I’ll never forget the way I felt when Aisha/Pema Salem took the stage at SAND. I’d been listening to these boring old white male non-dual teachers all day. I was there with my BFF Dennis, and Dennis kept saying, “Listening to these guys talk about spiritual awakening is like listening to a virgin talk about orgasm. Like come on, guys, if you know anything about this, why can’t you help me feel it?”
So when co-founder of Science & Non-Duality (SAND) Zaya Benazzo got on stage to introduce Aisha/Pema Salem, who she said had profoundly changed her life, I paid attention. Aisha got on stage and announced to the room something like “All you spiritual bypassers, we’re going DOWN,” in this authoritative booming voice. I saw many of the men just get up and leave. Then with those who stayed, she led us in a meditation about the shadow, about going into the depths of pain, rather than transcending it. What followed was not a transcendence of pain but an invitation into it. She guided us into the shadow, into grief, into the places we had been told were not real, not non-dual, just ego. I found myself in tears, not from distress but from relief. After days of feeling subtly shamed for my humanity, I felt seen, weeping with relief after days of listening to people tell me my pain was wrong, unspiritual, less than holy.
By the end of her hour presentation, I felt like I was in love. That feeling is worth pausing with, because it is often the doorway. Charismatic leaders do not just teach. They evoke. They awaken longing, devotion, hope, and sometimes a kind of ecstatic recognition that can feel like truth itself. That does not mean it is truth. It means something in you has been touched, and that something deserves your curiosity and your care, not your immediate allegiance.
Over the years, through my own experiences and through studying the psychology of cults and high demand groups, I have come to understand how easy it is for intelligent, sincere, well meaning people to get naively and gullibly hooked. It is not a failure of discernment. It is a function of the very human longing for an idealized mother or father figure.
SAND was hosting her at a silent retreat a few days later, and I signed up immediately, as did Dennis. I won’t write about the five day retreat, other than to say I lost respect for her when she told us she had abandoned her young child because she was “too non-dual for him,” and I didn’t like the way she made her boyfriend lie prostrate at her feet while she put her foot over him, like she was some Hindu statue. Suffice it to say, I got what I needed, which was permission to explore my emotional world rather than bypass it. That was the end of my relationship with Aisha. No harm, no foul. But others who were at the retreat with me then signed up for her 21 day retreat in Europe and went on to be devotees.
One essay devoted to talking about the harm done by Aisha included this observation:
We feel that it is a part of human psyche to want to have a purpose – to help greater good or in some way influence the world and our surroundings for the better. After forming a trauma bond with Aisha/Pema, she suggests what one can do to help the world or their consciousness to become a better person. Donating money or working for her is the best way to purify and alleviate one’s consciousness as well as help the world as a whole. Once a person is hooked, there is a constant pressure, things will not wait, the time is always now – it can feel exciting to be always on the edge of ‘human potential’, but it is also very very exhausting. To be hooked into Aisha/Pema is like being in a whirl, an always moving vortex. She changes her mind constantly, she changes her emotions constantly – one is off the ground and finds themselves running and being on the edge all the time. It is destabilising. One does not have time for themselves in her presence and as one is tired, the critical faculty of the brain turns off and one accepts more and more of Aisha/Pema’s way of seeing the world and themselves. Some of us went deeper than others, but the strategy is the same: she creates doubt inside a person and of their perception of reality, and claims to have the answer to that doubt.
(You can read about people who were harmed by Aisha/Pema Salem here.)
I’ve since thought back to that falling in love feeling that came over me so instantly and led me to cancel work responsibilities and follow the guru to the retreat I hadn’t planned to attend. As part of my own recovery from various iterations of spiritual abuse, I’ve studied the cult recovery space and learned a great deal from it through listening to podcasts like Rachel Bernstein’s Indoctrination or NXIVM survivors Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames podcast A Little Bit Culty. I’ve also read books by Janja Lalich, Anke Richter, Steven Hassan, Daniel Shaw, Alexandra Stein, and more.
Now, a decade later and a lot of cult recovery psychoeducation, trauma therapy, deconstruction and sense-making later, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to spot these dynamics early on, so you can have the discernment to step away before you become vulnerable to the cultic tactics that can get you hurt.
Here are some practical things to look out for.
If someone claims to have the 411 to God, know “The Truth,” channel benevolent aliens sent to Earth on a rescue mission, have a bodily knowing of what is and is not good for you, have the ability to answer questions on God’s behalf, be a prophet, have a special place in a divine plan, or whatever, listen for the grandiosity, rather than getting hooked by fascination. The grandiosity is your biggest clue.
