people who genuinely care about them.
​
The emotional and social captivity of the ringleaders appears to be absolute. As they have been for decades, they are trapped within the assumptions, the habitus, and the relational system of the group.

I’ll write more in the future about how I try to make sense of the long-timers — and why I have largely forgiven them.

Freedom

As I move through the many feelings brought up by the allegations and by the current leadership’s response to them (or lack thereof), I experience greater freedom within myself.

Others have commented on this too. On the other side of the shock, the hurt, and the anger, beyond the sadness and confusion, a lightness often seems to emerge.

The flip side of losing trust in the meditation teacher and his community is regaining some trust in oneself and one’s own judgment.

The ashram cultivates dependence. So it makes sense that when one gets greater distance from that community, and all its expectations and strictures, one emerges into greater liberty.

Remember my friend who burned all his meditation center memorabilia? Up to that point, his longstanding identity as a student of that particular teacher, the warmth and belonging he had experienced in the community of meditators — and I’d guess, the compulsory loyalty that the group subtly instills in participants — all this had previously made it hard for him to fully move forward on a different spiritual path, the one that best helps him to grow and thrive now.

The new knowledge of the teacher’s misdeeds, and the ritual burning, helped him finally make a clean break from the group — one that he realized he’d actually been ready for for quite some time.

Other people I have talked to are also feeling, in time, more able to trust their own experience, and their own needs — even if it contradicts what the meditation teacher and his community have long taught them to consider correct understanding or practice.
​

We are freer to know natural joy and not just discipline.
​
Each person can follow their own goals for their spiritual life, instead of an impossible goal implanted by others.

Beyond the striving for Purity that the ashram now teaches and embodies, there is freedom to notice what practices work for you, and which people speak to you.

There is freedom also to enjoy the gifts of life — not to waste them in the doomed pursuit of perfection.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love…

But to experience ever and
​ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom, and
Light!

​~Daniel Ladinsky (inspired by Hafiz)​​

More on Anger

I have had to work long and hard to be able to claim my own anger. As a female socialized to be “nice,” ditto as a Midwesterner, as a thinker (enneagram 5w4) who takes refuge in my mind, and as a child of an alcoholic with a deep aversion to angry adults, anger is something I avoided, unconsciously, for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean I never felt it, of course. Anger is a basic human emotion, a built-in biological reality. But I didn’t know how to fully FEEL it, or how to EXPRESS it. Anger often stayed below the surface in me, fermenting sometimes into sadness or helplessness.

Ironically, words that first came to me through the meditation center — words of Gandhi — were one of the ways that anger has been helpfully reframed for me.

“I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”                                                                    ~Mohandas Gandhi

My life partner has also modeled for me the positive power of anger. I’m not saying every expression of fury is welcome — my first instinct is still to leave the room, because my sensitive nervous system will pay a price for hostile energy discharged in my presence.

But the one who has the capacity for intense, instinctive anger — and who trusts these natural feelings — also has the capacity for tremendous joy and resilience. I see these twin powers come to life in my husband. They are two sides of the same energy, the same vibrancy.
​

​To cut oneself off from any feeling is to cut oneself off from all feeling.

So these days, I honor my anger. It keeps open my access to joy. And it provides the energy for taking constructive action — something I want to keep doing.

Coming next:  resources for healing and moving forward — for individuals and potentially, for groups who want to continue together.

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

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Seeking Safely …….. My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong …….. The Roots of Control

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

I cocked my head away from my computer screen, rubbing my sock feet together for warmth in the cold dampness of a Bay Area morning. Leaning toward the thin trailer wall that separated my office from my co-worker’s, I listened intently. Was she…? Yes, Madelyn (I’ll call her) was crying again. The sound was muffled but unmistakable.

Should I try to connect with her after lunch? I had made overtures of support before, offering a hug or a listening ear. But to no avail.
​
So I could only guess what she might be struggling with: some old grief welling up — perhaps the very grief that had made this place seem to her like a haven, from afar? The loneliness of life at the ashram, which was in equal measure insular, and yet also lacking in genuine emotional intimacy? The accumulated frustration of trying to figure out how to accomplish something in her job, in the opaque culture of this community?

​The memory is frozen, the questions still unanswered for me almost twenty years later. Because Madelyn, it seems, learned to do something that I ultimately did not want to do: to turn her attention away from the feelings that troubled her, and as we’d been taught, lean into a spiritual practice instead.

Perhaps she mantramed her way through it. Or maybe she used the powers of concentration she had honed through years of meditation, and focused her attention back on some work task, as the untended tears dried on her face.

She certainly would not have done what I sometimes did when struggling through my dark year of the soul there — console myself with a sweet treat. No, sense training had never seemed like a challenge for my waifish peer. She was adept at self-denial.

Sidestepping Reality

Instinctively, my young adult self at that meditation center knew that feelings provide information. And that to cut oneself off from difficult feelings would be to cut oneself off also from important insight — from the very reality of one’s own experience.

When a person pushes away reality, they may well end up living in illusion.
I didn’t have this vocabulary then, but now I recognize that I witnessed a good deal of spiritual bypassing at that ashram.

Psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing to refer to a frequent phenomenon in spiritual spaces. It means

using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” [i]

My old group promotes the use of a sacred phrase, or holy name, throughout the day. With enough repetition, the phrase becomes embedded deep in one’s psyche. The goal was to do it so often, for so long, that eventually it would go on repeating itself in the mind effortlessly.

Such a practice appears in many different religious traditions, and I have no bone to pick with it generally. However, I believe it can be misused.

If the holy name is repeated to displace difficult emotions — instead of actually feeling them, and finding out what they have to teach you — the practice becomes a method for spiritual bypassing.

My old group did advocate repeating this kind of sacred phrase as a way to cope with strong emotions, such as jealousy or anger. Retreat leaders assured students that was not about suppressing emotions.

Instead, they said, practitioners would *transform* difficult emotions through this discipline. What could that even mean — transform them into what?

Granted, sometimes we need to pace ourselves to metabolize strong feelings. If a person uses their mantram just long enough to get grounded again, so they can then genuinely experience and deal with their emotions, well, I can see the utility in that.

But I suspect that Madelyn — and many of her role models at the ashram — are just as apt to use spiritual disciplines to perpetually avoid “negative” things.

To avoid grief, to skirt around cognitive dissonance, to veer away from anger that actually needs to be heard… to divert the mind from unwelcome questions, to postpone maturation of various kinds… suppress, suppress, suppress.

Avert Thine Eyes!

The current de facto leader of the group has gone all in on spiritual bypassing. In response to a series of credible allegations of wrongdoing by their founder, she is coaching meditators to push away information that might make cracks appear in their image of the organization and its founder.

She urges them, instead, to focus on maintaining the purity of their consciousness.

The chart below popped up on my social media feed recently. It captures very well the approach the leadership of my old group is taking.
​

​My old organization’s message to meditators is something like: Avoid exposure to ‘baseless rumors’ that could cause you turmoil; just do your practice and keep your mind steady.

In other words, nothing to see here. Keep Calm and Meditate On.

The organization appears to be largely ignoring sincere questions and concerns expressed by long-time practitioners who *have* reviewed the allegations.

Emails simply go unanswered. Except perhaps by the silent repetitions of sacred words in leaders’ minds. Rama rama rama rama…

Something’s Rotten in Denmark

When an institution works to silence questions and maintain the status quo, even in the face of legitimate concerns, that tells me that something is broken in the institution.

It’s a common enough pattern, sadly. I was sensitized to it as I completed seminary and started out as a congregational minister.

My tradition was then going through a time of reckoning over ministerial misconduct, and the long-term harm it does not only to individuals who are targeted, but to whole communities whose ability to trust leaders is damaged.

Shortly after I accepted my first call to serve a congregation, a major address at the national level powerfully broke silence on this issue. (The speech is not available from the sponsor organization Because Threat of Lawsuits, but it can be accessed from the speaker herself here.)

The upshot: secrecy harms individuals and groups, while honesty is the beginning of healing. Let’s get real, people.

“The [group’s] growth as religious people began by telling a secret. It continued with an analysis of power that our faith calls shared ministry — the priesthood and prophethood of all in covenant.” ~ Gail S. Seavey [ii]

​There had been voices crying in the wilderness for years. But a critical mass seemed finally to have been reached — in no small part, I believe, because of the preponderance of women now in the ministry in my tradition.

It has been a period of breaking silences, clarifying codes of conduct, making training in healthy boundaries a core part of professional development, strengthening systems of accountability, and increasing transparency about all of it. It remains a work in progress.

These are the kinds of things my old meditation group needs to do, if they are sincere about serving people. Start with the truth. Apologize to those harmed. Ask what will help them heal. Then, if the organization is to continue, get to work on building preventive systems.

Alas, so far, my old group’s leaders seem bent on staying in denial. They’ve been telling their story a particular way for decades, and they’re sticking to it.

The Sound of Silence

Another of my colleagues, whose ministry began in the early 2000s, wrote powerfully from her own experience of the dynamics of silence. As Erika was on the verge of being deemed ready to serve — but before she had passed that major milestone — a senior colleague propositioned her.

This mentor had all the power in the relationship. Including the ability, if he so chose, to derail her nascent vocation. Erika could hardly believe what was happening. She froze.
​
What cut even deeper was the silence of the system. For while one faithful female colleague, when taken into confidence, protected Erika, the man who misused his position was largely, quietly, shielded from accountability.

“When silence becomes a living character in our personal narratives, it’s often an accomplice to power.” ~ Erika Hewitt [iii]

Gosh, that tale sounds familiar.

In the stories I’ve heard about the founder of my old meditation group, the real kicker for victim-survivors was that the ashram community, who revered this man, largely did not — would not — believe them.

Instead, those who stayed have been complicit in the silence. Complicit in letting the harsh truth fade into obscurity within the larger mythology of the group.

So it wasn’t just one person, the supposedly most enlightened person, who betrayed the victim-survivors. In the end it was the whole community of those who participated in the silence-keeping.

And for as long as they continue to deny the truth — to perpetrate their own Big Lie — the organization fails everyone they purport to serve.

A Turning Tide?

Now, more people once affiliated with the group are learning about the allegations. Person by person and city by city, the extended community of meditators are considering the evidence and consulting our consciences.

Almost everyone who reviews the information finds the allegations credible, the pattern un-ignorable. Most are deciding that we will not be part of an organization more committed to maintaining its illusions than to caring for real people.

We will not be secret keepers, or truth deniers. No. This is where the silence ends.

