“I would pursue transcendence and live with its inevitable close cousins, disappointment and heartbreak, for most of my life.” So writes “Steven” (not his real name) in the first of our six spiritual heartbreak stories from our Patreon supporters.
“The spiritual by-passing of folks like Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle kept me spinning in a cycle of abuse and unable to see clearly enough to end an abusive marriage with a Unitarian minister.” That’s from Katherine—story number three.
And in our final story, Lynn writes: “I will say even though I've been through a really awful trauma and still have to deal with that residue, I am now happier than I've ever been in my life. I enjoy just being a simple person now, without the ever exhausting pressure of having to perform my religion, to awaken my consciousness.”
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You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, most predominantly Instagram where we post regularly.
You can also subscribe to Monday bonus episodes via Apple Podcasts and of course at Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Yeah, in the Patreon bonus department, we've had some real bangers.
Derek just covered J.P.
Sears' new line of CBD oils.
I'm on them right now!
Is that why they're doing nothing for you, Derek?
You're still kind of grumpy.
Maybe Sears should sell the human growth hormone steroids just straight out and get it over with.
Julian covered the religious historical significance of Trump opening his campaign in Waco.
And I put out an essay about how the charisma I nurtured in the singing and theater training could have taken a guru turn if I hadn't, you know, among other things, watched charismatic spiritual teaching help kill a friend of mine.
Yeah, lots of good stuff on Patreon.
And since we're putting our main episodes there, I really love the engagement of people in the comments too, which is really nice.
So we're starting to see A nice community engagement going on there.
But also, last bit of housekeeping.
Remember, you can pre-order our book.
The date is getting closer, June 13th.
I mean, we have had so many great endorsements from people we respect and who've been on the podcast.
And here's one example.
Over the last several years, as we doomscrolled social media watching the weirdness and unraveling of the wellness community, into a conspiratorial freakout.
The Conspiratuality Podcast's deep dive analysis was a salve.
In their book, they go a step further, providing important context and histories, positing that maybe the Great Awakening was realizing these beliefs were lurking beneath the surface all along.
So that's from Stacy Stukin, LA-based journalist and friend of the podcast.
She's done this great reporting on the cursed legacy of Kundalini Yoga and the life and times of the late Guru Jagat.
She joined us for episodes 36 and 37 at the height of Jagat's QAnon spiral,
A man came up to me after one of my weekend yoga classes.
He said, I've been listening to the podcast and wondering if you've covered the topic of spiritual heartbreak.
And that stopped me on my tracks.
I said, what do you mean?
What is spiritual heartbreak?
He very earnestly said, and I'll be paraphrasing, well, I'm in the midst of realizing a lot of beliefs and aspirations I was invested in for many years are not true.
I'm struggling to figure out what to replace them with and how to not just feel like a cynical nihilist.
He was so frank and sincere and really reporting on a very emotional and existential transitional experience.
So I brought it up to you guys and we put out a call on Patreon to see if this idea resonated and it really did.
I also followed up with him to see if he wanted to share his story, but I haven't heard back yet.
I definitely want to acknowledge that the topic and our title today came from that brief conversation we had.
So thank you, Barry.
So we've chosen six stories from the engaged Wellspring that is our Patreon, and some people have asked to use pseudonyms.
To everyone who sent in stories, thank you so much.
We couldn't obviously include them all, but we read everything and, you know, we carry it all into our comments here and also going forward.
So, Julian, you've got a story from Stephen, not his real name, to start us off.
He says, Hi.
My search for truth started back in the 70s.
I was in the ninth grade, falling to my knees and speaking in tongues at a local Pentecostal church.
Wow.
Up to that point, I was a non-tongue-speaking, buttoned-up Lutheran and had never set foot in a Pentecostal church or heard any actual gang member give their testimony.
I grew up in a small town in Washington State with little access to this kind of energetic spiritual church.
I'd recently seen the film The Cross and the Switchblade, which birthed an odd trend of former East Coast gang members traveling West to preach the Word of God in Pentecostal churches and community colleges.
I had not heard of this film, so I looked it up, and it's pretty interesting.
It's released in 1970.
It's based on a true story type of thing with Pat Boone playing Dean Wilkerson, a small-town pastor from Pennsylvania, who embarks on a ministry to youth gangs in New York City, and he recruits Nicky Cruz.
And this is played by Eric Estrada, and that's his debut.
And it was a big deal at the time.
The movie didn't do great, but Dickerson's memoir, which it was based on, sold over 7 million copies by 1975.
And then the movie spun out a comic book.
