I drove west, toward the Pacific Ocean, the ashram shrinking in my rearview mirror.

I hadn’t been there for almost two decades, since a confusing year as a meditation center employee that ended with my quiet return to the Midwest. At the moment I did not feel stirred up by this visit to the site of spiritual trauma. I wasn’t sure what I felt.

A beach was just ten minutes away. I had planned to let the healing power of the ocean wash over me, as I walked and walked at its edge, and ate my lunch from a high cliff, and let my being settle, after all the feelings and sensations of the visit.

I drove through the small resort town and down the bluff to the beach parking lot. Leaving my shoes in the car, I walked barefoot over the cool sand to the water’s edge.

The cold water on my feet grounded me in my body as I strolled through the surf. Waves crashed rhythmically onto the beach. Ah…

I drank in the sensations of wind and water, my mind quiet for some time.

Wave 1… Purpose

Twisty vines with tiny pink flowers rose out of the sand. They shimmied in the breeze.

So much had gone unspoken during my visit to the ashram. Why had I danced around the tension, been so diplomatic, avoided the elephant in the room?

Learning to lean into conflict, when called for, in healthy ways, has been one of my biggest areas of personal and professional growth over my life. I had been direct and transparent with the organization’s leadership when I first learned startling new-to-me history — sharing what I had uncovered, and asking for answers and accountable action. Yet, I had not done that today.

Would I come to regret this missed opportunity? I wanted them to initiate an independent investigation that took seriously the allegations that I now knew had been made by multiple women over the decades: that the group’s beloved teacher had abused his power monstrously, using others for his own sexual gratification — adolescents as well as young women — gaslighting them all the while, as he told them that it was for their own spiritual advancement.
​
The beach narrowed as a bluff rose up to my left. Hardy plants grew over the rocky curves. Resilient succulents matted the ground. Some sections held their red-green color palette, while other sections dried to gray.

After having the courage to speak their truth, it had to have been devastating for the sexual abuse survivors to be dismissed and written off, indeed, regarded as traitors, by their former ashram “family.” A subsequent betrayal like that can rival the original abuse in the pain caused.

Not to mention all the people hurt by the deception of decades of propaganda and cover-ups. It had been a collective project of many in this community to style the founder as a spiritual teacher on the world stage.

I now understood that, whenever reality threatened to dissolve the mirage they had created, they had zealously protected it. They coached public-facing folks, like retreat presenters, on how to steer people away from problematic pieces of the founder’s history. And there was a stream of hagiography about him, too, telling his story just so. That began well before he died in the late 90s, and has never let up.

Up on the bluff, bright yellow flowers popped from corkscrew blades of green. Insects crawled silently among the sunny florets.

Over the half-century since it formed, my old group had lured many soft-hearted seekers into successively deeper layers of the onion structure of the group — including my cohort. As I was reminded by the presence of Shelia (or her mother, whichever it was) on the access road at the ashram today, they are still continuing to ensnare people in their web of half-truths and lies.

Would it have been the perfect time, while Madelyn and I were connecting over the challenges that come with leading an organization, to express my disappointment in the way the leaders responded to my questions? (They basically smeared the victims, and then proactively coached others away from even learning about the allegations, lest they disturb their minds and impede their spiritual progress… classic DARVO and spiritual bypassing.)

I could have spoken from the heart about all this, but I hadn’t. These questions hummed through me, more in the form of swirling feelings than succinct thoughts, as I paced over the sand.

Ancient bits of rock, skeletal remains of marine life, and disintegrated plant matter made up the grains underfoot. The stories they could tell would span eons. The evolution and extinction of species. Ice ages and meteoric events. Human happenings that might or might not still be alive in the oral histories of indigenous peoples. The westward push of colonization that met the ocean here, with its own mythology of manifest destiny, its own economy of extraction, its own hagiography of the cowboy and the pioneer.

No, I did what I came to do. Accountability and truth-telling were not the point of this visit. My own healing was.

Perhaps my escapee-survivor friends and I will find ways, eventually, to prevent the organization from continuing to deceive and harm (as many) people. But that was not why I had asked to set foot on the ashram today.

Long-term, my own aims will likely be broader, fostering healing and prevention in relationship to high control groups in general, not just my old group.

