International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 5, 2014 55
reported exactly similar details: a secret room
with a specially built table, which allowed
Muktananda, then in his seventies, to stand
while he raped them. I will spare the reader
further, more specific details that all of these
women who spoke out, again without access to
each others’ accounts, described. Gurumayi has
continued to deny and cover up this aspect of her
predecessor’s behavior to this day. I also
learned that many of the parents of the young
girls whom Muktananda had molested had been
proud that their daughters were “chosen,” as
though for a special, divine ritual. I knew some
of these people well: Before coming to live full-
time in the ashram, one of the parents had been
an Ivy League professor, another a once-
prominent Jungian analyst. After Muktananda’s
death, Gurumayi continued to defend the male
leader who had abused the woman I knew and
who was also abusing dozens of other young
women, many of them minors.
All my dissociated knowledge suddenly and
dramatically broke fully into consciousness
when I heard the story of the young woman I
knew I literally felt my body become enlivened,
and I could physically feel my mind—brain?—
expanding, opening. In the phrase “Don’t ever
tell anyone about this, especially not your
mother,” I heard a chilling echo of the voice of
the incestuous father, the battering husband, the
sexual harasser, the rapist. As Judith Herman
says in her seminal work Trauma and Recovery
(1992), “Secrecy and silence are the
perpetrator’s first line of defense” (p. 8). It was
hearing these words, “Don’t ever tell,” that
broke for me what Ernst Becker (1973) has
called “the spell cast by persons—the nexus of
unfreedom” (p. 141). I recognized in
Gurumayi’s behavior toward her followers the
hallmarks of abuse: the use of power to
intimidate, seduce, coerce, belittle, and humiliate
others—not to strengthen, uplift, and enlighten,
as advertised, but for the more base purposes of
psychological enslavement and parasitic
exploitation.
I should note that while SYDA Yoga resembles
in many ways a mainstream Hindu religion—
there are many distinct sects and lineages of
Siddha Yoga practice outside of SYDA Yoga,
many of which may not be cultic. And of
course, my characterization of SYDA Yoga as
cultic would be hotly contested by its many
remaining loyal followers. What I have
expressed here is based on my experience and
represents my personal understanding.
In the United States and other major world
capitals, SYDA Yoga was successfully marketed
to a population of highly educated, affluent
professionals, and they included quite a few
internationally known celebrities in business, the
arts, and journalism. Once I had spoken out
publicly about SYDA Yoga, in the early days of
the Internet, I was instantly, literally within
hours, persona non grata in the community, so
that the dozens of people I thought of as friends,
and the hundreds of others from all over the
world who had been friendly acquaintances,
immediately cut me off completely.
Fortunately, there were enough members who
left the community when I did for us to form a
support group using the Internet just as it was
becoming popularized. I also began to attend
conferences organized by what is now The
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA),
where I have met hundreds of people over the
years who identify either as having been in an
abusive, authoritarian group or as being
concerned for loved ones in such groups.
Since I became licensed as a clinical social
worker in 1996, I have worked with dozens of
cult-involved people, both in pro bono situations
and in my private psychotherapy practice. Much
of my interest in and development of ideas about
the relational system of the traumatizing
narcissist stems from my interest in making
sense of what for me, and for thousands of
others who have experienced abuse in cults, was
an enormously painful, life-altering experience
that began in an ecstasy of hope and possibility,
and which ultimately became an abyss of
cumulative relational trauma.
My cousin’s wife is a psychiatrist, and when I
told her, a few years after I left SYDA Yoga,
that I was going into psychoanalytic training,
she said, “Great! You left one cult, and now
you’re joining another!” This is not an
uncommon observation.1 But my own analytic
1 See Mitchell and Black (1995), p. xx, which includes the
following tongue-in-cheek section heading: “Myth #4:
reported exactly similar details: a secret room
with a specially built table, which allowed
Muktananda, then in his seventies, to stand
while he raped them. I will spare the reader
further, more specific details that all of these
women who spoke out, again without access to
each others’ accounts, described. Gurumayi has
continued to deny and cover up this aspect of her
predecessor’s behavior to this day. I also
learned that many of the parents of the young
girls whom Muktananda had molested had been
proud that their daughters were “chosen,” as
though for a special, divine ritual. I knew some
of these people well: Before coming to live full-
time in the ashram, one of the parents had been
an Ivy League professor, another a once-
prominent Jungian analyst. After Muktananda’s
death, Gurumayi continued to defend the male
leader who had abused the woman I knew and
who was also abusing dozens of other young
women, many of them minors.
All my dissociated knowledge suddenly and
dramatically broke fully into consciousness
when I heard the story of the young woman I
knew I literally felt my body become enlivened,
and I could physically feel my mind—brain?—
expanding, opening. In the phrase “Don’t ever
tell anyone about this, especially not your
mother,” I heard a chilling echo of the voice of
the incestuous father, the battering husband, the
sexual harasser, the rapist. As Judith Herman
says in her seminal work Trauma and Recovery
(1992), “Secrecy and silence are the
perpetrator’s first line of defense” (p. 8). It was
hearing these words, “Don’t ever tell,” that
broke for me what Ernst Becker (1973) has
called “the spell cast by persons—the nexus of
unfreedom” (p. 141). I recognized in
Gurumayi’s behavior toward her followers the
hallmarks of abuse: the use of power to
intimidate, seduce, coerce, belittle, and humiliate
others—not to strengthen, uplift, and enlighten,
as advertised, but for the more base purposes of
psychological enslavement and parasitic
exploitation.
I should note that while SYDA Yoga resembles
in many ways a mainstream Hindu religion—
there are many distinct sects and lineages of
Siddha Yoga practice outside of SYDA Yoga,
many of which may not be cultic. And of
course, my characterization of SYDA Yoga as
cultic would be hotly contested by its many
remaining loyal followers. What I have
expressed here is based on my experience and
represents my personal understanding.
In the United States and other major world
capitals, SYDA Yoga was successfully marketed
to a population of highly educated, affluent
professionals, and they included quite a few
internationally known celebrities in business, the
arts, and journalism. Once I had spoken out
publicly about SYDA Yoga, in the early days of
the Internet, I was instantly, literally within
hours, persona non grata in the community, so
that the dozens of people I thought of as friends,
and the hundreds of others from all over the
world who had been friendly acquaintances,
immediately cut me off completely.
Fortunately, there were enough members who
left the community when I did for us to form a
support group using the Internet just as it was
becoming popularized. I also began to attend
conferences organized by what is now The
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA),
where I have met hundreds of people over the
years who identify either as having been in an
abusive, authoritarian group or as being
concerned for loved ones in such groups.
Since I became licensed as a clinical social
worker in 1996, I have worked with dozens of
cult-involved people, both in pro bono situations
and in my private psychotherapy practice. Much
of my interest in and development of ideas about
the relational system of the traumatizing
narcissist stems from my interest in making
sense of what for me, and for thousands of
others who have experienced abuse in cults, was
an enormously painful, life-altering experience
that began in an ecstasy of hope and possibility,
and which ultimately became an abyss of
cumulative relational trauma.
My cousin’s wife is a psychiatrist, and when I
told her, a few years after I left SYDA Yoga,
that I was going into psychoanalytic training,
she said, “Great! You left one cult, and now
you’re joining another!” This is not an
uncommon observation.1 But my own analytic
1 See Mitchell and Black (1995), p. xx, which includes the
following tongue-in-cheek section heading: “Myth #4:
