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

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

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

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

Layer by Layer

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

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

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

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

At the Heart

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

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

Relationship Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring Around the Ruler

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

He had a handful of supporters from his earlier campaign in the Bay Area who had kept the faith. Most notable was a woman I’ll call Carrie, who provided the home that would shelter not only the guru and his wife, but additional early students.
​
As the guru’s audience grew, an inner circle of close students and housemates developed. Eventually the group would obtain a rural property on which to establish a commune. The idealistic young adults who surrounded him there built the compound with their own hard labor.

​While the teacher continued to commute to the city to give public talks, he carved out a traditional guru-student role for himself with the young residents of his new ashram. There was a bait-and-switch tactic here that could make a used car salesperson proud.

In public talks previously, the eminently humble teacher had told eager meditators that he merely pointed the way to enlightenment; each person would have to do their own traveling. Once the young seekers were firmly ensconced as residents at the ashram, however — increasingly isolated from their families and the outside world, increasingly immersed in mind-altering spiritual practices, increasingly talking and thinking in the loaded language he supplied them — the teacher changed his tune.

Now he beseeched the eager seekers to surrender to him as their guru, if they truly wanted to attain enlightenment. The students had been acclimated over years of life with the guru before this pronouncement emerged. As one escapee told me emphatically, “I never would have joined a group where the leader said, devotion to the teacher IS the path.”

The guru’s inner circle at that time would have been drawn from this group of communalists, made up of those who were most loyal, deferential and compliant. At a later stage of his life, when he struggled with the health challenges brought by age, this inner circle would include his direct caregivers.

Within that inner circle, closest to the guru and his wife were lieutenants that enforced norms on their behalf. In some groups, these positions would have formal titles (like lieutenant). I don’t think that was the case in my old group; but the function was the same, carrying out the will of the leader within the group.

It probably made the holder of such a position feel special to be so trusted. Alas, there is typically higher turnover in these positions, who are exposed to more of the ugliness at the heart of the onion, and more at risk for disillusionment, burnout and misconduct, or grabbing power for themselves, any of which would make them a threat to the leader — and thus get them removed. No one but the teacher is irreplaceable.

Among those who were enforcers for the couple at the heart of the onion, one man got into trouble with the law when — repeating patterns of the founder, only outside the group — he attempted to serve his own sexual needs with an underage girl.

As I saw myself when I worked at the ashram, and have consistently observed from afar in the twenty years since, the Board of Trustees for the organization has always been stacked with loyalists. The organization scores poorly with external bodies on things like the independence of its governing board and the transparency of its financials. This kind of insularity is a red flag that a group is likely controlling in nature. It shows that even when the leader is gone, the onion remains intact, inner ring and all.

Residents & Workers

While the inner circle would, I expect, have drawn primarily from those who lived and/or worked at the ashram, not everyone there is equally on the inside. This larger pool of people created a community that could engage with the wider world.

Some resided at the ashram, worked in the nearby community, and helped the ashram run through their contributions of labor in the kitchen or the gardens, or in maintaining the buildings and grounds.

Others took up specialized roles to support the mission of the outward-facing organization. The founder was their brand — when I was there, they even went through a rebranding phase where the web site, emails and everything else consisted of his name. That felt uncomfortable to me at the time, as I was still holding to the “he only points the way” side of the group’s propaganda.

No doubt the young enthusiasts over the decades were lauded for giving selflessly (largely anonymously, to the public) to the group’s work. Ultimately the group’s real function was to serve as a vehicle for glorifying the founder.

Students of the guru worked as volunteers or low-paid employees for public-facing programs. It began with his talks and lectures throughout the Bay Area; expanded to include a press that published a journal, and later books; special projects, such as those in the fields of health and conservation; and in time, overnight meditation retreats.

This ashram layer includes a group that doesn’t fit neatly into the schema — people who show up strictly as employees, live locally, may develop friendly relationships with the residents over time, may interact somewhat with the wider public served by the organization, but are not themselves meditators or students of the teacher. They are not exposed directly to the programs and teachings of the group.

I’m not sure how many there are in that category currently, or when it started. During my peak involvement, it included a local woman who cooked meals for the retreats, and perhaps some people who helped ship books from the press’s warehouse. This in-but-not-really-in group is depicted in my graphic as a shoot that touches all the layers from meditator-workers through the public.