And I scrubbed through a bit of it and I can say that the vibe is very pre-Reagan.
After the 1950s boom, we have this feeling of the moral majority being very worried about
urban decay and delinquency and the cops are like kind of useless because they're either
borderline corrupt or they're just kind of inept like Officer Krupke or something like
And so the down-home earnest preacher vibe of Wilkerson is just the antidote.
Amazing bit of cultural history there.
And let me say here very quickly, uh, in South Africa, in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, this was a film that was, that was played on television.
We had one official TV channel that was owned by the government.
And if you can imagine like the Republican party, uh, serving up like all of the kinds of conservative material that they felt should be, uh, should be consumed by the country.
That's what it was like.
That's wild.
Yeah.
So this was, this was a story that me and all of my schoolmates were very familiar with.
Amazing.
Back to our listener story, he says, I dove in headfirst, and it was that experience that lit a fire which burned for many years.
From that point on, I would pursue transcendence and live with its inevitable close cousins, disappointment and heartbreak for most of my life.
But with no gurus around, I instead used my imagination and a fair amount of drugs to try to touch the beyond.
Yeah, I would pursue transcendence and live with its inevitable close cousins, disappointment and heartbreak for most of my life is like, I think it's like a keynote for this episode, and we could do a whole episode on that line.
And I, you know, I want to be careful about pathologizing language here, but it really draws out what I think of as being this bipolar undercurrent of the spiritual journey and, you know, possibly the spiritual personality, which, you know, features really high highs and low lows.
I don't think you can write a sentence like that without the backstory that informs it.
Yeah, right.
Along the way, I found another calling.
I became an actor, which I figured was pretty close to being a preacher.
I moved to Los Angeles.
There, with no money, I had ample opportunity to become a seeker.
My first real girlfriend was a former Scientologist, and we both fell in love with yoga.
Now, I had psoriasis over large parts of my body and was told that yoga could help it.
Of course.
I believed and practiced hard.
Lo and behold, the psoriasis went away, and I was hooked on flow and Iyengar yoga.
Yes, okay.
So it's really interesting how things begin to combine to form like a worldview and an
orientation you, you know, so you're on a certain path and it will be virtually guaranteed
at some point that you're going to attribute a positive result with that path instead of
the more likely explanation that it's coincidental.
Like these, these are the miracle stories that drive us forward.
I studied with Anna Forrest and Ganga White at the Center for Yoga.
I became a teacher living and teaching there while studying with every famous yoga guru at that time who came through LA in the 1980s.
It was a golden era in LA yoga.
They all taught workshops at the center, including BKS Iyengar.
I was deeply committed, naive, and vulnerable to any teaching that basically said, you are not who you think you are, you are more than that.
I was willing to be physically bent, punched, slapped, and yelled at to reach this other ideal.
I think I submitted to it because what I saw as me was too human and too disappointing, which is partially why I became an actor.
Ouch.
It's such a deeply L.A.
story.
And of course, that goes back to Indra Devi.
Richard Hiddleman filming the Yoga for Health TV show in the 1960s out of KTLA.
And like in the whole, in the US context, there's not a lot of daylight between, I don't know, searching for something in performance and becoming enlightened, wanting something transcendent.
I also want to reference people to the latest episode of If Books Could Kill because it's on Rich Dad Poor Dad and Michael Hobbs goes into this great piece where he talks about the fact that this idea of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and always working, he really shows how this idea has really played well for banks And for elites in a way that what Steven is just referencing, this idea that pain, you have to grind and grind to get somewhere eventually, it is embedded in the American mindset and ethos, but it also comes from a particular place that we know as against any sort of social policies, against constantly using communism as a battering ram to shut down ideas they don't appreciate.
So, it just, that line jumped out at me because it would make a nice companion to Stephen's
story in some way.
Right.
Yeah.
And then on a different track, which is something we can all relate to at that time, I also
became a Reiki practitioner, which still freaks me out when I remember that, as I don't know
how I paid for it and certainly never made any money from it.
But I do remember partnering with my girlfriend at New Age health festivals to heal others for free.
I began making a living from acting in 1987, and it's around that time that I met a very young Marianne Williamson.
Amazing.
And studied with her a bit.
With acting money in my pocket, I now had the means to spend hundreds of hours in therapy with a number of therapists, including a very eccentric guy named Phil Stutz.
The Netflix guy!
He says here the Netflix special on him is amazing.
I worked with Ayurvedic practitioners.
I got my TM mantra, my Vedic mantra.
I even worked with David Life a couple times.
I spent many hours and hundreds of dollars at the Bodhi Tree bookstore.
