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

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

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

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

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

Burying Kokopele

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had lost his song completely by Thanksgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later I will need my altar with its symbolic objects — the fossils from a southern Indiana creek bed, the flaming chalice made by a potter in my church, yes, a waxy scarlet leaf from Premadari, and several long, gray-white tail feathers Koko had shed — but there is no need for props out here. All of nature is our shrine.
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​I place Kokopele gently in the earth, returning him to the Source. As I sprinkle cool, damp soil into the hole and pat it level, I feel a darkness close over me as well. Kokopele, my trusting trickster spirit, is gone. Perhaps some of my own fertile magic is dead too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layer by Layer

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

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

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

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

At the Heart

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

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

Relationship Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring Around the Ruler

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

He had a handful of supporters from his earlier campaign in the Bay Area who had kept the faith. Most notable was a woman I’ll call Carrie, who provided the home that would shelter not only the guru and his wife, but additional early students.
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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.
​
After the guru’s death, the retreats continued, with his long-time students facilitating workshops, and playing recordings of his talks. As a retreat-goer, after all the talks viewed, not to mention books read, and stories shared around the retreat house dining table by long-time students, it felt like I knew the teacher myself.
​​

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

Satsangs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers

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

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

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

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

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

What the Onion Structure Accomplishes

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

Moving Down the Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gradual Conditioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Way You Slice It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 have long appreciated Karen Armstrong’s insightful, compassionate writing on religion — in books like A History of God, The Battle for God, and The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions.

But it was Armstrong’s latest autobiography, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, that resonated with me like few other books have. Armstrong had been a Roman Catholic nun, in a particularly strict order, in the years just before the Vatican II reforms — and then had left. Her book found its way into my hands during my own years of post-ashram stabilization.

​At that moment in my own unfolding story, Armstrong’s tale of leaving a cloistered community and reconstructing a life in the ordinary world included words I could have uttered myself:

“I had submitted to other people’s programs and agendas for far too long.”

“I still felt protective of the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal.”
​
“I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself.”

As it happens, last fall I read the two biographical works that preceded The Spiral Staircase (2004). Through the Narrow Gate (1981) was Armstrong’s first memoir, chronicling her experience inside her Catholic convent. Beginning the World (1983) was her first attempt to describe her transition back into the world, including the emotional, vocational, social, medical and spiritual aspects of that journey.

While taking a doctoral class on religious leadership last fall, I chose Armstrong as the subject for an Outstanding Leader Profile assignment. I take inspiration from her work on the Charter for Compassion, and more recently, tapping resources that spiritual traditions offer to help us constructively face our ecological crisis.

It was my interest in the latter that led me to take the class. I read all three of Armstrong’s autobiographical works in succession, not so much for the paper as with a renewed sense of kinship. I was struck again by Armstrong’s own hero’s journey — through and beyond a tightly structured religious community — which offered parallels to my experience.

​The timing of this reading was fortuitous. A few weeks later I would learn startling allegations about the founder of the spiritual organization I had been deeply involved with as a young adult; as I reconsidered the group, the scales fell from my eyes. Now that I am familiar with high control groups, I put my former group squarely in that category. Armstrong’s life in a pre-Vatican II Catholic order exhibited many of the same characteristics.

Granted, my experience was far less extreme than Armstrong’s. The program I took to was presented not as an ascetic path but as a sort of Middle Way. Its authoritarianism was cloaked beneath a genteel learnedness and cross-cultural difference. The worldview was a sort of universalized, inter-spiritual mysticism of a Hindu teacher — and one with a supposedly matriarchal lineage.

On the surface, this was all quite a contrast to the orthodox Catholic Christian theology that Karen knew, with its rigid belief system, unapologetic authoritarianism and (to me) suffocating patriarchy.

I had only been at the ashram for a year, and as an employee, not a resident, vs. Karen Armstrong’s six years in her convent. The community I participated in was not my faith of origin — though I thought I had tested and vetted and gone slowly, deepening my meditation practice and getting to know the community over five years, before I moved there at 31. Whereas Karen had grown up Catholic, and joined her order at the tender age of 17.
​
So the differences were dramatic.