Ashram Associates
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The next layer out was created later, sometime after a program of meditation retreats was well-established. What I’ll call here the Ashram Associates program was geared toward young adults when I started going to retreats. I’m not sure if it existed in some other form before that.

It used the social lever of scarcity — we have a limited number of spots, and you must apply and make your case for why you should be included. It offered the opportunity for a greater sense of intimacy within the participating cohort, and between those participants and the ashram long-timers. And it promised spiritual rewards for the deeper exploration in which we would be guided, over six months of intermittent in-person retreats, at-home work, and online connection among participants.

I participated in this program, along with many other young adults of my cohort. It proved an effective means of deeper indoctrination into the community. And it was a gateway to the next layer in — most of us ended up, sooner or later, moving to the area and living and/or working at the ashram.

For some this was a move from southern to northern California. For others, like me, it was from another region of the U.S. to the Bay Area. Still others came from other countries, even another continent.

Later a similar model was used, with the same name, but minus the focus on young adults. I suspect not enough of us “stuck” — young adults, after all, tend to be in a time of transition. Easy come, easy go. (I mean, not *really* easy — it upended my life! But we childless, early-career YAs were less tied down elsewhere.)

Subsequent cohorts included folks who were later in their careers, or even retired. Well-established and, I think, largely past the child-rearing stage. The ones I know of were professionals who had the resources, of money and time and skills, to be able to help carry out the work of the group. Most of the married ones seem to have been in relationships with people also practicing the group’s methods; they progressed inward in the onion structure together.

Participation in this program promised mature adults a sense of purpose and closer relationships, similar to the appeal for YAs. Only these folks would not soon conclude, as I had, that there was no way they could save for retirement adequately while working for the group. No, they already had that taken care of.

An overlapping category here may be those who would become program presenters. This is a structure that was developed after I left the group. The aging first-generation students were looking for ways to sustain retreats, while reducing reliance on themselves. For those offered the opportunity to serve in this way, it would have seemed a great honor to be so trusted. I gather their training was quite controlled, with scripts that required strict adherence.

Similarly, some people would come closer in other kinds of volunteer capacities, such as serving on the editorial team. They would work closely with — and be closely guided by — loyalists who were deeper/longer in.

Some of those later associates and presenters did end up moving to live near or at the ashram. As with my YA cohort, however, there was plenty of “leakage.” People who moved back outward again are seen in outer layers of the onion, or are made invisible beyond it.

The group was left with a challenge at the opposite end of the age spectrum from the one at which I entered — how to prevent older ashram associates, ones who had taken the leap to living on group property, from becoming a net drain on resources as they aged out of their productive years. I understand that some years ago, leadership adopted a rule — “voluntarily” embraced by all to whom it would one day apply — that associates would retire, and cease to live on group property, when they hit 70 years of age.

I wonder how many waves of these special programs there have actually been over the decades. Each time, the organization netted some short-term free or cheap labor and donations. Each time, one or a few people may have stuck and become long-term residents / workers, replenishing the heart of the onion that would keep it all going.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t seem to be enough. I don’t see the ashram community or the 501(c)(3) program provider surviving past the dwindling population of current residents. The remaining stalwarts may themselves have come to terms with this; those who fully embrace the teacher’s story of reality may expect that they will be reunited with him in future lifetimes, when all are reincarnated and can pick back up with the work in same way.

Retreatants

The guru expanded from public talks to overnight meditation retreats sometime in the mid-80s. These began in an existing retreat center in the Bay Area. Over a decade later, the group would establish its own retreat house, much closer to the ashram.

The guru was aging by this time, and was purposeful in training hand-picked students to learn to present his program of meditation and related practices. (When the long-timers did likewise with non-residents, they were simply replicating the train-the-trainer model.)

You can get pretty deeply indoctrinated just from retreats, which provide a focused period in a controlled environment, a closed community. Meditating together in person seems to amplify the effects of the practice. That in turn makes one more suggestible to teachings presented in that time.