Being a “wounded healer” may bring some gifts to those endeavors, so long as I am sufficiently healed myself. And my journey back to the center of my own spiritual trauma felt quietly powerful in that regard.

Wave 2… Settling

Iridescent purple shells on the sand enticed my eyes and fingers. Across the bay, Point Reyes drew nearer as I progressed down the ocean’s edge.

Would I write about this visit? It had crossed my mind at the ashram to take a picture, if only of my canary’s (approximate) resting place. But I wanted to respect the trust Madelyn had extended to me by letting me come. I doubted the Center’s leaders would want me taking and posting pictures. So I had dismissed the idea as soon as it had occurred to me.

No doubt they’d prefer I not write publicly about the visit, either. While I was at the ashram I didn’t think I would. On the beach, I wasn’t so sure. I could already feel the pull of my preferred mode of processing. For me, writing has always been one of the best ways to make sense of my life experiences.

I had brought my little Yellowstone composition notebook with me. At one point, as gulls glided overhead, I cracked it open and wrote a few paragraphs. That was all I could do on the beach, though. The words weren’t ready to come.
​
As the waves lapped the shore, I was much more in my body than my mind. Settling my nervous system — that was my immediate need. The processing would come gradually, in layers of feeling and reflection. The perceptions grounded in my animal being would integrate in their own time with the verbal and other faculties of my mind.

​Like a Gold Rush prospector panning for precious metals, in the days that followed I would sift through the events and emotions of my ashram visit. I would accept whatever nuggets of insight rose out of the stream of memories.

This process ebbed and flowed during the rest of my week in the Bay Area. It would continue in the background all the way home, as I drove through the Sacramento valley, over the Sierra Nevadas, across sage-covered desert mountain territory from Nevada to Colorado, and back into the plains.

Only later, when I was re-anchored at home, would I be able to put fleshy words on the bones of all that swirled within, as I meandered along the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Wave 3… Idols & Golden Eras

Here and there on the sand, skeletons of tiny creatures caught my eye. What were they? What kind of lives did they live?

One translucent form was so complete, I wondered if it was still alive.

The circle of life was palpable here. Not so at the ashram, frozen in time. Walking through it felt like visiting a museum.

I recalled something a friend observed, that the long-timers looked back to the 60s, 70s, early 80s as the golden era of their experience with this group. Perhaps much as I still remember fondly (though not without mixed feelings) my early retreat experiences. They were full of spiritual exploration, connection, sensory renewal, and peak experiences — what felt like genuine, positive growth. In both cases, the anchoring memories were before things went awry. Or at least, before one’s misgivings demanded real attention.

For the long-timers, the before and after might be marked by the period in the early 80s when doubts and dark experiences began to be shared aloud, and the teacher threatened to abandon them all — they had to shape up (and shut up), or he would ship out. A dozen people departed; others ended up all the more tightly trauma-bonded to the teacher.

I remembered what Liahna told me about pilgrimages to the ashram, and how the center has created sites of homage throughout the compound. As the real, all too flawed man gets farther and farther from them in time, the most fanatical grip all the more tightly to their idealized image of the teacher — and present him to others accordingly.

More marine forms caught out between tide pools appeared between my feet on the sand.

I had collected a few shells, but had no interest in touching the bones of decomposing creatures. Nature would take its course, drawing them back into the sand and the sea. They could nourish new life, no less singular or precious for their anonymity. Let them be.

Scanning to my left, I watched a pair of teens wading into the water with boogie boards. They caught waves as they could.

Wave 4… Control

I passed an unknown object on the sand, a reddish… shellfish? How did such a creature survive, in the ocean swells and scouring sand?

There was another one. I bent to inspect its form. I saw no legs. Was it still alive?

Flashes of my conversation with Madelyn came back to me. The way she responded to my expression of concern for her future, uncomprehending and unphased.

She has been “putting others first,” effacing herself, for so long — what was left? I could only guess what was going on beneath her courteous exterior. How many layers down did she know herself?

I wove between fleshy bulbs and seaweed reeds washed up on the shore. My mind returned to the film I had watched on my tablet the night before. Wicked Little Letters had been in my Netflix queue for some time. As my ashram visit neared, this tale from another time had promised to distract and amuse me.

