Directory of Articles

I started writing online in January 2024, on the Medium blogging platform. After reflecting on that experience one year out, and realizing that having to sign up for a Medium account (albeit free) was a barrier to some readers who were interested, I decided to migrate all my posts here. I anticipate cross-posting going forward.

What's here, at a glance:  (click on any blue title to open article)

Disclaimer   About liability, copyright and so on. Applies to all articles.

Notice   Use of this site and all articles herein to train A.I. is prohibited.

Savvy Seekers & Proactive Teachers

• Seeking Safely: Tips for Meditators (or Would-Be Meditators)   10-14-24
• Safely Teaching Meditation & Mindfulness: Reducing the Risk of Harm to Students   10-29-24

A Spiral Season​: Becoming A Savvier Seeker   1-16-24     My first post, at the beginning of seeing my past experience through a new lens.

How I Was Primed: From Open Mind to Closed System    2-3-24
Early experiences made me positively predisposed, when I later encountered a group that turned out to be coercive.

My Experience in a Meditation Cult

• What I Wanted: Into the Cultiverse  4-6-24
• What I Found: At the Inscrutable Ashram  4-7-24
• What I Lost:  A More Complete Accounting of Ashram Impact  4-8-24

• Burying My Songbird: A Turning Point Revisited  3-23-25 (orig. March 2009)
• The Courage to Trust: A High Control Group Survivor on Healing from Betrayal  (12-10-25)

No one knowingly joins a cult. So what happens... and who is vulnerable?

High Control Group Primer

• Who Joins Cults & Why?  3-24-24  
• What Is A High Control Group? How to Spot Cults and Other Controlling Collectives   12-26-24
• Leaving A High Control Group: Motives and Methods of Getting Out   1-4-25
• Layers of Illusion: How A Cult Is Like an Onion   3-10-25

Smooth Operators - How Cults Deceive and Manipulate

• Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance: How A Cult Stays Hidden in Plain Sight  4-28-24
• Surprises, Blinders and Lies: More Ways Cults Are Concealed  5-3-24

• What's Love Got to Do with It? Attachment & High Control Dynamics  8-25-25
• A Sea of Legitimization: on Leveraged Trust  5-15-26

Journey to Surrender

• Engineering Surrender - Series Introduction  7-5-26​
• Establishing the Practice: First Steps  9-6-26
• more coming...

How Culty Groups Are Like 1:1 Controlling Relationships
(draws on personal experience in culty meditation group)

• Power & Control in Collectives: 5 Lessons from Domestic Violence that Apply to Controlling Groups  3-10-24
• Reading Between the Power Moves: 4 More Signs that Someone Is Trouble  3-15-24
• The Roots of Control:  A Tangled Web Out of Sight  3-21-24

My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong  
​ 5-29-24       Why I related SO MUCH to Armstrong when I read her autobiography after my own exit from a high control group.

Fallen Guru - Betrayal & Liberation

• ​​The End of Silence: On Spiritual Bypassing and the Costs of Denial   11-17-24
• All the Feels: A Year of Getting Free   11-28-24
• Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher: From Shock Toward Integration   12-1-24

• They Can't Take That Away from Me: Parsing My Passages, Holding to the Constant     8-17-25
• Journey to the Center: Visiting the Site of Spiritual Trauma    10-26-25
• Deep Currents: Settling & Sifting After My Ashram Visit   10-30-25

The Shadow Side of Meditation

• Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini   7-10-24
• Calming the Kundalini Fire: How I Stabilized Myself   7-11-24
• The Shadow Side of Meditation & Mindfulness: Stress-relief, Self-realization... or Psychosis?  7-16-24

​Meditation Malpractice & Its Roots

• ​​Five Systemic Meditation Mistakes: The Muddy Root of the Lotus   7-19-24
• ​​How Was Meditation Mainstreamed? From the Monks to the Masses  7-26-24​

• The Accidental Buddhist: How Secular Is Mindfulness?   8-11-24
• From Ardent Adoption to Rampant Risk: Four Factors that Play into Meditation Malpractice   8-23-24

Why Do Westerners Turn to the East? ​Pinpointing the Appeal  3-24-25  Explores six factors that lead people in Western nations to engage with Eastern religious traditions.

One Year On: Reflecting on a Year of Writing Online  1-14-25

Photo:  ​Me in Oompa Loompa costume, 2021. This was before I knew enough about cults to realize that a) I had unwittingly been in one and b) Willy Wonka and his army of Oompa Loompas gave off some pretty culty vibes.