(If they haven’t already, I expect someday scientists will measure how our minds affect each other. We know that our nervous systems can do this — children cue off their parents’ responses to surprising events, to know whether to respond with alertness or calm. Perhaps our alpha-states are somewhat contagious, just as emotions of various kinds can spread between us humans, who are such social creatures.)

Over time, a variety of options were developed in the retreat program. In person near the ashram, for a weekend, or a whole week. Special pilgrimages of one’s own to this sacred site of the guru. Regional retreats, held for many years in major cities throughout the U.S., and even overseas. More recently, especially since the pandemic, online retreats.
​
After the guru’s death, the retreats continued, with his long-time students facilitating workshops, and playing recordings of his talks. As a retreat-goer, after all the talks viewed, not to mention books read, and stories shared around the retreat house dining table by long-time students, it felt like I knew the teacher myself.
​​

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

Satsangs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers

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

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

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

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

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

What the Onion Structure Accomplishes

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

Moving Down the Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gradual Conditioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Is Maya… The Membranes’ Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Way You Slice It

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

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

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

I hope, though, that if the truth gets out more widely, fewer new people will get drawn in, unawares.
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Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
Seeking Safely … What I Found … What Is A High Control Group?

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Endnotes

[i] From The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, as quoted in Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[ii] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich (University of California Press, 2004).
[iii] Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandrea Stein (Routledge, Second Edition 2021).
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower Others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Trained on Safety & Support

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples: [ii]

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

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

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

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

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

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

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

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

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

Make No Idols

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

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

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

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

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

In sum:

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

Beginning, middle, and now end; I have shared what motivated me as I got involved with a meditation group as a young adult, as well as what I actually encountered when I moved cross-country to work at the ashram. What did I lose?

I did not immediately recognize all the problematic ways my affiliation with the group — and coming close to the center of things — had affected me. I see more now, almost twenty years later. I’ll start here with some of the more obvious things and work my way to the more intangible, core losses.

Money

It would be an interesting exercise to total up everything I spent to participate with the group. I’m not gonna, but it would be interesting. The tally would include books, retreats, donations, my self-funded move from Indiana to California (and my job-funded move back — other people’s money), as well as the savings I spent down while I was working there for poverty pay. I could make an educated guess at the income I forfeited by not sticking with a job at my previous level of compensation. Harder to account for is what I didn’t save for retirement during that period — because there was no margin for that — and the compounded value of that money over years, had it been invested.

Time and Prana (life energy)

This would add up dramatically too. Half hour of meditation per day at the beginning, doubled a couple years in as I added an evening session. Weekly meditation group meetings. Time planning for, traveling to and from, and attending retreats. Time spent volunteering for the organization in several capacities. About a year of my early professional life working for them. And since my departure, years of processing, trying to make sense of my experiences, sorting through what to keep and what to jettison.

Career Momentum

I was one of the luckier ones in this regard. Not only was my tenure working for the organization relatively short, but the position I held there was a continuation of my previous professional life. When I returned home to the Midwest, I then went back to a similar job as I’d been in before.

So I include this category not so much for myself, as for others who spent longer, and left their previous careers to work for the organization. For someone in the latter situation who later left the group, it meant a gap to explain and/or a bigger process of reinventing oneself.

Relationships

Again, I may have been luckier in this regard than some others who moved in close. I didn’t get sucked in far enough to isolate myself from family and old friends; and I returned to live closer to those people after a relatively short time. I did miss significant events in friends’ lives while I was off in another part of the country — I didn’t have the resources or time off as a newbie to fly back for a friend’s wedding, for example.

Probably the biggest impact for me around relationships, during my period of peak involvement, has to do with the sweetheart I was with before I started meditating. I broke up with him after three years of involvement with the group. This would likely have happened eventually anyway — but probably later. Because my assessment of that relationship and whether it was good for me was definitely influenced by the worldview of the group.
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As I was in my final week around the ashram, I shared with a friend from the group who was coming closer: “This year has been much harder than my break-up year with [old boyfriend], which was the hardest year of my life to date. But this definitely tops that. I am so relieved to be done with it.” Both of the hardest periods I had gone through in my life by that time — in close succession — were influenced by the group.
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​Idealism

The group had leveraged my idealism, first, to involve me as a participant in their programs (spending all that time and money — and enthusiastically introducing others to the practices too). Then, they leaned on my commitment, my idealism, my trust in who they presented themselves to be, to draw me out to work for them. “You can help us transform the world!” “Okay, let’s do it!”
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The environment I entered is one that at this point I consider to be unhealthy at best, exploitative at worst. And in the end, I didn’t have much to show for that year of heartfelt, banging-my-head-against-the-wall effort. I didn’t do a 180 and become a full-on cynic. But this experience definitely took the bright-eyed edge off my idealism.

