Eastern spirituality has been hip and cool in the U.S. since the counter-cultural era of the 1960s.

(It had earlier phases of appeal too, particularly to educated and elite populations — from Transcendentalists getting their hands on the first English translations of Eastern scriptures, their writing and perspectives infused with these influences, to Swami Vivekananda being the first to wow people in person, at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.)

These days, blooming lotus paintings and statues of meditating Buddhas are as likely to be found in the décor of a massage studio or therapy office as are feeling wheels and herbal tea stations.

On a visit to a chiropractor or physical therapist, posters of chakras and energy meridians may hang nonchalantly alongside those of the skeletal or fascia systems.
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​And depending on the neighborhood, Buddha statues may be more or less numerous in people’s gardens than ceramic gnomes or Virgin Mary and St. Francis figures.

What’s going on here?

Six Explanations for the Ascendance of Eastern Spirituality

The cultural position of Buddhist, Hindu, and other Eastern symbolism is NOT primarily due to the presence of ordinary people who have immigrated here from Asia, carrying Eastern religious heritages with them.

No, exposure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Eastern perspectives to gain popularity in the West.

Rather, the following six factors help account for the prominent place of Eastern spirituality in American pop culture today.

Intrinsic Appeal

To state the obvious, people can respond to ideas that make sense to them, rituals or practices that are effective for them, religious stories or art that move them, etc., from any source, because of the thing itself.

​When I studied “world religions” for the first time in college, I felt a natural affinity with the Tao te Ching. I carried a pocket edition around campus with me, pausing between classes to read a passage or two.

The book’s imagery, drawn from nature and daily life, its elegant wisdom, and the natural yet ineffable concept of the Tao itself — all these connected with me in an intuitive way.
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Whether it’s an idea like a cyclical sort of cosmology (and at the individual level, reincarnation), an orientation like seeking illumination, a practice like meditation, or an aesthetic sensibility, aspects of Eastern spiritual traditions can genuinely appeal to people on their own merits.

Clean Slate

When I see a stranger, I tend to assume the best of them — or at least, to be open to who they may reveal themselves to be.

But with someone I know, the better I know them, the more I know not only their finest qualities, but also their most frustrating ones.

That’s true of religious traditions too. One can more readily recognize the flaws in the thing we know more intimately.

Whether it’s through direct experience, or through exposure to the Christian-dominant culture of our country, many Americans know well one or another expression of Christianity (or Judaism). Thus we are familiar with the pitfalls in the particular ways these traditions have taken shape and been practiced around us.

​I grew up attending a United Methodist church with my family. There is plenty to admire in the Jesus tradition (which I still claim, in my own way). I benefited from my participation in that Methodist church, and still appreciate what I learned about religious community, the biblical literacy I acquired, and the introduction to the prophetic figure of Jesus.

Yet, the more I learned about that religion — particularly through two years of confirmation classes in junior high — the more I began to chafe and question.

The patriarchy in the Bible was stifling. In the church sometimes, too.

Some of the practices and the debates around them seemed arcane to me. Should Holy Communion be done by intinction? What does this rite mean? Who is allowed to take communion? (To their credit, Methodists welcomed anyone to do so. That wasn’t true at my neighbors’ Catholic church.)

For baptism, should babies be sprinkled or should people old enough to choose for themselves be dunked? Is a non-baptized person at a cosmic disadvantage — or even bound for hell — regardless of whether they had exposure and access to this tradition?

I had difficulty with various ideas of The Way Things Are. What’s up with atonement theology — why so much focus on sin and death? What kind of God would sacrifice his child?

​And the dogmatism in general rubbed me the wrong way. Why was Right Belief the main thing? Isn’t it more important how a person actually treats other people? It didn’t make sense to me.

I did not get confirmed, as I did not feel I could stand before the congregation with integrity and publicly confirm all the things that one must confirm at Confirmation.

I had more questions than answers. I found other questions more relevant to spiritual living than the ones the church emphasized in its membership process.

​The adage “better the devil you know” suggests that people often prefer to deal with a problematic, but familiar and predictable, person or thing, rather than encounter something new and unknown. That may be true for a sizable portion of any population, when it comes to religion.

But I’d guess there is at least a significant minority who are more like I was, with the opposite tendency — knowing all too well what I find problematic in my native religion… wondering if some other spiritual tradition or group has managed to hold onto the kernels of goodness, and steer clear of the accidents of history that plague my own religious heritage.
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Emerging into adulthood with such an attitude, it’s no surprise that Eastern traditions would pique my interest, when I had occasion to encounter them.

Personality Differences

Humans are born with a variety of temperaments, and we are socialized in particular ways. Regardless of the religious experience or exposure one has as a result of family and culture, some of our personality traits are, at least to a degree, inborn.

One of the Big Five or Five Factor personality traits, Openness, could help explain why some people are more adventurous about religion than others. The Big Five model names — you guessed it — five traits that vary across humans. This model has shown high scientific validity.

The trait of Openness to Experiences refers to a curious attitude toward life. People who score high on Openness are more likely to be creative, to try new things, and to enjoy playing with abstract ideas. Such a person’s brain will show more interconnections across certain, disparate brain regions.

In contrast, those who score low on Openness are more focused on the concrete. They tend to be traditional, practical people. Their brains exhibit fewer connections across different brain regions.

The trait of Openness is inherited to a certain degree. At an estimated 61%, Openness actually showed the highest genetic component of all five traits in one study. [i]

Along with nature, nurture must play a role too. If we have a genetic predisposition toward Openness AND are raised by curious, creative, intellectual people, it’s a double whammy — one might have a particularly robust trait of Openness in that case.

Neither of these ways of being in the world — with high or low Openness — is right or wrong, better or worse. Human communities probably benefit by having people of both types in them.

Which type of person would you expect to be more likely to be spiritually inquisitive?

Savvy Marketing

When describing something perceived as foreign or exotic, the marketer enters the marketplace with a distinct advantage over the consumer. It’s harder to be a shrewd consumer when you lack a frame of reference upon which to make reasoned judgments. Such is the situation with cross-cultural contact.

In Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, Gita Mehta chronicles an era of spiritual tourism that began in the counter-culture of the 1960s, when “the West adopted India as its newest spiritual resort.” [ii]

Mehta describes the peculiar collision of cultures:

“We were Indians but we had caught the contagions of the American Age. Speed was the essence of action, and America proved it daily… [Western spiritual tourists to India] thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong. Then the real action began.”

What was this “real action”? As American mass marketing penetrated the Indian countryside, “the unthinkable happened. The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi.” [iii]

When the Beatles embraced meditation and mysticism via an Indian guru, Mehta indicates, “the East” was able to turn the tables. Suddenly the spiritual heritage of the East was a hot commodity for Westerners.

“Eventually we succumbed to the fantasy that Indian goods routed through America were no longer boringly ethnic, but new and exciting accessories for the Aquarian Age. From accepting the fantasies it was a very short haul to buying them and, later and more successfully, to manufacturing them. As our home industry expands on every front, at last it is our turn to mass market.” ~Gita Mehta [iv]

​Of course, plenty of Eastern teachers — and not just from India — have migrated westward, publishing books, teaching meditation in classes and retreats, building audiences and ashrams.

I have described elsewhere how the religious roots of meditation practices were often softened when presented to Western audiences (see How Was Meditation Mainstreamed?). That may be true, to some degree, for these religious traditions generally — and whether introduced by cultural ambassadors of the East or the West.

Esoteric elements may be downplayed, and universalizing vocabulary adopted. The language of science, in particular, may be used to communicate that this Eastern wisdom is not at odds with modern metaphysics.