We expect grandiosity from movie stars, rock stars, star athletes, CEO’s, doctors, lawyers, and other successful or talented people. But somehow, we miss the most obvious and most ludicrously grandiose of them all, the spiritual teachers and transformational leaders who claim to be enlightened, spiritually awake, advanced in their development, and possessing of certain special powers. That’s the grandiose of the grandiose! But we soooo want it to be true.
If someone claims to have exclusive access to truth, to God, to ultimate reality, or to special powers that place them above ordinary humans, take a step back. Healthy teachers point you back to your own inner knowing. Unhealthy leaders create dependency and position themselves as the source of truth. The more someone insists that they alone can see clearly, the more cautious you should become.
That falling in love feeling can be intoxicating. It can feel like awakening, like coming home. But what happens after the initial intoxicating high matters more than the high itself. Do you feel grounded, nourished, and more connected to your own life, or do you feel unmoored, ungrounded, obsessed, and pulled away from your center? Do you feel more capable of managing day to day life, or do you find yourself ignoring your job, your children, your family members, your financial security—to pursue the next high?
It can be hard to trust your body when cultic leaders are intentionally separating you from it, spiritualizing dissociation and meditating you out of your body. Especially if you have childhood trauma and disorganized attachment wounding, you might be dissociative before you even join the community. This can flip your body compass upside down, making dangerous people feel safe to your body and safe people feel dangerous.
But making it a practice to come back to your body can help you turn your body compass right side up again. When you’re in your body rather than escaping it, you’ll feel the tingling in the back of your neck, the spidey senses that warn you “Don’t trust this person. They’re a con artist.” Your nervous system will tell you the truth if you listen over time.
One of the most common tactics used to manipulate you is the creation of urgency. You are told that now is the moment, that hesitation is resistance, that if you do not act now you will miss your chance for transformation. This kind of high pressure marketing bypasses your capacity to reflect and consent. Real growth does not require you to abandon your pacing. If something is true, it will still be true tomorrow. As my IFS therapist always says, “Self is in the pause.” False lights will not be okay with your healthy discernment that comes from the pause, but healthy people will still be offering the next workshop when you’re ready and clear on your yes or your no.
In healthy spaces, your questions are welcome, and your critical thinking and skepticism are seen as a natural part of your intelligence. In unhealthy dynamics, doubt is reframed as a problem within you. You are told that your confusion is evidence of your wounding, your ego, your lack of spiritual readiness, or your lack of faith. To get the benefits, you have to be “all in,” you’re told. This slowly erodes your trust in your own perception, discernment, and judgment and replaces natural doubt with reliance on the charismatic leader.
At first, you may feel deeply seen, valued, and special, as if the falling in love feeling is mutual. The leader or the community may shower you with attention and affirmation, praise and flattery, making you think you’ve finally found your tribe, your chosen family, the end of your gut-aching loneliness. Then, often subtly, that warmth becomes manipulatively conditional. Approval is given when you go along to get along, and it’s withdrawn when you question, doubt, or hesitate. This creates a powerful emotional trauma bond that can keep you striving for belonging, always jonesing for the next hit of intoxicating love bombing.
If you find yourself being encouraged to distance from friends or family who do not share the belief system, pause. If insiders and outsiders get reframed as the special ones (Hogwarts) and the unspecial ones (Muggles), if the leader is making you paranoid about the people who have known you for a long time while encouraging to trust the people who just met you, beware. While it is natural for growth to shift relationships, and while some relationships fall apart if you get into therapy, start setting boundaries, get sober, or otherwise change the relational dynamic, any teaching that actively undermines your existing support system deserves scrutiny. Isolation increases your vulnerability to cultic dynamics.
Unhealthy leaders will also gaslight you on the regular, trying to confuse your reality. Hold onto what you know and stay boundaried against the gaslighting. If someone tries to override your reality, just label it “gaslighting” and resist the urge to question yourself. If someone minimizes or dismisses or flat out lies about your reality, walk away.
It’s one thing to pay for one weekend workshop teaching you something you’re inspired to try, like memoir writing or painting or jewelry making. It is another to be drawn into a series of increasingly expensive, higher tiered offerings that teach something you can never master, like meditation or spiritual awakening, and are framed as necessary for your evolution. When money becomes tied to your worthiness or your spiritual progress, something has gone off track. Transparency and consent should always be present, and healthy growth should increase your ability to manage your finances responsibly, not weaken your financial stability.
Some charismatic leaders create an atmosphere of constant change, such that the community is always chasing after their mercurial moods and unstable temperament and plans. Rules shift, expectations evolve, and emotional climates fluctuate. This unpredictability can keep you off balance, making you so busy that you don’t have a break to slow down and figure out if this is good for you. That’s the point. The prevent you from self-reflection, from discernment, from asking the necessary questions. Stability supports autonomy. Chaos erodes it.