​Yet, key aspects of her journey resonated with me:

• the discovery, only after arrival, that there’s a lot more going on under the surface than any outsider might guess (and often more than even one embedded could readily decipher or explain while in the midst of it)
• a culture of monasticism and renunciation that was in marked contrast to the message for the masses about what it looks like to practice the tradition
• an institutionalization of Surrender to a degree that could damage one’s sense of self, self-trust, and self-worth
• practices that shut down critical thinking faculties, blunt emotions, and cut one off from the wisdom of the body
• leaders who themselves may have regressed psychologically and spiritually — and whose own capacity for empathy may have been stunted — as a result of this way of life
• mysterious and painful physical and psychological responses to the unhealthy environment and spiritual practices, which led each of us to leave
• a complicated adjustment to “normal” life after the period of going deep into an alternative community and culture
• gradual renegotiation of meanings and identity, over many years
• a busy new outward life of work, friends and recreation, yet “increasingly, that was no longer where the action was… the real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself”
• a recurrence of “that old longing for a more intense existence, shot through with transcendent meaning” — even after the earlier attempt to answer that longing had ended discouragingly; you can take the seeker out of the spiritual community, but the homing beacon within continues to signal and search
• in fact, that persistent religious sensibility became, in time, the basis for a new — no less spiritual or valid — vocation

That’s a lot of common ground. If there’s shared good news in our similar-but-different stories, perhaps it is that a difficult early religious experience does not mean one is doomed to an empty existence as a survivor. There is life after spiritual trauma.

Armstrong found her way to a much healthier life situation. In time she found the companions, created the home, and discovered the vocation that suited her. I did too.

If you’ve been through your own particular trials or hurts in spiritual life, know that healing, joy, purpose and connection are real possibilities for you too.

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Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How I Was Primed …….. What I Lost ... Who Joins Cults
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Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my online articles for your own life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then, the socialization can be just as effective when done more subtly. Gurus and their acolytes can simply “reinforce devotion with attention and approval, and punish its lack by withdrawing them.” (Karmer & Alstad, The Guru Papers)

At any rate, the commitment of long-term students to the teacher was clear. My cohort was cultivated in the years following his death, a time of potential turmoil for the community. When I worked there, the way leadership coped reminded me of those WWJD bracelets that were popular among certain Christian evangelicals in the 90s — except this group ran everything through the filter of What Would Our-Teacher Do?

I could feel how a teacher-centered, devotional sort of approach was the norm among the inner circle. As I told a friend around the time of my departure, “if you’re not like that [as I wasn’t], people won’t trust you as much.”

Turns out, all of this is textbook high control group stuff. Here’s how sociologist Janja Lalich sums it up: “The ultimate aim is to get the devotee to identify with the ‘socializing agent’ — the cult leader, the patriarch or matriarch of the cult, or the controlling and abusive partner, as the case may be. The desired outcome is a new self … whose actions will be dictated by the ‘imagined will’ of the authoritative figure.” (from Take Back Your Life)
​
The socialization into group and teacher loyalty went very deep. Because even after I left, barely a year after I had moved out there — and with many negative feelings — it never occurred to me to speak ill of the group. Even to my fellow meditators back home, I was vague about what I had experienced. Partly that was because it took me time to find the words to describe what I had gone through. But partly, I was hesitant to burst their bubble. It’s not like any of them were going to move out there.

​I also knew that to the core group, anything but loyalty was a no-no. I was supposed to be grateful! And indeed, at that time, I was still grateful for the positive things I had gotten from my spiritual practice and my involvement with the group.

During my year there, I had learned that many people had come and gone from the group’s orbit over the decades. The long-timers didn’t talk about those other people. Someone more on the edges told me about serious students who had been there for a couple decades, and gave so much to the work — they were literally airbrushed out of pictures after they left.

So it looked like progress to me when, after giving notice, I and another departing member of my cohort were given a warm send-off luncheon. People offered good wishes for our continuing journeys.

What they actually said about us after we left is an open question. I recall judgmental things I heard insiders say about retreatants, or people who had backed away. Nonetheless, having been steeped in apparently caring relationships with these people, I remained in touch, sending family holiday newsletters along with periodic donations over the years.

I had been willing to look past the dysfunction I experienced when I worked there, and try to focus on the good aspects of my experience. Because I had chalked up the problems I observed there to the deep grief of the teacher’s long-time students after his death. Maybe there was something about the selection process of who came there and stayed, too.

I don’t see it that way anymore. Now, I view the true believers as the most deceived and betrayed of the founder’s followers. And I understand that they wouldn’t be how they are, if he wasn’t how he was.

As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The teacher created the cult-ure of that community. He did it so well that his disciples are still dependent on him a quarter century after he departed this earth.
​
It turns out that, like an abusive partner, the leader of a high-control group is in the center because he put himself there. Whether or not the founder of my group believed he was serving others in some pure way, I will not speculate here; the guru-ashram model is a thing in his culture, so it is possible he meant well.
Either way, I believe with Kramer and Alstad (The Guru Papers) that the model is inherently authoritarian, and therefore ripe for corruption and abuse. The leader can easily shift, imperceptibly, from shepherd into wolf.

