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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower Others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Trained on Safety & Support

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples: [ii]

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

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

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

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

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

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

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

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

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

Make No Idols

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

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

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

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

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

In sum:

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

So long as what you are doing helps people to gain deeper trust in themselves — rather than making them dependent on a person, program, or ideology outside of them — you will be sharing the treasures of meditation with them in good faith.
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​For more about how groups behave when they become unhealthy, check out What Is A High Control Group?

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

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Endnotes

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

Cults are popping up all over pop culture these days. Documentaries abound on streaming platforms. Cult-related podcasts are legion. Investigators and whistle-blowers bring real-life drama out of these groups and into the news.

​I suspect one of the questions that drives people to consume such content is the desire to understand why anyone would get involved in bizarre groups — and perhaps to feel assured that “it could never happen me.”

What most people don’t realize is that it could happen to anyone. Ordinary people join such groups every day. While the groups that get a lot of attention are the most extreme or strange examples of high control groups, others are more tempered in their tactics, maintaining respectable public images.

In my case, I’d been primed by a culty group I came in contact with while I was a college student. Those connections nurtured the curiosity I already had about meditation, and planted several assumptions that predisposed me to view meditation favorably — as something I could benefit from, not something I would need to scrutinize.

One of those assumptions was that meditation is healthy for mind and body. Another was that such practices could be nonsectarian or compatible with a person of any (or no) religious background; there was no proselytizing agenda behind meditation programs. I no longer believe either of those assumptions to be categorically true.

Following are two perhaps surprising assumptions I DO now hold about cults.
No One (Knowingly) Joins A Cult“No one joins a cult. People delay leaving orgs that misrepresented themselves.” I’m cribbing this quote from the very useful Cult 101 Cliff’s notes offered on the web site of the Conspirituality podcast. Cult expert Cathleen Mann made this quip to Conspirituality co-host (and repeat cult survivor) Matthew Remski.
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When someone gets involved in a group that turns out to be deceptive, controlling… culty — they think they are saying yes to something good. It could be a job, a support group, or a spiritual practice… an entrepreneurial opportunity, a pathway to personal improvement, or a Bible study group… a humanitarian organization, a leadership program, or simply a caring new circle of friends.

​The person may not discover until much later — if they ever do — that the group or program falls somewhere on the continuum of culty-ness. Which brings me to assumption #2.

The Cultiverse Is A ContinuumA group can be anywhere from 100% healthy to “a little bit culty” to People’s Temple-level toxic. The latter group ended tragically via mass suicide / massacre at Jonestown, through poisoned Flavor Aid. This is the origin of the horrendous modern proverb, “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” (Really, let’s stop saying that.)
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Where a group might be placed on that culty continuum depends on the degree to which factors like authoritarianism, thought-constricting language, social proof and coercive persuasion are at play. A group can be authoritarian, by the way, without mean or Alpha leaders. As the saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Soaring ideals and (apparent) kindness can draw a person onward, with less likelihood of feeding doubts.

​Organizational questions are independent of the group’s purpose or teachings. Regardless of espoused ideas and goals, the thing to watch is how power is shared (or not) and whether there is transparency and consent — where people know up front where this program could eventually take them— vs. a process of gradual indoctrination or even manipulation. Are people being served, and/or used?

It can be a bit tricky to place a group on the continuum, because even two people involved in the same group may have different experiences. Leaders and groups tend to try different things and adjust their approach as they go, based on the results they get and on evolving conditions. The life cycle of the organization can also play into this; many cultish groups get more rigid, even paranoid, later on (per The Guru Papers by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad).

From how I now understand the history of my group, it was more cultish in its early counter-culture decades, when the focus was on building a community around the guru. (Ashramites were hardly allowed to visit their families, and meditated for zany hours upon hours, expecting enlightenment in seven years...)
The group’s more public-facing persona — including the press and the retreat center — toned it down, so as not to turn off potential recruits of all ages, stages, and lifestyles as the organization reached its peak of influence.

The nature of the community was not at all apparent to me when I got involved. Then, a few years after the founder’s death, an obsession with purity took hold. I gather that even the retreats have become increasingly worshipful of the teacher in recent years; if I got out a cult-o-meter now, the needle might be moving into higher-risk territory even for newer people.

Consider also that a sophisticated leader or group may approach people differently during the same time period, adapting to the needs and vulnerabilities of diverse individuals or demographics — and to the needs of the organization that they are trying to get those people to meet. For example, the potential major donor may get rather different treatment, one-on-one, than a young adult being wooed in for cheap labor and good optics.

Cult-ivation of Members

Speaking of donors… I envision high-control groups approaching the cult-ivation of participants much like development officers in non-profits are trained to guide donors down a pipeline. People are given opportunities and support to move from a modest initial gift or volunteer involvement, to increasingly larger investments of labor, meaning and funds over time. Many people are expected to “leak” out of the “pipeline,” so that the number of donors that will become major gift givers or estate donors will be modest compared to the total number of small annual or one-time givers.

