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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.
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As the guru’s audience grew, an inner circle of close students and housemates developed. Eventually the group would obtain a rural property on which to establish a commune. The idealistic young adults who surrounded him there built the compound with their own hard labor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Residents & Workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreatants

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

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

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

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

Over time, a variety of options were developed in the retreat program. In person near the ashram, for a weekend, or a whole week. Special pilgrimages of one’s own to this sacred site of the guru. Regional retreats, held for many years in major cities throughout the U.S., and even overseas. More recently, especially since the pandemic, online retreats.
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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.
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​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.
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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.
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Through this immediate experience brought on by behavior, as well as through instruction, the way they think becomes the way you think. (Or the way you don’t think — the suspension of thought is a big part of the process.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Way You Slice It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Befriend Your Feelings

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

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

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

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

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

Seek Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What About My Practice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Sense of It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Safely

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

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

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

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

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

What Are Local Groups Doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the resources section that follows, I mention some books and other materials that may be of interest to either individuals or groups who are broadening their source material.

Resources

Looking for SPIRITUAL READING for yourself or a group? Here are some suggestions:

Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Spiritual Wholeness by Marsha Sinetar. I don’t remember how I came across this book. But I read it after I left my ashram job, as I was integrating what I’d experienced there and seeking my own path, with a greater sense of freedom and self-trust. I have re-read it several times. Part of why I put this title at the top of this list as that it encourages people to find their own way — there is no one-size-fits-all program for spiritual growth or living.

I also loved some autobiographical stuff I read: those of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork), Karen Armstrong (post-ashram, I read The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, she has two earlier ones also), and as I’ve mentioned already, Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, which draws from painful personal experience and held important messages for me in my recovery.

I had previously read Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, which a friend from my former local meditation group had recommended to me. (I think I ordered it from the foundation created by friends of Peace Pilgrim, https://www.peacepilgrim.org/ … probably also available used.)

All four of these have in common that they were by and about women. That felt especially important to me, for reasons I understand more fully now! The first three were also people who had flawed teachers and who found their own way forward.

A few other random thoughts:

• David Whyte’s writings, such as Consolations, might meet a group well. Consolations has short entries of a few pages on different terms. Whyte also writes poetry. To me he has a spiritual sensibility about him. I don’t remember a specific tradition.
• John O’Donohue is a Celtic Christian writer with books of both moving, lyrical prose and blessings or written meditations.
• Several books of Quaker writer Parker Palmer have spoken to me too, including Let Your Life Speak.
• Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters. Toward a healthy, mature spirituality.

Want to learn about HIGH CONTROL GROUPS, and inoculate yourself against future manipulation?

Many of my online pieces address this:

• High control group primer: Who Joins Cults — What Is A High Control Group — Leaving A High Control Group
• How cults keep their true nature hidden:  Hidden Levers & Dissolving Dissonance — Surprises, Blinders & Lies
• This 3-part series traces parallels between 1:1 abusive relationships and high control groups: Power & Control in Collectives — Reading Between the Power Moves — The Roots of Control
• Chronicling my experience in THAT group (other groups are likely to have parallels to this journey): What I Wanted — What I Found — What I Lost — My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong

Book suggestions:

• Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich — best general introduction, accessible and practical, from a sociologist and cult survivor. (Interesting tidbit: rumor has it the original publisher of this book had ties to my same group, decades ago — and that was the motivation for publishing it.) This helped me start to identify controlling elements in my group’s modus operandus.

• ​Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse: A Workbook for Recovery and Growth by Gillie Jenkinson. By a psychotherapist in the UK who has specialized for decades in supporting people who’ve had these kinds of experiences. Can be used on one’s own, or in conjunction with therapy.

• The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad. It’s so good. And so very relevant to my old group. Topics include: authority, hierarchy, and power; the seductions of surrender; gurus and sexual manipulation; the traps of being a guru; healing crippled self-trust; oneness, enlightenment, and the mystical experience. Helped me understand why scandal, particularly sex scandals, are so commonplace among gurus, why the guru-student model is inherently fraught, and why rebuilding self-trust is the key to healing from such an environment. This could be a very potent conversation-starter for a group — IF members are open to major deconstruction.

​

• When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura E. Anderson. Written from the perspective of a recovered Christian fundamentalist-turned-trauma-therapist. There’s a lot that carries over to Eastern or other spiritual settings too. She brings in the latest understandings about the nervous system and how trauma, including religious or spiritual trauma, affects us. Emotionally intelligent and accessibly written.

Podcasts — There are many podcasts out there on high control groups aka cults. The ones I have listened to the most are:
​

• IndoctriNation, hosted by therapist Rachel Bernstein, who has focused on survivors of high control groups for 30-some years, and has seen it all. She is a superb listener to her guests and the most sensitive, supportive, informative host for listeners who have had their own brush with controlling groups. On YouTube or wherever you get audio podcasts.

 

• A Little Bit Culty, hosted by a pair of amiable actors who are survivors of the ‘human potential’ group and in-the-inner-circle sex cult NXIVM (sounds like Nexium). I haven’t liked every episode I’ve heard, but there’s a lot of good stuff — including good high control group 101 episodes in the first season or two, like interviews with Janja Lalich, Daniel Shaw, and Alexandra Stein. The two-part Eckhart Tolle interview in Season 5 on The Ego Trap was thought-provoking to me re: where the founder of my old group may have gone off the rails.

 

• Conspirituality, hosted by three journalist guys, including two-time cult survivor Matthew Remski. They cover New Age cults, wellness grifters, conspiracy spreaders, and other stuff at the intersection of cons and spirituality. This is where, on a bonus episode, I first heard the criminal allegations against the founder of my old meditation group. The podcast and their book of the same name trace how pseudoscience, New Age ideas, the wellness industry, and rightwing extremism converged during COVID — leading to widespread vaccine hesitancy — and are continuing to create strange bedfellows, and infiltrate U.S. politics.

 

• Speaking of Cults, hosted by ex-Scientologist Chris Shelton, is also good.

Lastly, SUPPORT GROUPS & WEBINARS for survivors of high control environments.

These may be most helpful for people who have been in deep (such as living or working at the ashram). Although one can be psychologically “in deep” even from a geographic distance. Some resources on my radar:

• The Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, founded by Janja Lalich, a sociologist specializing in cults, and herself the survivor of a political high-control group.
• Rachel Bernstein is a therapist in L.A. who has focused largely on cult survivors for 3 decades. She has a Zoom-based support group for survivors of coercion that meets on Wednesdays.
• Another resource from Rachel is recorded webinars/videos that you can access for a modest fee. Living In Freedom
• Other resources listed for survivors via the International Cultic Studies Association: Support Groups — Counseling Resources — Articles & Books

​

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

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The End of Silence … A Spiral Season … How I Was Primed

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

Say you have benefited from a spiritual practice. Now you want to share this goodness with others — perhaps even make it your vocation, at least in part.

But, say you also want to avoid common errors that can undermine your good intentions. You want to steer clear of meditation malpractice, and reduce the chances that those you support will end up experiencing adverse effects, instead of (just) the good stuff.

If this is you, what can you do to help ensure that your actual impact reflects your best intentions?

I offer the following tips for teachers, drawing on my experience as an ordained spiritual leader, survivor of a meditation-based high control group, and as one who has been through the fire of bizarre suffering stemming from my meditation practice, and made my own way to stabilization and integration.
​

​Understand That You Are Treading on Sacred Ground

People explore contemplative practices for all sorts of reasons. Calming emotional turbulence. Following a vague spiritual longing. Seeking greater peace. Finding social support. Moving through grief. Improving focus. Gaining healthy detachment. Reaching for a connection to something greater. However well or poorly recognized, people turn to meditation to meet specific need(s).

Any person you work with as a teacher of spiritual practices may be vulnerable in some way. In addition to the specific goals they may have for their practice, they may carry childhood trauma with them, or more recent betrayals.

Into their experience of meditation — and their relationship with you — each person comes as a whole being, with their particular identities, their histories, their hurts, their hopes.

​The medical model can provide some useful insights for meditation pedagogy. And secular frameworks may be right for some people or some settings.

Yet, mindfulness and meditation engage with the whole person: body, heart, mind and spirit. Such practices, sooner or later, may raise existential questions inside practitioners. About who they are. What life is. How to make sense of their experiences. What is the point of this human be-ing.

The trust people place in you as a guide is precious and fragile. How will you earn that trust? How will you remain worthy of it over the course of a teaching relationship?

A good place to start is by remembering that you tread on sacred ground. Take it seriously. Pledge to first, do no harm. Consider how you will stay clear on these First Things of teaching.

              “Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.”
                                          ~ Howard Thurman

Empower Others

If your commitment is first and foremost to the well-being of the people you teach, then your baseline aim with every student — regardless of what brings them to you — is to empower them. There can be no lasting growth without this.

​Empowering people is the opposite of creating dependence. Empowered students learn to know themselves, to trust themselves, and to do what is right for themselves.

How does an empowering teacher behave? Consider these DOs and DON’Ts.

DOs:
1. DO coach and model listening to the teacher within

2. DO use open-ended language and check your hunches with others (favor dialogue as a communication method, including when trouble-shooting)

3. DO invite students to listen to their own bodies, feelings, and reasoning, and to share their observations

4. DO believe this personal testimony — real experience trumps theory

5. DO encourage adaptation of practices to meet individual needs and circumstances

6. DO offer resources and options that the student can consider

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

8. DO respect the needs and goals that drive participants’ interest — there is no one right or best reason to do the practice(s)

9. DO be mindful of group dynamics such as people-pleasing and social contagion

10. DO take a balanced approach to recognizing the potential benefits — and drawbacks — of the method(s) you teach

DON’Ts:
1. DON’T assume that one size fits all

2. DON’T withhold important information about the group or practice

3. DON’T mold them in your own image, or that of anyone else

4. DON’T “correct” students when they use their own words instead of group jargon

5. DON’T reward “good” students with your attention and punish “difficult” students by withdrawing your time or regard
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6. DON’T make individuals’ belonging in the practice group contingent upon conforming to rigid expectations

7. DON’T, under any circumstances, instill shame or use shame to generate compliance

8. DON’T discourage people from doing their own due diligence

9. DON’T reflexively just tell people to dig in and do the practice more — or assume they must be doing something wrong — when they encounter difficulties

10. DON’T treat meditation/mindfulness as a panacea

What would you add to your list of DOs and DON’Ts, based on your own experience as a practitioner and teacher?

Know Your Limits

No matter how long you have been teaching, you are a regular human. You do not have to be all-knowing; you do not have to be perfect; no one can be.

Learn about your own shadow side. There are many ways to do this.

If you journal, what shadow material comes up there? What insight have friends and family offered you about yourself? (If you haven’t asked, now’s your chance.) Working with a mental health professional is another way to zero in on your growing edges.

​Do you know your enneagram type? This can be helpful for understanding your own motivations, insecurities and blind spots.

Do you know your Myers-Briggs type? It reflects cognitive functions favored by different people for processing information, making decisions, and connecting with people. What strengths and challenges are common for people with your preferences?

These are just some of the resources that may support you in knowing yourself and functioning at your best with others.

Hone your practice of self-differentiation. This means being firmly grounded in your own values and personhood, so that others’ anxious or insecure behavior will not influence you (as much). When you are differentiated, you are able to stay connected to other people without absorbing their thoughts and feelings — or needing them to share yours.

Relatedly, be aware that projection can occur with anyone, including students. And to the extent that others relate to you as an authority figure (even unconsciously), transference might pop up too. You don’t have to be and do everything people want from you. And you need not take responsibility for that which is not yours — in fact, you shouldn’t.

The upshot? You can’t control how other people behave, including how they interpret what you say or do. But you can improve your own self-understanding and your own functioning within the relationship. You can effectively stay connected to others, while remaining grounded in your own beliefs and values, and respecting other people’s.

Get Trained on Safety & Support

You should be familiar with adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness, ways to reduce the chances of them occurring, and how to respond supportively when you or your students do experience them.

Doing so will not undercut your effort to bring the benefits of meditation to others; on the contrary, it will help maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

Are you getting rigorous, unbiased information about these topics through the program or tradition with which you are associated? If not, you should take it upon yourself to find external resources. (You can also encourage your program to beef up their training for the future.)

This may all sound a bit abstract. So let me share one concrete, useful thing that researchers have come to understand: many of the same mechanisms that account for the benefits people receive also account for some of the problems that can occur. As it turns out, the inverted U-shaped curve that scientists encounter regularly applies to meditation and mindfulness programs as well.
Researcher Willoughby Britton puts it this way:

“everything has an optimal level beyond which you … start to get trade-offs or negative effects… That’s true of any physiological process or psychological process… so [mindfulness] is just like everything else” in that way. [i]

Some examples: [ii]

• Concentration practices improve executive functioning and downregulate emotions — helping bring you back from strong emotion to a steadier state. However, if you “overtrain your cortical limbic system” you may end up with neither negative emotions, nor positive ones. I recall one heartbreaking example I heard, of a parent who no longer felt love for their child as a result of this dynamic; they were just going through the motions of parenting.
• Contemplative practices can help one achieve equanimity, able to accept feelings as they are, or see thoughts as passing weather systems. This may feel better than getting hooked by thoughts or feelings that are unpleasant. But if you have “learned to systematically disregard emotions and thoughts” that provides “fertile ground for gaslighting.”
• Training your attention can be calming, as mental clutter falls away. However, if you overdo it, it can lead to panic. If you keep going, “eventually your system can only get so aroused before you either end up in the emergency room, because you haven’t gotten sleep for a week” or your body shuts down and you dissociate.
• Detachment from emotions can help you get a healthy distance. But pushed too far, the practice may lead to a person no longer feeling like they are in their body. They might feel like they are far away from everyone and everything, isolated and separate.

If you get sound training, and adapt your practices accordingly, you should be able to avoid making common mistakes that increase the risk of harm to students of meditation and mindfulness.

Cheetah House is a non-profit, science-based organization offering training on a variety of topics relating to safety and support. They also provide professional consultation to teachers and teaching organizations focused on meditation and mindfulness. There are lots of free resources on their web site too.
Know of other good resources? Please share details in the comments.

