Seeking Self-Reliance in Yoga After Cult Life Didn’t Work
As a specialized subgroup, we Yoga people were indoctrinated to blame the victim. We were under the illusion that we had autonomy, and that our healing could come from within ourselves alone.
And
The Guru May Actually Hate You, and You May Actually Hate Him
[Cult] leaders follow clear patterns:
At some point they realize how desperately co-dependent they are in relation to their students. They begin to regard their students as idiots, children, incompetents. They begin to loathe them not only for their immaturity, but even more intensely because they are dependent on that immaturity, that devotion, for their daily bread. They’re trapped. Some drink themselves senseless, others take drugs, hide out under mountains of cash, or think help. Some manage to kill themselves.
Sogyal Rinpoche punching a nun,
Trungpa sexually assaulting public figures in a temple,
Osho staring blankly at his followers from the window of his Rolls,
Iyengar ranting about how students who have touched his feet for a decade are ignorant fools, and then hitting them,
Michael Roach giving people meaningless unpaid tasks and joking with the inner circle: “Of course we’re in cult.”
The pattern I’ve seen seems to be that the cruelty increases in direct proportion to the “success” of the guru. Is power its own addictive feedback loop? Yes, but so is loathing. How can the guru not loathe himself, when he sees he’s propped up by the very people he’s broken?
They hit their students, sexually dominate them, starve them, steal their labour and money, mock them. These are all morbid actions, but they also acts of retribution against the terms of their shameful imprisonment, which they blame on their students, and cannot own for themselves.
Jeez, Janki Kirpalani really belongs on that list too, laughing out as she said
First we tell people that everything here is free,
then we take everything of they have got! (abridged)