The Orientalism that is a legacy of European colonialism may be leaned into, as intangible qualities associated with the East are sold to Western audiences weary of materialism.

Om-washing may cue people to relax the reasoning, monkey mind. To lean into imagery, into intuition, into mystery — into be-ing rather than do-ing.

Ah, that’s better…

​(Or is it?)

The Questioning Stage of Faith Development

If you’ve heard about the six stages of faith development, you might guess where I’m going with this. When people reach the fourth stage (if they do), they’ve moved from a conventional faith to a reflexive or individual one. [v]

In the synthetic-conventional stage (stage 3), people move beyond the literalism that previously guided their relationship to myth and symbols — engaging more abstract thinking — and synthesize the different areas of their life into a single whole. People in this stage are strongly rooted in relationships and community. They may find it hard to think outside the parameters of their inherited tradition, looking strongly to authority figures to guide them in their beliefs.

​In the individual-reflective stage (stage 4), people bring critical reasoning to their faith. They think carefully about what they believe, often questioning previously taken-for-granted ideas, and take responsibility for their faith on an individual level. Self-identity becomes more integrated with one’s values and worldview.
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There is no universal pace for moving through the stages. A person can remain indefinitely at any stage. But stage 3 is typically associated with adolescence. Stage 4 may begin in late adolescence, young adulthood, later, or not at all.

Those in stage 4 sometimes become critical of the faith they inherited. They may even reject it. I expect it is at this stage that many people may become open to wisdom from other traditions — particularly ones that do not exhibit the same flaws now perceived in one’s own first faith.

Other religious traditions may be of interest to people in later stages too.

Stage 5 is called the conjunctive stage. This is when people find balance in the contradictions in their religion, and in reality. They develop a new appreciation for paradox, recognize their own finiteness (including of mind and perception), and are open to multiple meanings that may be found in faith symbols. This stage is typically not reached until mid-life, if at all.

Stage 6 is called universalizing faith. People at this stage exhibit deep openness and understanding, having been transformed and possessing a holistic kind of faith. They recognize wisdom from many sources. Often spiritual leaders and mentors to others of all stages, they typically lead lives of service. This stage is considered rare, most likely occurring later in life.

I hypothesize that in a society that is predominantly Judeo-Christian, interest in Eastern traditions is especially likely to develop, when it does, around stage 4 — particularly if it is readily accessible to the person at that time.

​People in stages 5 and 6 may also take an interest in traditions other than the one they grew up with. This may be enriching to them, and be part of the process of developing a greater awareness of one’s own and others’ perspectives, and integrating that knowledge.
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If not brought into contact with other traditions, though, I suspect people at these more developed stages would not feel a need to search outside their own native tradition. They could resolve the contradictions of their own tradition from within it, and access deeper levels of wisdom that are available in every major religious tradition — including their own.

In today’s interconnected, multicultural world, many people will gain exposure to diverse religious traditions, and need to decide how to relate to them.

Still, I see stage 4 as the stage when the greatest numbers of people are likely to both analyze and come to personal terms with their own faith tradition — warts and all — as well as go into seeking mode, becoming curious about diverse sources of wisdom.

Intercultural & Racial Identity Development

How can we understand Westerners’ relationships to Eastern spirituality? Another type of developmental approach that may offer some insight into this question comes from models of racial or cultural development.

Let’s start with the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) created by Milton J. Bennett. [vi]

“Each orientation of the DMIS is indicative of a particular worldview structure, with certain kinds of cognition, affect, and behavior vis-à-vis cultural difference typically associated with each configuration… it is a model of how the assumed underlying worldview moves from an ethnocentric to a more ethnorelative condition, thus generating greater intercultural sensitivity and the potential for more intercultural competence.” ~ Milton Bennett [vii]

Once people have enough exposure to get beyond Denial that different cultures exist, they move into the stage of Defense.

Defense describes well the emotional tone of this stage, which is defensive. The cognitive structure here includes mental categories that can recognize cultural difference; however, the original world view is protected by poor integration of the new categories. This may lead to a hardening of categories.

Initially, a person might respond by focusing on what is good — in fact, better — about one’s own culture, and evaluating the differences in another culture in a negative fashion. A person in this situation may be most comfortable staying in bubbles where their own culture is dominant. At the extreme, they might embrace supremacist attitudes and even behaviors.

An alternate response in this stage is to regard the other’s culture as superior, and see one’s own as inferior. The dynamic is the same — only one can be “right” or “good” — this position just flips which culture is regarded as right/best and which as wrong/lesser. This version of the stage is called Reversal.
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​The DMIS was developed in relation to whole cultures. My sense is that it was intended to speak to situations of cross-cultural contact such as occurs in the context of international business, or prolonged immersion in a new culture, such as for a Peace Corps volunteer or a person who immigrates to a new country.
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To me the DMIS seems useful for understanding religious differences. Religion is, at least in part, a cultural phenomenon. Religious perspectives are part and parcel of what makes “the West” or “the East” or specific countries (the U.S. or Canada, India or Japan) what they are, culturally.

The stage of Defense, alternately called Polarization, can be seen in how people orient themselves when they encounter a religion that is foreign to their culture.
A non-Asian Westerner who engages with Asian religion and worldviews, and chooses to continue to do so, if still in the Defense stage would most logically come to it from the point of view of Reversal — seeing the other’s religious culture as superior to one’s own religious heritage.

I say that because a person at the other pole of polarization, Supremacy, would have little motive to remain deeply engaged in Asian religion, while regarding it as inferior, and in a stand of cognitively and emotionally defending one’s own, Western religious upbringing.

It’s hard for me to remember now, but I might have been at this stage in college. As I’ve indicated, I was very much interrogating my own, Protestant Christian heritage. At the same time, I was curious about other traditions, and especially drawn to Taoism.

My engagement with Eastern religions was not very deep then — it was largely intellectual, through college coursework and independent reading. It did not bring me significantly into contact with the baggage that one encounters in an embodied expression of any tradition, as practiced by real people and woven into institutions.

So it would have been easy for me to remain discriminating and critical with the devil I knew (Protestant Christianity), and have a sunnier disposition toward very different traditions (such as Taoism).

Even once a person begins to develop a deeper exposure to a new-to-you tradition, I suspect it often takes a while to see its shadow side. Especially if its emissaries have taken pains to make it appealing to Westerners (as indeed, plenty have).

It strikes me that an Asian Westerner is in a more complex situation. I think of the person who introduced me to the meditation teacher whose community I would one day move to. (I describe the beginnings of our connection, while we were both in India, here.)

She was (is) Chinese American, from San Francisco. I don’t know if her family were practicing Buddhists (or Confucian or Taoist), or Christian converts, or identified as non-religious. But there was surely some influence of the religious worldview of her Chinese ancestors, carried over into her family and their ethnic enclave in San Francisco.

Yet, Linda (I’ll call her) would also have grown up very much an American, socialized by American schools, friends, business, culture in general. She may be several generations away from the immigration experience — when it is common for people to reclaim their cultural heritage, as I remember from sociology classes.

I don’t know what brought Linda to take up the method of meditation taught by an Indian guru, and become close to his ashram community, and grow so enthusiastic that she evangelized me. Any or all of the other motives I describe in this piece may have been alive for her.

But I suspect it is more than coincidence that of all the people with whom I have shared the shocking new things I have learned about that guru recently, she is the only one who has cut off contact with me. She doesn’t want to be exposed to this information — she has said as much to me. It seems to be threatening to her in a way that it isn’t, or to a degree that it isn’t, to all of the other people that I knew personally through this group and with whom I have shared information over the past 15 months.

It’s possible that Linda is, or at some point was, in a developmental stage where it is important to honor one’s heritage. And that part of the draw to Sri Acharya (I’ll call him) was the way he affirmed the wisdom of the East. He was complimentary to Western religions too, and drew on all traditions in his teachings. But at heart, he viewed everything through the lens of his own heritage. And he encouraged all people to see the East as the purest source of spiritual wisdom.

I could be wrong about Linda. I acknowledge this is mere speculation. Either way, it illustrates how the dynamics may be different for a person in the West, who has Eastern heritage themselves, when relating to Eastern spirituality. Their own identity is caught up in it in a different way than for a person who is white or black, Latina or indigenous American.

Another developmental model, this one focused on racial identity, speaks to this. Beverly Daniel Tatum indicates that for a person of color in a white-dominant society, the stage of Immersion / Emersion — which comes after a person has recognized the impact of racism on their life — is a time of removing oneself from symbols of whiteness and immersing oneself in symbols of one’s own racial identity.
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​“Individuals in this stage [Immersion] actively seek out opportunities to explore aspects of their own history and culture with the support of peers from their own racial background.” [viii]
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Besides Linda, I also wonder how these dynamics affected other Asian or Asian-American people who developed ties with the ashram community of Sri Acharya. There were several Indian or Indian American young adults in my cohort of meditators.

There are many reasons they may have been drawn to this teacher and his particular way of teaching, and likely more than one at play for any person (as is true for his students of any other background). But for people with Indian heritage, the respect and gravitas Sri Acharya ascribed to India and its spiritual treasures may have been very healthy, even needed, at certain points of personal development.

Other stages from the DMIS no doubt also pertained to people involved with this group. Our meditation teacher’s approach was in essence congruent with the next stage after Defense, which is called Minimization.

In this stage, the polarization of the Defense stage is overcome by focusing on the common humanity of all people, and other kinds of commonalities that bridge cultures. In religion, this could show up as acknowledging that there is wisdom in every tradition; no one faith has a monopoly on virtue or insight.

But as the name Minimization signals, the down side of this stage is that it downplays and underestimates the real differences between cultures. While focusing on physiological similarities (“we all bleed red,” “we all want our children to be safe”), or subsuming difference into generalities (“the basic need to communicate is the same everywhere,” “we are all children of God, whether we know it or not”), minimization remains ethnocentric to one’s own culture.

People in Minimization actively support principles they regard as universal, whether they are religious, moral, or political. Niceness prevails — definitely an improvement over the antagonism of defense! But the institutionalized privilege of dominant groups may go unrecognized.

​Milton’s model indicates that the developmental task for those in Minimization is to develop cultural self-awareness. To learn to see all the things about one’s own culture which are so taken for granted they are not visible to a person as being culturally specific, but are instead taken as universal.

For someone like me with ties to Acharya’s ashram community (a white American), that would require engaging more deeply with my own (Western) religious heritage, instead of ignoring it in favor of Eastern sources.

To his credit, whatever else may be said of Acharya (and I’ve said much!), he did encourage his North American audience not to discard their own heritage, but to find the treasure that is there, too.

(That said, he still looked at that treasure through his own Hindu lens, himself. So perhaps he himself was in Minimization, with a tail in Superiority of his own Indian heritage. When I first took the DMIS, many years ago now, I was in Minimization with a tail in Reversal — still more acutely aware of the drawbacks of my American culture than of its strengths. I see the fingerprints there of the ashram’s conditioning!)

This review of some of the pertinent stages of development in cross-cultural sensitivity and racial identity provides helpful context for understanding some of the observations of Gita Mehta, who wrote insightfully and cleverly about the marketing of the mystic East to the West. Consider this one:

“The trick to being a successful guru is to be an Indian, but to surround yourself with increasing numbers of non-Indians. If this is impossible, then separate your Indian followers from your Western followers in mutually exclusive camps. That way, one group accepts the orgies of self-indulgence as revealed mysticism and the other group feels superior for not have been invited to attend.” ~ Gita Mehta

Wondering what comes after Minimization? That’s the stage most people are in, by the way, at least in the U.S. The next stage is Acceptance.

In Acceptance, a person fully recognizes their own, rich cultural identity. They also accept that other cultures have differences that are more than superficial. And they are curious about those differences.

​A person in the Acceptance stage holds onto their own core values, while acknowledging that their ways are not necessarily better or worse than those of other cultures — they are just different. And those differences make a difference in how people of different cultures work, and could work together.
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In Acceptance, curiosity is the predominant feeling. Cognitively, a person is gaining knowledge and developing a more complex understanding of cultural differences. The developmental challenge is to refine one’s analysis of cultural contrasts, between one’s own and others’ cultures.

This can lead to Adaptation, in which a person has gained the skills to behave sensitively in other cultural contexts. A person at this stage can communicate more effectively cross-culturally, and see the world from the point-of-view of other cultures. This person may be gaining skills at code-switching.

For ex-pats, global nomads, and world citizens — people with deep and prolonged cross-cultural immersion — continued development of knowledge and skills may lead to the final stage, Integration.

The racial identity model is fascinating too. I won’t sketch out the other stages for people of color here, other than to mention that after Immersion comes Internalization. At that stage, a person is secure in their own racial identity, and their affirming attitudes to their own ethnic or cultural identity “become more expansive, open and less defensive.” [ix]

While those in Immersion may prefer to remain among people of shared identity, those in Internalization are ready to be in meaningful relationships with white folks who respect their identity, as well as to build coalitions with people who have other kinds of marginalized identities.

My Chinese American acquaintance, Linda, might well have been (or by now be in) this stage. That’s true also of the Indian and Indian American folks affiliated with Sri Acharya and his community.
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There’s a separate, somewhat different set of stages for racial development in white people. All of these models — the DMIS, and the racial identity development schema for both people of color and white people — are well worth learning more about. But for purposes of this article, I’ll stop here.

It’s Complicated

There are many reasons Westerners turn to Eastern spirituality. I have introduced six of them here:

1. The intrinsic appeal of Eastern traditions and their content — concepts, practices, stories, scriptures, etc.

2. The ability to encounter a tradition afresh, with a clean slate — in contrast to the baggage one may carry from one’s own tradition, and the particular, intimate history one has with it

3. Personality traits like high Openness to new experiences and cultures, which may predispose a person to be a seeker spiritually

4. The savvy marketing of Eastern traditions to Westerners, which may use Orientalism to the benefit of particular Eastern teachers or communities

5. Being in the questioning stage of faith development, often with some degree of rejection of or distancing from one’s faith of origin

6. Being in a stage of development that leads one to be open to — or even needful of — Eastern perspectives, in terms of cross-cultural contact and personal racial identity

There may well be other reasons that I have not touched on here. If you see one I missed, feel free to name it in the comments!

For any particular person, one, several, or all of these could be in play.

If you are a Westerner who has had some level of involvement with Eastern religions or spiritual practices, which of the above factors resonate with your own experience?

What I Am NOT Saying

To be clear, I am not saying that Westerners should or should not turn to the East. I’m simply saying that why and how that happens is complex.

I believe there is value in understanding why we do the things we do. Both for the individual in their personal journey, as well as for recognizing patterns across groups.

Wherever your journey takes you, I wish you insight, growth, and well-being.