Wicked Little Letters turned out to be a story of deception, control, betrayal, and survival. Comedy, yes. But on the beach, it struck me that it was also a fitting allegory for the ashram.

          (Spoilers ahead!)

The story centers on Edith Swan, played by Olivia Colman. An upright young woman, Edith has been receiving hostile, profanity-laced letters. The missives upset the pious home she shares with her mother and father. Neighbor Rose Gooding, a single mother and Irish immigrant with a vivid vocabulary and a zest for life — complete with bawdy humor — is suspected of writing them. Thus begins a lighthearted whodunit.

All was not what it seemed. Inspired by a scandal that rocked the seaside town of Littlehamptom in Sussex, England, in the 1920s, the plot twist at the end of the film felt all too familiar to me.

Beneath the laughs, through a slow drip of revelations, the movie illustrates the dynamics of control. Edith was the good daughter, keeping house for her father, exuding modesty and virtue. When she stepped out of line, her father’s anger and entitlement was palpable. He had her copy out Bible verses as punishment/training.

Edith’s mother had learned not to think — in one scene, when asked her opinion on events, she averred with relief that she had none. Edith knew she was supposed to stay on the (subservient) sidelines too. She did her duty at home, and welcomed every opportunity to burnish her saintly image: gracefully enduring, like Christ, as the initial target of the letters; self-effacingly quoting hallowed words (Saint Francis included) as she encouraged others to turn the other cheek with Rose; allowing herself to be persuaded to speak on the matter in church, and to accept compliments in the press for her cheerful forbearance.

Beneath the nicey nice manners in Edith’s home, darkness lurked. Edith’s father, it turns out, was the cause of her called-off engagement some months before the letters began. Locals thought Edith had changed her mind. But her father had actually secretly driven away her suitor, in order to keep his eldest daughter at home, as his domestic servant.

Edith’s family, local law enforcement, and the community at large blithely blamed the colorful character Rose for the letters — easily believing what confirmed their worldview. Meanwhile, an intrepid ‘woman officer’ and a few local women in cahoots with her unraveled the mystery: straight-laced, scripture-quoting, demonstratively humble Edith was the true author of the wicked little letters!
​
Edith had not started out with a plan to frame Rose. It becomes clear to the viewer that Rose’s friendship had actually been good for Edith, helping her to lighten up. Edith’s quashed feelings of resentment and anger at her position in life simply came out sideways, through the letters. While reflexively patronizing toward her moral inferior and foil, Rose, Edith only threw her under the bus — playing up the idea that Rose must be the culprit, after others would not let it go — so that she would not be caught out herself. The betrayal of her friend was a matter of survival.

It was only when her fiancé and new married life mysteriously went *poof* that Edith found anonymous outlets for her unacceptable (for a female) feelings, using the alternate persona to vent her vitriol and provoke her parents.

Her anger at her lost agency and stuckness is perfectly understandable. I empathized with Edith when she explained to Rose late in the movie that she had never meant all this to happen — once she’d started, she just could not stop writing nasty notes. Inadvertently, the person who was controlled herself became a deceiver and manipulator. Her one-time friend Rose was collateral damage to the rage and pain that Edith otherwise had to keep in check behind a decorous façade.

I did get the sense toward the end of the movie that Edith was finally breaking free of the cage of spiritual aspiration and daughterly duty. At Rose’s trial, when cracks began to show in Edith’s story, exposing her, she instinctively insisted to her father that all was well. The smile fixed on her face corresponded to a state of willed denial.

But as she was being hauled away to prison, her father stated that he knew it could not have been her. Now he was in denial. Defiantly, Edith shouted at him that yes, it WAS her! She threw in a few epithets to underscore the point. She then broke out in spontaneous laughter, at her audacity, a genuine smile lighting up her face.

The truth set her free, at least in spirit. Rose applauded Edith’s verbal exploits, and to the audience, too, she was redeemed.

In the days that followed my ashram visit, starting on my beach walk, bits and pieces of the film would echo back to me, resonating with ashram ways.

The passive-aggressive patterns, polite stiffness on the surface, deep currents of tension palpable at the gut level.

The father figure who manipulated others for his own selfish gain.
​
The misappropriation of spiritual words and ideals, used to paper over and avoid what was difficult.