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

The role of teaching contemplative practices in medical, secular, or non-church contexts is a relatively new one in countries like the United States. Anyone can throw up a shingle (or a web site) and declare themselves a meditation teacher.

This contrasts sharply with more established fields of service. Longstanding religious traditions, at their best, provide significant infrastructure to support the effectiveness of religious communities and those that serve them. Similarly, governments regulate fields like law, medicine, counseling, education, and social work.

​Wherever people are vulnerable and need to know if they can trust a provider to put their needs first, resources like these prove valuable:

• Training systems that equip people to take on a professional role — degree programs, apprenticeship models, credentialing processes
• Mentoring relationships and networks of peers
• Codes of Conduct and systems of accountability
• Continuing education, including training and support for professional ethics and healthy boundaries, as well as keeping up with new needs and evolving knowledge in the field

Look for these kinds of professional resources for meditation teachers, and make the most of them. If they don’t exist yet, support their creation. Everyone will be better off.

Make No Idols

Want to avoid inadvertently slipping into insularity, rigidness, and aggrandizement of a particular practice or person? If you abide by the DOs and DON’Ts above, that will take you a long way toward that goal.

Alas, it is all too human for a group or program to start out healthy, and slowly slide into cultish-ness over time. In a more decentralized arena like the mindfulness movement, this might seem less likely than in a religious context, or one with a clear leader and hierarchical structure.

But mindfulness groups are far from immune to cultic dynamics. As mindfulness practitioner and researcher Willoughby Britton observes, “often the systems are set up to not allow people to do whatever they want; there is a right goal, there’s a right way to do things, certainly no allowance for criticizing the system.” [iii]

Beware of treating meditation and mindfulness as the solution to every problem. Watch out for too-high goals like perfect peace or unending detachment. Don’t put anyone, or anything, on a pedestal.

Absolutely welcome the benefits that spiritual practices can offer, and celebrate when they happen. But never put practices above people and their real experiences and needs.

In sum:

• understand that you are treading on sacred ground
• empower others
• know your limits
• get trained on safety and support
• embrace professionalization
• make no idols

So long as what you are doing helps people to gain deeper trust in themselves — rather than making them dependent on a person, program, or ideology outside of them — you will be sharing the treasures of meditation with them in good faith.
​

​For more about how groups behave when they become unhealthy, check out What Is A High Control Group?

Did I miss something important in this article? Please chime in to share your perspective or resource in the comments.

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

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

Endnotes

[i] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[ii] Ibid. All references in this post are to those two podcast episodes.
[iii] Ibid.

Yet, there are serious problems with the way meditation has spread. In a field that is newer — and which some governments, like mine in the freedom-of-religion U.S., are loathe to regulate — those who teach these practices are not systematically held accountable for doing so in responsible ways.
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Financial pressures, social dynamics, and ideological commitments can further obscure the truth about various practices. Programs with a veneer of secularity can be just as susceptible to these pressures as overtly religious ones.

The result? People who turn to meditation looking for peace or better health sometimes end up experiencing, instead, a variety of adverse effects. These can range from moderate physiological and psychological problems clear through to psychotic breaks.

Undesired effects tend to be interpreted by teachers as positive signs, or downplayed, when they are talked about openly at all. And there is often little real support when they occur — as they predictably will, for some portion of practitioners. (I have elsewhere described my own dark night, and my recovery process.)

On top of all this, some opportunities to learn and practice meditation operate as doorways into high control groups. Vulnerable people may be drawn into deeper levels of involvement, where the risk of coercion and harm increases. Such teachers or groups will always present themselves as there to serve YOU — even when they will actually cannibalize your time, energy, money, reverence and idealism for their own benefit.

What can be done? Here, I offer suggestions for seekers.

Know Thyself

Reflect on what you are looking for, and how you would know if you found it — ideally, before you check out a new group or program. You might journal or talk to a friend, using prompts such as these:

1. What needs are you seeking to meet? Write or speak of the ones that are most top of mind for you. Next, it may be helpful to go through a list, such as the needs list here from the nonviolent communications model. Identify any more subtle needs that might well lead you to respond to a group or program that speaks to those needs.

2. What sources of authority do you find credible? For some people, direct experience or scientific study might be most credible. For others, a particular scriptural source or lineage provides assurance. What role does the testimony of others play for you? Peers or role models? Other sources of authority you rely upon?

It may be helpful to rank trusted sources in order of importance to you. Likewise, you can explore how you will evaluate the validity of each kind of authority that you trust. For example, if a particular program or group is promoted through science, how can you discern the independence of the researchers, the quality of study design, and the rigor of the analysis?

3. Identify your internal red flags. How do concerns or gut feelings show up in your mind or body? When has this internal warning system proven reliable for you before — accurately telling you whether a person, group, or activity is problematic for you? If this is an area you want/need to strengthen, you can ask a friend, therapist or other trusted person to be your gut-check buddy.

​4. What do you believe to be the appropriate role of a teacher or leader? Explore this on paper, or with a friend. If you are later exposed to other ideas of how a teacher or leader should function in relation to you, you’ll have a baseline to return to for comparison. This doesn’t mean you can never change your mind. But you’ll be less likely to shift your understanding imperceptibly, without even realizing it, and without pondering the implications.

Thinking through these core questions early on in your engagement with a practice or group is akin to getting a vaccine — it primes your system to recognize what is foreign or dangerous to you, and be ready to respond swiftly and effectively if/when that happens.

Use Your Guardrails

As you get involved — or get more deeply involved — with a particular meditation group, practice or program, observe how it functions, and how it is (or isn’t) working for you.

Periodically reflect on what you witness, and how it fits with your inner compass:
Is this group/program meeting the needs you originally set out to meet? Has it made you aware of any other needs that you now realize you have? What keeps you coming back? (see needs list)

What sources of authority does the group/program draw upon in support of its approach? How does this square with those sources of authority that you find credible? Is there any gap between what is officially communicated vs. what is actually practiced? Are you reoriented toward particular sources of authority over time?

Is anything tripping your inner warning system? Keep a record of any such instances. Pay attention to any patterns. Do NOT dismiss your spidey sense.
Reflecting on these questions is like giving yourself a booster shot against groups or practices that would be unhealthy for you. It’s a good idea to do it annually, just like you might for the flu.

Do Some Digging

Ask teaching individuals or entities questions like these:

1 — What should I know before I take up this practice?

2 — What kind of training have you received to teach it?

3 — What adverse effects may arise as a result of this practice? (Are there side effects, beyond the results you are aiming for, that a practitioner might find concerning or that might negatively impact their daily functioning? What are they? How can I reduce the risk of that happening?)

4 — Are there any people who would be better suited to a different practice? If so, what are the criteria for determining that?

5 — What kind of training do you have to support people who do experience adverse effects?

6 — Who would you turn to for support if you realized you were out of your depth in a particular situation?

7 — What systems of accountability are in place in this tradition or for this practice?

There should be real answers to these questions.
​​

​​In addition to the substance of the answers, pay attention to how the questions are received. Does the teacher or organizational representative respond with warmth and thoughtfulness? Do they become irritated or flustered? Do they deflect, or blow you off?

Does the person seem aware of their own limits? Do they exhibit humility — are they able to say, “I don’t know, but I have some ideas of where I would go to find out”?

You can also do some digging online. Web sites like Charity Navigator provide some organizational accountability metrics — you can see how your group scores on things like the independence of its governing board, and reviews or audits of its financial statements.

Your favorite search engine is also your friend in research. See if anything noteworthy turns up when you combine the name of the organization, teacher, or meditation method with words like scandal, abuse, suicide, and misconduct. One bad review shouldn’t necessarily taint the whole enterprise, but if serious allegations arise — and especially if there’s a pattern — pay attention.

Gauge Group Health on Key Criteria

Go slowly, and watch for where the group or program falls in terms of its degree of health or risk. Along with whatever else seems noteworthy to you, following are some things to watch for. (A group could fall anywhere on the spectrum between each set of poles.)

Encourages OR discourages awareness of your own feelings, use of your own critical thinking, and trust in your own direct experience and judgment. This can be subtle. My old group instructed that “strong emotions create a false self” (from retreat notes), with the founder consistently teaching that you are not the body, you are not the mind, but the timeless Self within.

The metaphysics of being not (just) body or mind appealed to me at the time, but I see now how such teaching could be used on a practical level to encourage people to ignore what their own bodies and emotions tell them. Similarly, the idea that “every movement in the mind is insecurity,” also taught at that retreat, could easily be applied in ways that stifle legitimate questions and doubts.

Promotes reasonable goals VERSUS sky-high aspirations. Sometimes a group will emphasize practical benefits at first, but eventually shift the focus to much loftier — perhaps impossible — goals. Illumination, nirvana, perfect peace that never leaves you, the end of sorrow, the cessation of suffering.
​

​Mere mortals may get exhilarating glimpses of these, with or without a spiritual practice. But if someone coaxes you to believe that you must keep going until (and that you have failed unless) you abide in spiritual perfection — well, they are setting a trap for you that isn’t about what’s best for you. It’s about keeping you dependent on them.
​
Points to ponder VERSUS indoctrination. Are participants free to adopt only some of the teachings offered or practices taught, or must it all go together as a package? It’s helpful to be familiar with subtle forms of persuasion, social pressure, and positive or negative reinforcement that controlling groups use to guide people toward the correct behaviors, and by extension, the correct beliefs. (Here’s a brief primer on invisible levers of influence, and how cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved.)

Supports development of community in ways that affirm the whole person, VERSUS supports relationships only on the basis of the shared practice/doctrine/etc. — and conditional upon adhering to group culture. “Love-bombing” is a classic red flag for high control groups, but I think it can be hard to distinguish healthy from unhealthy groups based solely on the behaviors that welcome and affirm people. Almost all human social groups, including sound ones, will try to give participants a positive sense of community and caring as they get involved. (Why would one return otherwise?)

The trick with a controlling group is that positive attention is especially strong for newer people, and attention may become more scarce depending on whether the teacher/group is getting what they want from you, and has hope of getting more. If you waver in your compliance with the group’s belief system, spiritual practices, inside language and so on — or they discover you have little time, money, leadership to give to the group — a problematic group will get stingier with its attention to you. They may become cooler when you do connect.

One clue as to the group’s real relational bent is how the group speaks of people who have come and gone from their orbit. Do they trust that each person will find the right path for them — meaning, people who left simply discerned for themselves that this wasn’t the best fit for them? Or do group representatives indicate, however blatantly or subtly, that anyone who left THIS path is to be pitied (bless their hearts)?

Some groups actively shun ex-members, and speak ill of them to current members. Others barely speak of such people at all, as if they didn’t exist. My old meditation group literally air-brushed former ashram members out of photos after the first big exodus. Interesting choice, eh?

Has a balanced approach toward ego, encouraging healthy humility, along with self-acceptance and self-love VERSUS cultivating self-abnegation, and a humility that may be either performative, or so sincerely extreme as to undermine self-worth and well-being. Other points from my group’s retreats illustrate this one: “humiliation helps dissolve ego”; “if you are agitated, a samskara is involved” (samskara = a well-established way of thinking/being, generally pointing to patterns like anger, fear, and greed, which the group regards as negative; the root of all samskaras was said to be ego).

Actually, humiliation is NEVER constructive. Humiliation is a form of social-psychological violence. And one can be agitated for very good reasons, that need to be recognized and acted upon — such as being mistreated by a person or group.

Permeability VERSUS purity and policing boundaries. A healthy group/teacher/program acknowledges that there are many sources of wisdom in the world, and that it does not have a monopoly on spiritual treasure. It does not try to control whether or how people engage with other practices or other inspirational materials.

At the other extreme, a cultish group will guide people toward exclusive loyalty to its particular teacher / teachings. It will concern itself much with maintaining the purity of its own programs. It may not even trust its own leaders to lead, without falling back on the words or example of its founder(s).

To what degree does a group or program function as an open system, interconnected with a wider web of wisdom, vs. a closed system, that has all the answers unto itself — and even sees the outside as a distraction or a threat?

Light and limber VERSUS tight and rigid. A healthy organization may be serious about its mindfulness mission, but it will also create a community in which joy, laughter, and authentic connection can flourish. Spirituality need not be the enemy of fun!
​
If you realize that you are overly constrained by the group — or by the norms you have internalized, and which you especially know to follow when together — that’s a red flag. One way this might show up is by feeling more free, more able to breathe deep and be spontaneously yourself, when you leave a retreat or sangha session and return to your own safe space.

It can also be telling to compare long-timers with newer folks. And not just the ones that the organization selects to represent the program to newcomers in retreats and workshops — those are likely to be polished people who can smile and chat winningly over meals or down time.

Instead, if you have the chance to get to know people who have been involved for years, and who are *not* presenters or teachers, their demeanor may tell you more about the heart of the organization. It’s a bad sign when people become more colorless and zombie-like the longer they are involved, or the closer to the inner circle they get.
​

Transparency and truthfulness VERSUS opaqueness and deception. Is the practice secular or religious? (Personally, when it comes to claims that mindfulness programs are secular vs. patently or latently Buddhist, I consider a dose of skepticism healthy. More in The Accidental Buddhist.) Is the program genuinely inter-spiritual, or are all traditions filtered through the worldview of the founder’s tradition?

Is the group honest and forthcoming about the founder’s past, and the organization’s? Are they aware and up front about the risks of adverse effects associated with the practices they teach? What about priorities, finances, and decision-making structures? (If you haven’t already checked them out online, it doesn’t take long.)

This one can be tricky to suss out, because you only know what is shown to you, or what you can readily find. If it turns out that a teacher or group has omitted significant, problematic information from its story, that’s a big red flag. A healthy group can learn from its trials and tribulations, and share openly how it has grown as a result. Unless it is focused on perfection, and lifts up teacher(s) as examples of such, it will not need to cover up a one-off past lapse of its founder(s).