Perhaps, as in the community Gail Seavey served, this is also where the spiritual growth deepens.
​

​​If you’ve had your own journey with spiritual bypassing — or with breaking oppressive silence — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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

Up next… probably a piece that’s been brewing about All The Feelings I and others I know have cycled through, upon realizing that A) our meditation teacher did Very Bad Things and B) it was (is) a high-control group. Expect at least one feeling wheel.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The Shadow Side of Meditation & Mindfulness … How Cults Are Concealed

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

Endnotes

[i] Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

[ii] 2016 Berry Street Essay by Gail S. Seavey, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, presented at UUA General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, in June 2016. Essay available in writing and via video at https://www.gailseavey.com/2016-berry-street-lecture. Response available at https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/2016-response-to-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-david-pyle/.
​
[iii] “The Dynamics of Silence” by Erika Hewitt, in Braver/Wiser, November 15, 2017. Available at https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/dynamics-silence.

In my last post, I considered why the conflicted experience of participating in a high control group leaves one in the dark about what is really going on. How is it that astute people miss what is happening right before their eyes? Hidden levers of influence are used, softly, gradually, to manipulate people. Cognitive dissonance arises and is resolved — most often through unconscious compliance with the group’s worldview.
​
Let’s examine a few more reasons the inner workings — and the nature — of a culty group may remain veiled.

Surprise Inside

High control groups promise to make a difference in the lives of their participants, and/or in the wider world. This is why they especially attract caring, idealistic people who are hungry for meaning and purpose.

Like most of us, such people tend to assume that others are like them (most people are). We assume people mean what they say (most often, people do). We give people the benefit of the doubt if something doesn’t add up. (Wouldn’t I want the other to do that for me?)

A sensitive, empathetic person will imagine others’ inner motives to be similar to our own, or to other people we know. It’s hard to perceive other possibilities, foreign to our own experience. Especially if everyone in the group lauds the person as special, enlightened, wise, the embodiment of love — whatever the persona of a particular cult’s leader happens to be.
​
Enter a leader from the Cookie-Cutter Messiah School. That’s what cult survivors sometimes call it tongue-in-cheek, upon discovering striking similarities among their different leaders (Take Back Your Time by Janja Lalich).
​

​The formal position of the leader varies — spiritual teacher, political leader, therapist, lover, esteemed pastor, college professor, workshop trainer, etc. — but he (or she) usually possesses these qualities:

• “a dramatic and convincing talent for self-expression”
• “an intuitive ability to sense their followers’ needs and draw them closer with seductive promises”
• an ideology with untestable claims that the leader indoctrinates his followers into (using the same, seemingly innocuous levers of influence noted in the previous post)
• “inescapable magnetism, winning style, and the self-assurance” to persuasively promote their chosen cause or worldview

Many (though not all) cult leaders are believed to have personality disorders — not that regular folks would be likely to discern that. On the contrary, “initially many persons with personality disorders appear quite normal. They present themselves to us as charming, interesting, even humble… their contact with reality appears solid” (neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, quoted in TBYL).

​Trauma therapist Beth Matenaer describes narcissism, common in cult leaders, as characterized by “high need for control, admiration, and lack of maintainable empathy” (in TBYL). The narcissist tends toward paranoia, exploitation of others, grandiosity, lack of genuine concern for others’ needs, and charismatic allure.The narcissist wants attention and will weaponize it when they get it, along with using other forms of manipulation and coercion. They zero in on empathetic people and exploit them to meet their own needs.

Some cult leaders may further have antisocial personality disorder, which is viewed as a subgroup of narcissistic personality. (TBYL) The M.O. of a sociopath, as Robert Jay Lifton coined it, is manipulation from above, idealism from below.

​Other common characteristics of a sociopath include being captivating storytellers, appearing helpful and even ingratiating (while covertly domineering), presenting themselves as enlightened (but also the most humble), pathological lying, having shallow emotions, inability to give or receive love, engaging in thrill-seeking behaviors (publicly or privately) to stave off boredom, lacking personal boundaries or a sense of responsibility, and often scapegoating others.

Multiple marriages, sexual misconduct, and sexual control of followers are common for such a person. Their personal history is often erratic, involving many changes in location or occupation, and a parasitic lifestyle. They may have significant health problems and attribute them to “their so-called compassion in taking on their disciples’ karma” or their role in leading the group. (TBYL) (If “cash karma” is real — consequences rebound on one instantly, or within one’s lifetime — one might deduce, instead, that the leech’s own hurtful misbehavior is the actual root of their illness.)

If a cult leader doesn’t start out as a narcissist — and perhaps a sociopath — living in the authoritarian power seat for a while may well turn them into one. Cathleen Mann, cult expert and educator, commented in one interview on how this can happen:

“Something could be said for compensatory narcissism, which is narcissism that comes out of being put in a powerful position, for a long period of time. It causes you to become narcissistic… you learn the behavior and part of it is a function in order to survive in the system, but a lot of it is because they enjoy it.”
                                       ~ Cathleen Mann

Whatever the stated mission of a cult, its real purpose “is to serve the emotional, financial, sexual, and/or power needs of the leader.” (TBYL)
​

​I wager that most people are not going to recognize a narcissist, sociopath, or other charming con artist upon encountering them. Especially not if that person is already surrounded by admirers, who sing their praises and interpret all their behaviors in the most positive possible way. Once such a “trust bandit” has assembled his first cluster of followers, he can prey all the more easily on other kind souls. He will seem like a remarkable, intriguing figure.

Indeed, as Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich put it, “What you first see is not what’s inside” the cultic group. Instead, cults — and their enthralling leaders — are “reminiscent of a jack-in-the-box — a pretty, innocuous-looking container that, when opened, surprises you with a pop-out-figure,.. Similarly, surprising and frightening things pop out over the course of membership in a cult.” (Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace)

Given all of the above, it must be a rare person indeed who can meet a cult leader in their element — and recognize the emptiness beneath the luminous exterior of these emotional vampires.

Need Trumps Logic

Humans are quite capable of deceiving ourselves when it helps to meet important needs. Psychologist Robert Cialdini tells the story of going to an intro lecture on Transcendental Meditation (TM), as part of his observational research into professional persuaders (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 2021 edition). He brought along a curious colleague who specialized in statistics and logic.

During the Q&A, the logic professor “pointed out precisely where and why the lecturers’ complex argument [for the uniqueness and boatload of diverse benefits] of TM was contradictory, illogical and unsupportable.” The facilitators sat in stunned silence before acknowledging that the points merited closer examination.

But what fascinated Cialdini was how the other attendees responded. “After what appeared to have been an embarrassingly clear collapse of [the] presentation, the meeting had somehow turned into a success,” with audience members making down payments on TM training at dramatically high rates.

​Cialdini and his colleague spoke with several such individuals, curious to understand their rationale. People had come with a variety of aims: to develop discipline to succeed in one’s profession, to overcome insomnia, to sleep less so one could study more and do better in school. (Yes, those last two are opposites.)

All had their hopes pinned on the solution that the presenters had offered them in TM. The logician’s counter-arguments were so compelling, one attendee admitted, that he did not want to give himself time to go home and mull on that before acting. If he didn’t commit now, he knew, logic would win over. Then he’d be stuck still lacking a way to resolve his problem.

Once people had invested in TM as the solution, it was easier to banish that pesky logic from memory and stay focused on their goals. Humans are more secure in our self-image when we perceive ourselves as sticking to our commitments and behaving in ways consistent with our own past action. Hence, eliciting a commitment, and inviting follow-through later, is an oft-used tactic by influencers.

High Stakes and Big Blinders

If a person can so easily delude themselves simply for an as-yet-unrealized hope, one might surmise that blindness to the truth is even more common when the stakes are high. And for social creatures like humans, who need one another to develop and to survive, the stakes are never higher than in our most important relationships.
​
Consider betrayal blindness. Psychologists and researchers Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell write about this subject, with examples as wide-ranging as children abused by parents or other adults on whom they are dependent, cheated-upon spouses who are the last to see it, date rape victims, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled). Betrayal blindness is the term they coined to describe the “observable, ubiquitous psychological phenomenon” of “systematically not seeing important instances of treachery and injustice.”
​

​Betrayal blindness is most likely to come into play when someone must rely on others for their survival or well-being. This dependence may be emotional and/or financial. For children, it involves their most essential attachment bonds to caregivers. In the case of a high control group, it may involve the entire worldview on which the person has built their life.
​
Always, there is broken trust. That is the root of the betrayal — someone who was supposed to care about me and support me instead used me.
“Betrayal blindness is almost always a survival strategy,” explain Freyd and Birrell.

Betrayal blindness allows the victim to maintain the status quo, and continue to meet the needs that this relationship is meeting. A housewife caring for small children, lacking her own income, is dependent on the husband to provide for them all — incentive to “forgive and forget” his belitting behaviors (or worse), or not see the signs of infidelity. And what choice does a child have if a parent is the abuser — or doesn’t believe them about another’s abuse? Even bystanders may favor unawareness, so they don’t have to take action or risk their own status and comfort.
​
A variety of cognitive, emotional, and social processes can play a role in keeping a person blind to betrayal by one they trusted — someone they should have been able to trust. The information is there the whole time, and bits and pieces may be accessible in memory in isolation, minus accurate interpretation. Sometimes awareness may come and go in flashes, especially with a family member or other close relation — this is called rotating betrayal blindness. But the person will not connect the dots, look directly at the whole picture, and remain consistently aware of the truth.

The repertoire of ways people remain in the dark includes:

• forgetting events or details (the hippocampus, which is key to the formation of memories, has been found to be shrunken in many trauma survivors)
• compartmentalizing or isolation of knowledge, which occurs more frequently when betrayal is by someone we are close to
• suppressing “odd” or “weird” feelings that arise when confronted with evidence of betrayal

• cognitive dissociation that helps keep threatening information out of awareness
• use of distraction or divided attention to keep dangerous knowledge from seeping into consciousness (hmmm… spiritual practices could be used this way — focus the mind somewhere else)
• development of alexithymia; that’s the “inability to know or state one’s own emotional feelings and experiences,” which is correlated with childhood abuse
• pressures from other people to remain ignorant and quiet
• avoiding putting one’s experiences into words — which makes them more concrete and inescapable — whereas unverbalized knowledge is more amorphous
• groupthink and self-censorship

That’s a long and sophisticated list of ways to obscure the truth from oneself.

Facing the Truth

Aside from practical concerns of emotional, financial, and spiritual dependence upon those who have betrayed one — and the need to secure other ways to meet those needs if not through the betrayer — facing a betrayal requires enormous personal strength.

For the knowledge of betrayal brings with it many other challenges:

• a sense of free fall as one’s overall sense of the solidity and safety of the world dissolves

• a loss of trust not only in the particular individual who betrayed one, but in any bystanders or institutions who looked the other way (sadly, institutional collusion in betrayal is both common and particularly toxic)
• the risk of being disbelieved or blamed upon disclosure — which constitutes an additional betrayal, often experienced as even more painful than the original betrayal
• an intensification of mental and physical health symptoms, if a supportive response is not forthcoming

Is it any wonder that victims do not always recognize or confront ill treatment? Freyd and Birrell report, “Numerous studies have discovered that nondisclosure, recanting, and delayed disclosure are common reactions to sexual assault.” The sad fact is that disclosure can make things worse for the victim.