A striving that locked people in, instead of setting them free. Where tools that once helped them cope became part of the trap, limiting what one can see — or be.

How the controlled person may, in desperation, turn to deceit and denial.
​
The “friends” betrayed.

I recognized it all in my own experience with the ashram, and in the stories that others of multiple generations have shared with me.
​
Nearby on the beach, dogs splashed around in the tide pools, tails wagging. Their joy was infectious.

From my body I could feel that in the visit I’d just made, dynamics of control had unfolded once again.

The way I had to get permission to visit, and how grateful I felt after Madelyn said yes, after having first said no. (Ah, intermittent reinforcement, you are such a trickster.)
​
Threading the needle of conversation — staying on “safe” topics, leaving so much unspoken. Hearing party lines from Madelyn and neither agreeing with nor challenging them.

Squashing the impulse to take a picture, or the thought of writing about this later. That came partly from genuine respect for Madelyn, wanting to keep to the terms I had presented for my visit. Eschewing pictures still felt like the right choice on that count.

But mixed in with appropriate boundaries were echoes of the loyalty the group instills in people. For so long it had inhibited me from talking openly about my negative experiences there; I self-censored, as people do in authoritarian systems. Today at the ashram, I had walked among ghosts from my past, and re-absorbed a bit of their unspoken code of silence.
​
I wanted to shake that off, to leave behind that rekindled bit of conditioning. Let it wash energetically back to the ashram, like the water on the sand sliding back into the sea.

Wave 5… Time

As I sat on a grassy ledge of sand, watching the waves crash under a gray ceiling of clouds, another bit of the conversation with Madelyn played back in my mind’s eye.

She had pointed to patience as a source of challenge and growth. As a leader of the group, perhaps Madelyn’s welcome of me was an example of this very principle — an act of prudent patience for the institution.

In the past, the true believers at the ashram had seen trials as a test of loyalty. Did Madelyn and her contemporary counterparts see the recent set of questions and allegations about their teacher similarly? Probably so.
​
And patience might well be a key part of the strategy for dealing with those of us who find the allegations credible. The center had guided people to focus on the purity of their minds, and steer clear of information that might trouble them — rather than actually address that information directly and transparently. This don’t-think-about-it response was both telling and troubling.

Perhaps those currently orchestrating the organization’s course expect to wait us out, the seekers of truth and justice — just let those questions die down, let whoever falls away from the organization fall away, keep cultivating new crops of meditators, and wait to reap a harvest of goodwill and major gifts from those future supporters. There have been so many waves of meditators and retreat-goers and donors already, over the past half a century. They’ve gotten very good at this process.

Perhaps this attitude of patience even helps explain Madelyn’s switch from no to yes, in response to my inquiry about visiting. Once it became clear that I had not come with ill will, or intent on confrontation, but rather was focused on my own healing journey, they might have decided to go with the “catch more flies with honey than vinegar” approach with me. Expecting to be done with me once I left California on this once-in-a-lifetime trip. Which they may well be.

Point Reyes was small in the distance as I turned back to survey the span I had traversed. The ashram, too, would recede in time. Not just in physical distance but in emotional weight.
​
My spirit cleansed, I strode through the sand to my car and headed back east.

Wave 6… Casting Off

On the drive back from the beach to my temporary home base, it dawned on me that there was one item I’d intended to do something symbolic with, which was still waiting for attention.

I owned a bathrobe that I’d received as a hand-me-down from one of the ashram residents when I worked there twenty years ago. The long charcoal robe, made of soft wool, had kept me warm on many winter evenings and mornings. It had come with me back to Indiana when I left my ashram job, and then on subsequent moves to Texas and Nebraska.

Over the past couple of years, though, since I had learned of the deplorable abuses of power by the meditation group’s founder, I had not been able to pull the robe off its peg. I could not put this garment on anymore.

The teacher was credibly accused of sexually abusing adolescent girls — girls my own daughter’s age — specifically, as part of a bedtime ritual. (Multiple adult women had told of his misconduct with them, too.) I could not look at that robe without thinking of this long-hidden history. And even wondering if any such betrayal had happened in proximity to the robe.

I had considered carrying out some ritual action with the robe to vent my feelings about the group and its fallen founder. Shred it with scissors? Burn it?

