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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Befriend Your Feelings

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

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

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

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

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

Seek Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What About My Practice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Sense of It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Safely

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

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

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

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

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

What Are Local Groups Doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources

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

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

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

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

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

A few other random thoughts:

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

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

Many of my online pieces address this:

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

Book suggestions:

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

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

 

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

​

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Information

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

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

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

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

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

Keep Going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ocean of Feelings

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

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

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

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

Shock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anger

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

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

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

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

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

Are you freakin’ kidding me?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

It all went up in glorious flame.

​My friend found this quite cathartic.

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability & Vigilance (Fear)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guilt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compassion

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

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

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

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

Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​~Daniel Ladinsky (inspired by Hafiz)​​

More on Anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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