A classic culty behavior is not only to gloss over or suppress troubling information, but to tell followers that ignoring concerns is actually in their own best (spiritual) interests. Think about that, though. Can the truth ever be against a participant’s long-term, deepest interests? Certainly, investigating the truth could be threatening to a group — which would be telling.
​

​Real-world accountability VERSUS internal ethics alone. Another dimension of open vs. closed systems is structures of accountability.
​
Consider well-regulated fields like education, law, medicine, counseling and social work. These are open systems with healthy boundaries. Each has structures that provide such essential safeguards as credentialing processes, codes of conduct, continuing education, training specifically in ethics and boundaries, mentoring and peer support, bodies charged with intervening when a professional goes off the rails, and perhaps even resources to support those harmed.

Such structures and processes benefit professionals and their institutions, as well as those they serve. They are win-win.

Religious denominations may fulfill similar functions for clergy, other religious professionals, lay leaders and congregations. I have watched my own tradition — among the most radical to grow out of the Protestant Reformation — develop clearer boundary expectations for professionals, and more/better institutional support for misconduct victims, just over the past couple of decades.

However, even among many long-established traditions, prevention and accountability remain growing edges when it comes to misconduct by those in positions of authority. Surely every Catholic, Southern Baptist, and news-consuming American knows this by now.

Traditions that are hierarchical in their structure and culture may carry a particularly high risk of papering over problems, as the good old boys’ network lingers on. People in non-denominational churches are at higher risk still — there is not even the pretense of protective practices. Also at higher risk are those in cultures that place a high value on charisma and on traditional, alpha-male models of leadership.

It strikes me that many meditation retreat centers may be in a similar position to charismatic, nondenominational churches. The meditation center I once worked for certainly was (and still is, it appears). However egalitarian their messaging or philosophy, a group that lionizes certain teacher(s), evangelizes their meditation program, and lacks any higher or external authority beyond the center and its leader(s), is ripe for misconduct — and for cover-ups in the name of protecting the mission.

​The counter-argument would be that a true teacher — perhaps an illumined person — has all the moral compass that is needed inside, or from God. But a long string of guru scandals tells me that spiritual teachers of meditation and yoga are no more immune to the corruptions of power than have been the countless priests and pastors who have been exposed as wrongdoers in this century.

If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s time for meditation centers and groups to come together and develop the type of infrastructure that religious denominations at their best have provided. (If that *has* happened, I’d love to hear about it!)

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

I will write separately for teachers or teaching organizations, with suggestions for those that want to maximize potential benefits, and reduce the risk of potential harms, that are associated with meditation and mindfulness practices. The question of external regulation deserves attention too.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How Was Meditation Mainstreamed? … The Accidental Buddhist

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

In recent posts, I’ve looked at

• HOW meditation and mindfulness have historically reached new audiences (religious roots have often been downplayed, with practices frequently taught in universalizing, Orientalist, and/or science-washed ways)
• WHAT the consequences have been for some converts to these practices (59 adverse effects in 9 domains that are distressing or functionally impairing), including my own dark night and my recovery, and
• WHY so many meditators have been unprepared for what they eventually experienced (thanks to lack of informed consent, lack of screening, lack of skilled support for those who suffer, promoting practices that increase risk, and deflecting responsibility away from practices/teachers)

​

​Streams of Influence

Let’s explore four overlapping reasons that the shadow side of meditation largely flies under the radar. The first two are specific to a U.S. context.

1 — American Religiosity

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Hence, a competitive marketplace of spirituality has been the norm since early in this nation’s history.
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The self-improvement culture of the country, its rugged individualism, and its waves of religious refugees have guaranteed that lots of people turn to religion or spirituality in their search for a good and meaningful life. Religious community is also one of the go-to balms for the excesses of individualism. We are a society of people seeking fulfillment, with a history of religious fervor — and weakened social safety nets, too.
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​The Constitutional separation of church and state also means that the government treads lightly in the realm of religion. Religious groups can do a lot here, while being exempt from taxes, and subject to far less scrutiny than groups not identified as religious. No one wants to be accused of interfering with others’ religious freedom.
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If you’re objecting that Americans aren’t as religious as they used to be — all the “nones” and “spiritual but not religious folks” — that seems to me a distinction without a difference. What we are seeing isn’t the end of seeking so much as it is a turning away from traditional institutions like churches and denominations. And a turning toward all sorts of alternative sources of answers, practices, community. These trends feed right into the problem of meditation malpractice.

2 — The Almighty Dollar
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Spirituality and wellness — two categories with blurry boundaries — are big business in America. When I describe religion in the U.S. as a competitive marketplace, I am not speaking metaphorically. Religion has long been the top category for philanthropic giving in this country.

What about church alternatives and the “spiritual but not religious” arena?Meditation centers may be registered as 501(c)3 non-profits and show up in philanthropy reports — that was true of the one I once worked for. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is taught in institutions like hospitals that are also often non-profit.

Other services, like yoga and meditation studios, operate openly as capitalist enterprises. As of 2023, over 36 million Americans practiced yoga, and the U.S. yoga industry earned over $9 billion annually.[i] The US “meditation industry” (you read that right) is said to be worth over $1 billion, with 14% of Americans and growing having tried meditation. [ii]

Regardless of how the tax code treats the entities where meditation is taught, the people doing the teaching are making a living at it. When Jon Kabat-Zinn first experienced a calling to make (Buddhist) meditation available to people who would never go to the Zen Center or to an insight meditation retreat, what he calls a secondary motivation was to establish “a form of right livelihood” for himself, and possibly for many others.[iii] That certainly has happened. Whatever other motivations and ideals might be associated with teaching meditation, for some it becomes a career that supports themselves and their families.
Journalist Tomas Rocha, probing these issues a decade ago, wrote:

“Given the juggernaut — economic and otherwise — behind the mindfulness movement, there is a lot at stake in exploring the shadow side of meditation. Upton Sinclair once observed how difficult it is to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” [iv]

The research sector is not immune from financial pressures, either. Like non-profit organizations, researchers compete for funding dollars.

What gets funded? Research that focuses on the things people want to know about. In the United States, that includes benefits like managing stress, helping one get along well with others, and enhancing focus and productivity in the workplace — the sort of things that are valued by American culture.

As Rocha observed,

“When the time comes to develop hypotheses around the effects of meditation, the only acceptable — and fundable — research questions are the ones that promise to deliver the answers we want to hear.” [v]

This may be one of the reasons that research that asks about adverse effects of meditation — or even shares with funders and the public whatever happens to be self-reported by subjects — has been in the minority.

Whether the beneficiaries of the meditation boom are individual teachers, researchers, or teaching entities of any tax status, once an income stream is established — and perhaps a reputation too — there is a vested interest in preserving it.

Other factors beyond financial ones may be in play, but if someone has written a book or developed a program or makes a living teaching mindfulness, consciously or unconsciously, their interpretation of results may be filtered through their biases. Britton has found that people who have a declared, financial conflict of interest “statistically find fewer adverse effects in their studies.” [vi]

3 — Social Dynamics

No matter how steeped we are in individualism, humans are social creatures. We need community, places and people with whom we feel belonging. And we are deeply influenced by the people around us.

If I move in church circles, people espouse certain beliefs, which are embodied in shared practices. These beliefs are expressed in a particular vocabulary, and are even associated with a tangible material culture. For example, beliefs in the divinity of Christ and atonement theology show up in hymns and the act of communion (the Eucharist), and the ubiquity of crosses on building and necklaces.

If I move in meditation circles, people are devoted to certain practices, which are built on tacit beliefs. The language participants speak is almost as much the glue of such groups as the meditation practice. And it’s all associated with a material culture too.

The kind of meditation I long practiced, for example, slowly nurtured in me certain ideas about the nature of the human being, the conundrum of life on earth, and the way to overcome that challenge. These ideas were threaded through the meditation passages I took deep into my being, the books and talks I consumed, the retreats I attended, the satsang sessions.

There was an associated material culture, too; my meditation chair and altar; my case full of sacred books that I collected together, and cherished no less than a devout Christian treasures their Bible; the necklace I wore with an image that could be interpreted as either a flaming chalice (its original and continued meaning to me) or as an oil lamp, a significant symbol of my meditation group.
​

​In the case of a typical church or a meditation group, it’s likely that there are people in the group who aren’t 100% on board with everything, but who don’t want to lose the community. So they fake it, or just try to shake off the parts that don’t fit them.

Their friends, their family are part of the community. They may be at church multiple times per week. This is where the casseroles come from during a health crisis. This is where the kids have unrelated adults who know them and care about them. That’s hard to walk away from.

I know this because some of those church folks who finally couldn’t take the rub anymore find their way to my non-creedal tradition, where they don’t have to pretend. They are relieved to find a community where it’s okay to be there FOR the community, and to have freedom to explore different beliefs or practices. I’m one of those people too; I left the mainline Protestant church as a teenager, when the dissonance was too much for me. Many people hang on longer, feeling pressure from their family or peers.

This dynamic happens in meditation and mindfulness groups too. If a long-time meditator has a spiritual crisis and finds that meditation becomes problematic for them — or perhaps they are newer and the kind of meditation their group does just doesn’t prove sustainable for them (how many ADHDers can maintain a meditation practice that trains attention?) — they may want to keep coming to sangha even if they aren’t meditating. Because it’s their community. “The one membership card to a sangha is that you meditate,” Britton notes. [vii] No need to mention the fact of their lapsed practice…

Besides the powerful human need to belong, uglier kinds of social pressure can come into play.
​
Willoughby Britton describes how she has been treated differently at different points in her research career. She chose to research mindfulness and meditation because she had benefited from it herself, and was a self-named “evangelist” for the practice. When she was promoting it in the way that others wanted, Britton was “venerated for that and given all sorts of opportunities and stroked and lauded.”

Britton held off for years on publishing her first set of findings, on meditation’s impact on sleep. It went against the positive narrative of meditation as an all-good panacea. She hadn’t expected that. She knew it wouldn’t go over well.

When Britton finally began sharing not only the positive findings of her research, but also the legitimate negative findings about meditation — the adverse effects hardly anyone was talking about — she reports that “the love bombing disappeared.” She receives threats and vitriol from meditation advocates on a regular basis. Including, from other researchers.

​One wonders how many researchers might be sitting on negative data — or choosing not even to ask questions about adverse effects — because they do not want to be on the receiving end of such treatment.
​
4 — Transcendent Ideology and Personal Purpose

When people experience the benefits of a practice and community, commitment may develop to the tradition or worldview that has given them those positive experiences. Taking part in the community and the practices becomes not just a way of belonging and of continuing to reap practical benefits — it can also become a source of personal identity.

Take the following attitude:
I am a meditator. I have a disciplined practice. My life is made meaningful by my practices and by the ideas that undergird it.

That was core to my own identity for a long time, so I get how this can develop for many people — even if it wasn’t something they (consciously) started out seeking. As concepts like vocation and right livelihood suggest, personal purpose and career can become anchored in the spiritual framework.

This may happen in part out of a desire to share with others the same benefits one has experienced oneself — an altruistic motive. As someone who gave away dozens of books written by my (then) meditation teacher, and organized a meditation workshop in my local area, and eventually went to work for the teaching organization with a motive to help others, I understand how powerful the drive can be to share spiritual riches with others. It can offer a deep sense of purpose.

Developing a strong identity tied to one’s spiritual practice can also lead one to want to protect the precious source of the goodness in one’s own life. You don’t want your spiritual practice or community to betray you, to cease to provide the peace, the connection, the clarity you’ve come to expect from it.

A Perfect Storm

When all of these forces converge — spiritual seeking… individual and collective economic pressures… the need to belong and group social dynamics… personal identity, existential security, and ideological commitments — it must create tremendous pressure on how meditation data is interpreted, from the sangha to the science lab.

One type of meditation that has received enormous funding and research attention is Transcendental Meditation (TM). Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars from National Institutes of Health have been funneled to Maharishi University for such studies — but the money dried up by the 2010s. Similarly, a dearth of current TM studies at ClinicalTrials.gov suggests that the scientific community has lost interest in the potential of this practice.

Writing in depth on the TM movement, former practitioner Aryeh Siegel summarizes the research landscape this way:

“There are many reasons for TM’s precipitous fall from grace in the research world, including: poorly designed studies that rarely include a randomized active control group, often biased researchers who are affiliated with TM institutions and/or practice TM, and a history of exaggerated findings.” [viii]

What about mainstream forms of spiritual practice? After learning how resistant many teachers and meditators are to information about adverse effects of meditation — including practitioner-researchers — it seems obvious to me that research on mindfulness meditation should be scrutinized as to whether it is riddled with flaws similar to those found in the body of research on TM.

Willoughby Britton came to wonder whether it is “a basic human drive… to have this pristine category [of something that is] perfect and that we can love unconditionally.” She speculated it might be an attachment-driven process — a deep-seated human need for something you can rely upon as an anchor.

​Therapist Rachel Bernstein, who has spent decades working with cult survivors, found this confirmed in her practice. People “need to have this space that has that quiet, that makes sense, that is their retreat, and where they feel safe, and they don’t want anything to take it away,” she agreed. “We deify things so that we can feel like” we have the formula we need. Some people, “left without that,.. feel like they’re on this precipice, like they’re just going to fall off a cliff.” Bernstein finds that it can reflect a basic attachment need, at least for some people.

Those are yet more motives for seeing only the up side of meditation and mindfulness, and rationalizing away any disconfirming evidence.

Looked at through the lens of medicine — the context in which many people are learning mindfulness practices these days — this makes little sense. No clinician would hesitate to list the side effects of a medication, and treat them as undesired and potentially problematic effects; “nothing in medicine is unassailable and everything has side effects,” says Britton.

Yet, she has observed that when meditation is the treatment discussed,

“suddenly people are coming out of the woodwork and doing the most bizarre gymnastics to make it anything other than harm — including researchers … upstanding scientists and clinicians and people who recommend policy to governments … are actually doing these weird mental gymnastics.”

​Watching these reactions over the years is what has led Britton to look increasingly at the social dynamics playing out in the teaching and practice of meditation and mindfulness. Her big “aha” was recognizing, not only that cult dynamics might be at play in the mindfulness movement, but that “cult dynamics might be the default” for humans. She suggests that “unless you really go out of your way to learn about the dynamics and put yourself through the rigor in your organization to not repeat them, you’re gonna repeat them.”

As a meditation cult survivor, ordained religious leader, and sociologist by training and disposition, I believe Britton is spot on.