(The researchers also speculate that differences in mental health symptoms between men and women — women suffer disproportionately from depression, anxiety, and PTSD — may trace, at least in part, to women’s higher rate of exposure to betrayal traumas like incest, domestic violence and rape. Betrayal trauma is also associated with chronic health problems and physical illness symptoms.)

As I consider my old meditation group — having recently read/heard disclosures of sexual and spiritual abuse by the founder that I absolutely believe to be true — I feel deep anger and enormous sadness at the scale of betrayal. Most of all, for the teens and young women who were used by the founder — and if they had the strength to confront it, were subsequently disbelieved by members of the community. Even their own family members.
​

​At my best, I can also muster compassion for others in the community, who froze because they were unable (or unwilling, but let’s say unable) to metabolize the life-shattering new knowledge of their beloved teacher, to whom they had devoted their lives.
​
As long as victims/survivors are still alive, there is still the possibility of offering the healing balm of witness, belief, apology, reconciliation. Indeed, disclosure followed by “respectful reception is so healing” (BtB). If the remaining adherents are going to continue the organization’s work, there are new people who deserve the whole truth, too.

It’s not too late for former bystanders, for the institution, to make different choices. Those who continue to affiliate with the ashram still have open to them a positive pathway forward: seeking support, grappling with these harsh truths, reconciling with victims and all those deceived, and in the process healing themselves as well.

As Desmond Tutu said, writing on the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa (quoted in BtB, as all in this section):

“If we do not deal with the past it will haunt and may indeed jeopardise the future.” ~ Desmond Tutu

I mention support because, to face difficult truths, the leaders and members of my old group must be willing to go through their own free fall experience. Do they have it in them? Will they choose to try?

Perhaps this advice from psychologist Belle Liang could help, on learning “to notice when I’m having a long argument with someone else in my head. That’s a data point … I know that I need to pay attention to how I’m silencing myself in the relationship and move toward unsilencing” (emphasis mine).

​It is my hope that those in the ashram community who may have long been silencing themselves will pay attention to that — and start having those crucial dialogues with each other, out loud.

Outright Deception

A few words about outright deception, which can also play a role in high control groups — as I now believe it has in my former group.

The leader(s) of such a group may carefully manage their own image, or they may have consummate professionals who manage it for them — from clothes, sets, photos and videos, smiling followers, articles and books that tell the story of the leader(s) just so… to omitting inconvenient truths about the founder or group (how many marriages did he have? under what circumstances did he leave X institution? what happened in those years you glossed over?)… to outright lies (did he really complete that prestigious program?).

These facts, too, could be sought and freely acknowledged. It’s never too late to set the record straight.

Embracing Truth

Truth is a universal moral and spiritual value. I conclude here with some quotes that speak to me of the guiding light of Truth.
​
Make me always ready to come to you
with clean hands and straight eyes,
So when life fades as the fading sunset,
my spirit may come to you without shame…
Let me remember always that you give the gift of a new day.
Never let me be burdened with sorrow by not starting over.
~ Native American tradition

The Self desires only what is real, thinks nothing
but what is true. Here people do what they are told,
becoming dependent on their country, or their piece of land,
or the desires of another, so their desires are not fulfilled
and their works come to nothing, both in this world and in the next.
~ The City of Brahman

What is meant by wholehearted devotion to God alone?
It means that in every act, public and private,
the aim and purpose should be purely work for God’s sake,
to please him only, without winning the approval
of other people.
~ Rabbi Bahya ibn Pakuda

In your word, speak the truth.
In the world, seek peace.
In personal affairs, do what is right.
~ Tao te Ching

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
~ John 8:32 of the Christian Bible

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox.

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
A Spiral Season …….. What I Found — At the Inscrutable Ashram

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

Here I explore the first two of five reasons a person involved in a high control group (aka cult) does not comprehend who the leader/group really is — and what is happening to them — as they are pulled in.
But first, let’s set the scene.

A Conflicted Experience

“A cultic experience is almost always a conflicted experience.” So says Janja Lalich, sociologist, cult survivor, and my favorite general writer on high control groups (in Take Back Your Life). She writes this in reference to all the reasons it is hard for someone to leave a group in which they have become deeply involved — even when they have negative experiences.
​
The benefits of involvement with one’s group are crystal clear. One is constantly sold on those benefits, and experiences them (the real ones, anyway) directly.
The difficulties encountered with a high control group, at least in my experience, emerge more slowly — and are much more slippery.

It is tough to recognize and name what is happening, while in the midst of a subtly coercive group. Most people leave controlling groups on their own. They often find it hard to put their finger on what they were involved in and why they needed to leave. (TBYL)

It is only now, nearly twenty years after I left a high control group — prompted by new (to me) and shattering stories emerging about the founder — that I have pieced together a clearer picture.

A keen intellect does not protect one. On the contrary, intelligent, educated people are more likely to be drawn into high control groups. I have two graduate degrees. I once learned that based on test scores, I qualify for Mensa membership. I have the cognitive functions (INFJ) that give me all the advantages a person can have in understanding people in all their complexity (and am a 5w4 to boot). Yet, after four years of increasing involvement, when I decided to move cross-country to work for my group, I had little understanding of what I had gotten myself into.
​
Perhaps the above helped me, eventually, to pull on the thread and find my way to the truth, more easily than I otherwise would have. But it didn’t keep me from being taken in in the first place. And the same goes for so many bright, caring, idealistic people who were drawn to the same community as I was, and to other groups with soaring ideals and a glow of deep meaning.

​Why is it so hard to see what’s really going on? Why is the most important information the last to be discovered? Why does the gestalt reality of the group not “pop” early on — if it ever does? Let’s get into those dynamics.

Unseen Levers of Influence

The process of recruitment and indoctrination into a high control group typically draws upon some or all of the techniques of persuasion to which humans are almost inevitably vulnerable. I draw here from Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (new and expanded, 2021).

Consider the fixed-action patterns used by animals. A mother turkey will nurture and protect an animal that goes “cheep cheep” just like a turkey chick, for example — even if it’s not a turkey chick. Like when a researcher substitutes, for an actual chick, a stuffed polecat emitting a turkey-like cheep cheep noise. The turkey’s mothering program, and similar automatic behaviors exhibited by a variety of animals, serve their survival most of the time.
​
People display such shortcut behaviors too. In the hundreds of judgments and decisions we make each day, we can often save time and energy by following unconscious rules of thumb. If certain “trigger features” are present, we move into automatic mode.

​Humans can acquire fixed action patterns through social learning, as well as instinct. In fact, life today makes it likely we will use these shortcuts more often. There is so much stimulation, so many decisions, so much information overload, that we would suffer analysis paralysis otherwise.

“The form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics,” writes Cialdini. Thus “we depend increasingly on our shortcuts to handle them all.”

Cialdini drew from experimental research, and supplemented that with his own direct experience as a participant observer among what he calls “compliance professionals”: people who sell things, raise money, market products or services, recruit people, or otherwise influence people’s behavior in a particular direction.
​
Cialdini describes seven of the shortcuts that are common in human social life. When a persuader is in relationship-building mode, the favored strategies include reciprocation, liking, and unity. When the persuader needs to reduce uncertainty in a prospect, social proof and authority are highly effective. And when it comes to motivating their prospect to action, a compliance professional most often leans on the principles of consistency and scarcity.

​Hayley Lewis’ sketchnote, above, nicely summarizes Cialdini’s original six levers of influence. The more recently added one is unity. It refers to the experience of shared identity with others, which ties in with feelings of mutual belonging, regard for one another’s welfare, and increased likelihood of shared endeavors.

If we do not understand how such automatic behavior patterns work, we will be more vulnerable to those who do.

Cialdini draws upon the martial art of jujitsu to illustrate how this works. A practitioner of jujitsu can make the most of gravity, inertia, leverage and momentum to conserve her own energy. These invisible forces can enable the martial artist to defeat even a physically stronger rival. Likewise, a compliance professional — or a savvy con artist — can quietly, systematically use the ordinary levers of influence that people usually respond to unthinkingly.

As Cialdini observes, this gives the persuader “the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation. Even the victims themselves tend to see their compliance as a result of the action of natural forces” — and their own free choice — “rather than the designs of the person who profits from the compliance.”

These principles help me understand why my experience in a high control group felt similar to other experiences with groups of people — largely positive experiences — and why I did not recognize that such social principles were being used in cumulatively coercive ways.

Cialdini regards high control groups as a long-term influence situation. When the levers of influence are used over time in a cultic setting, the social pressures exerted are extreme.

It helps me to be reminded that it is human nature to be vulnerable to such pressures. Cialdini told cult survivors and experts (as quoted in Lalich, Take Back Your Life): “We can be fooled, but we are not fools. We can be duped, but we are not dupes.”

Dissonance Dissolved

Another category of proscribed awareness relates to what we may initially see, but sooner or later suppress or settle.

Lalich observes that a “high level of cognitive dissonance … may be present in a cult.” For someone who sticks around long-term, this is most often resolved through “a dramatic change of identity.” (Take Back Your Time)

Like the dissonance in music — where two or more adjacent notes rub against each other — dissonance within a person occurs when the ideas they hold in their mind do not hang together harmoniously. Or, the ideas may be at odds with the person’s emotions or actions.
​
It is natural to want to fix that discord. Consider how satisfying it is to the ear and emotions when a musical suspension or dissonant chord resolves into major harmony. Ah, that’s better. Cognitive dissonance similarly nags at a person until it ceases.
​

​I remember that nagging experience, viscerally. When I wrote about my journey seven years after I left the ashram vicinity, I put it this way:

“All along with [the spiritual disciplines], with retreats, I found I had an inner tussle between what ‘they’ taught and hearing my own inner voice. I felt a reaction to certain teachings and authority role and always had to go back home and let things settle out to feel what was right for me and trust that.”

I can recall some of the things that bothered me in my early years of affiliation, when I was just a retreat-goer. Some examples follow.

One concern was about the teaching that all people need to reduce their own egos and focus on meeting others’ needs; this seemed like a problematic over-generalization to me, especially given my past training and work at a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis center. Doesn’t this vary from person to person, I asked? Women, for example, are socialized to accommodate others and often need to learn to value their own needs and to set healthy boundaries.

I was told this teaching did not mean we should all be doormats. Stories of tender firmness, when called for, were shared to underscore the point. In time I stopped pressing on this, accepting that the group’s message was a corrective for the average me-centered American; I could interpret it appropriately for myself, or so I supposed.

I was intrigued by many Hindu concepts, and found value in some. But I felt I had been misled as, over time, it became clear that the teacher and his program were not just inter-spiritual or syncretic, honoring wisdom from many sources. Rather, at root, the teachings remained firmly grounded in the founder’s native Hindu perspective.
​
While saints and scriptures from the West were liberally quoted too, the underlying worldview was Eastern. Reincarnation was assumed in the teacher’s talks and writings, for example. The issue came up only occasionally, abstractly. So I decided I could just remain agnostic about that question, and set it aside. In other words, this dissonance felt modest enough to tolerate.