This is quite the CV, right?
It's like straight down the line.
I filled in my spiritual downtime with more drugs and more alcohol, but nothing seemed to be getting me any closer to what I thought I wanted, the annihilation, or at least an equal partnership with the ego.
Hundreds of dollars at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore is like one crystal.
Yeah, he may be underestimating.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe it means hundreds of dollars each time I went there.
Yes, yes, that would make more sense.
In 1996, I got sober.
I think I must have drank and done all those drugs because of the continuing grief I felt for not receiving or living the promises that all of those teachers told me would come.
Mainly, happiness.
But it wasn't time even for sobriety to be the final answer.
Almost immediately, I proceeded to be drawn in by a sober.
and emotionally abusive astro intuitive. Oh my God. And eventually helped set up meetings for
him so that others could give him cash for his bullshit astrology readings and abusive chidings.
Oh man.
Then more yoga in New York City with David Life and Sharon Gannon, Kadampa Buddhism and Ken Wilber
until I finally landed on Zen Buddhism, which seemed much more sane with only slight cultish
Well, according to the group, of course, so maybe that was lucky, but I'll just note that Kadampa Buddhism has a huge cult problem.
Uh, including the fact that it continues to orbit around a llama who made his name by casting spells against the Tibetan hierarchy and seems to now be dead, but the inner circle is still pretending he's giving orders.
Let me also point out that the Zen Buddhist temple in New York City recently underwent some big scandals.
I have some friends over there, so maybe it wasn't that cultish then, but apparently there was a real cult of personality in recent years.
And Julian, what's the 101 on Wilbur?
Well, I was a huge Wilbur enthusiast in the 90s.
He's basically a self-styled syncretist philosopher who probably got the most exposure in the late 90s and early 2000s via shout outs from Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Deepak Chopra referred to him as my guru.
He says I read everything he's written.
So that's kind of a faint praise or something.
And then of course Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins was a big Ken Wilber reader and proselytizer.
He wrote a lot of books essentially trying to create a grand theory of everything that integrated all disciplines of human inquiry from science to psychology to mysticism, but with this perennialist underpinning that had non-dual awakening at the center of it all.
And didn't he endorse, like, the worst people ever in the world?
Oh yeah, so I did a bonus episode on him a couple years ago regarding Adi Da.
Right, okay.
Adi Da Samuraj.
So there's a few.
There's Adi Da, there's Andrew Cohen, more recently there was this someone whose name I'm forgetting because he was barely a blip on the scene, but he was basically claiming he could use the power of his mind to make crops grow more plentifully.
And Wilbur kind of never met an enlightened god-man who was very, very abusive that he didn't think was probably the most self-realized human being ever to live.
So that's a bit of a problem with his grand theory.
Okay, back to Stephen.
So Stephen says, six years later, I got married.
We had kids and they became my focus and my biggest teachers.
Things seemed to find their rightful place.
I was still gently seeking, still meditating, but there were other priorities in my life.
Then, around 2010, The Seeking Portal opened again with Tony Horton and Beachbody.
I worked with that particular program for over three years.
My parents died in 2011 and in 2012.
My grief and fear of using again drew me back into AA and recovery, understandably, and along with that came some teachings of non-duality.
Non-duality floated in the background, waiting for my full attention in the near future.
That's also like a classic sentence.
Oh my God.
Non-duality floated in the background, waiting for my full attention in the near future.
Right.
Which is always right now.
But in the meantime, folks like Charles Eisenstein came into focus.
I was also fond of early Jordan Peterson and Zach Bush.
All of these guys that your show has done deep dives on.
I watched their videos, read their books or blogs, and took on what all of them said as some form of truth.
When the pandemic came, I dove deep into any videos remotely trauma-based.
I practiced Kundalini again.
I dusted off my TM mantra.
And yet the winner of them all became non-duality.
A constant non-voice in my head.
I watched hundreds of online meetings Spoke to a few of the online speakers by phone.
I found myself laughing a lot and experiencing the sense of no thing, less stress, and pandemic-related anxiety, but also the sense of emotionally distancing myself from my family.
I interpreted non-duality as there being no one here and no one there.
Only what is.
Only absolute wholeness.
It's hard for me to see this in print and not feel callous.
How did all of that seem so right at the time?
Well, I really sympathize, especially with recognizing that you are emotionally distancing yourself from friends and family.
But still, at this point in the story, I kind of see an upward arc because this is no longer about trying to get close to charismatics.
Because, I mean, let's remember where this started, which is being lit on fire in a group of people going through ecstatic trance states, right?
