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:

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

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)

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

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

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? ​Parsing 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.