​What was more emphasized in the teachings was the idea that the goal of life is Self-Realization or Illumination. Which means, dissolving the small-s self to merge with the large-S Self. I never bought into full-blown God-Realization as MY goal. It wasn’t what motivated me to start meditating, nor did I see it as my personal purpose in life, which was more about making a difference. (And anyway, wouldn’t focusing on MY illumination be self-focused? Which we weren’t supposed to be?)

But I did come to absorb, to some extent, the group’s beliefs about what illumination means — that this is an attainable state for any human determined enough to pursue it wholeheartedly (likely with some grace); that an illumined person has overcome the foibles and temptations that snag most of us mere mortals, and so is a model for others; that an illumined person will be a gift to the world, benefiting those around them and perhaps our human collective in some way. If other people felt drawn to that goal, I felt, fine for them. Different strokes and all that.

I also struggled intermittently with how the inner circle of the community related to the teacher. As my relationship with the group grew, the supposed benefits of us newbies doing likewise were subtly communicated. Experimentation was encouraged so that one might “discover for oneself” if those benefits accrued.

Whether or not one consciously adopted the founder as teacher in a personal way, like a traditional sadhak, the desired behaviors and attitudes were built into regular practices: reading the teacher’s writings before bed, watching his video talks in our local meditation group weekly, getting plenty of video darshan at retreats, and so on. If you continued to participate, you would do those things.

A few years after I came and went from working at the ashram, I tried to explain how continuous immersion in the group milieu shifted things for me. I wrote:

“[I] had experienced an inner dynamic of testing the boundary between others’ teaching and what I take as true for myself. Before I got close, this was fine; I could have my inner rebellions during a retreat, and scribble in my journal, challenge a point or raise a question and hear the facilitators’ response; and then go home to my safe space and listen for what my heart, mind and experience told me about whatever. The lessons were more explicit then — they were verbalized and discussed, were designed as curricula.

But when I was chronically close, the struggle was more ongoing, and confusing. Much teaching was then not so much consciously spoken and heard through the ear, as transmitted through ways of being and absorbed through culture. Not quite visible, but powerfully felt.”

​Either consciously or quietly, cognitive dissonance has a way of resolving. People “tend to reduce the uncomfortable feeling caused by the dissonance by bringing their attitude in line with their behavior rather than changing the behavior” (Bounded Choice by Janja Lalich).

And so, though I don’t remember choosing the teacher as My Guru, whom I trusted as a personal guide, as I continued the disciplines taught by the group — and absorbed their attitudes — gradually I did come to feel more grateful and reverential toward him. (There were artful ways of slipping that in, too. Including the surprise ritual I described here.)

By adopting the group’s program — practicing the behaviors that were taught and modeled — my thoughts and feelings gradually shifted to match those actions. That resolved the most significant of the internal inconsistencies. Even if I hadn’t intended that outcome. And even if I didn’t notice the changes in myself.

In the next installment, I unpack a few more factors that keep the workings of a culty group opaque: Surprises, Blinders and Lies.


You can subscribe here to receive future posts in your inbox (free). Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇

Reading Between the Power Moves … What I Wanted … What I Found

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

Beginning, middle, and now end; I have shared what motivated me as I got involved with a meditation group as a young adult, as well as what I actually encountered when I moved cross-country to work at the ashram. What did I lose?

I did not immediately recognize all the problematic ways my affiliation with the group — and coming close to the center of things — had affected me. I see more now, almost twenty years later. I’ll start here with some of the more obvious things and work my way to the more intangible, core losses.

Money

It would be an interesting exercise to total up everything I spent to participate with the group. I’m not gonna, but it would be interesting. The tally would include books, retreats, donations, my self-funded move from Indiana to California (and my job-funded move back — other people’s money), as well as the savings I spent down while I was working there for poverty pay. I could make an educated guess at the income I forfeited by not sticking with a job at my previous level of compensation. Harder to account for is what I didn’t save for retirement during that period — because there was no margin for that — and the compounded value of that money over years, had it been invested.

Time and Prana (life energy)

This would add up dramatically too. Half hour of meditation per day at the beginning, doubled a couple years in as I added an evening session. Weekly meditation group meetings. Time planning for, traveling to and from, and attending retreats. Time spent volunteering for the organization in several capacities. About a year of my early professional life working for them. And since my departure, years of processing, trying to make sense of my experiences, sorting through what to keep and what to jettison.

Career Momentum

I was one of the luckier ones in this regard. Not only was my tenure working for the organization relatively short, but the position I held there was a continuation of my previous professional life. When I returned home to the Midwest, I then went back to a similar job as I’d been in before.

So I include this category not so much for myself, as for others who spent longer, and left their previous careers to work for the organization. For someone in the latter situation who later left the group, it meant a gap to explain and/or a bigger process of reinventing oneself.

Relationships

Again, I may have been luckier in this regard than some others who moved in close. I didn’t get sucked in far enough to isolate myself from family and old friends; and I returned to live closer to those people after a relatively short time. I did miss significant events in friends’ lives while I was off in another part of the country — I didn’t have the resources or time off as a newbie to fly back for a friend’s wedding, for example.

Probably the biggest impact for me around relationships, during my period of peak involvement, has to do with the sweetheart I was with before I started meditating. I broke up with him after three years of involvement with the group. This would likely have happened eventually anyway — but probably later. Because my assessment of that relationship and whether it was good for me was definitely influenced by the worldview of the group.
​
As I was in my final week around the ashram, I shared with a friend from the group who was coming closer: “This year has been much harder than my break-up year with [old boyfriend], which was the hardest year of my life to date. But this definitely tops that. I am so relieved to be done with it.” Both of the hardest periods I had gone through in my life by that time — in close succession — were influenced by the group.
​

​Idealism

The group had leveraged my idealism, first, to involve me as a participant in their programs (spending all that time and money — and enthusiastically introducing others to the practices too). Then, they leaned on my commitment, my idealism, my trust in who they presented themselves to be, to draw me out to work for them. “You can help us transform the world!” “Okay, let’s do it!”
​
The environment I entered is one that at this point I consider to be unhealthy at best, exploitative at worst. And in the end, I didn’t have much to show for that year of heartfelt, banging-my-head-against-the-wall effort. I didn’t do a 180 and become a full-on cynic. But this experience definitely took the bright-eyed edge off my idealism.

Self-Acceptance

Embedded in the soaring worldview of the group was an aspiration to spiritual perfection — and the belief that it is possible for a human being to perfect themselves through their spiritual disciplines. A couple of years after I left the community in California, I wrote to the then-spiritual leader of the organization, trying to give voice to what I had experienced.

A key theme was the insidious erosion of my well-being, including my sense of self-worth. I quote myself (2008):

“Idealism and perfectionism are a tricky mix … At some point in my CA year, the balance of my thinking shifted toward deficiency rather than the divine within — I kept seeing half-empty, seeing my inadequacies, like how prone to attachment and impatience I still was. Throw in a pinch of self-judgment for carbonation, stir them together over the heat of major life changes, [ashram] subculture … wacky energy stuff, and the death of the one dear friend I had brought with me to CA (my canary), and you have… a near-implosion … as my sense of sovereignty over my [spiritual path] and life began to evaporate — transformed from liquid to gas, molecules careening in that inner cauldron, so like the trapped energy pounding inside my neck and skull.”

Before I moved out near the ashram and started working for the organization, I was able to focus on the positive aspects of the group’s worldview, which spoke to my hopeful heart, in a way that was affirming and empowering in my life. But once I was deeper in, the streak of impossible perfectionism that runs through the teachings and program took over. And it was not good for me.

​Clarity & Groundedness

Here’s what I wrote about confusion in my 2008 letter:

“It was really a grand paradox I faced — a difficulty reconciling all the positives I had experience before and sometimes still did … with some of the junk I encountered, and my energy stuff and wasting away-ness. The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ comes to mind, but I hesitate to use that term, because it does not convey the holism of the experience of contradictory inputs, how it impacted my body, heart, mind, spirit. It was quite confusing, during and after my time there. I ended up unsure of what was real around me — [at the ashram], in myself, in life. Things were not what they seemed, yet I could not fully grasp the dynamics in which I was caught up.”

Beyond the immediate, visceral confusion I felt, my experience with the group also left me with lingering metaphysical disorientation. Which ideas were mine, and which were planted and unconsciously absorbed (even if I thought I’d declined them)? I’m more focused on “practical theology” — how I live day to day — than sussing out formal beliefs. And my foundations haven’t shifted; Love has always been both ends and means for me.
​
But sometimes words still come out — whether in casual conversation, in my journal, or in a more formal situation — and I wonder if those phrases, those concepts are really mine deep down, or if they belong more to the meditation teacher and his minions than to me. Deconstruction is a long process that I’m still in.

​Trust

After this dark night of the soul period, when it felt like the rug was pulled out from under me, and the community I thought I knew turned out to be something else again — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on — my sense of trust was frayed. In my 2008 letter I wrote:

“It seemed that my ‘surrender’ to this [spiritual] path, to meditation, to the ways of [the ashram/organization], had led me to chaos. There was in me a creeping distrust of surrender — the surrender to this path that I had chosen and to the spiritual forces at work in my life — and a burgeoning fear that I would not be able to get my [spiritual life] back. What could I trust? What was safe for me now? What was true for me?”

Perhaps most of all, I had lost faith in my own powers of discernment — my ability to accurately read others’ character and trustworthiness. My decision to move out to work for the group was not proving to be a good one; what did that say for my judgment?

This lack of self-trust affected future relationships. When I was back home, on a path of healing, I began earnestly searching for a life partner. Using and trusting my judgment was essential to that process. I took more time than I might have previously; I doubted my head and my gut.
​
This impaired trust in my own judgment came perilously close to costing me my relationship with the man who became my husband and co-parent. By the time we met, neither of us was young. And he did not want to waste time with someone who was unable to commit. It all worked out in the end — but it could have gone otherwise.

​Sense of Safety

I’ve alluded to the unexpected, sometimes unsettling “side effects” of meditation that I experienced, starting after I had decided to move out to the group’s location, and intensifying while I was there. (I give this subject more attention elsewhere, because too many people know nothing of the risks before starting a meditation practice; I certainly didn’t.)

In my previous post about that year, I described the overriding experience I had of feeling STUCK and TRAPPED while I was there. In my 2008 letter I observed:

“In the past couple of years [since leaving CA], I have noticed that in describing my inner life to friends, I use the word ‘safe’ a lot. I am usually referring to emotional safety: freedom from judgment and pressure. Not having others around that constantly need things from me, including needing me to conform to their ideas of how things are or should be. The ability to breathe naturally and be myself, be real. Just what I was lacking there!”

