What I Lost: A More Complete Accounting of Ashram Impact

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.

Image: EdenMoon / Pixabay

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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Image: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

​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.

Image: Uday Mittal / Unsplash

​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.

Image: Evan Dennis / Unsplash

​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.

Image: Jonah Pettrich / Unsplash

​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.

Image: Jaël Vallée / Unsplash

​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.”

Image: sbtlneet / Pixabay

​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.

Image: geralt / Pixabay

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

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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