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

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
How A Cult Is Like An Onion … The End of Silence — On Spiritual Bypassing and the Costs of Denial … Is This Normal? Meditation Surprises

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

Endnotes

[i] “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study” by K.L. Jang, W.J. Livesely, and P.A. Vernon, September 1996 in The Journal of Personality. Accessed at PubMed March 2025.

[ii] Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta, 1979.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] This section draws on Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning by James W. Fowler, 1981.

[vi] I was introduced to this model in training sessions offered in October 2013 by Adam Robersmith and Jill McAllister, as part of the fall retreat of the Heartland Chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. In this section, I draw on understanding developed there, as well as on Bennett directly.

[vii] “Intercultural Competence for Global Leadership” by Milton J. Bennett, as provided by the Intercultural Development Research Institute, with this note:This reading is an edited compilation of two articles by Milton J.

• Bennett: “Developing Intercultural Competence for Global Managers” in Reineke, Rolf-Dieter (Editor) (June, 2001)
• Interkulturelles Managment. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, ISBN: 3–409–11794–6 and “An Intercultural Mindset and Skillset for Global Leadership” from Conference Proceedings of Leadership Without Borders: Developing Global Leaders. Adelphi, MD: National leadership Institute and the Center for Creative Leadership, University of Maryland University College, 2001.

[viii] From a handout on Racial Identity Development drawn from “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial identity Development Theory in the Classroom” by Beverly Daniel Tatum, in the Harvard Educational Review, 1992.

[ix] Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

Burying Kokopele

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had lost his song completely by Thanksgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later I will need my altar with its symbolic objects — the fossils from a southern Indiana creek bed, the flaming chalice made by a potter in my church, yes, a waxy scarlet leaf from Premadari, and several long, gray-white tail feathers Koko had shed — but there is no need for props out here. All of nature is our shrine.
​

​I place Kokopele gently in the earth, returning him to the Source. As I sprinkle cool, damp soil into the hole and pat it level, I feel a darkness close over me as well. Kokopele, my trusting trickster spirit, is gone. Perhaps some of my own fertile magic is dead too.

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

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

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

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

Millions of U.S. Americans have been involved in cultic groups, with ~500,000 belonging to high control groups at any one time, and something like 85,000 entering and leaving cultic groups each year.[i]
​

​These numbers are likely underestimates. That’s because people are often unaware of the nature of such a group while they are in it. Plus, once they become aware (if they do), group-instilled fears and societal stigma may deter people from naming their cultic involvement as such.[ii]

The point is, getting involved with a high demand group is a common occurrence. Sticking with Americans for comparison, a similar number of people are likely involved with culty groups each year as the number of people who experience a stroke.[iii]

Having gotten engulfed in a high demand group, how — and why — does a person get out?

Opting Out

The most common way people exit cults is by leaving on their own.
These Walkouts, as they are sometimes called, may realize that something is off with the group, without having enough knowledge about high control groups to realize that they were in one. That describes me and the group I left in 2006. In that way, I was typical.

Janja Lalich explains, “Some people leave the group … knowing only instinctively that for their emotional or physical survival they had to get out.”[iv] Check.
​
A person often reaches the limit of how many contradictions they can hold about the group while continuing to operate within it. They become “disillusioned, fed up, or burnt out, or they realize the cult is not what it said it was,” explains Margaret Singer.[v]

​In the early years of my old group — long before my time — the teacher encouraged students to believe they would reach enlightenment in twelve years, a typical expectation in spiritual settings in his homeland. Residents gradually increased their sitting time until they were meditating four hours per day.[vi]

Yet, no one attained samadhi. Twelve years came and went, and little changed. Except, so slowly it wasn’t noticed, an escalating level of dependence cultivated by the teacher.

The teacher — who never outright said he was illumined himself, though it was everywhere implied and assumed — eventually modified expectations. In the West, he now said, it would likely take them more like 25 years to reach enlightenment.
​
Later, the goal posts were moved again, to 50 years. Finally, the teacher began to convey that it could take lifetimes — and his true students would return for as many lifetimes as it took to reach the goal.

The carrot held out by the ashram would forever dangle just ahead of them, never to be obtained.

When accusations of sexual impropriety by the founder emerged, a group of his early students could no longer repress their doubts or suspend their disbelief. After fifteen devoted years at the ashram, a dozen people left.

They all cited the same reason. The founder had become stifling. “He degenerated from a teacher to a father figure they neither needed nor wanted, and ultimately evolved into a guru whose authority was not to be questioned.”[vii]

Fizzling Out

If a group’s core charismatic figure disappears from the scene, participation may fizzle out.

The leader may choose to leave the group. (Cult leadership can get boring after a decade or two.)[viii] He or she may be convicted of a crime and jailed or deported. Mutinous ex-followers may kick him out of the community. Or, like the founder of my old group, the leader may die.

Some explanation will have to be made for this departure. Whether the leader left voluntarily, was jailed, faced a coup, or perished, the community will need a story to make meaning of this turn of events.

In a group where all allegiance flowed to the leader — and all power ultimately flowed from him — his disappearance is a major destabilizing force. Some groups don’t make it.

My old group was in this stage when I moved cross-country to work for them. For years I chalked up much of the confusion and dysfunction I witnessed (and experienced) there to a haze of grief and disorientation. I now understand there was much more to the story. But that was a piece of it.
​
They have made it several more decades. An early pronouncement that there would be no successor teachers — and the presence of the founder’s widow as heir-apparent — prevented a struggle for rights of succession. There would be no factions, no split, and no large-scale drifting apart.

By the time the widow died, remaining true believers had articulated a series of principles the group would follow to ensure it remained true to the founder’s blueprint. A friend jokingly calls this The Purity Wars.

I suspect the group’s increasing rigidity in retreats and teachings alienated more than a few people who had started coming closer to the group’s orbit — and decided, instead, to back away while still on the outer perimeter.

While there is no named successor to take the place of the founder, just a legal entity and its board, this simply means that soft power prevailed. And thus, those who effectively use soft power have positioned themselves at the top of the hierarchical culture, which continues on.

Some groups simply dissolve and disperse after the core charismatic figure is gone, in however short or long a time.

Though my group has continued on, I have heard about individuals who chose to leave once the teacher was no longer there in the flesh. I suspect some, at least, have gone looking for sources of charismatic authority elsewhere, to replace the lost supply. I have heard stories of several who wound up in other groups with enthralling teachers.

Back in my old group, the remaining true believers may well be following a pattern that is not uncommon in Eastern religious groups when a cult leader dies — waiting for him to reincarnate so they can return to their former way of life, with him at the center.[ix]

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if the group meets “success” by worldly criteria. In the fullness of time, its purpose can still be met. If the few remaining true believers slowly die off, until no one is left, they can still sustain themselves with this story that all will be united again in cosmic time.

Dying Out

In other situations, it is not (only) the founder, but one or more followers in a high control group, who leave the group through death.

Cults whose violence risks, and sometimes takes, lives may be among the better-known examples of high control groups.
​

You’ve probably heard about the 1978 murder-suicide of almost a thousand people in Jonestown, British Guyana, at the behest of Jim Jones, founder of the Pentecostal-leaning People’s Temple. Almost the entire commune died from cyanide-poisoned fruit punch, or like Jones himself, gunshot.

I remember well coverage on Waco, Texas, in 1993. In a showdown between the feds and David Koresh at his Branch Davidian compound, he and eighty followers lost their lives. Government actors made poor decisions that contributed to the tragedy, but one cannot help but wonder why Koresh didn’t let his people go. It seems that cult leaders tend to prefer martyrdom to surrender.