Drawing on the new vocabulary I’ve gained from studying up on high control groups, I might now say that I was still shaking off the invisible manacles of coercive persuasion that I had been experiencing ever since I got involved with the group — and especially during the year I worked there.

Health

I also now suspect that the way my nervous system responded to that controlling, unsafe, ever-closing-in environment has had long-term effects on my health. I’ve described elsewhere the depression I fell into halfway through my year there.

Psychotherapist Shelly Rosen* describes a state of “frozen high energy” that can occur when someone realizes that a person or group they thought they could trust is not actually safe for them. The person may dissociate, with fear or pain lodging in the body while the mind/emotions show up as “blankness, a felt absence or forgetting.” On the spectrum of control, my particular experience with my particular group was somewhere in the middle — not the most extreme situation — but Rosen’s description resonates with me. Yes, I and my sensitive nervous system have visceral memories from my ashram year. Still.

​Rosen further lifts up findings from the research literature that interpersonal trauma is “likely to be more traumatizing than many physical events.” The worst part of an interpersonal ordeal is feeling alone and betrayed by people you had trusted.

“In cultic groups,” Rosen continues, “social pressure is constant… Traumatic stress … over-whelms and gets stuck as a result of social and emotional captivity.” Erratic behavior on the part of the cult leader(s) or group — sometimes loving, sometimes critical (in the case of my group, painfully passive-aggressive) — can lead to traumatic attachment.

According to Rosen, “manipulation, coupled with one’s being trapped or immobilized by internalized fears and traumatic attachments, are factors that can lead to the most serious trauma reactions in an individual.” She cites the common occurrence of PTSD in cult survivors — one U.S. study found PTSD rates of 61% for men, 43% for women. That’s significantly higher than for military personnel, post-deployment, cited as 10% to 25%.

I do not suspect that I experienced PTSD.* I do wonder about some of the members of my cohort who were in deeper and longer than I was (and who were basically ejected, to boot, so there’s an extra dose of relational trauma — rejection).   *as of 2026, I actually DO suspect ongoing C-PTSD
​
For myself, I see a different impact of the “frozen energy” I experienced once I was immersed more deeply in my group. Cult dynamics, Rosen explains, result “in potentially repeated betrayal traumas for group members, which trigger potent destabilizing nervous-system arousal and harm the psyches and souls of those members.”

​I suspect how this played out for me was in setting off the beginnings of a chronic illness rooted in the nervous system’s response to the perceived lack of safety. It is an invisible burden I live with, that has dramatically affected the quality of my life for a long time now.

A couple years ago, I finally got a diagnosis (which I do not share here), and I have it better managed than it once was. But this condition may be with me for the rest of my life. Though I’ll never know for sure, I think it’s very likely that the onset of this malady traces to my experience of being misled and confusingly cornered by that meditation group.
​
I’m done pouring out gratitude for the good things I gained from my spiritual practice and my time involved with that group. A fuller accounting of my experience with the group — the good, the bad, and the ugly — comes out in the red. That’s my truth.

​You can subscribe here if you’d like to receive future posts in your inbox (free). A post is percolating on the role of deception in my group experience.

If you liked this post, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Power & Control in Collectives .… How I Was Primed .… Who Joins Cults

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

Source Cited
*Rosen, Shelly. “Cults: A Natural Disaster — Looking at Cult Involvement through a Trauma Lens” in Cult Recovery: A Clinician’s Guide to Working with Former Members and Families, © 2017 by the International Cultic Studies Association.

In my last post, I described why I started meditating, and continued to get more involved in the meditation teacher’s group — until, within five years, I moved cross-country to work for them.

I was looking to contribute meaningfully to their work, and have a new adventure, presumably while continuing to benefit from my own spiritual practice. What did I actually find?

Welcome to the Left Coast

For several months after I first moved out to work for the group, I was just taking in new experiences. Every new job has a learning curve, so I didn’t expect to find things easy immediately. Getting to know my co-workers was interesting. The setting was lovely and different. I was also exploring the nearby community where I lived, on long walks, and settling into an apartment with a roommate. (She moved out around the same time to work for the group.)

​I came in with positive expectations, of course. All my visits to this place had conditioned me to associate it with deep peace, warm community, and learning opportunities. The whiff of eucalyptus trees, the sight of the “golden” hills, the foggy mornings, the beach on the bay — all these triggers and more told me I was in one of my happy places.

In my first months in the office, I remember having a surreal feeling. I was kind of high on the idealism, through the evocative imagery and poetic speech that I was now exposed to even more as I acclimated to my new setting — particularly via the uplifting words of the founder. This high-minded language now was not only part of my nighttime spiritual reading or occasional verbal teachings, but also permeated my workday.

At the Center

Gradually I acquired a different set of lived experiences in that place. I’d been having a variety of weird, sometimes painful side effects of meditation. It started not long after I decided to make the move, and escalated while I was in the energy vortex of the ashram.

I write elsewhere about the dark side of meditation, which I had had no warning about; the important thing to share here is that it interrupted my meditation and got in the way of going deep. So I had lost the thing that I had considered my anchor before I decided to make the move from Indiana to California.

(I still sat down to meditate faithfully each morning. I longed for what I used to get from it, and presumed that this was just a phase. Anyway, I knew that the most basic form of loyalty in that community was doing the practice faithfully; I would be an imposter there if I wasn’t meditating. But it was at best ineffective and at worst, a source of serious pain.)

I also felt like I couldn’t talk publicly about the sometimes difficult or strange experiences that my devoted meditation practice had set off — woo woo stuff was frowned on in that community. And we’d been discouraged from discussing our personal practice with others, lest people lapse into unhelpful comparison. I was cut off from something precious — pining and grieving for it — yet isolated from others by the obligatory silence.

​When I was on my way out a year later, a friend asked me to share how I had experienced the community up close. I wrote:

“The most concise way I could describe my experience is that I have felt STUCK. In [spiritual practice], diminished ability to hear and trust my own inner voice; professionally immobilized; financially squeezed; and socially crowded and isolated simultaneously. I can identify these separate aspects but it all runs together in experience to create this psychological feeling of being TRAPPED.”

Frustrations accumulated in the work I had come there to do. I wanted to support the group’s mission in the wider world. I didn’t come there just to be there. I wasn’t looking for tighter community or more support. I wanted to accomplish something that mattered.

Yet it was hard to get things done. My patient efforts at building relationships with colleagues and creating collaborative processes didn’t seem to amount to much. I would run into walls and just couldn’t figure out how to move things forward; or something that had already been decided through a solid team process would suddenly, mysteriously come undone.

In time I came to feel that I was spinning my wheels and wasting my time. I asked for more work and was assigned some hours in another department, lest I wind up just staring at my computer screen. There was a period later in the year when the refrain “wasting away again in Margaritaville” went around and around in my head in my office at the ashram, voicing my sense of listlessness, loneliness, and inevitability. Oh Jimmy, if a salt shaker was all I’d lost, I’d be just fine. But I seemed to be losing much more — my sense of purpose, my sense of agency, my sense of self.
​
I began to have a sneaking suspicion that they hadn’t really wanted all these young people to come out to do necessary jobs, so much as they wanted to lure people further in, to living at the ashram — something I had known from the outset I was NOT going to do.

What else? The leadership culture was very top-down and lacked transparency. Some of the long-timers were speeded up and scattered. (Despite sooooo many years of meditation. Oh the irony!) And the community was conflict-avoidant, often favoring indirect communication. This meant that there was a continual undercurrent of annoyance and … hostility? Something. I wasn’t entirely sure.

The atmosphere of suppressed conflict made for a stressful environment for a Highly Sensitive Person like me, who can hardly help but absorb other people’s emotions. They also had trouble delegating, because they didn’t trust newbies like me; tenure was loyalty and loyalty was the ultimate proof of trustworthiness.
​
Rock Bottom

The hardest thing that happened, only a few months in, involved a supervisor assuming that in a conversation with a supporter, I had tried to pressure that person. (In reality, I had been trying to do just the opposite — to ease the sense of pressure she was clearly feeling.) He made a quick recovery when he realized there was another explanation. But the damage was done.

I realized that these people really did not know me at all, if he could so quickly jump to that conclusion. I saw that they were not capable of the kind of basic trust that I had taken for granted in every other job I’d ever had. No matter how many mantrams I repeated to dissolve my hurt, it would not change this basic reality.

I was also forbidden to speak with the supporter. The misunderstanding was left dangling, and others who had been in the loop continued on with a false — and negative — impression of who I was.

In an earlier 3-part series comparing controlling groups with abusive partners, I described other factors contributing to the stuck-ness and trapped-ness I felt. They included: the cessation of love-bombing, mind-altering practices, isolation, paternalism, conditional care, gaslighting, dissociation, undermining self-worth, blurred boundaries, hijacked sexuality, paternalistic attitudes, and the self-centering of the group leader(s) as the ultimate arbiters of truth.

​Why had I come to this inscrutable ashram? What was I accomplishing? Very little, it seemed to me. Nor could I envision any change of functioning on my part making a dent in the unhealthy culture of the place. I’d have to stay put for a good decade before they’d trust me with anything of consequence. Meanwhile, I was just hanging out, out there in the sticks, with only dairy cows for neighbors.

It was after coming home to Iowa to visit my parents over Christmas, then returning to California, that it sank in that all was not well for me there. I became depressed — probably clinically so. I was functional when I needed to be “on” with others, but was sad, numb, dulled inside. I was shutting down.

The low point was when my canary — the dear friend I had brought with me, a sweet sweet creature — died. A vet told me it was caused by a nutritional deficiency. But I felt (I still feel) that it was more; my little songbird absorbed my malaise from that place, and bore that burden in his tiny feathered form. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone as I did the day I buried him beneath a pine on the ashram grounds.

A Way Out

What a relief it was when I got a job that took me out of there. The process took months, and at first I wasn’t sure what I wanted. But as I explored one possibility, I started to get some energy back — to get some life back, to get a sense of self and agency back. I started with one option and came to consider many. One way or another, I would make an exit plan.

​Over the months it took to go through the job search process, I said not a word to anyone at the ashram. Not until the way was secure. I wasn’t sure how they would relate to me once they knew I was leaving.

As it turned out, I got a position in the same organization I had left when I came to California. Back I went to my previous stomping grounds, normal work environment, and all the social supports I would need to have in place as I metabolized that bizarre and difficult year.

I didn’t fully understand then what I had experienced, or how it had affected me — I just knew I needed out.

I’ll share what I’ve eventually come to realize about What I Lost, in my next post. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

If you liked this post, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Reading the Power Moves …… Who Joins Cults …… A Spiral Season

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

It all began so innocently. At an open moment in my life, while seeking purpose on an overseas adventure, a bright new travel companion connected with me, heard my yearnings — and answered them by introducing me to a meditation practice that seemed to meet me where I was.
​
I was already primed and positively predisposed toward meditation generally. That night as I sat down to meditate for the first time, I took the first step in a long journey that would lead me deeper and deeper into the cult-iverse.

