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.

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 recent posts, I’ve shared my experience with Kundalini Syndrome (as I initially learned to call it), relayed how I stabilized myself and integrated these experiences, and reviewed the adverse effects of meditation that scientists have begun to document and explore.

What Goes Unsaid

I’ve mentioned before the German government’s study of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which found widespread adverse effects. Similar observations have been made at the group’s headquarters in the U.S. For example, Anthony DeNaro, a law and economics professor and one-time legal counsel for Maharishi International University (affiliated with TM), provided a sworn affirmation in 1986 testifying to the bizarre and impairing effects of TM that he observed while working at the university.

He wrote “that many of his students were spaced-out, unfocused, zombie-like automatons who were incapable of critical thinking. The consequences of regular and intensive meditations were so damaging and disruptive to the nervous system that students could not complete assignments.”

Further, in his role at the university, he was included in internal deliberations of high-ranking TM officials, including the Maharishi himself. DeNaro

“witnessed a system of denial and avoidance, as well as outright lies and deception, to cover up or sanitize serious problems on campus. These included nervous breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre behavior, threats of and actual attempted suicide and homicidal ideation, psychotic episodes, crime, depression, and manic behavior that accompanied rounding (intensive group meditations).” [i]

Dan Lawton, whose story I shared previously, and who went on to work for a time with Cheetah House, underscores the widespread problem in meditation circles of important information that is too closely held by organizations and leaders. In an April 2022 podcast interview, Dan says:

“This is from Jack Kornfield’s 1979 doctoral thesis … Jack Kornfield, arguably the most famous and influential Buddhist teacher in the US right now. And he’s describing the normal experience that people will have on meditation retreat centers. He says, unusual experiences, visual or auditory aberrations, hallucinations, unusual somatic experiences, and so on are the norm among practiced meditation students. He describes things like heavy sadness, screaming mind trips, incredibly strong hate, violent crying, loss of body awareness, loss of perceptions of hands, body disappearing, the head detaching itself.

“You’re never going to see this when you go to Spirit Rock where Jack Kornfield teaches. Nobody’s ever going to talk about this. But what Jack is saying in 1979 is not that this is just something that occasionally happens. This is the norm. This is the normal progression of meditators. And it’s interesting because in ’79 he’s pushing back against the idea that this is pathology. He’s saying this is a normal part of the spiritual practice. Years later, this has been completely obfuscated and hidden in a lot of places.” [ii]

That certainly squares with my experience.

Bliss, or Obliviousness?

When I started meditating, I had no idea that those kinds of things (or other commonly occurring symptoms) could happen to me. I was a restless idealist, hungry for greater spiritual depth and a sense of purpose — that was the hook for me.

I was curious, open-minded, non-dogmatic. Based on my childhood experience of Christianity — not even a particularly rigid variety as that goes — I did not expect that tradition to meet me where I was. Spiritual practices with ties to Eastern traditions, or multi-spiritual / interfaith practices, or secular / science-backed practices were the ones most likely to appeal to me at that time in my life. I suspect this could be said for a significant portion of Westerners who end up taking up a meditation practice.

​My first impression of meditation came in college, when one of my favorite college professors was a meditator. I read glowing descriptions about the form he practiced (Transcendental Meditation) and how it could benefit a person. Besides, he was kind and cool. (I could not have known, then, how sadly his story would end.)

Almost a decade later, when I began to meditate myself, I learned about the method I took up by reading the meditation book given to me by a fellow traveler. A short book inspired by Gandhi, it gave directions for meditating in the appendix. So, while I was in India learning about Gandhian-style community development, I began meditating Gandhi’s way, using sacred writing as a focal point. The instructions provided for this method of meditation were brief and straightforward. There was no mention of adverse effects.

When I read the same teacher’s book that gave a fuller treatment of meditation, the program was presented as one with a great variety of benefits. According to the book, meditation could help me discover my calling, love more fully, concentrate better, manage stress, overcome anger, live in the present, prevent depression, and “release deep reserves of energy.” (That latter phrase takes on a whole new meaning after my wild kundalini ride!)