Next, I’ll delve further into what culty stuff can look like when it creeps into a meditation group or practice — how do you know it when you see it? And most importantly, I’ll explore constructive approaches to guard against those dynamics, to keep your meditation group and practice healthy.

You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.
​
Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How I Was Primed … At the Inscrutable Ashram … Lost in Transmission

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

Endnotes

[i] Yoga Industry Statistics published June 2023, accessed at https://www.zippia.com/advice/yoga-industry-statistics/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20pilates%20and%20yoga,2017%20to%2048%2C547%20in%202023.
[ii] “What’s Next For The Mindfulness Industry?” at Fitt Insider, accessed August 2024.
[iii] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[iv] “The Dark Knight of the Soul” by Tomas Rocha, in The Atlantic, June 2014.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[vii] Ibid. This is the source of Britton (and Bernstein) quotes in this post.
[viii] Siegel, Aryeh. Transcendental Deception. Janreg Press, 2018.

​Out of the Cloister

The founder of my old group spoke poetically about taking meditation out of the cloister and bringing it into the community. Swami Vivekananda had done that, going from wandering sadhu and disciple of Ramakrishna — a monk — to becoming an ambassador of Hinduism to the West. Beginning with the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago, and continuing over several years of lecturing on the continent, as well as in his writing, Vivekananda introduced the West to meditation.

He called it the science of mind. He also preached a message of tolerance and acceptance for the truth in all religions, making him the undisputed star of the 1893 interfaith conference — though representatives of other faiths, including Buddhism, also connected with Euro-American audiences then.

Even before that seminal gathering in 1893, interest in Eastern scriptures and practices had been sparked in a certain segment of society. A group of intellectuals got their hands on the earliest English translations of works like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada in the mid-1800s.

Already predisposed toward universal ideals, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott and the rest came to be known as Transcendentalists. Despite the lack of teachers on hand to learn from directly, they started experimenting with putting these ideas into practice. Thoreau built a special bookcase for his “nest of Indian books” and took some of them with him to his cabin at Walden Pond — a venture inspired by the forest monks of India. [i]

​Most meditators in the U.S. today, of course, are “householders” — people practicing in the home and community, not in an isolated setting. And Buddhism has particularly made inroads among Americans of non-Asian descent, in no small part thanks to interest in meditation.

But the widespread teaching and learning of contemplative practices turns fifteen centuries of culture on its head.

Whether in Himalayan caves, monasteries in southeast Asia, or the Egyptian desert sought out by early Christian contemplatives, interior spiritual disciplines were traditionally taken up by people set apart from ordinary society — people who had left behind comfort, social station, and striving for material success.
​
Monks and nuns did not adopt ascetic practices to relieve stress, improve concentration, manage anxiety, or help one find one’s place in society. They did not practice mindfulness in order to appreciate the beauty in the everyday.
Instead, they were looking for union with God. Or they wanted to get off the wheel of karma and achieve an end to suffering. They were seeking spiritual perfection, however they understood it.

​Ascetics and their communities learned firsthand about the “adverse effects” of contemplative practices. They, of course, interpreted them within their respective religious frameworks. Meditation sickness, corruptions of insight, dark nights of the soul — whatever a particular tradition called it, they were well familiar with the sort of symptoms appearing in Cheetah House’s list of 59 adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness.

This is why, as researcher Willoughby Britton and colleagues have observed, records of these effects — along with religious interpretations — are littered throughout texts of various traditions: key branches of Buddhism as well as Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism. [ii] And of course, Hinduism, from which I gained the language of kundalini phenomenon to describe my own experience.

Into the Community

Let’s go back before the many strands of Eastern teaching were introduced directly by teachers in North America, in the 1900s. Before D.T. Suzuki and Zen Buddhism. Before Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other bridges to Tibetan Buddhism. Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and various and sundry other Hindu teachers. Before Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and other advocates of insight meditation. Before Thich Nhat Hanh and mindfulness. Not to mention various forms of yoga and martial arts.

Recall those New England Transcendentalists in search of literary and spiritual adventure in the 1800s. Not satisfied merely to stretch Protestant Christianity beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, these seekers — most of them moving in Unitarian circles, a few, like Emerson, even ordained — wanted “Contact! Contact!” and to know “Who are we? where are we?”[iii] They wanted direct experience of transcendence. They wanted mysticism.

​The “Boston Brahmins” were not the only householders in the 1800s drawn to Eastern contemplative traditions. Around the globe, in British-occupied Burma, Buddhist monks answered the efforts of Christian missionaries with their own mission to the masses: they took vipassana meditation out of the monastery and into the villages. The practice of meditation, once limited to ascetics, spread among the laity over the next seven decades. [iv]

Lost in Transmission

As meditation met a wider audience — and especially a Western audience — its religious roots were often softened.

Going Universal

​One cross-cultural strategy is to downplay the esoteric elements — those parts of a practice and the worldview in which it is based, that would not connect with a new audience — and favor universalistic language and framings, instead. I have the sense that Indian ambassadors of meditation, in particular, often followed in Vivekananda’s footsteps in this way. But the example of S.N. Goenka shows this has happened with Buddhists too.

​Goenka was one of the first to teach meditation to people from another culture. The “religious lineaments and rituals” disappeared; “gone was the cosmology of hell realms and hungry ghosts and karma and rebirth. Gone was the promise of miraculous healing and mind-reading and flying that meditation was believed to enable. Gone, too,” writes David Kortava, “was the open acknowledgment of the sundry mental and physical tribulations that might surface in the course of a serious meditation practice.” [v]

Omwashing

Another common dynamic is to coast on the imperial logic of what Edward Said called Orientalism. The founder of my group epitomized this in his talks and books, emphasizing the timeless spiritual treasure of the East — in contrast to the West’s (Enlightenment) cultural strengths in science and logic. He would often speak of the spiritual heritage of the East as one that belongs to the whole world.
​
In other words, my one-time teacher, an Indian who came of age in colonized India, was saying, here, Westerners, help yourself to my culture, and don’t worry about misappropriation — not only can you trust me as a guide, but you have as much right to this treasure of the East as I do.

He had internalized Orientalist logic. While he was able to use it to become a self-styled guru, I can’t help but think there was some compensation going on inside him, as a colonized person labeled inferior by the colonizing culture. On the surface, the use of Orientalism combatted that message — he had something very valuable to offer, to fill the void left by Western materialism— although deep down, it could also reinforce the stereotypes, and the unequal positions.

​Writing about yoga and omwashing, Sheena Sood observes that

“‘Orientalism’ continues to find relevance and application to contemporary imaginings of the East. It conditions people who study and become immersed in Eastern culture to uncritically revere and accept ancient and mystical wisdom as objective truth.” [vi]

Sood notes that Orientalism also leads people to assume there is a pure origin story for Eastern practices, like yoga — or, I would add, meditation — and to focus on faithfulness to its origins rather than on “the ethics of how and for what purpose yoga is deployed to various populations.” For example, yoga and spirituality can be used “to divert attention away from the inherent structural violence” of social institutions like prisons, with the result that “these programs cooperate quite neatly with a racist, classist system.” [vii]

Speaking Science

Yet another strategy to make meditation palatable to contemporary Westerners is what we might call science-washing. If you can speak to those enduring Enlightenment values — draw upon the scientific method to show evidence for something’s beneficial effects, make a logical case, even a common-sense one — you can reach a wider audience.

Groups that research meditation fit the bill. That’s true whether they have their roots in an Eastern tradition, like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, or whether they are Western scientists speaking their professional language of science, like Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Of course, a group need not be limited to one strategy. My group utilized all three of the above-mentioned methods of promoting its form of meditation. As a smaller group, it had fewer scientists to take up a research program than the legions of researchers studying some other forms. But the group made the most of every opportunity to preach the gospel of meditation.

Untethered

The end result? We have a lot of people teaching and practicing spiritual technologies, often with as much fervor as a religious convert — but often with an absence of awareness about the potential down sides of meditation, and lack of preparedness to respond effectively when things go south.

​Whether intended or not, I see this as a bait and switch situation: Come for the anxiety reduction, stay for the underlying worldview you may quietly absorb — and perhaps the meditation sickness, too.

There’s more to explore about the social, psychological, and economic dynamics at play. Stay tuned for upcoming post(s) where I’ll address evangelism, indoctrination, group belonging, funding pressures, demographics, identity, research bias, accountability and more.

Endnotes appear at the bottom of this post.

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

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

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
When Meditation Hurts … Surprises, Blinders & Lies … Seeking Safely

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

Endnotes

[i] “The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism” by Todd Lewis and Kent Bicknell in Education About Asia, Volume 16:2 (Fall 2011): U.S., Asia, and the World: 1620–1914
[ii] “The Dark Knight of the Soul” by Tomas Rocha, in The Atlantic, 6–25–2014
[iii] The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
[iv] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, in Harper’s Magazine, April 2021
[v] Ibid.
[vi] “Introducing Omwashing” by Sheena Sood, in The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide, edited by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, 2024
[vii] Ibid.

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

What Goes Unsaid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That certainly squares with my experience.

Bliss, or Obliviousness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Deeper

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

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

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

Underlying Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oblivious Experts

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

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

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

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

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

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The End of Silence ... All the Feels ... Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher
​
Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

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

I have shared how I calmed the kundalini fire brought on by meditation, and how I began to get more insight into some of my strange experiences.

As it turns out, I was lucky. My experience was relatively mild compared to what could have been.

Four Stories

1 — Kimberley had a series of “other worlds” experiences, after which she became physically ill and exhausted. In this period of spiritual emergency, she was unable to work and lost her home. She moved in with family for a time. Although she eventually established an independent life again, including getting a new job and place to live, she remained unwell emotionally and physically. She ended up collapsing after a few weeks at the new job. (From In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine G Lucas)

2 — Dan Lawton was “an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness” for over a decade. He’d had a regular meditation practice, including attending a dozen silent retreats, and for four years was a full-time teacher of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Dan had experienced a number of significant benefits from his practice.

But then in the midst of a retreat in North Carolina, he “split apart,” experiencing a “hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia.” While the retreat leaders were kind and offered suggestions for altering his meditation practice, as he explained to them, “I couldn’t stop being mindful or aware of everything that was going on within my mind and body, and the awareness felt like it was choking me to death.” The effects of the retreat did not abate as he recuperated at his sister’s for a week, nor when he returned home.

“In the months after the retreat,” Dan writes, “I suffered from symptoms diagnosed by a therapist as post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently experienced involuntary convulsions and simple tasks like cooking a meal induced panic attacks. I was occasionally so overwhelmed by my bodily sensations that I was unable to speak, and sometimes had problems differentiating myself from my surroundings.”

​

​Dan had no history of trauma before the retreat, nor any psychotic episodes. Through a variety of means — including, crucially, stopping his meditation practice — he found his way back to stability in time. He still uses the tools of mindfulness. He also strongly advocates transparency about spiritual practices, including their negative effects. (Dan’s story, When Buddhism Goes Bad)

3 — Seeking a restorative experience, Megan Vogt went to a silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center in Delaware in 2017. A week in, the twenty-five-year-old was experiencing bliss. But soon after, her mental and emotional states began to unravel. As she left the meditation center with her family at the end of the ten day period, she was overcome with a compulsion to end her life. A week in the psych. unit of a hospital seemed to help stabilize her; her psychotic symptoms were receding.

Her family kept a close eye on her when she returned home, and tried to connect her with psychiatrists for continued support. Megan resumed meditating. But things still weren’t right with her. Tragically, a few months after her intensive meditation experience, she was found dead in her truck, a suicide note left behind for her family. (David Kortava relays her story more fully in this 2021 piece in Harper’s.)
​
4 — Another young adult, David, told writer Tomas Rocha about a divine experience he had at a meditation retreat, describing the process initially as “the best thing that had ever happened” to him. He turned down a spot at law school while on this high. But over the ensuing months, the meaning drained out of life.

​Trips to Asia seeking guidance made no difference. Still trying to re-center himself, David went to a retreat at a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation center in Washington. It was a wild ride for him — including confusion, terror, and thoughts and feelings he did not want to experience but could not stop. Retreat leaders had only verbal reassurances to offer. For effective support, David wound up at Cheetah House, “a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.” (Rocha’s 2014 piece in The Atlantic)

Not Just Outliers

But those are only anecdotes. Some might suggest they are the outliers, the exception to what usually happens.

As researchers like to say, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a few people who meditated went on to have difficult experiences does not necessarily mean meditation caused those experiences. Such instances are easily dismissed by supposing that the individuals in question had latent psychological problems that happened to come to a head during/after their meditation experience. What about hard data?

I was intrigued to learn of research on Transcendental Meditation (TM). I had some early exposure to TM, and that method of meditation is in some ways similar to the kind I practiced for years.

The German government completed a research project on TM in Germany in 1980, spurred on by ex-meditators (and spouses and parents of meditators) reporting troubling symptoms to authorities that they believed originated with their TM practice. Per Aryeh Siegel, the German study is “the most thorough study of TM regarding the comprehensive study protocols used and the preparation of interviewers who conducted the study” (Transcendental Deception, 2018).

As Siegel relays, “many meditators experienced severe mental disturbances, including disturbed sleep, anguish, problems with concentration, hallucinations, and feelings of isolation, depression, and over-sensitivity… [as well as] detrimental effects on decision-making… Whether they were ordinary meditators who had little contact with [the TM organization] or more committed, many of their complaints were similar.”

The investigators wrote: “The mainly positive experiences in the earlier stages (pictures, feelings of happiness) are replaced in time — according to reports of the ex-meditators — by terrifying images and feelings of fear or anguish.”

​A majority of meditators (63%) noted physical complaints associated with meditating, including digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, and neck pain. Psychological problems were even more prevalent, occurring in 76% of cases.While a small number had pre-existing illnesses — which got worse after starting to meditate — most of the cases were new disorders or illnesses, with 43% of participants requiring psychiatric or medical treatment to address them. The most common issues were fatigue (63%), anxiety (52%), depression (45%), nervousness (39%), and regression (39%). (Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018)

To me this suggests that if a person took up TM for stress relief or emotional support, the cure is liable to be worse than the disease. Yikes!