Lesson #13: A partner or group who wants you to forego other deep bonds, give up other avenues of growth — and abandon your own inner wisdom — does not deserve your fealty. Whether the pressure is urgent and apparent or subtle and sophisticated, do not surrender to another’s authority. It is the taproot of control.

If there is any solace for me in this situation, it is that the group may no longer be trying to draw new people out to live in the community.

But I mourn for all of those idealistic seekers who have quietly, unknowingly, by degrees, for some period of time — often years — lost some of their freedom through close involvement in this group.

For one involved with an abusive partner or a cultish group, the roots of control include blurred boundaries, hijacked sexuality, paternalistic attitudes, and the self-centering of the partner or group leader(s) as your ultimate master. Is this your situation? To assess, look past the ideology and zero in on the structure of the relationship.

(Missed the first two posts in this series? Here they are: Part 1 Part 2)

I learned the hard way these lessons about power and control in collectives. I hope my sharing here may help others avoid such experiences — or see them more clearly, and recover more fully, if you or your loved ones have been through something like this.

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

“He was always right. Problems were always my fault.”

People who misuse power stay in the driver’s seat by taking credit for the good stuff in the relationship, while avoiding accountability for the bad stuff.

“Baby, you need me. You’d be nothing without all I’ve done for you.”

The bad boyfriend might send this message. But so might the controlling group.

If they are subtle about it, well-socialized group members will simply model the message: “Ordinary people like you and me would never get far by ourselves. I give gratitude daily to _ [founder(s) / teacher] _ for showing us the way.”

As for failures? That’s on you, not Mr. (or Ms.) Perfect.
​

An abuser might blame his partner for driving him to cruel behavior — “If you would’ve taken care of those things like I told you to, none of this would have happened. You can’t do anything right, can you?”

He might downplay his bad behavior, even deny he had any part in it. “It wasn’t that bad. You were due for dental work anyway.” “You fell down the stairs, don’t you remember? You’re such a klutz.”

An authoritarian leader or group may similarly deflect responsibility. “God is punishing you for your lack of faith.” “That was your own karma rebounding on you.”

In response to credible allegations of abuse from members of the community, true believers might respond with blind faith and improbable excuses: “We know Beloved Leader did not do those awful things; from our own direct experience we can tell you he’s not capable of such behavior. Whoever is spreading these lies must be jealous or seriously disturbed.”

Lesson #6: Be clear-eyed and honest about who is doing what.
​· Have you developed a new skill — practical, spiritual, or otherwise? Good for you! Whether or not anyone else contributed, you couldn’t have done it without… YOU.
· Has a person or group in your life treated you poorly? That’s on them. If they are mature — if they are worthy of being in your life — they will be able to own up to mistakes, and show concretely in their behavior that they can learn and grow. Don’t believe it unless you see it.

“He’s kind of controlling sometimes, but overall it’s a good relationship — not an abusive one. Not like ______ [some extreme example] ______.”

A relationship doesn’t have to involve physical violence or other undeniable red flags to be unhealthy.

Does he turn to you mostly when he needs something from you? Subtly signal that he may leave you if you don’t conform to his expectations? Belittle you, or dismiss your feelings? That is not a mutually supportive relationship. You deserve better.

If a group wants your unpaid (or underpaid) labor, your financial donations, and your endorsement of their program — but strictly on their terms — its relationship with you may be shallower and more transactional than you thought.

If they show you love only when you adhere to their formulation of Pure Teaching, and distance themselves from you when you think independently, consider that this group may in fact be using you.

Other group members may have genuine affection for you. But in a high-control group, the organization’s priorities — maintenance of the group’s status quo, the lionization of its leader(s)/teacher(s), keeping control of the public narrative — these are always going to trump your needs.

A group doesn’t have to be Heaven’s Gate or NXIVM-level extreme to be harmful. If ANY of the elements of power and control show up in the dynamics — loss of autonomy, isolation, minimizing-denying-blaming, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse, threats-accusations-intimidation, economic control, rigid rules about sexuality and gender — watch out.

Also realize that just because you haven’t experienced intense power dynamics, doesn’t mean others haven’t — or that you won’t eventually, if you stay.

Lesson #7: If the love is conditional, or there is any amount of coercion, the relationship is harmful — you’re being used. Don’t stay with a person or group who undermines your ability to trust yourself and think for yourself.

“I feel like I’m going crazy. Is this all my fault?”

​A person in an abusive relationship likely finds their world getting narrower and narrower, as the abuser comes to control more aspects of their life — where they live, who they associate with, what ideas they hear, how much freedom they have. In the process, she may go from feeling strong to feeling fragile.