Another headline-grabber was the apparent mass suicide, in 1997, by members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate in San Diego, California.
​

Another group with violent events in this same time period, though one I don’t recall hearing about then, was The Order of the Solar Temple (OTS). It was noteworthy for ritualistic murders and suicides of 69 people in Canada, Switzerland, and France in 1994 and 1995. A fringe New Age group, OTS members believed they were on earth to fulfill a cosmic mission. When the group self-destructed, two leaders talked about their desire for a “departure … even more spectacular” than in Waco.

These and other examples of headline cult news — with in-depth attention to Heaven’s Gate and the Democratic Worker’s Party — are explored in Bounded Choice, which endeavors to understand how true believers become motivated to take such drastic actions.[x]

Departure by death need not always be dramatic. In my old group, now 50-some years after the ashram’s founding, a number of long-time residents have met their natural death. This may be the ultimate exit for the remaining true believers there.
​

​And some of the tragic deaths that end cult members’ lives happen on a smaller scale. For example, 38-year-old Ian Thorson died in the Arizona desert after being ejected from Diamond Mountain University, a neo-Buddhist organization then led by Michael Roach. At this point in 2012, Thorson and his wife appeared to suffer from mental health issues and be mutually dangerous to each other.[xi]

​But a high control group does not invite scrutiny from law enforcement or mental health providers, not even when lives are at risk. A cult will always put organizational interests over those of individuals.

So at the behest of university trustees, instead the couple with a known history of domestic violence was — together! — banished from the community, with nowhere to go and no one to help them.

Thorson’s death was attributed to dehydration. But it reads to me like it might more accurately be described as the result of being squeezed out from the group, as soon as he became more liability than resource to the organization.[xii]

Which brings us to those who leave because they are …

Squeezed Out

A high control group always places its own needs first, above those of individual participants. Anyone who is deemed as a threat to the organization — or fails to contribute enough time, money, obeisance, or prestige to the group — may simply be pushed out.

These Castaways, as they are sometimes called in the cult literature, may struggle with guilt and shame, taking at face value the rationale given for their ejection — which is likely to blame them for not measuring up. Without sensitive support from someone who understands cultic dynamics, they may be gripped by grief and loneliness. They may even develop suicidal impulses.[xiii]

My old group provides several illustrations of different ways people can be squeezed out.

There was one troubling incident related to my group that I learned about when I researched them online, before moving there. A long-time ashram resident had been arrested, while traveling, for indecent solicitation of a child — a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl.

The group treated this as an aberration completely unrelated to the community’s culture. They responded by banning the offender from the ashram.

​When I learned about this illegal and immoral behavior, I had heard no other concerns tied to the ashram. So, to my later regret, I accepted the organization’s explanation that this was one bad apple, not reflective of the group’s ethics.

This man had strayed badly from the founder’s teachings, they said. I now believe that this student was actually repeating behaviors of the founder. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as the expression goes. The relevant point here is that the group had to kick out the person who had so publicly offended, who might besmirch their reputation.

More recently, since people have begun learning about gutting allegations against the founder — and his own transgressions with females at the ashram, including adolescents — those who ask questions or express concern have been squeezed out.

A woman — I’ll call her Theresa — had been living at the commune for some years. She loyally participated in its lifestyle of spiritual practices, group meals and so on. When Theresa learned about the allegations, she took them very seriously. She personally knew one of the victims and believed what she had conveyed about her experience as a young teen.

Before long, ashram leaders asked Theresa to meet with them. They informed her that she was being “relieved of kitchen duties.” (The implication — she was impure and should not touch their food. You can’t make this stuff up!)
​
Theresa suggested to them that they were deliberately shunning her in hopes that she would choose to leave. The leaders did not deny this. Instead, they piled on — accusing Theresa of dishonoring their spiritual practice, their beloved teacher and so on.

​A student of nonviolence, Theresa clung to the truth as she understood it in that situation. She told the leaders that she cared about them, and that how they are responding is not spiritual and only reinforces the concerns that people have.

The kicker: the leaders did not show any sign of caring. Theresa shared that they “just nodded at me like I was full of [crap].” She went on, “I wished them both well and then told them the meeting felt really creepy to me.”
​
(Theresa also tried to find out, while in the process of moving out, if she could still meditate in the group’s meditation hall. The response that came back was, “Only [teacher’s] students may meditate [there]” — meaning, not Theresa anymore! She gently asked to have this guidance put in writing. But the leader, looking nervous, declined and scooted away.)

People in not-so-inner circles have also been cut off — without notice.

When they learned of concerns about the founder, members of a nearby meditation group affiliated with the ashram started discussing them together. The simple act of reading materials, trying to understand what is true and considering together what to do, was evidently reported back to the ashram by someone tied to the group who also works for the organization. That person indicated she and her spouse would not remain in the group unless it decided to continue working strictly with teachings of the ashram, its founder and spiritual program.

Only one person in the group (other than the employee) had any contact directly with an ashram representative. In the course of a brief phone conversation — basically friendly chit chat after addressing a practical question — this person mentioned she was aware of some controversy going on at the ashram. The representative flatly denied anything was happening that was affecting ashram folks at all, and he promptly ended the call.

Soon after, the caller discovered she had been omitted from a special mailing that she normally would have received; it appeared she had been dropped from a circle she’d previously been part of, simply for having used the word “controversy.”

Subsequently, the entire local group — with one traveling member now back in the area — concluded their discussion about the allegations. They made the decision to disaffiliate from the ashram, and turn to other spiritual resources.
This was shared with the person in the group who worked for the organization, for her own decision-making. No other contact took place with the ashram.

A week later, many members of the group (now minus the employee and spouse) were left out of a mailing about upcoming retreats. Some stopped receiving print publications or emails they routinely received from the meditation center before, too. It appears a number of changes were made to the meditation center’s contact lists, reducing or eliminating communication for some group members — though on what basis is not entirely clear.

This is nothing new for the organization. People who left in an 80s exodus were more overtly shunned, when they would later come across ashram residents in town. Loyalists would cross to the other side of the street to avoid the the defectors, averting their eyes. So much for family-like bonds.

Shunning is a serious issue in high-control groups. It is “a silent form of bullying and rejection.” Psychology tell us that “the brain registers exclusion as physical pain that cuts deeper and lasts longer than bodily injury.” For innately social creatures like human beings, shunning can cause long-term mental health difficulties.[xiv]

Counseled Out [xv]

​The other way people may leave a controlling group is through an intervention. Just as loved ones may gather around a person to express concerns about drinking, drug use, or hoarding, they can observe how group involvement has negatively affected a person, and ask them to learn and reflect on this.

An intervention is typically arranged by family members who are working with a team of professionals, or at least an exit counselor — someone experienced in educating group members and their families about cultic dynamics and the methods of influence they systematically use.

The aim is to provide factual information about the specific group, how such groups work in general, and to provide a safe, supportive space apart from the controlling group where the member can re-evaluate their involvement.

The presence of someone else who has successfully left the group can be extremely helpful as “proof of life” after cult involvement. Groups often implant fears about what happens to those who leave, so a counter-example can be freeing.
​

​There was a time when some interventions were conducted without the person’s consent. That was a response to some groups’ increased vigilance against letting members out of their grip even temporarily, lest they be presented — and choose to take — the opportunity to engage in an educational process and reassessment of their membership.
​
If coercion is the very thing you want to combat, you should not use it yourself. Forcibly removing someone from what they consider their home and family can cause trauma, no matter how well intended.

Fortunately newer, cooperative ways of working with members and families have been developed. A mutually-agreed process of learning and consultation has now long been the standard for exit counseling.