Dark Nights in Mainstream Meditation

But TM is only one form of meditation, and not among the most prevalent forms practiced in the West. Plus, it is arguably quite culty. (Patrick Ryan says as much here, or check out Aryeh Siegel’s aforementioned, thoroughly researched book to assess from fuller information.)

Mindfulness is all over pop culture these days. It’s not just a thing at Buddhist retreat centers or sanghas anymore — ‘secular’ versions are widely promoted in mainstream health and mental health fields, and the language of mindfulness has filtered into everyday lingo. The meditation and mindfulness revolution could not have gone on this long if it had the same sort of shadow side as TM… could it?

Fortunately, the question of adverse effects is starting to get some attention among researchers. Clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton is a pioneer in this area, investigating the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. Although they look at all kinds of effects, she and her team at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory have become particularly known for their work on adverse effects — likely because attending to undesired effects has been relatively uncommon among researchers.

Britton was herself an avid meditator, leading her to choose a meditation-related topic for her PhD dissertation. She studied the effects of a meditation practice on sleep quality. At that time, it was commonly believed that meditation improved sleep quality. But what Britton found when gathering data in the sleep lab was that people who meditated more than thirty minutes per day slept worse — with less total sleep and lower sleep quality. In fact, the more they meditated, the worse their sleep.

​As an evangelist for meditation, Britton was flummoxed. For years she opted not to publish her data. In 2010 — a few years after a meditation teacher told her at a retreat, “everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough… you stop sleeping” — Britton decided to share her data publicly. (as relayed in Kortava piece)
​
From there, she started talking more to the people who ran retreats, curious about what else she didn’t know about potential adverse effects of meditation. She heard horror stories at every center, with common threads being impairments in cognitive functioning and psychotic breaks — either short-term or long-lasting.

Britton and her colleagues at the lab are best known for their groundbreaking study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (originally the Dark Night project). They surveyed the range of meditation-related effects described by Buddhist practitioners in the West. Their aim was to learn about how these effects impact practitioners’ lives, and to gain insight into the causes, prevention, and integration of experiences that might include unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or functionally impairing effects.

Subjects consisted of meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. People whose challenging experiences could be accounted for by other causes were excluded, as were those with mixed practice histories beyond the three forms of Buddhism named above. Since the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was designed to shed light on the adverse effects that other research may not ask about, and that are often under-reported by practitioners, people with no adverse effects were also excluded. (Notably, only 4 of 73 meditators who initially completed interviews were free of adverse effects to report — this means that 95% of the people in the original pool of meditators and teachers HAD experienced adverse effects.) The final sample size was 60 people.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLUS ONE in 2017. (One lay-friendly article summarizing findings is here.) A key deliverable is a taxonomy of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. Researchers identified seven domains, each including up to 15 symptoms, with a total of 59 symptoms attributable to meditation.

​Some examples within each domain:

1. Affective: flattened emotions, irritability, depression, traumatic flashbacks, dramatic mood swings, fright, suicidality
2. Cognitive: poorer executive functioning (concentration and memory), heightened clarity, vivid imagery, disintegration of conceptual meaning structures
3. Somatic: fatigue, headaches and pressure, involuntary movements, pain, energy sensations, hotness or coldness
4. Perceptual: derealization (the world feels unreal or dreamlike), hallucinations, extreme sensitivity to sound or light
5. Sense of self: feeling disembodied, loss of sense of agency, altered perception of boundary between self and other
6. Conative: loss of ability to experience pleasure, loss of motivation, change of goals
7. Social: difficulty transitioning from intensive practice to normal daily life, increased sociality, impaired ability to work

For a complete list of symptoms in each domain, and narrative summaries, see Cheetah House’s Symptoms List.

Beyond Symptoms

Besides the development of the taxonomy, notable findings include (quotes directly from the study):

• “The vast majority (88%) of participants reported that challenging or difficult meditation experiences bled over into daily life or had an impact on their life beyond a meditation retreat or beyond a formal practice session.”
• “Each category was reported by an average of 20 practitioners and 5 experts, indicating high consistency across participants.”
• Whether people regarded the experience as positive and/or negative varied, depending in part on their frameworks of interpretation.
• “The associated level of distress and functional impairment [ranged] from minimal and transient to severe and lasting.”

• ​“In order to determine what variables affect the valence [positive or negative] and impact of a given experience, the study also identified 26 categories of influencing factors across 4 domains, including factors related to the practitioner, the practice, relationships, and health behaviors.”
• The results challenge “common causal attributions, such as the assumption that meditation-related difficulties only happen to individuals with a pre-existing condition (psychiatric or trauma history), who are on long or intensive retreats, who are poorly supervised, who are practicing incorrectly, or who have inadequate preparation. However, this is not to say that these and other factors do not play a role.”

It’s worth reiterating that 95% of the initial interviewees (not the final subject pool) had experienced adverse effects from meditation.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…

So, adverse experiences are not just rare results of meditation when practiced in extreme ways or by particularly vulnerable people.

Challenging experiences are well-known in traditions with a long history of contemplative practices, where such effects are an expected part of the spiritual journey. Even casual users of meditation apps have been showing up at Cheetah House programs needing crisis support. (Dan Lawton met a number of people who suffered after using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.)

And while more study is needed, adverse effects are now increasingly documented not only anecdotally, but through well-designed research. (That includes the “weird energy stuff” I described from my own experience in previous posts… the researchers call them Energy-Like Somatic Experiences and they were reported by over half of people interviewed.)

​That leaves the question, why is there so much talk about the potential benefits of meditation and other spiritual practices — and so little acknowledgment of the predictable, potentially problematic effects that many people will experience?

Given that adverse effects are common among serious or long-term meditators, why don’t we hear more about them — and before we are in deep? Why don’t meditation programs come with a list of possible side effects and contraindications, similar to prescription medications, so people can make informed choices?
​
In the next installment in this series, I explore further five common problems in the ways meditation is often taught.

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

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found

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In my last post, I described my experience with kundalini and (as I would come to think of my particular experience) Kundalini Syndrome.

The people who were ostensibly my meditation mentors did not know what to do with this, and the helper they referred me to was primarily helpful not for resolving the underlying symptoms, but for providing someone with whom I could speak freely about this strange kundalini fire. I came to recognize that I needed to change my circumstances — to return to some baseline of basic safety — before I would be able to stabilize myself physiologically.

​I left my job at the meditation center, moving back to my previous community, work, and social support network. There were no more incidents of having to RUN as if my life depended on it. And the depression I’d fallen into lifted with the change of settings. My energy, however, had not evened out.

I would get surges of energy and enthusiasm, pouring it into projects at my new job. Eventually I would hit a wall and be spent. Then after a while the cycle would repeat. I remember describing it to a friend as like bi-polar disorder, except not the emotional content — just ups and downs of energy.

I must’ve said something to my mother about all this, because I remember a point in my first year back when she requested that I see a psychiatrist, to rule out any issues requiring support. Mostly to put Mom at ease, I did that. My minister gave me a referral to a local professional she respected.

I told the psychiatrist about my experiences, and my belief that it traced back to a long-term meditation practice. She went through her usual assessment process. She found no cause for concern. In retrospect, I wonder if she’d seen this sort of thing before. In any case, she sent me on my way.
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So I went about readjusting to a “normal” life. Along with beginning to untangle my ashram experience — and moving outside the spiritual box they had taught people to stay in — I experimented with what felt right to me in my spiritual practice now. And I paid more attention to my body.

​Here are some of the things that seemed to help calm my energy cycles and stabilize me:

• While I still meditated off and on — still grieving the deep peace I used to reach reliably, and wanting access to it again — I came to favor meditating while I was walking, rather than sitting. That way, as the energy rose up to my crown, I could pour myself out into the canopy of trees. Simultaneously, I experienced a feeling of belonging to a larger whole, my sense of personal identity melting into that. I felt more balanced meditating this way than doing just sitting meditation.
• I went to a reiki practitioner off and on for several years. She described opening up restricted places so energy had more room to flow through me.
• She also recommended “grounding” myself in the earth, such as walking on the ground in bare feet, and putting my back against a tree. As a nature lover, this was welcome advice which I put into practice. I also continued my regular nature walks and hikes, which felt more important than ever.
• I used water imagery in a purposeful way, to counter the fiery feelings of the excess energy inside me. Salt baths and other literal contact with water also felt helpful.
• In time I also started eating more animal food. I had been a vegetarian for a decade, and never missed meat — so it was a surprise when I started craving animal flesh. It wigged me out at first; meat had long ago ceased to be appealing to me as food. I had favored “eating low on the food chain” as a choice consistent with my values of care for the planet and the poor. (I was aware of the ashram’s moral stance on vegetarianism as a nonviolent diet, too; this may have influenced me subconsciously, although I had chosen that type of diet for my own reasons, long before I started meditating.) I did feel better when I snuck some chicken into my salad bar salads (Bloomingfoods, I still miss you and your hot bar / salad bar), and had the occasional piece of fish. Besides the messages my own body was giving me that I now needed an omnivorous diet, a B12 deficiency and other medical test results confirmed that shifting my eating habits was a necessity.

Returning to “safe” relationships and community supports was also an important part of stabilizing myself. In addition to old friends, and my church community, I eventually looked for and found a life partner. The instinctive sense of safety I felt with him was a significant influence in my choosing the partner I did. I remember vividly the hug my now-husband gave me at the beginning of our second date, and the visceral feeling of safety and comfort. “Hmm, something’s different about this one. {contented sigh} ”

Within a couple years of returning home to the Midwest, circa 2008, I found resources online, on kundalini awakening and kundalini rising, safety protocols for kundalini activation or treatment, kundalini signs and symptoms, etc. Though the links where they were originally posted no longer work, I saved some articles to my computer. (You can also find plenty out there now — more as time goes on, it seems — if you search on these terms.)

A piece on techniques and pitfalls of kundalini yoga had this to say: “We are treading sacred waters here. To plunge in recklessly is to risk self-annihilation. When Kundalini awakening happens to people who are not on a spiritual path, the experience can leave them fragile and fragmented. As the Kundalini process involves a redefinition and reintegration of self, it adds extra pressure when people wish to suppress the transformation and insist to lead their lives normally.” [emphasis in original]

​I was a person “on a spiritual path.” But I was not one who had been particularly seeking illumination. Nor had anyone warned me, at any point, that a regular meditation practice could eventually lead not only to the positive daily benefits I valued — improved discernment about life decisions, enhanced relationship skills with others, greater patience, emotional stability, etc. — but that regular meditation could also lead to becoming “fragile and fragmented.”

An article on Kundalini Signs and Symptoms, by someone named EL Collie, included the following list:

The following are common manifestations of the risen Kundalini:

• Muscle twitches, cramps or spasms.
• Energy rushes or immense electricity circulating the body.
• Itching, vibrating, prickling, tingling, stinging or crawling sensations.
• Intense heat or cold.
• Involuntary bodily movements (occur more often during meditation, rest or sleep): Jerking, tremors, shaking; feeling an inner force pushing one into postures or moving one’s body in unusual ways. (May be misdiagnosed as epilepsy, restless legs syndrome (RLS), or PLMD.)
• Alterations in eating and sleeping patterns.
• Episodes of extreme hyperactivity or, conversely, overwhelming fatigue.
• Intensified or diminished sexual desires.
• Headaches, pressures within the skull.
• Racing heartbeat, pain in the chest.
• Digestive system problems.
• Numbness or pain in the limbs (particularly the left foot and leg).
• Pains and blockages anywhere; often in the back and neck.
• Emotional outbursts; rapid mood shifts; seemingly unprovoked or excessive episodes of grief, fear, rage, depression.
• Spontaneous vocalisations (including laughing and weeping) are as unintentional and uncontrollable as hiccups.
• Hearing an inner sound or sounds, classically described as a flute, drum, waterfall, birds singing, bees buzzing but which may also sound like roaring, whooshing, or thunderous noises or like ringing in the ears.
• Mental confusion; difficulty in concentrating.
• Altered states of consciousness: heightened awareness; spontaneous trance states; mystical experiences (if the individual’s prior belief system is too threatened by these, they can lead to bouts of psychosis or self-grandiosity).
• Heat, strange activity, and/or blissful sensations in the head, particularly in the crown area.
• Ecstasy, bliss and intervals of tremendous joy, love, peace and compassion.

Psychic experiences:

• extrasensory perception; out-of-body experiences; past life memories; astral travel; direct awareness of auras and chakras; contact with spirit guides through inner voices, dreams or visions; healing powers.
• Increased creativity: New interests in self-expression and spiritual communication through music, art, poetry, etc.
• Intensified understanding and sensitivity: insight into one’s own essence; deeper understanding of spiritual truths; exquisite awareness of one’s environment (including ‘vibes’ from others).
• Enlightenment experiences direct Knowing of a more expansive reality; transcendent awareness.

I had experienced most of the “common manifestations” of risen kundalini, as well as some of that “increased creativity” and “intensified understanding and sensitivity” listed in the second grouping.

Lists like this online supported my sense that this was not just a positive experience of awakened kundalini that I’d been having, but that there was a common, well-known shadow side to it — the headaches and pressure inside my skull, the pain in my neck, the energy cycles. Indeed, these were all a direct result of the spiritual disciplines I had undertaken so faithfully for years.

While any of the above listed symptoms might be “normal” in the context of spiritual development, it would not be normal to most of the people around me. After I left my job at the meditation center, I was no longer bound to silence on these topics due to the subtle pressures of ashram culture.

But treating these experiences as a secret, to be shared with only a trustworthy few, was now a strategy for blending in in mainstream culture. Kundalini awakening was not exactly a topic of conversation at Chamber of Commerce mixers.

It was helpful to have the lens of kundalini rising to make sense of my experiences. I wished I’d had it sooner. I remained curious to learn more, and open to other frameworks for interpreting my experiences. Periodically I came across a new resource that was helpful to me.

I left the ashram and returned home in 2006. Importantly, I found new spiritual companions on the page — not only Peace Pilgrim but Rumi, Karen Armstrong, Etty Hillesum, Tara Brach, and the historic UU spiritual sisterhood, among others. I bought a house in 2007, and met my now-husband in 2008. The process of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering was perhaps the most grounding experience of all (and the most exhausting, too); our daughter was born in 2010.