I had never felt moved to do so at home. While I’d certainly had angry streaks, and considered that a perfectly healthy response, I did not feel like destroying the robe would actually be cathartic for me. It was a mismatch for my healing trajectory.

I had considered taking it to Goodwill instead. But if that robe actually *had* been around for sexual assault at the ashram, did I want someone else to end up with it? No. I really didn’t.

This is why, after ignoring the robe since I learned what I’d learned, no longer using it myself, it still hung on my bathroom door. For a year and a half, it had been a visual reminder of the whole mess at the meditation center. I didn’t want it in my house. But I was stumped as to what to do with it.

So I had tucked the robe in a bag in my car when preparing for this road trip. Perhaps, I’d thought, my friends and I would do something with it as part of our reunion of apostates. But the day of our group hike, already past, it had slipped my mind. All this bubbled up as I drove away from the beach.

What if I gave the robe back to the ashram?! That felt perfect.

I shouldn’t have to figure out what to do with this thing. Give it back where it came from, and let them deal with it. Yes! That was what I wanted to do.

Alas, at this point the bag with the robe was back at the house where I was staying during the Bay Area leg of my road trip. Otherwise I would’ve stopped at the ashram on my way past it, just long enough to drop off the tainted-by-association garment.

When I got back from the beach, I called Madelyn. My voice mail explained that I just wanted this robe off my hands. I would just pop in and set it by her office door, tomorrow on my way to lunch plans in the area; I did not need to see or talk to anyone, no big deal.
​
Madelyn called me back later. In a tight voice, she instructed me NOT to come by the ashram and drop off the robe.

I’m not sure if she was aghast at my line of thinking (which I had glossed over, but still), or if she was annoyed practically at the idea of having to figure out what to do with it herself, or if she was just following orders. But she wasn’t happy about it. I thought my solution was imminently reasonable; she wasn’t having it.

Arg.

More control.

Whatever.

What was I going to do with this thing? It gained more symbolic weight the longer it remained with me. I did NOT want to take it back home to Omaha.

I considered my options again. I still did not feel like destroying it; my overriding feeling toward the ashram at this point was deep sadness, not anger.

I recalled a relevant new tidbit I had just learned during conversations in the area. The woman who gave me the robe was a thrifter. Apparently, picking up nice finds and giving them to others was a pattern of hers. It was a high-quality robe. She might even have been responding kindly to my Midwesterner’s adjustment to the less-robust heating systems of the Bay Area, which left me chilly in the damp winter. In any case, probably neither she nor anyone else at the ashram had ever worn the robe.

I was also surprised to learn that she was not, as I’d thought, one of the “first generation” students — those who had been at the ashram since the founder and his fledgling group settled in there fifty years ago. She had come in the 80s, after the big split (and, I’d heard previously, after insiders started mindfully keeping the teacher from being alone with women). Ergo, nothing horrible would’ve happened in that robe. Whew!

With this new information in mind, I decided to donate the robe to a local thrift store. I dropped it off on my way to a lunch visit the next morning.

California, you can keep your culty crap. I give it back.

​As I walked out of the Goodwill, through the parking lot, and drove away, I felt lighter.

Wave 7… Home

​Back home after my 3-week road trip, I was reunited with my people and place. Between unpacking, laundry, being with my beloveds, going through photos, re-anchoring in my home and habits, and mentally preparing for the end of my sabbatical, I began to write about the trip.

Yes, I would write about my visit to the ashram. I stopped ceding my power to them a long time ago. I will not censor myself now.

I will continue to share my processing, because other ex-associates of that place have told me how helpful it has been to them.

And because it may be helpful to others too, loved ones of those who’ve had ties to that meditation center, and people involved in other groups with high demand dynamics.

A few days ago, as I was decluttering some surface in my house, I came across a passage on patience. Madelyn’s voice from the ashram visit floated back to me, wondering aloud what patience really is.

​The pushpin-sized hole at the top of the page tells me I once had it posted on a bulletin board. I don’t remember how or when it came to me, or what it meant to me then. It feels full of fresh meaning to me now.

Patient Trust
​
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability --
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually — let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

​       ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There is no need to be complete, or perpetually relieved of oneself, or “established in God.”