​Similarly, the donor pyramid that fundraisers use would translate well to a high control group’s cult-ivation of members. Plenty of people will just read the books, take a seminar, join a study group (or whatever the entry point is for this group)… few will end up at the top of the pyramid, as core members, residents, staff of the organization. You will get more attention — and more concerted influence attempts — the further down the pipeline (or up the pyramid) you progress.

There are limits to this analogy, of course. For one thing, any ethical fundraiser will avoid deception and look for win-win relationships. From my fundraising days, I remember codes of conduct and systems of accountability for pros. Whereas a high control group often practices deception, at least sometimes — and has little, if any, accountability.

Risk Zones

Proximity to the group can also matter greatly. Someone who just watches videos, attends a webinar, or adds a few tools to their life may enjoy some of the genuine benefits of the program with modest exposure to the risks of deeper involvement.

An analogy I find useful comes from Matthew Remski of Conspirituality, who suggests looking at involvement and risk in a cult in a way similar to the hazard map of a wildfire. How dangerous a fire is — or how dangerous a cult is — depends on how close you get to it.
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Take the San Francisco Bay Area, for example. This 2017 fire risk map from a public radio/tv station tells me I should be most concerned and proactive in a very high (red) or high (mustard) hazard zone, whereas folks in the light yellow (moderate) or unmarked areas can rest a bit easier. Much of Santa Rosa was in the clear. West of Petaluma, on the other hand, more caution was warranted at the time of this map.

​If only we had similar maps for the risks of manipulation, like we do for wildfire! (Oh California, you would still have lots of red.)

Remski uses a wildfire map to suggest similar gradations of risk exist for high control groups.

• At the greatest distance from the fire / cult — the color-free areas on the map — people have relationships of genuine mutuality and equality, information is shared transparently, and health and resilience levels are unaffected by the group.
• Yellow risk means some cautionary signs are beginning to appear. This might include the presence of some charismatic leadership, and shifting ways of thinking and being among participants. Of course, not all charismatic people misuse their influence, and personal transformation can be a positive. But some discernment is called for. (For many in my group, including me, doing the practices brought benefits that increased my health and resilience — at least initially.)
• Orange here could represent recruitment zones, where things are not as they seem (or are presented to be), social influence and emotional contagion are used systematically, the participant is beginning to feel special and use inside language, and commitment begins to escalate.
• Red zones are ripe for abuse: people this close may be fully indoctrinated, and grow dependent on the group in a variety of ways (making it difficult to leave); if they see things that don’t add up, they may be gaslit; and if the leader or group crosses the line into unethical or criminal behavior, obfuscation and coverups are likely.

Note that unlike wildfires, the hazard zones in a high control group may be influenced as much by psychological proximity as by geographic proximity to the group. One can be far from the headquarters, yet still have deeply internalized the group’s values and power structure.

I can look back at my timeline of involvement with my group, and see how I progressed into stages of increasing risk as I was culti-vated down the participant pipeline.

So Who Joins?

That depends on the group. Whatever your age, life stage, identity, hunger, frustration, hopes… there’s a group out there that might be very appealing to you, should you be approached at the right moment in your life.

That said, there are some factors more common among recruits, as summarized by Janja Lalich (Take Back Your Life). Some of them apply to most people, like a desire to belong, and lack of awareness about how groups can manipulate people. Idealism, dissatisfaction with the cultural status quo, and a desire for spiritual meaning may also make someone more likely to find a group’s appeals enticing. All of the above pertained to me — and, I believe, to most of the young adults my group was cultivating — in my period of peak involvement.

Not surprisingly, other qualities that can make one more susceptible to indoctrination and longer/deeper involvement include trustingness (less likely to scrutinize what one is told), lack of self-confidence, low tolerance for ambiguity (urgent need for clear answers), and lack of assertiveness (difficulty saying no or expressing doubt). People-pleasers, beware!
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For groups that promote practices that induce trance-like states, susceptibility to such states could also increase responsiveness to the indoctrination program. Prior use of certain drugs, for example, could increase such susceptibility. I wonder if some people are just naturally wired to more easily enter — and find refuge in — such states.

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Besides personal qualities, life moments can also influence how open and interested one would be in a group that offers belonging, meaning, stress relief, etc. A relationship break-up, job loss, devastating death, parental overwhelm, health diagnosis, the challenge to identity posed by retirement… the list is long of life transitions and difficulties that could make a person more vulnerable to the influence of a group that offers solutions or comfort.

I speculate that many people who haven’t (knowingly) been a part of a high control group might expect that the folks who would most flock to culty groups are those who are not-so-smart, emotionally unbalanced, doormats, or misfits. But the myth of the weak-minded joiner is just that — a myth.
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“Most cult members are above-average intelligence, well-adjusted, adaptable, and more than likely idealistic,” Lalich reports. (That is, when they first get involved. A person might not be so well-adjusted — or mentally sharp — after their cult experience, if they get out. But that’s a different post.)

In a future post, I’ll share more of my own story of why I got increasingly involved in my old group. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. Thanks for reading!

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A Spiral Season …… How I Was Primed …... The Roots of Control

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