By 2012, I was starting seminary, as the first step in the process of becoming an ordained minister in the tradition of Unitarian Universalism. That began a second round of life review. I was still trying to make sense of my experiences at the meditation center, in particular.

During that time, I read a 2011 book titled In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening by Catherine G Lucas. I don’t remember how I found it. It pointed me toward other resources, including the 1989 Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (edited by Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof) — indicating that the kind of experience I’d had was recognized, not only by yogis and mystics worldwide down the centuries, but by the field of psychology for at least several decades. I also reached out to the Spiritual Emergence Network in my country; alas, I never heard back.
​
I found it helpful to use a series of writing prompts from Lucas’ book, based on Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey, to take a fresh look at my life’s journey and spiritual journey. I shared it fruitfully with the spiritual director I was working with at that time.

​Reviewing that telling again now, what stands out to me is the repeated lesson of trusting my own needs and my own knowing, rather than too readily adopting others’ advice or perspectives — particularly by learning to listen to my body, including my energy.

This breakthrough started with realizing I needed to leave the ashram, as the insistent kundalini symptoms were telling me to do. My recovery process after I left included much self-care and self-listening that was specifically body-attuned. When it came to childbirth, I felt a deep trust in my body’s innate knowing and capacities. I had a swift, smooth home delivery (6 hours vs. the typical 12–24 hours for a first birth). And what made me trust the “aha” moment of recognizing the call to ministry was the clear, calm, joyful sensation of my crown wide open and buzzing at the idea.
​
A few years ago, when reading up on trauma and somatics, I recognized my urge-to-run experiences in Peter Levine’s descriptions of trauma discharge (In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010). As I recall, in a moment of danger, the fight-or-flight response may turn into freezing instead — because it is not safe to run during the time of actual threat, or in some cases, because playing dead may give the animal a better chance of survival. Later, when a person is safe again, letting this urge run its course (literally) is a healthy way to release the stress of that event, which would otherwise remain embedded in the body. (Shaking it off, again literally, is another method. Animals instinctively do either of these things.)

This is what some animals do when a predator has it cornered: the gazelle freezes, and if the tiger picks off another member of the herd instead, or is distracted by a competing predator, like a hyena, the frozen gazelle can spring back into action and flee. By using the adrenaline for its intended purpose — to fuel the vigorous exertion required to escape danger — the stress energy of that life-or-death encounter is discharged. Aha! At last I had an explanation for those times when I’d just HAD to run.

This still left me with a puzzle, however. I had a happy childhood, with no traumas that would lead to such frozen energy, no date rape in college, or anything else I could point to as an obvious origin for this. Where did the threat come from? When had I ever been prey to a predator?

While the source of my “frozen energy” remained hazy to me, I learned that the phenomenon of spontaneous movement is familiar to some in medicine and body work fields. An occupational therapist, upon hearing me relay the movements that still sometimes happen, and feel therapeutic to me, told me that she had been taught to call this “unwinding.” In myofascial teaching, the fascia, where trauma is held, unwind as a way to move you through that trauma to release it. This is regarded as a natural, self-healing phenomenon with which practitioners can collaborate.

Most recently, as I learned about high control groups — and with no small amount of shock, recognized my old group in the descriptions — I concluded that it was actually the one-size-fits-all meditation practice and the ashram community that my body recognized as unsafe. That passive-aggressive, patronizing, untrusting, judging, not-caring-as-it-first-seemed, not-actually-equipped-to-support-me community was the threat I had cause to run from.

I now consider the meditation center’s founder a predator — a malignant narcissist and serial user of the “gazelles” in his midst. And the organization he founded is one designed, not to accomplish the mission of service it outwardly proclaims, but rather to cannibalize people — their minds, bodies, time, money, labor, skills, and idealistic fervor — for the aggrandizement of the founder. (It doesn’t matter that he’s dead. That’s the cultural DNA and it’s still playing out now, as it was when I was there.)

If only I had known how to listen to my body while I was there working at the ashram. It was telling me — literally — to run away from that group. At another point in my year there, depression communicated the same thing: this place isn’t good for you, you need to GET OUT.

I did get out. I calmed the kundalini fire. I created a life I love. Surely my experience of troubling, unexpected “side effects” is the exception among meditators, right? Surely mainstream champions of meditation effectively guide and safeguard people?

Well, not so much. Next up in this series: adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. Not from spiritual teachers or ancient religious writings, but from contemporary study using the methods of science. Fascinating stuff, offering necessary knowledge for practitioners.
​

​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.

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What I Wanted ... What I Found... What I Lost

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Eventually I would come to know it as Kundalini Syndrome — language I had to go out and find for myself. What I almost didn’t notice at first became as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, and equally solitary.

It started with my head tipping back, imperceptibly, during meditation. This was ~2003ish. I would notice it sometimes when I came out of meditation in my darkened room at home. The topic came up in a retreat workshop — I don’t remember now whether I asked about it, or whether one of the leaders observed it during our group meditation sessions.

In any case, I was encouraged to see this as a positive sign — not something to be concerned about, so long as I did not allow myself to be distracted. No particular framework was shared for understanding why this would happen or what it would mean. At the time, I took that as consistent with the organization’s general attitude of downplaying woo-woo stuff in order to focus on the positive, practical benefits of meditation.

There was also a period, around the same time as I recall, when violent images would frequently arise in my mind during meditation. I wasn’t sure what to make of it — it felt troubling. As I’d been instructed, I just continued to bring my mind back to my meditation focal point whenever it was interrupted by such imagery.
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​My sense of what was happening was that my mind was cleansing itself of all the negative imagery I had taken in over the years through television and movies. A kind of vomiting up and out from consciousness, not pleasant in the moment — but better afterwards.

Again, I don’t recall being offered any particular lens for interpreting this experience. The founder of the meditation center had long taught to take good care of your mind, with healthy recreation and mental inputs, just as one should offer sound nutrition to the body. Eventually it stopped happening. Okay, I thought; the purging is complete.

The head-tipping continued, though. I had been meditating for several years by this time, and completed an intensive six-month program at the meditation center. Not long after I made the decision to move across the country to work for them — but before I had made the move — I also happened to go in for a massage. My massage therapist suggested I might benefit from a session with her fiancé, who practiced reiki and other forms of energy medicine.

Curious, I decided to give it a try. While the body worker was doing something called “energy dowsing,” my head and neck began to move around. It was strange, though not unpleasant. It felt vaguely therapeutic. I wondered what this was all about.

I asked him what he was doing with these movements, only to be told that he was not moving me — my body was doing that on its own. I didn’t know what to make of this; I felt like the receiver of the movement, not like its initiator, similar to receiving a massage. I was not consciously choosing to move my head around. Ummmm… okay?

The body worker encouraged me not to be freaked out by this. “It’s a good thing,” was the message. “You have spiritual energy rising. Trust your body and its knowing.”

Thereafter, when I got into a zone in meditation, my head wasn’t just gently tilting back — it was moving around in all sorts of ways. It was hard to keep my mind on the intended focus of meditation with all this movement. But it felt unkind to suppress it. So, I got up from my meditation chair and let my body do what it wanted. Now it was not just my head/neck, but my whole body moving in and out of various positions, holding certain limbs or muscles taut, swiveling, sounds, emotions sometimes… I went with it, and my breath became deep, coordinating itself to the movements.

​Perhaps, I thought, like the troubling imagery that had come up for a while during meditation, this was a phase that would pass. I felt lighter after I stopped a session. A bit tired, but good. I think it was when I followed up with the body worker to share these bizarre (to me) occurrences that I first heard the phrase “spontaneous movement.” It’s all good, was again the message. Just go with it.

I let the spontaneous movement become part of my life. When I had time and felt the urge, I would go to a quiet room and just allow the energy to do what it wanted. It was like having a flip I could switch — if I told my body it was okay, it would start to go. When it had run its course — or more often, when I just needed to do other things — I flipped that inner switch back to “off” and my body quieted down. How long would this last?

I got through giving notice at my job, selling my house, packing my stuff, saying goodbye to my friends, moving across the country, settling into a new apartment, and starting my new job at the meditation center. Some weeks after the spontaneous movements started, it was still going.
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I talked to my designated “mentor” at the center — I’ll call him Brad — about these and other unusual experiences, which I attributed to the energy released through meditation. What should I do?

Apparently this issue was beyond the long-term meditators at the ashram. And the original teacher at the meditation center was deceased. So Brad referred me to a yoga expert in Berkeley, someone with Himalayan lineage that the center trusted.

In advance of my first visit with him — much like preparing for a doctor’s appointment — I wrote up as complete a description of all my symptoms as I could remember, and sent it to him. (Perhaps I was also giving him a chance to say — um no, you need a psychiatrist or a neurologist, not a yoga specialist. But he took it in stride and scheduled the appointment.)

Here’s what I wrote to him in September of 2005:

It started with neck pain which I attributed to a poor ergonomic situation in my workplace. Seeking relief, I went to a massage therapist I’d been to before and she did something new she’d been learning called “quantum touch,” where she chased the pain around with her hands. It does not involve massage-type touch. I could feel that it was definitely doing something though. She spoke of it more in terms of energy and chakras rather than just something muscular. She referred me to a healer that I ended up going to 3 times over the course of my last month in [Indiana] (July) before moving out to [California].

He also did quantum touch, and Reiki, and something called dowsing. Now my first session with this guy, Chris, ended with the dowsing and my head and neck were kind of rolling around and stretching. He wasn’t actually touching me but I thought it was his doing but not really, he said this was just how my body was responding to the energy thing he was doing, in its own way. This was maybe the last third of what became a 2-hour session.

After that I started having these movements occur at other times spontaneously-first in the state toward falling asleep, and then in meditation it wanted to start going, and then anytime I said the mantram very much [outside of meditation], and then under just about any mundane circumstances, it was like if I just mentally released the brake the movements would go. It was focused on the neck just at first. It will go for a short period of time (5 minutes) or a long period of time (several hours on some occasions until I got too tired), just however long I let it. Chris consulted his teacher and said this was something called “spontaneous movement” and a good thing, releasing energy blockages and maybe tied to emotional stuff too. I am a pretty practically oriented person … but feeling is believing. Stuff has just been happening.

It escalated from my neck to my whole body, rotating movements and yoga-like alignment movements and poses, kicks and flicks of my limbs, and just strange things, breathing things. I have felt things releasing some (muscles?) but also there is pain, especially in my neck but other places too. And some emotions, groans and laughter if I’ve let it go for a while at home, crying at times (some has definitely been grief and release from an old relationship). Anytime I mantram or give it permission it’ll just GO and I’m not doing anything, I just get out of the way and my body is doing these unpredictable movements. Neck especially (“throat chakra”). Chris had pronounced me unblocked at my last session in [Indiana] …

I had consulted Brad because I was concerned about how this was affecting my meditation practice (sometimes it is hard to disallow the movements during meditation, that feels unkind to my body) and I thought he might have advice. Brad thought this sounded like what can happen with Rolfing and similar modalities and that rang true to me from what he described. It feels like layers of muscles or something are getting loosened through these movements and sometimes I end up kneading specific tender spots too and there have been vocalizations and sharp outbreaths and emotions released as well.

I allowed the motions during the last two sessions with Chris and he said it looked like yoga moves, “spontaneous yoga.” I don’t know many yoga poses (I just have these two Rodney Yee tapes I got last year, on Brad’s recommendation to strengthen my back for meditation) but I did recognize Child’s Pose and there have been motions that seem dance-like as well. Other times it is much less graceful! Sometimes the motions have been rather painful at the time, sometimes I feel sore and tired after (not unlike after a deep massage where toxins have been released from muscle tissue?), there have been a few cycles including how it feels just today where it had flared up and been painful but then the same motions after a few days came to feel smoother, still intense but unknotted somehow.

Also by the time I was leaving [Indiana] a frequent modality was just this kind of crunching motion that feels like it’s on nodes around my neck and really under my skull from ear to ear in the back, and shoulder blades and at points all down my spine. And the back of the shoulder above the armpit, right shoulder mostly (I can’t help wondering about mouse hand, back to the work-station situation). It’s like my body is giving itself this internal massage that is working intensely on these spots, kneading them with whatever layers of muscle and tendon and bone are above the nodes.

Another symptom which I think is totally related is just a feeling of great pressure in my neck and head, that same place at the base of my skull in the back, and sometimes in my ears like my Eustachian tubes hurt and it hurts to put in earplugs for meditation, and sometimes on my crown, and even above and around my eyes at the worst. For several of my worst days in [Indiana] I felt like a pop bottle that had been shaken up but not released. Head-neckache and fiery pain that just made me want to cry. I also have had for about a year and a half this thing where my head tilts back in meditation and I feel like energy is moving up and out and that seems somehow related as well, although I had experienced that as positive if anything and not painful.

What else? The face and eyes have had movements that reminded me of Kathakali [dance] I saw in Kerala [India]. And the hands and fingers are really doing things sometimes, some of the same motions I recognize as recurring, like some kind of sign language to which I do not know the code (what does it mean). Also wailing. Wailing coming out of me sometimes.

The most dramatic perhaps was during the weeklong retreat I attended after I first got to CA. It was intense in the usual ways of [meditation center] retreats firing up one’s sadhana, plus personal stuff going on (a challenging unresolved relationship situation, entanglement), plus a kind man who was in our retreat died during the week and it just hit us all. Anyway one night after that driving home from the retreat house the wailing just surged out of me. This was not the first for that kind of thing (there has been breathing stuff and grunts) but the most dramatic.

Also once in the Penske truck on the way here [to California] (one of few times during that week I had any space at all from my parents who helped me move), along with the neck-crunching motions and loosening-breathing things, there were vocalizations that had intonations, like singing. I am actually a singer but this was the purest sound my body has ever produced and I wasn’t doing it, it was just coming through me. It was pretty brief.

Perhaps the other most dramatic thing that has happened besides that grief-filled wailing was earlier on-I think was the peak of excess energy if I had to pin it down… I had been really finding vigorous exercise quite necessary and felt that the energy was just taking over me when I went speedwalking, my body was propelled forward and I wasn’t doing it, and some of the swinging motions would go on and on if I let them, if I was in the woods where no one could see (right shoulder especially, this is still a hot spot).