Self-Acceptance

Embedded in the soaring worldview of the group was an aspiration to spiritual perfection — and the belief that it is possible for a human being to perfect themselves through their spiritual disciplines. A couple of years after I left the community in California, I wrote to the then-spiritual leader of the organization, trying to give voice to what I had experienced.

A key theme was the insidious erosion of my well-being, including my sense of self-worth. I quote myself (2008):

“Idealism and perfectionism are a tricky mix … At some point in my CA year, the balance of my thinking shifted toward deficiency rather than the divine within — I kept seeing half-empty, seeing my inadequacies, like how prone to attachment and impatience I still was. Throw in a pinch of self-judgment for carbonation, stir them together over the heat of major life changes, [ashram] subculture … wacky energy stuff, and the death of the one dear friend I had brought with me to CA (my canary), and you have… a near-implosion … as my sense of sovereignty over my [spiritual path] and life began to evaporate — transformed from liquid to gas, molecules careening in that inner cauldron, so like the trapped energy pounding inside my neck and skull.”

Before I moved out near the ashram and started working for the organization, I was able to focus on the positive aspects of the group’s worldview, which spoke to my hopeful heart, in a way that was affirming and empowering in my life. But once I was deeper in, the streak of impossible perfectionism that runs through the teachings and program took over. And it was not good for me.

​Clarity & Groundedness

Here’s what I wrote about confusion in my 2008 letter:

“It was really a grand paradox I faced — a difficulty reconciling all the positives I had experience before and sometimes still did … with some of the junk I encountered, and my energy stuff and wasting away-ness. The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ comes to mind, but I hesitate to use that term, because it does not convey the holism of the experience of contradictory inputs, how it impacted my body, heart, mind, spirit. It was quite confusing, during and after my time there. I ended up unsure of what was real around me — [at the ashram], in myself, in life. Things were not what they seemed, yet I could not fully grasp the dynamics in which I was caught up.”

Beyond the immediate, visceral confusion I felt, my experience with the group also left me with lingering metaphysical disorientation. Which ideas were mine, and which were planted and unconsciously absorbed (even if I thought I’d declined them)? I’m more focused on “practical theology” — how I live day to day — than sussing out formal beliefs. And my foundations haven’t shifted; Love has always been both ends and means for me.
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But sometimes words still come out — whether in casual conversation, in my journal, or in a more formal situation — and I wonder if those phrases, those concepts are really mine deep down, or if they belong more to the meditation teacher and his minions than to me. Deconstruction is a long process that I’m still in.

​Trust

After this dark night of the soul period, when it felt like the rug was pulled out from under me, and the community I thought I knew turned out to be something else again — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on — my sense of trust was frayed. In my 2008 letter I wrote:

“It seemed that my ‘surrender’ to this [spiritual] path, to meditation, to the ways of [the ashram/organization], had led me to chaos. There was in me a creeping distrust of surrender — the surrender to this path that I had chosen and to the spiritual forces at work in my life — and a burgeoning fear that I would not be able to get my [spiritual life] back. What could I trust? What was safe for me now? What was true for me?”

Perhaps most of all, I had lost faith in my own powers of discernment — my ability to accurately read others’ character and trustworthiness. My decision to move out to work for the group was not proving to be a good one; what did that say for my judgment?

This lack of self-trust affected future relationships. When I was back home, on a path of healing, I began earnestly searching for a life partner. Using and trusting my judgment was essential to that process. I took more time than I might have previously; I doubted my head and my gut.
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This impaired trust in my own judgment came perilously close to costing me my relationship with the man who became my husband and co-parent. By the time we met, neither of us was young. And he did not want to waste time with someone who was unable to commit. It all worked out in the end — but it could have gone otherwise.