Accept being imperfect and incomplete. Accept the stages of instability as potentially a part of some greater good.
​
Let ideas shape themselves, let all unfold in its own time. Savor the journey.
​
It is enough, and enough, and more than enough.

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Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.
​Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher … A Year of Getting Free … The Roots of Control … Seeking Safely: Tips for Meditators … Teaching Safely

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

I cocked my head away from my computer screen, rubbing my sock feet together for warmth in the cold dampness of a Bay Area morning. Leaning toward the thin trailer wall that separated my office from my co-worker’s, I listened intently. Was she…? Yes, Madelyn (I’ll call her) was crying again. The sound was muffled but unmistakable.

Should I try to connect with her after lunch? I had made overtures of support before, offering a hug or a listening ear. But to no avail.
​
So I could only guess what she might be struggling with: some old grief welling up — perhaps the very grief that had made this place seem to her like a haven, from afar? The loneliness of life at the ashram, which was in equal measure insular, and yet also lacking in genuine emotional intimacy? The accumulated frustration of trying to figure out how to accomplish something in her job, in the opaque culture of this community?

​The memory is frozen, the questions still unanswered for me almost twenty years later. Because Madelyn, it seems, learned to do something that I ultimately did not want to do: to turn her attention away from the feelings that troubled her, and as we’d been taught, lean into a spiritual practice instead.

Perhaps she mantramed her way through it. Or maybe she used the powers of concentration she had honed through years of meditation, and focused her attention back on some work task, as the untended tears dried on her face.

She certainly would not have done what I sometimes did when struggling through my dark year of the soul there — console myself with a sweet treat. No, sense training had never seemed like a challenge for my waifish peer. She was adept at self-denial.

Sidestepping Reality

Instinctively, my young adult self at that meditation center knew that feelings provide information. And that to cut oneself off from difficult feelings would be to cut oneself off also from important insight — from the very reality of one’s own experience.

When a person pushes away reality, they may well end up living in illusion.
I didn’t have this vocabulary then, but now I recognize that I witnessed a good deal of spiritual bypassing at that ashram.

Psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing to refer to a frequent phenomenon in spiritual spaces. It means

using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” [i]

My old group promotes the use of a sacred phrase, or holy name, throughout the day. With enough repetition, the phrase becomes embedded deep in one’s psyche. The goal was to do it so often, for so long, that eventually it would go on repeating itself in the mind effortlessly.

Such a practice appears in many different religious traditions, and I have no bone to pick with it generally. However, I believe it can be misused.

If the holy name is repeated to displace difficult emotions — instead of actually feeling them, and finding out what they have to teach you — the practice becomes a method for spiritual bypassing.

My old group did advocate repeating this kind of sacred phrase as a way to cope with strong emotions, such as jealousy or anger. Retreat leaders assured students that was not about suppressing emotions.

Instead, they said, practitioners would *transform* difficult emotions through this discipline. What could that even mean — transform them into what?

Granted, sometimes we need to pace ourselves to metabolize strong feelings. If a person uses their mantram just long enough to get grounded again, so they can then genuinely experience and deal with their emotions, well, I can see the utility in that.

But I suspect that Madelyn — and many of her role models at the ashram — are just as apt to use spiritual disciplines to perpetually avoid “negative” things.

To avoid grief, to skirt around cognitive dissonance, to veer away from anger that actually needs to be heard… to divert the mind from unwelcome questions, to postpone maturation of various kinds… suppress, suppress, suppress.

Avert Thine Eyes!

The current de facto leader of the group has gone all in on spiritual bypassing. In response to a series of credible allegations of wrongdoing by their founder, she is coaching meditators to push away information that might make cracks appear in their image of the organization and its founder.

She urges them, instead, to focus on maintaining the purity of their consciousness.

The chart below popped up on my social media feed recently. It captures very well the approach the leadership of my old group is taking.
​

​My old organization’s message to meditators is something like: Avoid exposure to ‘baseless rumors’ that could cause you turmoil; just do your practice and keep your mind steady.

In other words, nothing to see here. Keep Calm and Meditate On.

The organization appears to be largely ignoring sincere questions and concerns expressed by long-time practitioners who *have* reviewed the allegations.