Only two of the over two hundred pages of this meditation handbook address dangers in meditation. The writer acknowledges that strong emotions (positive or negative) may arise, that some people may experience unusual inward stimuli, like bright lights, and that those who descend deep into consciousness may have tantalizing experiences, or disorienting ones.

That’s it. No mention of headaches, startling energy sensations, involuntary movements, dissociation, panic, impaired concentration, feeling disembodied, depression, psychosis or any of the dozens of other potentially distressing or impairing symptoms that are absolutely known to occur.

The main guidance offered was to just keep bringing my attention back to the focal point of my meditation; it would be my guide rope as I scaled the mountain of consciousness. In case of fear arising, having a picture of a saint or inspiring person on hand might help too, I read.

Going Deeper

What about the retreat experience? I don’t remember any communication that would prompt people to self-select out of retreats based on risk factors for adverse effects, or put leaders in a position to recognize people better served by other practices. Nor were there any acknowledgment statements or waivers that let you know that there was any risk of experiencing adverse effects.

Instead, as I went deeper into the practice and community, I got these messages: [iii]

• “if meditation feels difficult, that could be a sign of progress (!)”
• The path requires training the mind, training the senses, training the will, training one’s desires; implicitly, outcomes are in your control (with caveat that advancement takes patience and grace)
• Consult established meditators at the ashram for personalized guidance if issues or questions come up in your practice
• This teacher’s method of meditation was deliberately designed to be gentle and gradual. Keeping meditation to 30 minutes was also intentional.
• Adding a second 30-min period of meditation in the evening will move you more swiftly toward your spiritual desires.
• “No matter what, get your meditation in”
• Keep the duration of meditation sessions to the amount prescribed by [center] mentors, no more and no less”
• The takeaways communicated included these:· Interpret any “difficulty” in meditation (whatever that might mean) as positive.
• Know that you can get what you want from the practice — it’s on you.
• The retreat leaders have the necessary knowledge to guide you. First and foremost, you should listen to them. (Don’t make decisions independently based on your own experience).
• Implicit also is that other meditation teachers and forms of meditation — ones that are not so carefully graduated and contained — may create problems you’d prefer to avoid. But not this practice. It was designed to be safe.

Underlying Problems

As it turns out, the problems I encountered were not unique to my meditation group. My experience illustrates some of the ways that numerous teachers / programs fall short of offering transparent information and skilled guidance:

1. Lack of informed consent about potential adverse effects. Not on the web site of my group, nor in the books, nor at the retreats, nor in the periodicals was I meaningfully informed of potential adverse effects. Neither before I started meditating — as it should have been — nor after my practice was well established.

​Alas, this seems to be a common pattern among teachers and retreat centers. Ex-TM teacher Aryeh Siegel remembers that adverse effects were not brought up in introductory lectures on the method — even though the organization is clearly aware that things like pain and disconcerting things occur, as teachers are taught how to respond when those concerns are raised. [iv]
​
If you are a meditator or have gone on retreats, did you hear any of this? And if so, at what point in your involvement?

2. Lack of screening. Unless it was done strictly one-to-one, on the basis of what meditators shared privately with mentors, there was no screening done in my group. That level of connection did not occur until one was pretty embedded with the group. Certainly at the outset, upon registering for my first retreat, there was no systematic gathering of information by which they might assess individual risk.

I haven’t come across any examples of meditation programs that actively screen participants — not in the health / mental health fields, much less in meditation centers. (I mean, you’d have to acknowledge adverse effects before it would make sense to screen people for risk…)

Willoughby Britton, the clinical psychologist researching effects of meditation, noted that

“no one has been asking if there are any potential difficulties or adverse effects, and whether there are some practices that may be better or worse-suited [for] some people over others… [even though] the main delivery system for Buddhist meditation in America is actually medicine and science, not Buddhism.”  [v]

Not that screening could remove all risk. Most of the meditators interviewed for the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study had no pre-existing psychiatric conditions, yet almost all of them experienced adverse effects.