​Now, over twenty-five years later, I find myself sifting memories. After hearing startling new information recently about the founder — and studying up on high control groups — I am looking at my experience with fresh eyes. Why did I come closer, step by step, to the community that teaches this form of meditation? Why didn’t I see then what I see now?

What I Wanted

It’s hard to remember now, at 50, what I wanted when I started meditating at 26. I was spiritually curious, hungry for depth. I was a restless idealist looking for my calling in life. I had the normal uncertainties and emotional ups and downs of many young adults. The spiritual program I was exploring promised to help me with all of those things.

“Most cults appeal to the normal desires of ordinary people, but cult recruitment tends to increase those desires through a kind of courtship ritual,” writes sociologist and cult survivor Janja Lalich (Take Back Your Life). “The prospective devotee is wooed with the promise of reward, be it personal fulfillment, special knowledge, spiritual growth … — whatever may be most dear to that person at that time. This connection to a person’s innermost desire is the recruitment hook.”

About two years after I took up meditation, I was asked to describe the benefits of my spiritual practice in a letter of support for a grant application. Here’s what I lifted up to the Ford Foundation as the good that they could help foster through their investment:

• Patience for giving my best selfless service to the world
• Detachment from the immediate, visible outcomes of my efforts (a protection against burnout)
• Deepened solidarity with all people and all creatures
• A way to transform anger at injustice into compassionate commitment for action
• Smoothing my cycles of restless energy and inertia, helping me be more steady and emotionally resilient
• Maintaining my high ideals, belief in human potential, and faith in our ability to overcome the tremendous challenges facing humanity
• The wisdom to use my time, energy and skills effectively
• Doing constructive work through my current job, while thinking more broadly about my life purpose and discerning how I might fulfill it
• Integrating universal spiritual values into our social institutions and daily lives
• Building individual capacity for transformation of self and world

​

​By the time I made that summary, I had read a bunch of books, gone to a couple of regional retreats and a weeklong retreat at the ashram, was part of a local group that met weekly to share the practice, and was firmly established in my own schedule of daily morning meditation.

So, the above list is not necessarily a snapshot of what drew me in at the very beginning — I was already quite influenced by the worldview of the group when I wrote it. But these are things that I did value at that time. And I whole-heartedly believed that my association with the group, the spiritual practices they promoted, their retreats and so on, were helping me benefit in just those ways.

Getting Established

By the following year, I had added in a second daily meditation period, in the evening. I continued reading books by the meditation teacher, participating in my local weekly group, and attending retreats.

I was certainly experiencing some of the promised benefits of the program. Sometimes I went very still in meditation and found it deeply restorative. Poetic writings I had memorized became saturated with transcendent meaning for me. During daily life, I could more clearly see what was happening in my mind and heart, and make choices with greater freedom.
​
I learned useful concepts from teachings that were meaningful to me; this seemed supportive of my personal development. I felt less alone as an earnest idealist in me-first, capitalist America — my good heart and aspirations to make a difference were validated. And I had a new circle of friends and companions, both locally and through retreats.

​The founder and group leaders encouraged other aspirations, too, which I did not necessarily share. Why would I need to become illumined (if that’s even possible)? I’m just a regular person, not yearning to “overcome death” or get off the wheel of karma. I’m agnostic about reincarnation, a linear-thinking Westerner, content to focus on this life. So I simply stayed oriented to the things that were meaningful to me.

Ramping Up

Then the opportunity arose to take part in an intensive half-year program that involved monthly retreats at headquarters, as well as ongoing virtual engagement and group connection.

“Prospective devotees are carefully paced through the conversion process,” Lalich explains. As people move deeper in, mind-altering techniques escalate. Practices such as intensified meditation, chanting, increased darshan (listening to / watching the teacher, whether live or via recordings) and other trance-inducing activities can make participants more open to group influence. “At the same time, indoctrination into the ‘sacred science’ of the group continues” with extended workshops, homework assignments, group activities and the like. (Take Your Life Back)

As I look back now, I see the special program I participated in as just such an intensification. Aimed at young adults at the time, the by-application program tightened bonds within the group while simultaneously ramping up the indoctrination program. In high control groups, such a process typically includes a formal expression of allegiance to the program or teacher, as old ways of thinking and being give way to new conditioning. I did experience something like that (described in the last lesson here) — though I did not recognize it then for what it was.

Going for It

Soon after that program concluded, eager young adults started moving to live and/or work at the organization’s headquarters. Program leaders had floated that possibility during the affiliate program, and encouraged careful discernment by participants.
​
I’d already been volunteering for a couple years, where my professional background was relevant to the organization. I came to understand that a job was waiting for me if I felt it was my path to go there. Such a suggestion certainly makes one feel appreciated and valued. But I was content with my life where I was.

​Within six months, however, I’d become frustrated in my job. I felt I was at a dead-end in my career in the local area. I was restless to do something that felt like I was really making a difference. I had benefited from the meditation practice; why not support the group that helped others discover and access its powers? That path had already been laid out for me, so it was natural to consider it.

I was a bit bored too. The college town that had felt so expansive after my small-town upbringing had started to feel limiting after a decade of living there. I began California dreamin’: imagining what it might be like to experience a different landscape, to part ways with the Chamber of Commerce crowd that I had spent so much of my time with professionally, and to live in not just a blue dot — but a blue state.

What sealed the deal was making a piece of art I called my discernment collage. Phrases that any group member would recognize peppered the nature-heavy imagery. And this quote, clipped from an old Utne Reader (in pink below), summed up the moment I was in:

“And the time came when the risk it took to remain in a tightly closed bud became infinitely more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~ Anaïs Nin

Though the idea would have struck me as preposterous when I first started meditating, it almost seems inevitable to me now that I ended up moving out to California to work for the group. I was ready for a new adventure, and they had opened a way.

Next up in my tales from the cultiverse: What I Found, and What I Lost.

You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

If you liked this post, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
A Spiral Season …… Who Joins Cults …… Power & Control in Collectives

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

​How is a controlling group like a manipulative partner? Oh, let me count the ways…

In my first comparative post, I lifted up parallels related to the abuser’s or founder’s public image, the beautiful beginning of the relationship, how the partner/group mesmerizes and alters the person on the receiving end of their attention, ways conflict shows up and plays out, and what isolation may look like.

In a second set of comparisons, I explored four more ways to read between the power moves, including: who does (and who should) get the blame or credit, the red flag of conditional care, where the craziness in the relationship comes from, and why the victim may not notice they are losing their spark or being conned.

Here, I finish out the analogy between significant others and groups who are controlling, by taking a look at the roots of control in these relationships. Let’s zero in on a final four factors.

“I try to ‘do unto others,’ to have compassion for his challenges and model selflessness. But he doesn’t seem to respond in kind; he takes as much as I’ll give, and then some.”Establishing healthy boundaries is a growing edge for many people who are naturally empathetic or people pleasers. Further, regardless of temperament, females are often socialized to be mindful of others’ needs, and to put themselves last. Cultural factors can come into play too. (I’m looking at you, my Midwest Nice people.)

​When a person with any of these traits gets matched up with a partner who is preoccupied with his own desires, insecurities and problems, the relationship can become all give and no take.

Whether he’s a bona fide narcissist — or simply clueless about other people — she may have to fight both her conditioning and his predilections to set healthy boundaries in the relationship. A manipulator will be happy to take advantage of her deferential, forgiving nature.

A similar pattern can happen in groups. If you’ve ever been the person who kept saying yes to volunteer work until you burned out and blew up (or quietly dropped out), you know what I’m talking about.

A healthy group will not want you to give until it hurts. Leaders will honor No equally to Yes, looking for win-win ways to meet the needs of participants as well as the organization and its mission. You will be valued for yourself, not strictly for what you can do for the organization.
​
In contrast, highly programmed settings can blur boundaries, as expectations for schedule, activities, and ongoing participation press in. Consider situations like living with other group members, traveling to intensive retreats, or participating in a religious community with all-through-the-week expectations. Any of these can create a situation where a person has little space to discern their own needs or articulate their boundaries in ways that go against group culture. You are engulfed — physically, socially, and in your time and attention — by the group’s activities and worldview.

​Perhaps the most insidious type of boundary transgression by a group is the kind that can happen inside a person. If you internalize the group’s norms and values through repeat exposure (in sacred texts or written teachings, formal talks, informal conversation, spiritual practices, workshops, courses, etc.), no one has to ask you to prioritize the group’s values; you know what the ideals are. You can start to police yourself, regardless of where you are or who you are with.

The most existentially significant boundary may be your sense of self. A group I was involved with believed in deliberately going against the ego. They regarded dissolving the sense of self as the ultimate goal of the spiritual life.

I can see value in reducing superficial attachments, for someone who wants to become more free. But ego-reduction can be misapplied or taken too far.
​
It’s one thing for a mature, well-developed person to choose, in true freedom, a goal of nirvana or merging with the Godhead. It’s quite another to teach that enlightenment is the goal of life for every human being, and to inculcate self-dissolving practices in people who have yet to even establish a healthy sense of identity. The ego, after all, serves an important function.
​

The idea that killing one’s ego = spiritual growth is also ripe for abuse. If attachment to one’s own wants and needs is selfish and bad, if suffering is productive, if pain is a gateway to freedom or God, then a group can mistreat someone — or expect them to sacrifice themselves to their cause — and call it love.

Lesson #10: Know and value your own needs. Set and hold boundaries that are healthy for you. Give yourself adequate space to discern these, and be wary of any person or group who idealizes self-sacrifice. You matter and you deserve all good things — no more than anyone else, sure, but no less either.

“He criticizes me for ‘letting myself go’ but still expects sex, on his terms. I feel like I can’t say no.”

The power and control wheel describes some of the many ways that domestic abusers dominate victims: intimidation, threats, economic power moves, emotional abuse, isolation, blaming, claiming male privilege. These often build up over time, and eventually escalate to physical and/or sexual violence.

Laura E. Anderson (When Religion Hurts You) observes that the innate sexuality of a human being touches every aspect of a person. That makes sexuality a primary avenue of self-knowledge and self-expression, as well as a powerful means of connection with others. It follows, then, that “one way to control other people [is] to vilify sexuality and to script rules about how it’s expressed.”
​
A partner may do this as a way of exerting dominance. High-control groups do it too. As a survivor of a fundamentalist Christian group, Anderson comments on the purity culture that has been common in evangelical communities for decades. She writes that “purity culture teachings and lifestyles can result in trauma… people coming out of purity culture often have the same symptoms as victims of sexual assault.”

​Other controlling settings may also devalue the body, view sexual pleasure (and pleasure in general) as superficial or shameful, and establish strict norms around sexuality. Whether a group is religious or political, New Age or self-help in its orientation, it may couch these rules in its ideology.