​Sense of Safety

I’ve alluded to the unexpected, sometimes unsettling “side effects” of meditation that I experienced, starting after I had decided to move out to the group’s location, and intensifying while I was there. (I give this subject more attention elsewhere, because too many people know nothing of the risks before starting a meditation practice; I certainly didn’t.)

In my previous post about that year, I described the overriding experience I had of feeling STUCK and TRAPPED while I was there. In my 2008 letter I observed:

“In the past couple of years [since leaving CA], I have noticed that in describing my inner life to friends, I use the word ‘safe’ a lot. I am usually referring to emotional safety: freedom from judgment and pressure. Not having others around that constantly need things from me, including needing me to conform to their ideas of how things are or should be. The ability to breathe naturally and be myself, be real. Just what I was lacking there!”

Drawing on the new vocabulary I’ve gained from studying up on high control groups, I might now say that I was still shaking off the invisible manacles of coercive persuasion that I had been experiencing ever since I got involved with the group — and especially during the year I worked there.

Health

I also now suspect that the way my nervous system responded to that controlling, unsafe, ever-closing-in environment has had long-term effects on my health. I’ve described elsewhere the depression I fell into halfway through my year there.

Psychotherapist Shelly Rosen* describes a state of “frozen high energy” that can occur when someone realizes that a person or group they thought they could trust is not actually safe for them. The person may dissociate, with fear or pain lodging in the body while the mind/emotions show up as “blankness, a felt absence or forgetting.” On the spectrum of control, my particular experience with my particular group was somewhere in the middle — not the most extreme situation — but Rosen’s description resonates with me. Yes, I and my sensitive nervous system have visceral memories from my ashram year. Still.

​Rosen further lifts up findings from the research literature that interpersonal trauma is “likely to be more traumatizing than many physical events.” The worst part of an interpersonal ordeal is feeling alone and betrayed by people you had trusted.

“In cultic groups,” Rosen continues, “social pressure is constant… Traumatic stress … over-whelms and gets stuck as a result of social and emotional captivity.” Erratic behavior on the part of the cult leader(s) or group — sometimes loving, sometimes critical (in the case of my group, painfully passive-aggressive) — can lead to traumatic attachment.

According to Rosen, “manipulation, coupled with one’s being trapped or immobilized by internalized fears and traumatic attachments, are factors that can lead to the most serious trauma reactions in an individual.” She cites the common occurrence of PTSD in cult survivors — one U.S. study found PTSD rates of 61% for men, 43% for women. That’s significantly higher than for military personnel, post-deployment, cited as 10% to 25%.

I do not suspect that I experienced PTSD. I do wonder about some of the members of my cohort who were in deeper and longer than I was (and who were basically ejected, to boot, so there’s an extra dose of relational trauma — rejection).
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For myself, I see a different impact of the “frozen energy” I experienced once I was immersed more deeply in my group. Cult dynamics, Rosen explains, result “in potentially repeated betrayal traumas for group members, which trigger potent destabilizing nervous-system arousal and harm the psyches and souls of those members.”

​I suspect how this played out for me was in setting off the beginnings of a chronic illness rooted in the nervous system’s response to the perceived lack of safety. It is an invisible burden I live with, that has dramatically affected the quality of my life for a long time now.

A couple years ago, I finally got a diagnosis (which I do not share here), and I have it better managed than it once was. But this condition may be with me for the rest of my life. Though I’ll never know for sure, I think it’s very likely that the onset of this malady traces to my experience of being misled and confusingly cornered by that meditation group.
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I’m done pouring out gratitude for the good things I gained from my spiritual practice and my time involved with that group. A fuller accounting of my experience with the group — the good, the bad, and the ugly — comes out in the red. That’s my truth.

​You can subscribe here if you’d like to receive future posts in your inbox (free). A post is percolating on the role of deception in my group experience.

If you liked this post, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Power & Control in Collectives .… How I Was Primed .… Who Joins Cults

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

Source Cited
*Rosen, Shelly. “Cults: A Natural Disaster — Looking at Cult Involvement through a Trauma Lens” in Cult Recovery: A Clinician’s Guide to Working with Former Members and Families, © 2017 by the International Cultic Studies Association