“Adverse effects routinely occur,” Britton observed, “even under optimal conditions, with healthy people meditating correctly under supervision.”  [vi]

3. Lack of skilled support for people who do experience adverse effects. As I described in Is This Normal?, I was referred to someone outside the ashram community for support. Even though I faithfully followed his recommendations, I didn’t see any substantial change in my kundalini symptoms. And although I later learned that some of my peers had at times been told by mentors to stop meditating for a period, no one ever told me this. They absolutely should have!

Aryeh Siegel relays that Transcendental Meditation teachers were trained in a checking procedure, which they used systematically to guide meditators in correct practice.

“Major sections of the process were designed to deal with the meditator’s reporting any of a wide variety of experiences that could be deemed distressing,” writes Siegel. “Shaking and body movements, as well as overpowering thoughts, while rare, are common enough even during the first few meditations that an entire section of TM’s checking procedure is devoted to these severe symptoms.”

Siegel was taught to downplay anything disconcerting meditators might bring up from their experience. “Something good is happening” was the party line. (Sounds familiar to me.)  [vii]

Alas, Siegel notes, this rote approach often did little to help. “If a person was having problems, the proper intervention was to use the checking notes to enable them to have a correct experience of meditation. Period.” In the most severe cases, the teacher could ask the meditator if they had seen a doctor. That was all the supposed meditation expert had to offer.

Willoughby Britton not only studies mindfulness and meditation, she is a trained mindfulness teacher herself. Britton recalls, “I was taught how to respond to almost anything [in the same way], which is, well, how are you relating to this?” Though Britton wasn’t taught this one herself, pointing to the meditator’s ego as the source of any problems is a response troubled meditators coming to Cheetah House frequently got from their teachers. Is it any wonder people suffering from adverse effects turn somewhere else for help?  [viii]

4. Promoting practices that increase risk. Longer periods of meditation, longer retreats, and longer tenure as a meditator all seem to correlate with a higher likelihood of adverse effects. While my group avoided the pitfalls of excess meditation periods and drawn-out retreats, many retreat centers and teachers do not. I’m not a Buddhist meditator, but numerous consecutive hours meditating and long retreat periods appear to be common in many of these settings.

My group promoted something else that I believe also increases risk: a devotional approach. It doesn’t matter whether the devotion is to a particular divine/symbolic figure (e.g., Jesus, Krishna, the Divine Mother), or to one’s teacher — the latter certainly turned out to be a theme in my group, once you got close. Following the way of bhakti (devotion / heart-centered), as opposed to jnana (knowledge / mind), or karma (service / action), was lifted up in my group as the fastest and surest way to progress.

“For those who set their hearts on me and worship me with unfailing devotion and faith, the Way of Love leads sure and swift to me.” (so says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita)

Even if one does not have a particular object of devotion, I believe a zealous attitude about one’s practice and spiritual path may increase the risk of adverse effects.

A related multiplier of risk, in my mind, is surrender of agency to the object of one’s devotion, or to one’s practice generally.

“Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender in love, because there follows immediate peace.” (Bhagavad Gita)

By surrender of agency, I mean abandonment of one’s own observations, direct experience, judgment, and critical thinking. In a culty situation, you are likely to be guided toward surrender to your teacher or the organization generally, whether straightforwardly or in subtle ways. (I described a surprise one I experienced here.)

I never meditated for long consecutive periods; I stuck to 30 minute sessions. But I was very earnest. After a while, to my surprise, I also discovered a vein of devotion. And I was a long-term meditator. For me, even without any prior psychological risk factors, these things tipped me over into adverse effects.