While a small percentage of people leave cultic groups this way, it is a valuable option for friends and family concerned about a loved one.

The Official Story

In its telling of its own history, a group can choose to acknowledge former members — or not.

If it does acknowledge them, it can offer its own story about why they left. One former member — who I now understand to have been a sexual abuse victim of the founder — was sometimes written off as having been mentally unbalanced, and having to leave the group on that account.

Trusting meditators, of course, might not think to ask which came first — the group involvement or the mental illness.

It seems quite likely to me now that, like someone in a violent domestic relationship, it was the situation that was crazy-making — not the person who was, on her own, off-balance. Sexual and spiritual abuse by your supposed spiritual teacher, and institutional betrayal by the community you had considered your family, would do a number on anyone.

Some past walkouts from my group were described by long-timers who stayed as simply not committed enough to stick with it. In other words, if there was any fault to be found, it would be attributed to those who left, not to the group.

​I suspect for others of us who came and went — many in my cohort of young adults — that pattern was publicly chalked up to being “on a family path,” in contrast to the monastic lifestyle that became the norm at the ashram.

(Notably, it hadn’t originally been the norm — many of the founder’s first generation students had families and raised children at the commune. The founder probably felt he couldn’t get around at least some among original young adult students — the critical mass that made it possible to establish the ashram — having that inescapable desire. But that first generation certainly steered later ones away from doing likewise there. For more on the control of sexuality, including reproduction, see The Roots of Control.)

Mostly, I don’t remember my group talking about those who had come and gone in the past. Official publications barely acknowledge this fact. Explanations would only be offered if asked. Thus, silence on the subject of past members may be the norm.

If I had known, prior to moving out there, how many people had come and gone before me, I would’ve asked a lot of questions about that before making my own decision.

So, omissions that are part of a cult’s deception are not just about the teacher(s) or group and its history. The (deliberately) missing information is also about past participants.

Upshot

Most people opt out of cults — walking away when they realize something’s not right, or that the group isn’t delivering on its promises.
Others fizzle out when the leader is gone and a group disintegrates.

Some members are squeezed out, while yet others remain members until they die — be it a natural death at the end of a long life, or a premature one in which the cult had a hand.

Finally, a few have the opportunity of a supportive intervention, and manage to wake up and choose to leave at that time.

If you are in a group, and considering any kind of change that would put you significantly more in the group’s field of influence, I will give you the advice I wish someone had give me before I took such a step:

Find out who has already come and gone, and how, and why.

And don’t just take the group’s word for it. Look for neutral third-party sources, or better yet, locate and ask the ex-members themselves.

The only way to know for sure what led people to leave a group — and what they experienced while they were in it — is to ask them directly.

​Endnotes

[i] Per Michael Langone, former executive director of the International Cultic Studies Association, in Prevalence, accessed 1–2–25.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] According to Stroke Facts from the Centers for Disease Control, accessed 1–2–25, almost 800,000 people per year experience a stroke.
[iv] Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships by Janja Lalich (1994, 2006, 2023).
[v] Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace by Margaret Thaler Singer (1995, 2003).
[vi] The events I’m recapping here are described in a news feature published by a California newspaper, chronicling events from the mid-80s: “A Split at the Razor’s Edge” by John Hubner, San Jose Mercury News (April 30, 1989; accessible to subscribers of the newspaper).
[vii] Ibid. Ironically, I understand it was ashram officials who had taken the initiative to invite this coverage — perhaps having expected they could shape the story consistent with their own aims.
[viii] The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad (1993).
[ix] Take Back Your Life, Lalich.
[x] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich (2004).
[xi] “Psychosis, Stabbing, Secrecy & Death at a Neo-Buddhist University in Arizona” by Matthew Remski, in Elephant Journal (May 4, 2012). Accessed 1–2–25 at https://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/05/psychosis-stabbing-secrecy-and-death-at-a-neo-buddhist-university-in-arizona/.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Take Back Your Life, Lalich.
[xiv] “How Religious Shunning Ruins Lives” by Fern Schumer Chapman, 3–27–24, Psychology Today (article online here).
[xv] This section draws from two previously cited works — Lalich, Take Back Your Life and Singer, Cults In Our Midst.

When one learns how commonplace cultish behavior is among humans, it can make a person feel a bit … guarded. Over the past year, as I’ve come to see my old meditation group in a new light, that’s really been brought home to me.
​
I have literally had dreams about creating a cult-proofing curriculum for young people. Similar to programs on healthy individual relationships, training on healthy vs. unhealthy group dynamics ought to be available and used in mainstream religious organizations, high schools and colleges.

Let’s start with what kind of group we are talking about, before getting into how to know what you are looking at.

Defining The Cult-iverse

My group happened to be spiritual in nature (Eastern / syncretic). But high control dynamics can develop in almost any human institution or arena. Such groups can be religious, political, therapeutic, or even commercial. Spiritual ones can be Christian, Eastern, New Age, etc.

They are often seen as existing on a continuum of influence and control. As depicted in the continuum below (debuted in Who Joins Cults), the early, mild stages of influence may seem quite positive — group experiences that make you feel good and want to come back for more.

Potential harm increases as you move down the continuum of cultiness. Tongue in cheek, these are my stages:

• “Wait, is this love bombing?”
• “Perfection, here I come”
• “Leader, I’m not worthy!”
• Beware of Zombies
• Crime Zone
• Resistance Is Futile (borg cube — you WILL be assimilated, and perhaps disposed of at the will of the hive leader)

​

​At one end of the continuum are nearly benign groups. No one seems to put a 100% benign group on the continuum. But add a shade or two of omission and coercive influence, and you are getting into concerning territory.

At the other extreme are groups that so fully indoctrinate their members — and so rationalize their actions based on their particular transcendent ideology — that they may routinely engage in criminal behavior, or end in a blaze of violence.

On the Continuum

The word “cult” is often reserved for those at the extremes.Since “cult” has become associated with sensationalized cases and media coverage, people may be more likely to automatically dismiss the possibility that they could be vulnerable to recruitment, when the subject is cults.

But keep in mind that cultishness comes in many degrees and flavors. And even groups that end in apocalyptic imagery — think the Jonestown massacre — didn’t necessarily start out sounding nutso. (Jim Jones first drew people through his charismatic preaching on community responsibility and the imperative of racial integration. What’s not to like?)

More descriptive, neutral-sounding synonyms for cults are high control groups or high demand groups.

These groups do not (necessarily) overtly mistreat people in the way that prisoners of war in totalistic systems may be treated — literally imprisoned, like in Robert Jay Lifton’s classic study of “brainwashing” in China. (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China by Robert Jay Lifton, 1961)

Instead, the kind of influence they wield over people is subtle — at least at the beginning. And influence or pressure is increased gradually, once people are hooked on the belonging and other benefits.

​Depending on the particular group and how deeply involved a person gets, their experience could be purely positive… a mix (there is always some good, otherwise people would not be attracted and stick with it)… mildly damaging… or deeply harmful.

Keep in mind that for some people in some groups, it takes many years before any negative effects are observed. One can also experience harm without realizing it; participants may be taught to interpret negative effects as positive signs of their progress, for example, or simply to deny them.

It is common, too, for people at different levels of closeness to the same group — or who are involved at different points in time — to have different kinds of experiences.

Once you understand that almost anyone can be hooked by a controlling group at some point in their life — especially those who believe themselves to be invulnerable — it’s natural to want to protect yourself and those you love from potential harm.
​
The needs that drive people to seek and explore do not go away; so how does one go about trying to meet valid needs, while managing the risks of culty close encounters?

