Bonus Sample: Listener Stories: Christina (part 2)
Christina Flinders returns for the second of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics, conspirituality, and the long road towards finding her place in the world. Picking up where she left off, Flinders discusses breaking free of the sexually abusive cult of Eknath Easwaren, finding ambivalent agency as a stripper, and then graduating to yoga teaching—where she then had to dodge being redpilled.Thanks again to Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for their support.If you'd like to share your story with us and our Patreon community of listeners, please get in touch.
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Thank you.
This part may be for another podcast entirely, and maybe I'm reading too far into the parallels or citing synchronicity when in fact things are merely coincidental and circumstantial.
But not too long after high school, I found myself working in various strip clubs across the Southwest in California area.
After 10 years off and on spent working in strip clubs and now learning more about cult structures and influential power dynamics, I gotta say there really is something to examine there.
Yeah.
I didn't dance because I needed the money, although that part didn't hurt.
But there was a sense of familiarity within the organization of leadership between club and cult, BMCM, that felt similarly navigable and dangerous.
You know, when I read – I don't know if this is for another podcast or another topic – I thought, no, I don't think so.
Thank you.
There's a lot here, and I get why you wonder whether it fits, because I think just the nature of a life is… Can be meandering.
And we look back and we go, well, how did I wind up there?
Yeah!
Does that really connect?
But I see, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, a thread right back to the at once sexualized but also repressed claustrophobia of Aishwaran's group that you might've found yourself rebelling against in some way, and maybe even finding some power in that.
Is that fair?
Absolutely.
I wanted to find the furthest, most opposite thing from the Ashram.
And And that was the club.
And that felt powerful.
And there were points when I was working in the clubs, like in Vegas and everywhere, and I would drive back go home, visit my family, and drive past the ashram and be like, "Look at me now, assholes." - Mm-hmm.
So really claiming a sense of self, a sense of sexual autonomy, a sense that I can be transgressive and through that actually feel more of a sense of self-worth or power.
When you say that you didn't need the money, did you have some other source of income?
Yeah, my parents, my parents always supported me financially.
You know, to a certain extent, you know, this was at a time, this was when, you know, on TV and in the news we were seeing Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and I, I wanted that.
I wanted that so bad and that, that my parents couldn't nor wouldn't provide for.
But you know, I wasn't, I wasn't dancing to You know, to feed myself or feed kids or anything like that.
A lot of, you know, my colleagues were.
And so that was also really confusing.
Like, I'm choosing this.
Why am I choosing this?
And it's really interesting that you say it was similarly navigable and dangerous.
So it's not just this would be frowned upon, it's that this actually is at the heart of what was toxic about the cult and I'm finding another way to maybe express that or reimagine that.
Yeah, they mirror each other.
The inner circles and the hierarchies of cult and strip club are almost exact parallels and in congruence with the physical betrayal, the sexual betrayal of yourself, which is rewarded.