Emails simply go unanswered. Except perhaps by the silent repetitions of sacred words in leaders’ minds. Rama rama rama rama…

Something’s Rotten in Denmark

When an institution works to silence questions and maintain the status quo, even in the face of legitimate concerns, that tells me that something is broken in the institution.

It’s a common enough pattern, sadly. I was sensitized to it as I completed seminary and started out as a congregational minister.

My tradition was then going through a time of reckoning over ministerial misconduct, and the long-term harm it does not only to individuals who are targeted, but to whole communities whose ability to trust leaders is damaged.

Shortly after I accepted my first call to serve a congregation, a major address at the national level powerfully broke silence on this issue. (The speech is not available from the sponsor organization Because Threat of Lawsuits, but it can be accessed from the speaker herself here.)

The upshot: secrecy harms individuals and groups, while honesty is the beginning of healing. Let’s get real, people.

“The [group’s] growth as religious people began by telling a secret. It continued with an analysis of power that our faith calls shared ministry — the priesthood and prophethood of all in covenant.” ~ Gail S. Seavey [ii]

​There had been voices crying in the wilderness for years. But a critical mass seemed finally to have been reached — in no small part, I believe, because of the preponderance of women now in the ministry in my tradition.

It has been a period of breaking silences, clarifying codes of conduct, making training in healthy boundaries a core part of professional development, strengthening systems of accountability, and increasing transparency about all of it. It remains a work in progress.

These are the kinds of things my old meditation group needs to do, if they are sincere about serving people. Start with the truth. Apologize to those harmed. Ask what will help them heal. Then, if the organization is to continue, get to work on building preventive systems.

Alas, so far, my old group’s leaders seem bent on staying in denial. They’ve been telling their story a particular way for decades, and they’re sticking to it.

The Sound of Silence

Another of my colleagues, whose ministry began in the early 2000s, wrote powerfully from her own experience of the dynamics of silence. As Erika was on the verge of being deemed ready to serve — but before she had passed that major milestone — a senior colleague propositioned her.

This mentor had all the power in the relationship. Including the ability, if he so chose, to derail her nascent vocation. Erika could hardly believe what was happening. She froze.
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What cut even deeper was the silence of the system. For while one faithful female colleague, when taken into confidence, protected Erika, the man who misused his position was largely, quietly, shielded from accountability.

“When silence becomes a living character in our personal narratives, it’s often an accomplice to power.” ~ Erika Hewitt [iii]

Gosh, that tale sounds familiar.

In the stories I’ve heard about the founder of my old meditation group, the real kicker for victim-survivors was that the ashram community, who revered this man, largely did not — would not — believe them.

Instead, those who stayed have been complicit in the silence. Complicit in letting the harsh truth fade into obscurity within the larger mythology of the group.

So it wasn’t just one person, the supposedly most enlightened person, who betrayed the victim-survivors. In the end it was the whole community of those who participated in the silence-keeping.

And for as long as they continue to deny the truth — to perpetrate their own Big Lie — the organization fails everyone they purport to serve.

A Turning Tide?

Now, more people once affiliated with the group are learning about the allegations. Person by person and city by city, the extended community of meditators are considering the evidence and consulting our consciences.

Almost everyone who reviews the information finds the allegations credible, the pattern un-ignorable. Most are deciding that we will not be part of an organization more committed to maintaining its illusions than to caring for real people.

We will not be secret keepers, or truth deniers. No. This is where the silence ends.

Perhaps, as in the community Gail Seavey served, this is also where the spiritual growth deepens.
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​​If you’ve had your own journey with spiritual bypassing — or with breaking oppressive silence — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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

Up next… probably a piece that’s been brewing about All The Feelings I and others I know have cycled through, upon realizing that A) our meditation teacher did Very Bad Things and B) it was (is) a high-control group. Expect at least one feeling wheel.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The Shadow Side of Meditation & Mindfulness … How Cults Are Concealed

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

Endnotes

[i] Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

[ii] 2016 Berry Street Essay by Gail S. Seavey, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, presented at UUA General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, in June 2016. Essay available in writing and via video at https://www.gailseavey.com/2016-berry-street-lecture. Response available at https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/2016-response-to-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-david-pyle/.
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[iii] “The Dynamics of Silence” by Erika Hewitt, in Braver/Wiser, November 15, 2017. Available at https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/dynamics-silence.