In the high-control group I was involved in as a young adult, people were encouraged abstractly, through spiritual teachings, to dis-identify with the body. (“You are not the body. You are not the mind.”)
​
At the same time, various practices can contribute to dissociation — including spiritual practices like concentration forms of meditation, listening to the teacher’s hypnotic voice in talks, and using a mantram in daily moments of stress. Rather than attuning to the body and its knowing, such practices train one to turn attention away from one’s own body and the feelings the body conveys.

I don’t remember hearing messages specifically related to sex until I was fairly involved in my group. (That’s pacing for you.) As I recall, I had been meditating for several years, had gone to regional retreats, and finally signed up for a young adult retreat at the headquarters. A sort of kundalini 101 session taught that this life energy, often felt as sexual desire, can be transformed back into spiritual energy and used to power the journey to Self-realization.

At this point I got the message that the householder path — which typically includes marriage and family — is a recognized path; one need not be a monk to establish a spiritual life. Only several years later, after I had moved cross-country to work for the organization, did it become clear that the monastic path was regarded as superior by the inner circle of this community.

In a workshop about discerning one’s personal calling, we young adults were encouraged to be especially careful in determining whether or not parenting was part of our individual calling. No one explicitly said: don’t divert years of your life and untold energy to parenting. They just encouraged deliberation about this consuming part of life. At the time I thought, that’s right, having children should be an individual choice, not a general societal expectation.

My perspective on this has become more nuanced over time. I suspect that my cohort of young people was being subtly discouraged from having children. The first generation of the teacher’s students HAD coupled up and raised children at the communal site. Some of the long-timers seemed, in retrospect, to regard this as a detour from their highest calling or desire, to reach samadhi through focused spiritual disciplines.

Plus, by the time I came around — just after the founder died — the organization was at or past its peak phase of outreach and expansion. There was a growing sense of urgency about drawing a younger generation to the community to live and work, to sustain the organization as the teacher had established it — and to sustain the aging first generation. As a practical matter, children would divert precious young adult energy away from doing the work of what was now an organization with a ticking clock.

More recently, I have come to understand that raising children in that intentional community was problematic for the children who had grown up there (to put it mildly). Group leaders may have realized this too.

Whether or when to reproduce is only one part of the sex question for high-control groups. Most also have rules around if and with whom members have sex. In The Guru Papers, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad observe that “the two prevalent ways [sexual] control is exerted [by gurus or similar leaders] are through promulgating either celibacy or promiscuity.” Both have the same result: making it less likely for deep bonds to form between individuals within the group (couples), so that the guru can keep members’ primary emotional bond focused on him.
​

With some people and at opportune moments, leaders in my group did privately promote celibacy as the best path, the one that will lead most swiftly to spiritual advancement — including to some young adults of my generation.

I didn’t hear that message directly myself. But I had already indicated my expectation NOT to live in the intentional community. So they likely had me pegged as one of the YAs who would sooner or later go the family route, as indeed I did.

A leader who espouses celibacy or marital fidelity normally models it himself — or pretends to. Alas, as Kramer and Alstad note, “sex scandals go with the occupation of guru because of its emotional isolation and eventual boredom.” Among the instances they were familiar with were “religious leaders using their exalted position to seduce, pressure, or coerce disciples sexually, some even at puberty.”

To add insult to injury, Kramer and Alstad continue, “the real motives behind [the guru’s] sexual excursions are often masked by such words as ‘teaching’ or ‘honoring’ their disciples.” He might say that the objects of his attention are special.

Such behavior is problematic on many levels. What is often most difficult for disciples to accept, according to Kramer and Alstad, is the deception and what it means: “The lie [about his celibacy or marital fidelity] indicates the guru’s entire persona is a lie, that his image as selfless and being beyond ego is a core deception… not only did he not achieve [the goal of selflessness or ego transcendence], he does not even know if it is achievable.”
​

​With the duplicity and betrayal of sexual scandal, the image of the teacher — and the trustworthiness of his teachings — all come tumbling down. The entire enterprise of the group is shown to be hollow. Hence, it should not be surprising if people deeply invested in the group’s worldview and continuity deny that such accusations could possibly be true.

Lesson #11: Sexuality is sacred, powerful — and yours. The only person who can discern what is best for your sexual life is you. No relationship that lacks mutuality and consent can be good for you — and a relationship between a leader and follower is inherently unequal. A middle path, centering genuine intimacy and honoring pleasure, is less fraught than one that seeks either purity / abstinence or detached hedonism.

“He’s always instructing me how to do things — even when I know better than he does! Sometimes I feel more like a child than a partner. What’s odd is, I actually have a harder time making my own decisions than I used to.”

An abuser’s behavior may go beyond mere mansplaining to treating his partner like a child, a less-capable person who needs to be shepherded, schooled, perhaps even disciplined by him.

The stress of living in an abusive relationship, and the whittling away of the victim’s self-esteem, may result in her finding it harder to think for herself and navigate life choices.
​
In my group, I didn’t think much initially of the teacher-learner dynamics at retreats and such. It was what we participants had signed up for. But the pattern did not lessen over the years. At all. They were clearly the role models; we were forever the students.

The young adults who moved out to work for the organization were each assigned a mentor to check in with them periodically. This sounds thoughtful on the surface, and may indeed have been well-intended. But many of us were accomplished professionals in our 30s. Ostensibly they had wanted us to come to share our skills and knowledge.

The mentor-mentee relationship subtly reinforced the spiritual hierarchy of the group. It also provided a private, one-to-one container for the airing of questions and concerns that might arise as we adjusted to our new place inside the organization. Indeed, I suspect pooling of questions, concerns, and observations was fairly limited among the newbies. It was perhaps most likely between roommates — because where else would you have the privacy to share doubts and discrepancies?

This paternalistic attitude did not come out of nowhere. It is the pattern of a high control group, starting with the founder(s)/leader(s).

In a comparative study of two rather different cultish groups, Janja Lalich found that the parental role of the leader(s), and the followers’ strong attachment to that figure, resulted in developmental regression for a significant portion of the followers. (Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults)
​
This was not particularly a reflection on those participants; it was “induced, at least in part, by the group processes and interactions,” Lalich notes. It seems to be baked into cult dynamics that as a person grows more embedded in the group’s rules and routines and guidance, they begin to lose a sense of self apart from the family-like group. They become dependent; in extreme groups like those in Lalich’s study, members might even become child-like.
​

This type of control can also show up in who is allowed to share the teachings. In my group, this was a privileged role. It was only long-time students — the most loyal, orthodox, and socially adept — who led retreats or workshops.

After the founder died, true believers had become determined to Maintain the Purity of the Teachings — something I heard about during the time I worked there. It was officially proclaimed that no one else would ever be considered a teacher on par with the founder.

Still, more facilitators would be needed, beyond the there-for-decades disciples, if the program schedule was to be sustained. I suspect that householders newly invited to train as facilitators were long-term meditators who had passed the group’s loyalty smell test.

I have the impression that they were given exacting guidance about how to deliver the content. Perhaps this zealous approach helps explain why several iterations of facilitator training did not produce a sustaining cadre of program leaders; people may have been put off by the increasing rigidity of the program.
The organization has since turned its focus to online retreats and programs. Such a format would allow true believers to vigilantly Maintain the Purity of the Teachings themselves, from headquarters, while reaching people anywhere.

Lesson #12: With any potential partner or group, look for signs that they can share authority and respect with you, and will not patronize you, however subtly. Does the association help you hone and trust your own judgment, or are you expected to turn to them in perpetuity? Is there any provision for new teachers, writers, editors? What qualifies someone to be in such a role? How tightly controlled is the process for sharing the wisdom of the group?

“He’s so jealous. I’ve come to realize that he is deeply insecure. He talks like he’s doing everything for me… but in reality, it’s always about him!”

She might find her partner’s possessiveness flattering at first. But when he doesn’t want her to have any male friends — and even seems to begrudge her ties with family members — that’s another story.

He also comes across as confident initially. In time, though, she realizes it’s a façade; underneath his bravado is a fragile ego. That’s why he needs constant affirmation from her, and bristles at even the gentlest feedback.
​
With a group, this trait is likely to show up as a demand for extreme loyalty. In a charismatic group, it will be the leader who particularly requires your allegiance. In other groups, it may be the group generally, with its program and belief system.

In my group, the expectation of loyalty did not appear initially. The founder was just a sage writer… gradually I got to know him as a kind-hearted fellow who gave interesting talks on spiritual topics, often with a touch of self-deprecating humor (I saw them via recordings)… and, as I knew from the beginning, the creator of a particular set of spiritual practices, the group’s program — from which I was experiencing benefit. Nothing suspicious here.

As I got more involved, I heard some use an honorific from the teacher’s culture, acknowledging him as a spiritual teacher. That seemed fine by me; if I was hearing about a professor, or a member of the clergy, or a physician, I would not object to people referring to them as Professor or Rev. or Dr. So-and-so. Others, even residents at the communal site, eschewed the title and simply called him by his first name, or his initials.

It was evident from the stories told by the teacher’s first generation students, and the way they talked about him, that they held him in particularly high regard. Would I have responded similarly, had I met a person as wise and giving as they described him to be? Perhaps, I thought.

Gradually the idea of regarding the founder not simply as “a writer” or “a meditation teacher” but “my teacher” was introduced to the circle of young adults. Still, it was presented as an option — with guidance as to how to grow closer to the teacher, for those who chose to do so.

Between this subtle message, the continuous imbibing of the teacher’s words in books and recorded talks, and the modeling by workshop leaders and other long-timers, in time I absorbed the idea that this was MY meditation teacher. I began to think of him that way. After all, I was practicing his method of meditation. If people can have piano teachers, why not meditation teachers?
​
It wasn’t until I participated in a special, high-commitment program with a group of other young adults that the emphasis on a relationship to the teacher escalated. I vaguely recall a ceremony in which we emerged from the meditation hall after evening meditation, candles in hand. As directed, we walked silently, flames flickering against the dark, out into the memorial garden.

The focal point of the garden was a rock monument from which water flowed at the top. Its face was inscribed with a devotional quote from scripture. In this context, the devotional sentiment clearly went beyond the divine persona from the scripture; it was aimed at the group’s teacher. This brief night journey was a pilgrimage laden with meaning.

I had actually forgotten about this episode until another alum of the program brought it up recently. This friend reminded me we were also invited to show our allegiance to the teacher during this program. I don’t remember that specifically at all.

But then, the socialization can be just as effective when done more subtly. Gurus and their acolytes can simply “reinforce devotion with attention and approval, and punish its lack by withdrawing them.” (Karmer & Alstad, The Guru Papers)

At any rate, the commitment of long-term students to the teacher was clear. My cohort was cultivated in the years following his death, a time of potential turmoil for the community. When I worked there, the way leadership coped reminded me of those WWJD bracelets that were popular among certain Christian evangelicals in the 90s — except this group ran everything through the filter of What Would Our-Teacher Do?