As the follower of Aisha/Pema wrote, “To be hooked into Aisha/Pema is like being in a whirl, an always moving vortex. She changes her mind constantly, she changes her emotions constantly – one is off the ground and finds themselves running and being on the edge all the time. It is destabilising.”
In cultic groups, there’s usually a central figurehead, with an inner circle that orbits the sun. Then there are varying degrees of outer circle community. The closer one gets to the sun, the more abusive the dynamics, typically. The inner circle are often the flying monkey enablers, who protect the central figurehead, no matter how wrong that person might be.
The question is how power is held, whether right use of power is studied and practiced. Are there checks and balances? Is there accountability? Or is the leader beyond question, beyond feedback, beyond consequence? Power without accountability is a massive red flag in any context. If you challenge the leadership early on, and you’re met with DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender), if you’re shamed or humiliated for speaking up, if you’re ignored or shunned for daring to question, get out. Healthy leadership will respond to feedback with curiosity and care, with accountability if wrong has been done. Instantaneous defensiveness and lack of accountability is a sign that someone is high on the narcissism spectrum and likely to have issues with power and control.
Whether it is physical, emotional, sexual, or psychological, any pressure to override your own limits in the name of growth should be taken seriously. When Joe Dispenza gifted me admission to his advanced meditation retreat as part of my Sacred Medicine research, I found it deeply disturbing that we were asked to get up for a 4am meditation that would last for many hours, and we were told that we could not go to the toilet, that if we left the room for any reason, we would not be allowed back in. If anyone is asking you to deprive yourself from sleep, starve yourself, hold in your morning poo, or otherwise control your healthy behaviors, run. That’s about teh leader’s need for control, not your transformation.
Growth can be uncomfortable, and sometimes we have to stretch, but the stretch of transformation should never require self betrayal or suppression of healthy needs, like the need to empty your bladder. Your boundaries are not obstacles to awakening. They are not your ego talking. They are healthy self-protection and a normal part of your integrity.
It is easy to dismiss a single concerning incident, especially if you have also had meaningful or even transformative experiences in the same space. Most cultic systems benefit the cult members in some way. It’s how they’re lured in. There is usually something genuinely helpful or meaningful or good.
But just because there’s a baby in the bathwater doesn’t mean you should overlook the concerning moments just because you enjoyed some benefits. Remember that repeating patterns of harm matter more than isolated moments of genuine transformation. If something feels off repeatedly, do not justify or explain it away because something good also happened. Your perception is data. Mature discernment means being able to hold the paradox, that a cultic system can contain both good and bad. You get to keep the baby and remove yourself from the harmful bathwater.
Perhaps the most important protection is your relationship with yourself. The more you cultivate self trust, self protection, healthy boundaries, emotional awareness, and grounded discernment, the less likely you are to outsource your authority. No teacher, no matter how gifted, should replace your own moral compass and inner guidance. You are the one you’ve been waiting for. That perfect Mommy or Daddy exists inside of us all, and it points towards the guidance that can be trusted.
Don’t lose touch with the people who knew you when. Those who knew your pre-cult identity will be there to help you heal during your cult recovery and deconstruction of the indoctrinated beliefs. They will help remind you who you really are, the “you” before you fell under the sway of someone who did not have your best interests at heart.
Many people stay in cultic systems too long because they’ve already invested so much time, energy, money, and relationships. We can’t bear to think it was all for naught. The betrayal blindness that prevents us from facing the devastating truth that we’ve been conned and betrayed is a strong protector part, one that can keep people from leaving for way too long. We’re waiting for the promised payout to magically appear, not realizing that the cultic leader has been “future faking” the whole time. The promised ending was never going to happen. Cutting our losses and grieving the lost time, money, energy and relationships is the only way forward, but it’s so painful that many people avoid it, even when reality is unavoidable.
In Aisha’s case, the revealing detail that made me walk away was that she had abandoned her son and then spiritualized her explanation for her abandonment. Mothers who abandon their sons have nothing to teach me, I realized. If anything, I’d have something to teach her about attachment parenting, about the impact her abandonment would have on his relationships with women, about her failure as a parent.
Are these people evidence that the promises are real? Is their devotion worth it? Do they have healthy relationships, sovereignty, autonomy, good boundaries, financial stability, meaningful careers that showcase their talents separate from the guru? Are they good parents? Are they loving children, good cousins, good aunties and uncles? Do they follow public health guidelines during a pandemic? Do they encourage people to get medical care when it’s needed? Do they take a public stand about the moral issues of our time— Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, support for immigrants against ICE disappearances? Do they support democracy, in the community, in their country? Do they demonstrate integrity, even when it means going against the leader or holding the leader accountable?