What to Watch For

Following are some of the characteristics of high control groups often found on lists. If you are considering whether a group with which you are involved — or considering getting involved — might be controlling, you can check off any criteria that sound like the group, as you go through this list.

• Espouses high ideals; attract people who are spiritually hungry or want to make a difference, who seek belonging, or who are dissatisfied with mainstream culture.
• Usually replicate family-like bonds among participants. The closer into the inner circle you get, the tighter the bonds. But even those on the outside may be attracted by this experience of warm community.

• Inside language is taught and used. Sharing the lingo may contribute to people feeling a sense of belonging and specialness. Group jargon and slogans can short circuit critical thinking, as well, constricting how members think and talk.​
• Single-minded about spreading the teachings to more and more people — bringing in new participants (and funds), whether via print or digital communications, in-person experiences, or online experiences.
• Creation of controlled environments, whether on a temporary basis during instruction (e.g., camps or retreats) or full-time, living together in groups such as in a shared home, ashram or compound.
• Zealous commitment to the leader/founder, whether alive or dead; his teachings and practices are regarded as Truth, as law; she may be regarded not simply as a teacher but as an object of veneration; others may seem incapable of exercising their own judgment, but rather always cite the founder’s teachings/example to make decisions.

(Note that the zeal can be directed instead to the group’s ideology; the absence of an elevated teacher does not guarantee that a group is free from cultic dynamics.)
​

• Questioning and dissent are discouraged, whether overtly or subtly.
• All good things a person has gained from their involvement are attributed to the leader / group / practice / higher power. All problems are assigned to the individual practitioner. Likewise, at the societal level, the group’s program is regarded as the root solution to all problems.
• Dependence is cultivated — people become progressively more dependent on the group the longer they are involved or the closer they come. This dependence may be emotional (group meets connection needs), spiritual (group provides foundation for one’s spirituality), financial (a resident may not be able to make it outside), etc.
• Leadership dictates how people should behave; this may flow from the teachings/practices, with greater degrees of control exerted as one moves closer in.
• Impression management — the leader/founder’s or group’s image is carefully developed and protected. Lying by omission is common, as are other forms of deception. Triangulation (indirect communication), shunning of ex-members, minimizing concerns, and questioning of others’ motives are also common.
• Lack of informed consent. A person does not know at the outset where their involvement with the group could take them in time — where it is designed to take at least some of those who get involved. People are carefully paced through the group’s process of learning the teachings and practices, imbibing the belief system, building relationships within the community, and devoting more and more of their lives to the teachings / organization.
• Authoritarian style of leadership. The leader or a cabal at the top makes the real decisions, whatever the org chart might say. Genuine democracy is antithetical to cults. Ditto for true transparency. The chief virtue of followers is unquestioning loyalty.

• The leader/founder or successors are not accountable to any external authorities (unlike clergy in mainstream denominations, teachers, licensed mental health professionals, etc.). Misconduct of various kinds by leaders of such groups is common. This includes sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and other abuses of power.

While the above list is geared toward spiritual or self-help oriented groups, core attributes will show up in other kinds of high demand groups too.

Is a group a high control group if it only checks a few boxes? Not necessarily.
Many religious groups have charismatic leaders, attract idealistic people who are seeking belonging, and may use language not used in secular society.
​
These things alone do not make a group cultish. But if indoctrination, isolation, and emotional contagion are used systematically to trap people in the group and control their behavior — generally for the glory of a particular leader, ideology or goal — well, beware. You have entered the continuum!

Interested in more resources on how to identify a high control group? Matthew Remski provides a good summary of the most widely known frameworks.

For more on how cults camouflage their true nature, check out Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance and Surprises, Blinders & Lies.

An earlier, 3-part series describes ways that controlling groups have similar dynamics to 1:1 controlling relationships, drawing on my experience with my old meditation group: Power & Control in Collectives — Reading Between the Power Moves — The Roots of Control.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Know Thyself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Your Guardrails

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

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

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

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

Do Some Digging

Ask teaching individuals or entities questions like these:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There should be real answers to these questions.
​​

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

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

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

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

Gauge Group Health on Key Criteria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In recent posts, I’ve looked at

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

​

​Streams of Influence

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

1 — American Religiosity

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Hence, a competitive marketplace of spirituality has been the norm since early in this nation’s history.
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The self-improvement culture of the country, its rugged individualism, and its waves of religious refugees have guaranteed that lots of people turn to religion or spirituality in their search for a good and meaningful life. Religious community is also one of the go-to balms for the excesses of individualism. We are a society of people seeking fulfillment, with a history of religious fervor — and weakened social safety nets, too.
​

​The Constitutional separation of church and state also means that the government treads lightly in the realm of religion. Religious groups can do a lot here, while being exempt from taxes, and subject to far less scrutiny than groups not identified as religious. No one wants to be accused of interfering with others’ religious freedom.
If you’re objecting that Americans aren’t as religious as they used to be — all the “nones” and “spiritual but not religious folks” — that seems to me a distinction without a difference. What we are seeing isn’t the end of seeking so much as it is a turning away from traditional institutions like churches and denominations. And a turning toward all sorts of alternative sources of answers, practices, community. These trends feed right into the problem of meditation malpractice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Rocha observed,

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

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

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

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

3 — Social Dynamics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Perfect Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

Adverse effects of spiritual practices were well-known within the religious contexts in which those practices originated. Yet as meditation and mindfulness moved from monastics to the masses, this essential information has been increasingly withheld.

Why?

I believe it has everything to do with attempting to separate the practice from its religious roots, to sell it to a secular public.

You Can Take Meditation Out of the Religion, But…… can you take the religion out of meditation? If you present it in a lay-friendly, pseudo-secular, science-sounding way?

I don’t think so. Not entirely.

The Buddhist monk in colonial Burma who first started teaching meditation to laypeople wasn’t trying to take the religion out of it. Quite the contrary. Amid all the Christian missionaries running around, he was trying to keep his people Buddhist.

My old meditation group presented its method as universal and inter-spiritual, suitable for a person of any religious background, or none. That was a good part of the draw for me, along with the promised practical benefits of the spiritual practices.

But when it came right down to it, the program was rooted in a universalized form of Hinduism. Other traditions of East and West were incorporated in and interpreted through the Hindu lens of the founder. It’s no coincidence that the loaded language of that group (a high-control group, I finally realized) was heavy on Sanskrit.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), acknowledges his aim to remove the religious clothing — if not the actual religious worldview behind it — from mindfulness meditation.

He believes that mindfulness ultimately does not belong to Buddhism, but speaks to “universal qualities of being human.” He was also well aware that science, not spirituality, was the key to getting mindfulness accepted into the medical model and secular settings. [i]

“Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism”..? [ii]

Kabat-Zinn intentionally developed and described mindfulness practices in ways that would downplay its Buddhist origins, so as not to undermine “our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.” He pitched his program to medical colleagues as a way to offer “relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga.”
​

Yet, his efforts were inspired by a vision he had at a meditation retreat, at the Insight Meditation Society. He realized that his “karmic assignment” or personal dharma was to “share the essence of meditation and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them .., with those who would never come to” a religious retreat center.
​
His ultimate goal? To relieve the suffering of individuals, to foster awakening, and even to help bring about a spiritual Renaissance that would enable the whole planet to flourish.

Quite noble. Also pretty darn religious. Specifically, Buddhist.