Anyway sometimes in the evening I would find I just HAD to go out and exercise. This was even though I had done my 45-minutes power-walking in the morning with the hand weights and all. Once it was 11PM and found myself just pacing around my house and I had to go out and my body just ran at top speed, I couldn’t keep doing it for too long and ended up speedwalking but it was this tremendous burst of energy that had to GO, I could not hold it in
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It’s so surprising for stuff like this to happen to ME because I am a practically-oriented person in my sadhana, I have never been chasing after strange experiences, I would have been rather skeptical to hear someone else describe the things I am telling you. I never read about chakras. I was primarily analytical about religion and theology, and had a more materialistic view of the body, for a long time, until [founder of meditation center] brought me to the mystics. He won me over on the idealistic and practical qualities of sadhana, being an instrument of peace in the world, not seeking after unusual states during meditation or whatever. Anyway you’ve probably heard it all, but it’s just ironic if you knew me that this has happened to me.

If I give it permission, the motions and whatever else just come out of me, my body does things and it’s like I’m a third party, I just kind of let it happen in bewilderment and curiosity and eventually weariness. And laugh and look at [teacher’s] picture-what is this all about?! But I have taken folks at their word that I’m “working through” some issues that have gotten woven into my body somehow and are being released and that that’s good. I have a good inkling of what some issues and samskaras might be. But I just wonder how long this is going to last and it bothers me to be not having my evening meditation and to have these burning sensations in my body and this pressure in my head and need to keep accommodating this activity of the body.

Regular, vigorous exercise helps (I speed walk about 45 minutes each day-really power walk; and some occasional Rodney Yee yoga). Dropping evening meditation helps; or more accurately, doing evening meditation increases the pressure and energy and exacerbates it all. I think it helps to allow time and a private setting for the movements to happen. Sometimes mantram singing seems to be a good outlet (letting it get very buzzy like Tibetan monks or something), although other times the mantram seems to egg it on…

But I had the expectation that this was going to “run its course” before too long. I am through my big transitions (pretty much) now, I have let go of [my old city] and my life there, made peace with an older relationship break-up, gotten [other stuff resolved], and settled in here in my job at [the meditation center] and my new life and my intensified sadhana, and though there were quieter periods when I thought maybe it was about over, it keeps resurging.

I am getting the burning sensations in my neck and head and digestive system. I am finding the movements want to go at bedtime every night and in every morning meditation. I just wonder if there are things I can do that will facilitate the positive aspects of this, working through whatever inward stuff I need to work through and letting the energy be released through these body things. And I wonder if there are things I can do that will just help the experience meanwhile be more mellow, the energy be more mellow so it does not require a lot of management and so the need to allow motions and the head-neckaches and build-up of pressure does not interfere with my ability to concentrate at my work. I’d just like to be able to go about life like a normal person.

The yogi gave me some breathing exercises to do. I practiced them diligently for many months, especially on my regular walks. I could not tell if this made any difference in my symptoms; maybe it would’ve been worse without the special breathing?

Meanwhile, the spontaneous movements continued. I specifically remember having a couple more of those my-body-MUST-run experiences, when I left my apartment in the evening and just let my body GO in the dark, until I was spent.

Nothing much changed for the duration of my year working at the meditation center. I found some relief just in having someone I could speak plainly to about these experiences — something I implicitly knew I should not do with other meditators, per ashram culture. He seemed to know what I was talking about and feel confident we could handle it.

However, along with other unsettling experiences, I was still having the movements and the persistent energy-neck-headaches. I remember, after work, carpooling with a couple others from the meditation center, back to the nearby town where we newbies lived. I opted for the back seat, so my companions would not notice me squeezing out tears, the base of my skull feeling on fire, as the others chatted up front.

That spring, while perusing used books in the basement of a local bookstore, I came across a slim volume that immediately caught my eye. It had kundalini in the title — a word I’d heard in retreat workshops, which I knew was associated with spiritual energy — and likely with the strange energy experiences I had been having, though I’d had no such forewarning.
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Sure enough, the chapter on “signs of the arousal of the kundalini” included, among its long list of signs, all of the bizarre experiences I had been having with spontaneous movements (“certain people feel as if a spirit has taken control of their bodies because they can assume various yoga positions involuntarily”), big energy, electric sensations, positive emotions like joy and release, unusual sounds and more. (Kundalini: Discover the Secret Wealth of Energy in Your Body by Vikkar Tagor, 2003.)

​However, the author treated all of this as wholly positive. The only mention made of any potentially painful aspect of the process was that some people get awful headaches on the way to self-realization. This was attributed to new areas of the brain becoming active, beyond the 10–20 percent of utilization that the author said most people use. He likened that to labor pains, “since the yogi is now giving birth to spiritual awareness.”

I didn’t know whether the strange, sometimes painful things I continued to experience with kundalini would run their course on their own. But I had long since come to realize that the spiritual community I was in was not healthy for me — was not healthy, period. I was in the process of creating a way out.

Until I changed my circumstances, I did not expect these symptoms, including the painful ones, to resolve. After all, for a person on fire, what would be the point of dousing the flames on themselves — while still standing in the middle of the bonfire?

Next piece in this series: Calming the Kundalini Fire - How I Stabilized Myself.

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Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Surprises, Blinders, and Lies ….. My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong

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

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.
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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.
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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!

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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.
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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.

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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.

“Things started out so great. But I don’t feel safe with him anymore,” the caller told me. “I don’t know what to do.”

I took many calls like this — and some more frantic — while working at a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis line in the late 90s. Lessons from my training and time in that advocacy center have been coming back to me as I have learned about high control groups (sometimes called cults).

​Not only because the literature on such groups makes clear that abusive relationships can be, in essence, one-to-one cultic relationships, with all the same dynamics. But also because the more I reflect on my own experience in a group I now regard as a high control group, the more I notice ways that many of the same elements of control that are present in individual controlling relationships showed up — and continue to show up — in my old group.

Here are five of the lessons I learned as a volunteer and staffer in the women’s shelter, that translate to controlling group settings.

​Note: I typically refer to domestic abusers with male pronouns, and victims/survivors with female pronouns. This is the most common scenario. However, abusers can be any gender or sexual orientation, as can victims/survivors. The same holds true of the leaders and members of controlling groups. The important thing to pay attention to is the dynamic of power and control.

“He’s so well regarded, I just never guessed this could happen…”

The abusive partner may be a pillar of the community, just as the founder of a cultic group may have impressive credentials. Perhaps the abuser runs a business, practices law, or has buildings named for him due to his philanthropy. The group’s founder could be an accomplished scholar and gifted writer/translator who walked with a living saint.

Or they may have a more ordinary background; what the person lacks in accomplishments they may make up for in charm, the stories of their past experiences (real or fictitious), and their ability to read people and intuit how to connect and build trust with different people.

It’s likely that many people — particularly the ones they choose to be around, and who choose to be around them — find the person credible, likeable, even admirable. (Anyone who is put off by them, or sees through them, isn’t likely to stick around.) The abuser/leader/group may also deftly manage their public image, singly or with the help of skilled operatives.

So, it likely won’t be obvious from the outset that this person or group might be harmful. That’s no accident.

Lesson #1: Yes, even THAT person could be a controlling person — an abusive partner, or the founder/leader of an authoritarian group.

“Our relationship started out so great.”

In the early stages, a predatory person or group will often pour on the love. He may bring flowers and gifts and shower her with affection. He is considerate, caring, and complimentary. He pays attention to what she needs and responds accordingly.

Likewise, group members show interest in the prospective new member, offering things many people crave more of in their lives — attentive listening, warm connection, curiosity and interest about you, open-hearted sharing about me, especially where we have commonalities.

Early experiences with the group bring real value to participants. These may include social connections as they bond with other newcomers and develop a sense of belonging; introduction to tools and perspectives that participants can use to develop themselves or improve their life experience; perhaps delicious retreat food, needed rest, beautiful scenery, or simply a break from the pressures of ordinary life.

If the group’s founder(s) are still present in body in the group, becoming the focus of their attention and charismatic charge may make one feel particularly special and cared for. This attention may be brief, but as a rare commodity that only makes it more precious. Tender regard by their deputies or other leaders in the group may have a positive effect too.

Such experiences can foster a genuine sense of well-being and connection, encouraging prospects to continue and deepen their affiliation with the group.

Whether the relationship is with a romantic partner, charismatic leader or high-minded group, it’s only natural that such early experiences of meeting essential human needs set one up to expect more good things in the relationship.

Lesson #2: While not every beautiful beginning will lead to a controlling relationship, most controlling situations start out feeling very promising. There may be little warning of what will develop in time.

“This love was irresistible. It changed me.”

Romantic love has a powerful effect on the human person. Falling in love has been likened to an illness, with physiological effects that alter daily experience, and that must simply be allowed to run its course.

The reward centers of the brain go on overdrive, obsessive thoughts can take over, and the cycle of anticipation, connection, and separation enthralls the new lover. Suddenly this relationship and all the feelings it brings is the most vibrant thing in one’s life.

These dynamics pertain in a relationship with a (someday-discovered-to-be) abuser, just as they do with healthy people. The abuser may even add an extra dose of charisma and intensity into the mix, making the relationship more addictive than usual with new love.

Group experiences can affect and shape a person deeply, too, as one is buffeted by forces beyond their conscious awareness or control. Consider the following:
Individuals may have opportunities to feel especially valued by the group / leader(s) as they continue their association. For example, if I am invited to special celebrations that are not open to everyone, I feel honored. If I apply to a program which has prerequisites and a vetting process, I will feel special when I am accepted into the program. If I am welcomed to stay on the residential grounds of the group’s inner circle, or to make personal pilgrimages to the sacred place, I will feel closer to the inner circle myself. Such steps may increase identification with the group and generate positive feelings of being cherished and included.

Members of some kinds of groups — including therapy/encounter groups, religious or spiritual groups, and Large Group Awareness Trainings — may disclose deeply personal experiences to one another in the course of the group’s practices. Such emotional intimacy can form powerful bonds and encourage the person to remain open and vulnerable.
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Certain group practices help to settle the nervous system and can even put you in sync with each other physiologically. This signals to your body that you are in a safe space, where you can relax and trust. As described in Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands, such practices include: singing or humming together; rhythmic activities done together, such as walking in sync, clapping in rhythm, or rocking or swaying to music; cooking and/or sharing meals together.

​Though Menakem distinguishes between settling the nervous system and soothing the body through activities like prayer or meditation, the latter kinds of practices can certainly bring welcome calm, too. Meditating regularly — and meditating with others — may lead to deeper, more powerful experiences.

Margaret Singer (Cults in Our Midst) relays that “Trancelike states can occur during hypnosis, during complete absorption in reading or hearing stories, and during marked concentration” as well as through “meditation, guided imagery, drug use, fatigue, or sensory deprivation.” (I suspect certain kinds of dance — like whirling dervishes — and speaking in tongues fall into this category too.) In such altered states, everyday awareness of our surroundings and our relationship to the environment dissolves.

Indeed, participants may consider that one of the aims of their practice of meditation or other above-mentioned activities. “For many persons,” Singer observes, “entering a trance state is pleasurable. It provides a respite from thought about the woes of everyday life.” Meditators may spend weeks, months, or years taming the monkey mind, to achieve such a state of repose.

​Yet such altered states of consciousness have other effects, too; one is heightened suggestibility. Combined with facilitators’ “pacing and leading, exploiting positive transference .., and making indirect suggestions,” group members who frequently enter into trance states become more malleable to the worldview and aims of the group.

​Many high control groups also incorporate sermons or wisdom talks into the group’s regular practices. Meditation may be “followed by the viewing of repetitive soporific [videos], usually of the guru or swami lecturing.” Singer believed that “a number of speeches given by certain cult leaders, and some group chants, fit the criteria for producing transient levels of trance.” One study found that “speeches by cult leaders and fundamentalist evangelists had more hypnotic qualities than those of … mainstream church leaders.”

I am intrigued by Singer’s further observation that group or solitary readings of certain kinds of poems — including Romantic poetry influenced by “mesmerism, the opium-induced hallucinations of British writer Thomas DeQuincy, and Germanic authors’ stress on imagination” — can similarly generate “what are best called trance-augmented aesthetic experiences.” (Hmm, would the likes of Rumi, Kabir, Ramakrishna or Thomas à Kempis qualify? I’m guessing so.) The same qualities identified in this type of poetry “can be identified in analyzing the speech of many cult leaders, particularly when they are addressing groups of members or sympathizers.”

My fellow meditators-of-a-certain-kind, let this sink in: teachers with slow, soothing speech — and texts that drip like poetry from the tongue, slowly uttered in any voice (even your own inner voice) — are likely to induce hypnotic states.
The mechanics and chemistry of influence may be more subtle and gradual in a cultish group than in a new romance. Yet the shaping of identity, physiological experiences, states of consciousness, and heightened susceptibility to ideas and beliefs that others introduce — these are arguably more profound in a high control group.

Lesson #3: This is a two-parter:
· Early in your relationship — or better yet, before you start seeking — clarify for yourself what your goals are. How would you know if you found what you were looking for? Then as you gain experience with a potential partner or group, revisit your list occasionally. If your ideas about what you want change, consider carefully how and why they changed.
· Hold on to your individuality and your agency. These practices may help: when it comes to increasing your commitment level, go slowly; take breaks from the relationship (individual or group) so you have space to think for yourself; journal or otherwise “listen” to yourself; share what you are experiencing with uninvolved friends or other trusted individuals, and listen to their observations about your trajectory.

​“There have been difficult periods, but the thing is, I really love him.”

Any relationship has ups and downs. If you are with someone long enough, you will start to see their shadow side. By this time you have already bonded with them chemically — with things like oxytocin and dopamine that make you feel good.

When couples have disagreements, they try to work through them. Conflict styles and skills vary widely. Any couple goes through a process of learning how to work through difficulties with each other.

Controlling actions often begin very subtly, making it harder to recognize and name them as a different class of conflict from the usual personality clashes. At the first unmistakable sign of abuse — such as physical violence — many a girlfriend or boyfriend may consider breaking up with their significant other.