I could feel how a teacher-centered, devotional sort of approach was the norm among the inner circle. As I told a friend around the time of my departure, “if you’re not like that [as I wasn’t], people won’t trust you as much.”

Turns out, all of this is textbook high control group stuff. Here’s how sociologist Janja Lalich sums it up: “The ultimate aim is to get the devotee to identify with the ‘socializing agent’ — the cult leader, the patriarch or matriarch of the cult, or the controlling and abusive partner, as the case may be. The desired outcome is a new self … whose actions will be dictated by the ‘imagined will’ of the authoritative figure.” (from Take Back Your Life)
​
The socialization into group and teacher loyalty went very deep. Because even after I left, barely a year after I had moved out there — and with many negative feelings — it never occurred to me to speak ill of the group. Even to my fellow meditators back home, I was vague about what I had experienced. Partly that was because it took me time to find the words to describe what I had gone through. But partly, I was hesitant to burst their bubble. It’s not like any of them were going to move out there.

​I also knew that to the core group, anything but loyalty was a no-no. I was supposed to be grateful! And indeed, at that time, I was still grateful for the positive things I had gotten from my spiritual practice and my involvement with the group.

During my year there, I had learned that many people had come and gone from the group’s orbit over the decades. The long-timers didn’t talk about those other people. Someone more on the edges told me about serious students who had been there for a couple decades, and gave so much to the work — they were literally airbrushed out of pictures after they left.

So it looked like progress to me when, after giving notice, I and another departing member of my cohort were given a warm send-off luncheon. People offered good wishes for our continuing journeys.

What they actually said about us after we left is an open question. I recall judgmental things I heard insiders say about retreatants, or people who had backed away. Nonetheless, having been steeped in apparently caring relationships with these people, I remained in touch, sending family holiday newsletters along with periodic donations over the years.

I had been willing to look past the dysfunction I experienced when I worked there, and try to focus on the good aspects of my experience. Because I had chalked up the problems I observed there to the deep grief of the teacher’s long-time students after his death. Maybe there was something about the selection process of who came there and stayed, too.

I don’t see it that way anymore. Now, I view the true believers as the most deceived and betrayed of the founder’s followers. And I understand that they wouldn’t be how they are, if he wasn’t how he was.

As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The teacher created the cult-ure of that community. He did it so well that his disciples are still dependent on him a quarter century after he departed this earth.
​
It turns out that, like an abusive partner, the leader of a high-control group is in the center because he put himself there. Whether or not the founder of my group believed he was serving others in some pure way, I will not speculate here; the guru-ashram model is a thing in his culture, so it is possible he meant well.
Either way, I believe with Kramer and Alstad (The Guru Papers) that the model is inherently authoritarian, and therefore ripe for corruption and abuse. The leader can easily shift, imperceptibly, from shepherd into wolf.

Lesson #13: A partner or group who wants you to forego other deep bonds, give up other avenues of growth — and abandon your own inner wisdom — does not deserve your fealty. Whether the pressure is urgent and apparent or subtle and sophisticated, do not surrender to another’s authority. It is the taproot of control.

If there is any solace for me in this situation, it is that the group may no longer be trying to draw new people out to live in the community.

But I mourn for all of those idealistic seekers who have quietly, unknowingly, by degrees, for some period of time — often years — lost some of their freedom through close involvement in this group.

For one involved with an abusive partner or a cultish group, the roots of control include blurred boundaries, hijacked sexuality, paternalistic attitudes, and the self-centering of the partner or group leader(s) as your ultimate master. Is this your situation? To assess, look past the ideology and zero in on the structure of the relationship.

(Missed the first two posts in this series? Here they are: Part 1 Part 2)

I learned the hard way these lessons about power and control in collectives. I hope my sharing here may help others avoid such experiences — or see them more clearly, and recover more fully, if you or your loved ones have been through something like this.

You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

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

This is a spiral season in my inner life.

Whether in a curling seashell, the unfolding frond of a fern, or the vast arms of the Milky Way, the spiral form compels the movement of sound, green life, and light. It’s easy to see why the spiral has long been a symbol for growth, with its motion of extending and returning, in ever-broadening rounds.

Our lives are like this, too. We drift away from people, places, questions, only to circle back, often, at a later time. We encounter the familiar yet again, but from the vantage point of now. At such times we may discover how much we have changed in the interval.

This is not the first spiral time in my life. In my early 30s I worked for a meditation center. After five years of increasingly deep spiritual practice and community connection, I relocated from the Midwest to the San Francisco Bay Area to support their work full-time. I left the idyllic-looking ashram setting and returned to my prior stomping grounds within a year. Processing that experience was most intense in the following couple of years.


Turning Then
A visceral memory takes me back to that previous turning, as if it was yesterday: I remember pausing on the spiral staircase that led to my meditation loft, gazing down at the home I had created for myself. It was 2007 or 2008. Here I had stabilized myself after sinking into confusion and depression during that year (2005–2006) working for the meditation center.

Being in my own space allowed me to sort through what I still claimed — what worked for me — and what I let go of. In my loft, I posted quotes and images that spoke to me, from any source. I did whatever spiritual practices felt right to ME. No method was required, none off-limits.

I could practice meditation like I used to do, but with no rigid time schedule. I could listen to a guided meditation on Radical Acceptance. I could let my body stretch and unwind as it wanted on a yoga mat. I could play the flute or chant. Every day I listened within for what felt right for me.

Vividly I remember how, one day, while coming down the spiral stairs from my contemplative loft, something new happened. I paused on the steps, as I realized I was not thinking in words. The stream of narration in my mind that was so normal to me I did not even recognize it — it had fallen away. I experienced only immediate awareness of my surroundings, my sense impressions, my feelings. No labels, no interpretation. Just raw being.

When I was at the ashram, feeling crowded (yet alone) in the midst of a tight community, I had longed for a silent retreat; at last I had it, right in the comfort of my own home. Silence is deeply healing. It can reground me in the truth of my experience, my needs. It can put me back in touch with my inner voice.

From all the things you read and all the people you meet, take what is good — what your own ‘Inner Teacher’ tells you is for you — and leave the rest.”                                                                         ~ Peace Pilgrim

As I continued going up and down that spiral staircase, day by day and month by month, I was rebuilding self-trust and inner authority. I didn’t understand then, as fully as I do now, why I needed to do that.


Turning Now
​Fast forward to sixteen years later and another destabilizing experience. Almost by chance, last month I learned of several gut-wrenching allegations about the prolific writer and meditation teacher, now deceased, who had seemed so gentle, wise, and caring.

I say “allegations” not because I disbelieve the story I’ve now heard, but because I am not a judge or jury. And my purpose here is not to delve into those details. Rather, it is to share what I’m learning more broadly at this particular turn of the spiral.

For these new voices set me off looking with fresh eyes at my own journey. Among other steps, I am devouring resources about high control groups. These are sometimes called cults. That word is controversial among some scholars, as the commonly understood meaning emphasizes the extreme. Though I have yet to read anyone actually name a fully benign cult, everyone seems to agree that these groups fall on a spectrum. The public generally hears about only the most far-out examples; many are subtle, and under the radar.

​I do not expect there will ever be a public reckoning over the allegations that have come to my attention about the group I was once involved in and its founder. Regardless, this turn of the spiral has brought me to ask a question I scarcely considered before: was I involved with a cult?

​Even preliminary learning and reflection on the topic has brought me to the sobering conclusion that I was. And though some may be, this one was not entirely benign. Whatever else is true, I know this from my own experience. Because the closer I got to that community, the less whole I was.

Supporting the Savvy Seeker
In this latest spiral movement, I turn back toward my past experience, and to the natural human yearnings that lie beneath the spiritual search — the longings for meaning, belonging, well-being, identity, purpose. These are normal human needs, to be honored and supported.

But one thing is clearly different for me at this time: now the search is not just for myself. I hope that my lived experience, my deep compassion for seekers, and the journeying I have already done and continue to do as a companion to others, might help readers along their own paths.

If my reflections enable others to recognize and avoid the pitfalls that snared me — and to which any idealistic or vulnerable person may be susceptible — my own stumbles in confusion would gain greater purpose.

More than that, I hope to shine a light on effective ways for seekers today to meet those important higher needs.

This is not an easy time to be a seeker. Trust in most institutions has eroded. That includes traditional religious institutions, often for good reason. Freelance (and frequently unaccountable) figures — spiritual teachers, life coaches, personal development gurus and others — attempt to fill the gap. We have access to wisdom traditions from around the world, increasing both opportunities and hazards.
​
Ideological polarization and information overload are daily realities. Undue influence is commonplace and conspiracy theories abound. Amid unnerving ecological changes, we can’t even count on weather patterns, growing zones or the bounty of nature that was once taken for granted. For many of us, something feels wrong in our bones.

Is it any wonder there is generalized uncertainty and anxiety? This only heightens the natural needs for meaning and belonging that drive the spiritual search.

My hope is to support those who wish to navigate these times as savvy seekers, finding or creating fulfilling spiritual lives, without getting burned.

Already been burned? I get it. I see you, I respect you, I have some understanding of the need for healing, and I hope you will find useful nuggets here too.

If this piques your interest, I invite you to subscribe and to share this resource with others who might have something to gain.

And if you would like to know more about who I am and what I bring to savvy seeking, continue on.


Why Me? Why Now?
It strikes me as good timing that concerns about my past meditation teacher have come to my attention now. I have enough distance from that time in my life, that community, and that set of spiritual practices that I am able to metabolize new perspectives on them.

As I begin this blog, I am also entering my fifth decade — a stage of both greater trust in my own inner knowing, and greater ease with not knowing.

People have always fascinated me. So have the Big Questions about life. I studied sociology and psychology in college and graduate school, including religious studies and the sociology of religion. I was drawn to building communities that work for everyone, leading to a first career in non-profits and philanthropy.

​Over a decade ago, I began supporting others in their spiritual journeys as a central part of my vocation. I started with curious college students and young adults, worked with other small groups, and since 2016, have served Unitarian Universalist congregations as an ordained minister.

I serve in a post-Christian, spiritually pluralistic, radically love-centered tradition. Unitarian Universalist communities are places of spiritual triage for many who have left other traditions — or who are simply looking for moorings in our uncertain world. Ministering in this context has enabled me to witness a wide range of experiences, questions, needs, perspectives and vulnerabilities that people bring to the spiritual journey today.

Don’t worry, it is not my goal to convert anyone. Not to Unitarian Universalism, not to organized religion in general, not to any particular spiritual practice or path. While Unitarian Universalism is the right spiritual home for me, there is no one right path for all people.

What I do wish for you are plenty of rich, healthy connections to other people, to your authentic self, to our mysterious cosmos, and to a sense of purpose for your life. If that sounds good to you, I invite you to subscribe to be sure and catch future posts.

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