Mindfulness has many meanings. It’s used as a catch-all term, understood by Kabat-Zinn to be explicitly tied to “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddadharma.” Mindfulness can be used “as a place-holder for the entire dharma,… [carrying] multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously.” Early papers on MBSR recognized its roots in Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism, as well as “yogic traditions” like Vedanta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ramana Maharshi.

“Mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one,” Kabat-Zinn writes. He lifts up the need for advocates like himself to embody loyalty and vision “in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership, education, etc.”

In other words, it’s not enough to have integrated an essentially spiritual practice with “important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances” (which are made invisible) into mainstream medicine — champions of mindfulness want to penetrate all other major social institutions, too.

While Kabat-Zinn’s most immediate hope in his clinic teaching MBSR has been to ease the suffering of people in pain, he notes that what people learn in the clinic can take hold in their lives. Indeed, for many, formal meditation becomes “an ongoing feature of one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.” He’s pleased when clinic participants learning MBSR exclaim, “This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life.”
​

Kabat-Zinn knows that in the freedom-of-religion U.S., Buddhism must be extracted from mindfulness — at least in its language and presentation — in a setting that serves the general public.
​
But he still believes that the teachers of mindfulness in such settings should have their own fervent practice. They should sit long meditation retreats at centers (“a laboratory requirement” for teacher training), study with teachers from (usually) Buddhist traditions with well-defined lineages, and be firmly rooted in what sounds to me like Buddhist cosmology or theology.

In turn, these teachers in secular settings will be capable of offering “direct transmission” to the people they teach in any group course. The student group in such a class, he suggests, is functionally a sangha.

Such teachers, Kabat-Zinn writes, should not rely explicitly on Buddhist frameworks or vocabulary in teaching. Instead, they should cite scientific evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness, draw from direct experience with the practice, and help students accumulate and learn from their own direct experience.

In sum, Kabat-Zinn stresses the importance of “embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development.”

Sounds to me like a well-intentioned, humanitarian, culturally astute, and deeply religious endeavor. Sounds like stealth evangelism, 21st-century U.S. Western Buddhist style.
​

​~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thought experiment: How would decision-makers and end-users respond if a movement grew to take Christian contemplative practices, deeply rooted in Christian theology and culture, into secular settings? Would heart-centered prayer (or whatever was chosen, and however it was renamed) be threaded throughout American institutions and culture within a few decades? Would the same sorts of people who have championed Buddhist-style meditation regard quietly Christian practices as equally appropriate?

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

Buddhism and yoga seem to get a pass among many Westerners who are otherwise indifferent or averse to religious influence. Most Americans are familiar with Christian culture; whatever their own relationship (or lack of relationship) to Christianity, Abrahamic religion forms the basis of many people’s ideas of what religion is. Just because Buddhism — at least, as presented to Westerners — avoids god-talk, and offers a different diagnosis of and solution to the human predicament than Judeo-Christian faiths, does not mean that its worldview and practices are not religious.

What happens when a person turns to (quietly Buddhist-rooted) mindfulness practices for purely practical reasons? If one just wants to manage anxiety, develop the skill of detachment, or improve patience, can they keep it at that?

The Accidental Buddhist (or Hindu)

Let’s return to Dan Lawton, a young mindfulness teacher whose spiritual crisis I described in a piece on the adverse effects of meditation.

A “firm secularist” when he attended his first 10-day meditation intensive as a young man, Lawton did a breathing practice and an attending-to-your-bodily-feelings practice as a part of the retreat. It got intense. A lot of suffering came up; he remembers letting out a blood-curdling scream. He kept going through it, and got to the other side.

“And then I spent the next three months in uninterrupted bliss,” Lawton told Rachel Bernstein. “And so this was the experience that really made me convert. And I didn’t have a context and I didn’t understand that experience at all.” [iii]
Lawton explains that that experience

“reorganized my entire reality. And it essentially made me reliant upon Buddhist ideas, because there was no other framework that I had at that point to explain what happened to me.” [emphasis mine]
​

​Over a decade of practicing mindfulness, and teaching it for several years too, Lawton reaped “extraordinary benefits.”

Gradually, he absorbed much Buddhist doctrine. The idea that craving or desire is the source of all suffering particularly made sense to him.

“I was also impressed,” Lawton writes, “by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.” [iv] [emphasis mine]

Then, a decade or more after his first experience, at another meditation retreat, Dan experienced a deep crisis. The distinction between himself and the world dissolved, and he “was basically unable to turn the mindfulness off,” which was debilitating and distressing. He was later diagnosed with PTSD, stemming directly from his spiritual practice.

Lawton reflects on how this experience affected him:

“It led to a deep re-examination of my own involvement with American Buddhism, with the mindfulness movement in the context of wellness…. [and] a deep examination of many of the other actors in this movement… their various motivations, different power structures that were there, the history, a lot of the confusion.

“I sometimes say that I’m not sure what was more unsettling to me, the symptoms that I experienced in the aftermath of this retreat, or the fact that I started to realize that I had been part of an organized religion, which I had never really comprehended during the time that I was in it. It was kind of like the floor fell out from under me in some ways.” [v] [emphasis mine]

Lawton felt betrayed by the practices that had previously served him so well. And he felt betrayed by the community of teachers who had talked up the positives of meditation, treated negative experiences (when mentioned at all) as normal parts of spiritual progression, never offered guardrails, nor indicated that meditation could do real harm — and had only “keep plugging” platitudes to offer when adverse effects rocked his world. [vi]

Intention vs. Impact

I assume that people who have helped popularize mindfulness, in both Buddhist and secular contexts, have done so with a desire to help other people. I doubt anyone set out to cause suffering.

Yet, what has happened has been a kind of lying by omission on the part of authorities —those who treat spiritual practices as if they can be severed from their religious roots, who downplay adverse effects if they acknowledge them at all, and who more often than not advise doubling down on a practice, even when it is not serving someone well — or blame the meditator for difficulties that are predictable.

Indeed, it appears many of the people who become teachers of meditation and mindfulness are not themselves well-trained to understand adverse effects, or to know how to support people who experience them. Is it any wonder they are unprepared to help?

Whatever the original reasons for softening the religious basis of contemplative practices —to benefit a public skittish of organized religion, to make meditation acceptable in neutral settings like hospitals and schools, or simply as a result of looking through the saffron-colored glasses of a true believer — the outcome is the same. Some people end up seeing their suffering INCREASE, in ways they never bargained for.
​

​Unless we change how we talk about, teach, and practice powerful disciplines like meditation, stories like Dan’s (and mine) will keep happening. Meditation advocates need to get real with themselves and others about the full spectrum of possibilities in these practices.

It won’t be easy. Next time I’ll explore some of the forces stacked against the meditation teacher or organization that aspires to transparency and skillful support.

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 👇
Power and Control in Groups … Into the Culti-verse ... Calming the Kundalini Fire

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Endnotes

[i] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[ii] Ibid. All quotes and paraphrasing in the section “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism” are from Kabat-Zinn’s 2011 article.
[iii] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice.
[iv] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.
[v] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. Except where otherwise indicated, the source of material in the section The Accidental Buddhist is this podcast conversation.
[vi] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.

​Out of the Cloister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the Community

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

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

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

Lost in Transmission

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

Going Universal

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

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

Omwashing

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

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

​Writing about yoga and omwashing, Sheena Sood observes that

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

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

Speaking Science

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

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

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

Untethered

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

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

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

Endnotes appear at the bottom of this post.

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

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

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

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Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following are common manifestations of the risen Kundalini:

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

Psychic experiences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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