Looking back, I can see how my longing to grow, to transform, to wake up, to feel deeply, to be validated in my emotional truth, made me vulnerable to being swept away by some real crackpots. But the longing was real.
I am grateful for the teachers who have genuinely helped me—Rachel Naomi Remen, Frances Weller, Richard Schwartz, Asha Clinton, Tosha Silver, Karla McLaren, Rachel Carlton Abrams, Meggan Watterson, Shiloh Sophia, Orland Bishop, Miranda Macpherson, Bayo Akomolafe, Joanna Macy, Terry Real, Jeff Foster, Rebekah Borucki, Anasuya Godis, Jac O’Keeffe, Suzanne Scurlock Duranna, and most recently Nicole Wordlaw. None of them are perfect, but all of them have helped me grow, with relative safety and trustworthy enough behavior.
While it’s not a perfect system, the Association for Spiritual Integrity has a list of members who have promised to at least try to uphold a series of ethical guidelines, and if we fail to live up to those guidelines, to risk being called in or called out by our communities and peers. This offshoot of SAND grew out of all the ethical breaches coming to light during the #MeToo movement and #BlackLivesMatters in the Science & Non-Duality (SAND) community.
Curiously, the four male SAND speakers, endorsed by SAND year after year, who I have spoken out about—Deepak Chopra, Charles Eisenstein, Thomas Hübl, and Gabor Maté—have not joined. Most of those on my approved list haven’t joined either. So sadly, the 900+ members of ASI are preaching to the choir and ignored by many people who don’t wish to have any accountability. those who feel entitled to behave in ways that cause harm. But it’s a start. You can look up your favorite spiritual teachers here to see if they’ve agreed to be held accountable. You can also check out Seek Safely here.
There are teachers and communities in the world that are ethical, humble, and genuinely supportive of your autonomy. They may not be the big, famous flashy ones. They’re more likely to be doing their thing in relative obscurity, not needing to make tons of money or gain tons of sycophantic followers. They may not give you that “falling in love” feeling, but they will help you fall in love with yourself and build safe enough, brave spaces, holding space for connection with others without making it all about their need for narcissistic supply.
If you’ve experienced spiritual abuse or fallen under the sway of one of these charismatic leaders, just know it can happen to all of us. None of us are immune, and thinking we might not be can make us even more vulnerable. Cultic dynamics come in all flavors, not just spiritual and religious communities, but political groups, yoga groups, martial arts groups, artistic groups, activist groups, 12 step recovery groups. To learn more red flags and how to keep you and your loved ones safe, I recommend Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast, as well as A Little Bit Culty and Decult Talks. There are also tons of cult documentaries on streaming platforms these days.
- Wild Wild Country (Netflix)
– The rise and fall of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s commune in Oregon. - The Vow (HBO)
– Inside NXIVM and Keith Raniere. - Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult (Starz)
– A survivor-centered perspective featuring India Oxenberg. - Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath (Netflix/Hulu)
– Exposés of Church of Scientology. - Escaping Twin Flames (Netflix)
– The controversial Twin Flames Universe online group. - The Deep End (Hulu)
– Following spiritual teacher Teal Swan. - Kumare (various platforms)
– A filmmaker creates a fake guru persona. - Holy Hell (Amazon Prime)
– Inside the Buddhafield group in LA. - Awake: The Life of Yogananda
– Explores Paramahansa Yogananda - Waco: American Apocalypse (Netflix)
– The Branch Davidians and David Koresh. - Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
– Jim Jones and the mass tragedy. - Children of God
– The controversial Children of God (also called The Family). - Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (Netflix)
– The FLDS church and Warren Jeffs. - Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults (HBO)
– The Heaven’s Gate tragedy. - Twisted Yoga (Apple TV)
– Investigates MISA (Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute), a Romania-based tantric yoga group led by Gregorian Bivolaru - Trust Me: The False Prophet (Netflix)
– FLDS polygamist sect - Love Has Won: The Cult Of Mother God (Max)
– The tragic story of the cult leader Amy Carlson who died in the arms of her followers - Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (Hulu)
– Details the abuse and coercion carried out by Larry Ray against a group of college students. - Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (Prime Video)
– Explores the IBLP religious organization. - The Synanon Fix: Did The Cure Become A Cult? (Max)
– About Synanon’s founder, Charles Dederich - Orgasm, Inc (Netflix)
– About One Taste founder Nicole Daedone
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