5. Pointing fingers (evading responsibility). When I shared my “adverse effects” with mentors in my group, it was implied that this experience was caused by the energy worker, and not directly related to meditation. (I had mentioned that when the spontaneous movements first started up, it was during a session with an energy worker.)
​
However, the partner of the meditation center’s founder, who led the center after his death, acknowledged to me that she’d been hearing similar reports from people around the globe following their methods. It came off in an “aw shucks, what a surprise!” way, which strikes me now as false naivete.

The founder surely knew about these “side effects” of meditation that are so common among long-term meditators. Though he did not have a lineage per se (unless you count the supposedly spontaneously illumined grandparent), he had studied up from texts and teachers down the ages in his culture, where the kundalini phenomenon is well known.

​I assume this was why he so carefully designed his program to be gradual and gentle — to reduce the risk of weird stuff. His students would not have been warning retreat-goers not to seek or glom onto strange experiences if they were completely ignorant of them. Yet, the people I was supposed to turn to either acted bewildered, or pointed the finger elsewhere, before passing me onto someone else for support.

Apparently this is not an uncommon occurrence among meditation teachers and centers. As a mindfulness teacher, Britton was taught a limited repertoire of responses to problems.

“All of them,” she says, “are ways of preserving the pristine category of the practice… they all go back to the same source, which is the problem is you [the meditator] — such as you have resistance.”
​

​Britton sees a parallel with rape culture, in the way meditation teachers — and even doctors and therapists — turn meditation problems back on the meditator.

"There’s so much of the victim blaming culture that is woven into all of this,” she observes. “Which of course then just shuts people down. [And] the dangers of whatever practice it is — they’re going to go under reported.” [ix]

These are common ways many meditation teachers respond when students report difficult experiences: reiterating the basic instructions (implying the student has gotten off course in their technique), chalking it up to ego, using thought-terminating phrases (“Why do you think you’re responding that way?”), or asking if the meditator has seen a doctor (implying they have an independent medical or mental health problem).

What’s less likely to happen? Suggesting the practice needs to be adapted to the individual. Or stopped for a while. Or that perhaps it’s not the right practice for them at all, and here are some alternatives they might consider to help them meet their objectives. (Does this ever happen?)

That’s what a helping professional would do if we were talking about medication, or stress management in general, or any number of other things. Why is it different with meditation?

Oblivious Experts

By the way, Britton and her colleagues at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, though the best known, are not the only researchers to have documented adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. In 2020, a Scandinavian psychiatric journal published a meta-analysis of meditation’s adverse effects, based on the research literature then available.

Difficulties like anxiety, depression and cognitive impairments were common, registering in 65% of studies. (I don’t know whether the studies asked proactively about adverse effects, or whether they relied on subjects taking the initiative to self-report them.) The piece echoed what Britton has long said: not only that such effects are common, but that they can occur whether or not someone has prior mental health history. [x]

Is the obliviousness of “experts” around adverse effects of meditation just random? I don’t think so.

In my next piece in this series, I describe how we got here — to the point where meditation is mainstream, but nobody knows the trouble it brings — or at least, few people talk about it openly.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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Endnotes

[i]  Anthony DeNaro as quoted in Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018 (originally from TranceNet online)
[ii] From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice; that was part 2 of Rachel Bernstein’s interview with Dan Lawton on her IndcotriNation podcast; part 1 was on The Messy World of Mindfulness
[iii]  All quotes and paraphrasing in section are taken from my retreat notes, ca. 2002–2003
[iv] Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
 [v]  As quoted in Tomas Rocha’s 2014 piece for The Atlantic on “The Dark Knight of the Soul”
[vi]  As quoted in David Kortava’s 2021 piece for Harper's Magazine on “Lost in Thought”
[vii]  Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
[viii]  From Invisible Virtue, a 2022 episode of the IndoctriNation podcast in which host Rachel Bernstein interviews Britton; that was part 1 of their conversation — part 2 on The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness is also eye-opening
[ix]  Ibid.
[x] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, Harper's Magazine, 2021