This is often when the abuser turns up the charm and pulls out all the stops. He may beg you to take him back, convincingly promising it will never happen again. He may buy extravagant gifts, take drastic actions to prove he has turned over a new leaf, get down on his knees and profess his undying love.

And the thing is, the love between these two people may feel genuine, from one or both directions. If you love someone, if you believe they feel the same way toward you, and if they promise you they will change — well, many people will try to forgive and move forward.

The group parallel is a bit more complex here. A newer member may not agree with everything they hear from the group. In a democratic group that doesn’t matter; people don’t all have to think alike. But even in a group that turns out to be more doctrinaire, a participant may find enough of the teachings / practices beneficial and true in their own experience to want to continue with the group; so they brush aside any private disagreements or misgivings.
​
As relationships form with other people in the group, the relationships carry weight too. Individual relationships may be important to a participant — relationships which began in the group and make sense because of the group context. Whether you have connected with other newbies, long-time members, or the group’s charismatic leader(s), a similar cocktail of happiness chemicals can come into play as with a romantic partner.

​Plus, the collective relationship is its own thing. Belonging is a powerful force for humans; we are social creatures by nature. We all need community. We all need identity. To quote the theme song from the 80s sitcom Cheers, we all need places where “everybody knows your name.”

Yes, there are other fish in the sea, and other groups in the world. But when you are already emotionally attached to a particular partner or group, and have experienced how they can meet your needs for things like connection and meaning — those wonderful early experiences you had with them — it’s hard to walk away. Most people are going to keep trying, initially.

Lesson #4: Learn to distinguish who you care about — and even who may genuinely care about you — from who is actually good for you. One does not guarantee the other.

Love yourself enough to walk away if/when you realize a partner or group is controlling. (Controlling behavior rarely decreases over time.) Keep what you learned and get out while you can.

“He became the center of my world. Others fell away…”

Isolation is one of the classic signs that an intimate relationship is emotionally abusive, and at risk of becoming physically abusive, if it hasn’t already. I remember this wedge on the Power and Control Wheel graphic from training at Middle Way House.

Other people that the victim trusts could empower and support them to leave the relationship. But the abuser wants to stay in control. So he keeps her focus on him and their relationship. He might tell her that her friends don’t know what’s best for her, undermine her relationship with her mom or sister, arrange to move far away, even delete her social media accounts. Financial dependence may layer on top of emotional dependence in keeping her fixed in the relationship, serving his needs.

A couple months ago, as I was reading up on high control groups and noticing more and more of these parallels with abusive partnerships, I recalled the power and control wheel and wondered if there was an equivalent for groups. It’s much newer, but I did find one, in survivor-turned-trauma-informed-psychotherapist Laura E. Anderson’s 2023 book When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion. Below is her Religious Power & Control Wheel.

When I moved cross-country to work for the meditation center I’d gotten involved with — something a whole cohort of us then-young adults were cultivated to do — I put thousands of miles between myself and my long-time friends, my parents, my healthy church community, my choir, and other social supports. All I had in the new place were the people I knew from retreats. Even without moving into the ashram I had become much more isolated.
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I decided not to spend all my spare time with fellow meditators, going to group meditation, spiritual talks, volunteering in the garden or doing the other things that many others did do. I felt that spending my entire work week there was enough of a leap in time and energy devoted to that community and its mission.

Fortunately for me, another member of my choir moved from my city in Indiana to the same area of California the same month as me. We quickly joined a local choir together, and hung out weekly after rehearsal. I also checked out the nearest church in my (non-extreme) denomination and began to build relationships there. I have no doubt I fared better than I would have otherwise because I had a web of relationships beyond the meditation group. I went home to see my parents at Christmas, as well. That made me different from the people who lived on the group’s communal living site; they rarely seemed to have contact with their families of origin or other friends.​

There was a financial side to this too. I found I could barely make ends meet, even living in a small apartment with a roommate. My car was paid off, but in the future, when I had a car payment to add back to my budget, this scenario simply would not work. Not to mention, I wanted to be able to live generously — making donations to charitable causes (modest, but still, something) — to buy healthful food rather than the cheapest, less nutritious food, and to save responsibly for retirement.

I had done all those things before. But I could see none of that was going to work long term on the peanuts I was making at the meditation center. At the time, I saw this as a reflection of how out of touch the meditation community was with life for regular householders. Now, worse occurs to me: that the poverty pay was a kind of financial coercion to live at the ashram, where living expenses were considerably lower — and there was extensive “milieu control.”

In any case, I got a call from back east about a job opportunity, and began exploring that possibility. In the process, I realized that, for a variety of reasons, I needed to get myself out of this situation. All the official group email accounts of employees were monitored, I’d learned. So in job search communications, I was careful to only use my personal email address. It was only one of the forms of information control at work in the group — there were others I didn’t even recognize at the time — but it was unnerving.

Lesson #5: Stay connected with other positive people in your life. A social support network is important no matter what marvelous partner or group becomes part of your life. Anyone who wants to cut you off from that does not really want what is best for you. Be wary of financial dependence too.

I’ll share other lessons from the domestic violence field in the future. Next up: why, in a controlling relationship or group, it’s always your fault — never his or theirs.

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

The more I learn about high-demand groups, the more contacts and close calls I recognize in my past and that of my loved ones.

There was that copy of Dianetics on the kitchen table in my best friend’s house in junior high.

​My husband’s tale of the Pentecostal church he attended for a while as a teen. (They kicked him out for asking too many questions. Just as well.)

And as a young professional, my brush with a bootcamp-y Large Group Awareness Training program. (How’s it working for you? Really, though?)

None of those connections ultimately hooked me or my beloveds on beyond-benign groups.

But the one that primed me for my eventual slide into a quietly culty community? I encountered it as a college student.

Higher Education?

Two of the psychology professors at the liberal arts college I attended in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, were practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (TM). Transplants from California, they were part of the TM community just down the road in Fairfield.

Faculty member Dr. C was one of my favorite teachers. A kind-hearted guy, he was part absent-minded professor, part land-locked surfer dude. I remember with gratitude the warm encouragement Dr. C gave me to pursue graduate school, and the glowing letter of recommendation he wrote for me. I don’t remember him talking about TM. But somehow I knew he was part of that community.

It was another psych prof from Fairfield who brought ayurveda into the classroom of my Methodist-affiliated school. Am I a vata-kapha? I don’t know. But there’s a tea for that.

Science and Mystery

Anyhow, I ended up reading about the scientific benefits of meditation — a health practice, mind you, not a religion. There was oodles of data to back that up. Charts! References!

Not that I objected to religion necessarily. I mean, I was deconstructing my own Protestant upbringing in Biblical courses with Dr. God. (For my minor in religion and philosophy, I took all six courses the college offered in those subjects.)

I was interested in “world religions,” as Westerners refer to Eastern traditions. I started carrying around a pocket Tao te Ching. My pleasure reading also included the likes of Fritjof Capra, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith.

​So Transcendental Meditation might have piqued my curiosity even without the science-washing. The fact that it had some link to the seemingly non-dogmatic, metaphysically sophisticated wisdom traditions of Asia might, if anything, have counted in its favor to college-aged me.

Barriers

I might well have taken the plunge then, if not for the walloping fee I learned was a standard charge to get your customized mantra. As a student this was simply outside my means.

Had I seriously considered it, the private 1:1 sessions that were part of learning TM-style meditation might also have been off-putting.

As for those snickering comments I heard about the flying yogis of Fairfield? I had no idea what such commenters were talking about. And I didn’t suppose they really did either. People often make fun of things they don’t understand. Any derision from small-minded small-towners was more likely to increase my curiosity than suppress it.

MomentumI remained vaguely curious about meditation and what it might offer. But this was the 90s; meditation wasn’t widespread like it is now.

Meanwhile, I prepared for graduate school. The one time I visited Maharishi International University in Fairfield, it was to take the Graduate Record Exam. (The GRE is a standardized test required then for grad school applications.) After graduation, my new degree program took me to another Midwestern state.

There, I also found a spiritual home, in a tradition of seekers and freethinkers that welcomes wisdom from many sources. It focuses on the here and now, including social justice. Ah, that’s better.
​

Between the more cosmopolitan college town — with its flagship campus of the state university — and the congregation full of spiritual explorers, I was exposed to a rich array of new ideas and experiences: tai chi, Dances of Universal Peace (Sufi), study of the historical Jesus, earth-centered ceremonies, vegetarianism, yoga, local Buddhist communities, and on.

​In my doctoral courses in sociology, with minor in religious studies, I took particular interest in social psychology, social movements, ethnography, theories of religion, utopian communities and alternative religious movements. (Hmm. Foreshadowing?)

Turning Point

​I enjoyed learning. But the more familiar I became with the trajectory of a researcher — zeroing in on a narrow question in a niche sub-field, and studying it for decades… not to mention the contentious, competitive social environment… and the lack of work-life balance the research-1 university profs around me seemed to have — the less I saw myself being fulfilled in academia.
​
Perhaps if I hadn’t received a prestigious Research Assistantship, experience would have led me in another direction. The R.A. work meant I only got to teach once — which was enough to know I liked it, but not enough to know if it was my calling. My research mentor was great, and I appreciated the practical value of her research on society… yet I did not enjoy crunching data, or the other tedium of ivory tower life. I did not feel sufficiently useful to the world doing this kind of work.

Course Correction

My conclusion: it didn’t make sense to invest more time, money and life energy in the PhD track — unless and until I identified a research agenda that I could be passionate about for the rest of my life. So, I left that program one or two courses shy of the dissertation stage. (The consolation prize for these three years of my life? A master’s degree.)

I’m more of an applied person, I told myself. Let me go and do applied sociology in the community. Which is more or less how, in my mid-20s, I wound up in community development and philanthropy.

I liked the work I was doing in the community. It had a greater immediacy to it than the university setting. But I was still restless about my purpose. And curious about what else was out there in the world.

Still Searching

In 2000 I went on a “reality tour” to Kerala state, south India, building people-to-people ties as part of a delegation of North Americans. The trip was organized through Global Exchange, an international human rights organization. The particular tour I chose focused on how Kerala had implemented Gandhian-style community development, with impressive outcomes on many indicators of health, education, and quality of life.
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This nicely combined my social science background, my professional work in community development, and a long-standing interest in Gandhi and nonviolence that I had picked up from my mother.

I thought perhaps I would discover a research focus that would compel me back to finish the PhD in sociology. Instead, this cross-cultural adventure led to my first time in the pulpit. Later that year, at my home congregation, I shared how the Kerala experiment in people-powered development aligned with the very values we affirmed.

Hooked

What felt most significant at the time, though, was an exchange that happened on the first day in Kerala. While we tour participants hung out in the hotel, waiting for jet lag to wear off, another participant struck up a conversation with me. Linda (I’ll call her) wondered if I had a spiritual community or practice. She was an avid meditator herself.

I shared that I had long been interested in meditation. I probably told her about the pluralistic faith tradition I had joined a few years before. As it happened, the method of meditation she practiced drew upon all of the world’s wisdom traditions; I was intrigued.

Linda gave me an accessible little book written by her meditation teacher. Like our tour, it drew on Gandhi for inspiration. After listening about my spiritual journey, she suggested a selection from the Tao te Ching (instead of a Christian saint’s prayer, a common first choice for Americans); I could use it to give this method of meditation a try. Perfect!

I meditated for the first time, that night in my hotel room in Thiruvananthapuram. A new habit was well underway by the end of our two-week tour.
​
Primed and Ready

Remember those seeds planted by my encounter with Transcendental Meditation as a college student? They found fertile ground in this new meditation practice.

Like TM, my new discipline was a form of concentration meditation, promulgated by an Indian teacher. It was presented as nonsectarian — compatible with any or no religious tradition. The many benefits of meditation for mind and body were described in a common-sense, science-validated way.

My new meditation practice had something else in common with Transcendental Meditation: it appealed to educated, idealistic people. The founder of the meditation center was a humanities professor, accomplished enough to have come to the U.S. via a prestigious grant program for scholars. His meditation students included many PhDs, medical doctors, and other professionals. One was even an expert on Gandhi and nonviolence.

In his books, the meditation teacher was clear, practical, and warm. Inspirational. Humble. He made ancient wisdom accessible and relevant to life today. The meditation method he taught felt like a natural fit for me. And the people associated with it — like Linda, a socially aware activist and Silicon Valley success story — were smart, caring people. What could go wrong?

The benefits showed up in my life immediately — they were real, and increased gradually. It took years, in contrast, for me to recognize the risks and drawbacks. They were cumulative, too. And almost two decades after I left that community, I am still learning new things about how this involvement affected me.

Enigmatic Ending

One thing haunts me about my brush with Transcendental Meditation. That gentle psychology professor, Dr. C, who was the first person I knew who meditated? He died in a car accident five or six years ago. It was on the highway between Fairfield, where he lived, and my college in Mt. Pleasant, where he worked. When my mother told me about the tragedy, it was hard to grasp that his life had been cut short so randomly.

More recently, I have seen TM referenced in resources about high-control groups. I recall, as well, that Dr. C had been divorced from his first wife. I had the impression she was part of the TM community too. I can’t help wondering what happened on Highway 34. What’s the full story?

Sometimes an accident is just an accident. But there are other, troubling possibilities that now seem quite plausible to me. Was Dr. C happy and in good mental health when this happened? Had his relationship to TM and the community around him changed? (He had gotten re-married — to someone who worked at my college, who was not a Fairfielder, I think.)

Might he have been disillusioned with the community and practices that had grounded his life for so long? (He would not have been alone. There are plenty of ex-TM writings online.) Might he have been depressed, as I became after I moved to California to work for my meditation community? Did he suffer involuntary slips into alternate states, as can happen to people who meditate long or often? What if, during his regular commute through the cornfields, that happened behind the wheel?

I will probably never know. I am sad for Dr. C, for his family, and for the college community that lost a kind soul too early.
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More to Come

More posts are coming, on things like who ends up in high-control groups and why (you may be surprised); accountability, or lack thereof, for leaders; what nobody told me about meditation — good, bad, and wacky; similarities or differences among mainstream religion, fundamentalism, and the kind of groups people typically think of when they hear the word cult; and resources for vetting any group or helper that you might welcome into your life.

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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.
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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.