​He is constantly defining the situation in ways that benefit him, often at her expense. He may deceive her, gaslight her — deliberately denying realities she observes, to make her question her grasp on reality — and chip away at her self-esteem with messages that she is not enough, she is flawed, she needs him.

He blames her for whatever ills befall her, even those he inflicts. Society often blames her too, asking accusingly: why didn’t she leave? To the extent that she has internalized all this, she may blame herself.

But as domestic violence advocates know, the craziness is not her fault. She did not start out crazy. She is in a crazy-making situation.

Controlling groups operate in much the same way. What starts out as a good thing begins to constrict the participant’s world — and worldview — more and more.

The leader points the way to Perfection; the participant who has not yet arrived at this impossible goal is continuously directed to look in the mirror and try harder.
​
(As for the man — or woman — behind the curtain? Pay no attention to what he’s doing back there. Focus on his carefully curated image, and idolize him for that.)

In such a scenario, it should be no surprise if members of the group become less and less psychologically well.

I recall one group I was involved in, who explained that the emotional volatility of some long-timers was a result of “speeded-up karma.” In other words, they had worked so hard on their stuff, and gone so deep through their spiritual practices, that now they were working with the most difficult strata of personality issues.

They might seem unstable, but this actually reflected great spiritual progress. Up is down! Night is day! Neurosis is a sign of spiritual achievement!

Lesson #8: If you feel like you’re losing touch with reality, take a hard look at the people and environment around you, and consider how they might be contributing. If you feel worse over time, after a particular association begins, it likely has more to do with that association than with you.

If you find out a former member of the group wound up in a mental institution — a tale I’ve heard — think twice about where the crazy came from. And if someone tells you “everyone at the ashram/church/commune is crazy!” take it to heart and GET OUT.

“I lost my spark. I’m not sure when it happened, but looking back, I see how much I’ve changed.”

Being in a crazy-making situation can lead anyone from having a bold personality to a bland one.

The change may be more obvious to friends and loved ones than to the person in the controlling relationship. But in time, she may look back and realize how different she is than she was at the beginning of the relationship.

Trouble is, he may wait until she is trapped to show his true colors. “He was a perfect gentlemen until we got married.” “Once I had the baby, leaving became much more complicated.” “Without a job or my own place to live, I’m stuck.”

What about groups? Social psychologist Robert Cialdini views cultic groups as a type of long-term influence situation. Especially when principles of social influence continue over time, as in a controlled setting or ongoing program, the resulting changes in a person can be dramatic— yet may not be recognized as such by the participant.
​

Janja Lalich observes, “In most cases, the desired behavioral change is accomplished in small incremental steps because conversion to the new worldview is a gradual process.” (Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships)
​
In my group, I felt like I was making choices to increase my spiritual practice and explore a variety of spiritual ideas. It was indeed a gradual process — stretching over years — which at the time I would not have named as coercive.

​But now I see myself in a telling scene from the film Romancing the Stone. Danny DeVito’s character has just snatched the precious gemstone from Kathleen Turner’s character, who went treasure hunting for it with Michael Douglas’ character.

DeVito: I’m stealin’ this stone. I’m not tryin’ to romance it out from under her.

Turner, indignant: Wait a minute. Going for the stone was my idea.

DeVito: That’s what all the good con artists want you to think. He made you think you needed it, you sap.

It’s true that ideas I did not hold when I first came in contact with the group became not only familiar, but almost… alluring. And did I need them — the teachings, the group, the teacher — to help me get where I (now, maybe) wanted to go?

Once someone has committed to a high-control group, L.J. West and M. Singer observe, the group’s “way of thinking, feeling, and acting becomes second nature, while important aspects of their pre-cult personalities are suppressed or, in a sense, decay through disuse.” (quoted in Lalich / Take Back Your Life)

As for a newfound blandness in one’s personality, this may be a reflection of the induced dependence of the victim on the abusive partner or group.
​
What’s more, the manipulated person may in time become dissociated — what psychiatrist Robert Lifton calls psychic numbing. Trauma and overwhelm can cause dissociation as a protective mechanism. Meditation, chanting, lectures, fatigue, or verbal abuse can likewise sever typical connections among feelings, thoughts, and memory.

​Lesson #9: Distinguish between genuine serenity vs. a personality blunted by a systematic program of reshaping. If you can’t be yourself in a relationship, pass on it. A healthy partner or community will not need to snuff out your spark; rather, they will cherish what is unique and bright in you. Only unsound settings will demand that you dim your light.

In my next post, I’ll finish sketching out ways that controlling groups can be like abusive partners — including re: boundaries, sex, and loyalty.

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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.
​
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Don’t want to miss a post? You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

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