Yeah, and I want to say too, I don't know how familiar, like if this struck a chord for you as well, but that the kind of laugh that people who are kind of newly invested in the experience of some kind of non-dual awakening, it's a very particular It's ironic, but it's also cruel a little bit.
It's dismissive.
Because what you do is you laugh at anything that evokes an emotional, interpersonal,
like appropriate response, because there's this higher truth hovering behind it all,
which is that everything is empty of self.
Right.
There's something disturbing about it.
It's ironic, but it's also cruel a little bit.
It's dismissive.
Yeah.
For all the, you know, all the emphasis that people put on the amazingness of Buddha,
and obviously I very much appreciate his theories.
He was a deadbeat dad.
He named his first son Fetter because he thought that his son was going to hold him back.
He took on his wife as his first acolyte.
There was a lot of family dynamics that wouldn't hold up too well these days, and that doesn't take anything away from it, but I have noticed this idea of no thing can be used in a way that really shields you from feeling emotions, which ultimately, from my understanding, is not really the point.
The transcendence is more of holding on to anything for too long, understanding everything is fleeting, but that doesn't mean you don't fully feel things as you're going through them.
So that callousness is usually from the more Americanized versions of Buddhism, at least from what I've seen.
But looking back, I failed.
I didn't succeed in distancing myself from my family.
We met all the challenges of 2020 through 2022 together, imperfectly, stumbling, but emerged intact.
I wrote a book on all my unanswered questions about the mystery of acting.
I lost interest in performing or achieving anything or in seeking.
Then I came upon the Conspirituality Podcast.
I started hearing all of these well-researched stories and the names of many of the teachers I had come across or studied with and the healing modalities that were scams.
It was eye-opening and comforting.
It broke up a lot of old beliefs that I didn't know I'd been holding onto in such an unquestioning way.
There are times now I can feel really naive, like how could I have fallen for that?
Or why didn't I see the huge fucking red flags?
Maybe being a spiritual window shopper was my saving grace.
I always flitted around, picking up stuff here and there, trusting the message more than the messengers.
I feel like I've flown really close to the sun many times, but I think the key is I never found myself in the inner circles.
Always a bit of an outsider.
And even though, for the most part, I didn't deeply question these teachers or my participation, it seems maybe my survival instinct or gulp intuition kept me skirting around the edge of the circle.
It feels like my eyes are generally wide open now.
I don't reach for shit anymore that is sparkly, or that I think will get me somewhere.
Well, maybe some turmeric.
But mostly, there's less disappointment about not hitting some high or an expectation of getting some absolute truth.
Your show has been a nice piece of that particular, oh God, here it comes, healing.
Oh, right.
Oh, well, thanks for all your good work.
It helps a lot.
Stephen.
Thank you, Stephen.
That's awesome.
Beautifully written.
All right, next up we have Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle kept me spinning in a cycle of abuse.
And this is from Catherine.
I learned about your podcast during the pandemic from my daughter, alarmed at how many yoga folks in our community were exposing themselves as anti-vaxxers.
It's especially humbling because when she was born at home, I was part of a back-to-land hippie community of homeschoolers, and she was not vaccinated 30 years ago.
It's been a long journey for me of going back and listening to older episodes and coming to the conclusion that a history of PTSD left me vulnerable to cults and narcissists.
The spiritual bypassing of folks like Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle kept me spinning in a cycle of abuse and unable to see clearly enough to end an abusive marriage with a Unitarian minister.
I really want to underline this here because this is not something you're going to read on Goodreads or Amazon Reviews.
Yet I hear it pretty often that the sort of downstream effects of these writers, books like this, that they can be really sort of interpersonally crucial for people.
I think you could do an episode on the loneliness of looking back on decades of friendships that require having to bite one's tongue to maintain, of the prospect of making new friends in one's 60s after clearing the bookshelves of years of esoteric and new age, quote, research.
I mean, I imagine you guys can relate to this.
I mean, at this point, I basically have three contact circles.
You know, like, there's people that I knew from the yoga world who have not transitioned out of it, and I just can't really relate with them much anymore.
People from the yoga world who are transitioning.
And we share a kind of ironic and world-weary lens on the whole space.
And you guys are at the high end of that friend group.
And then there's guys like, you know, Mark in my neighborhood, fellow dad.
Our kids play Minecraft together.
We don't have a lot in common, but we could if I work at it, like if I went bowling with him.
So, you know, it's the people outside of that world that I really need to make friends with now, especially as a man, because we're just so crap at it.
I went bowling last week.
It is a healing protocol, for sure.
A healing experience.
No, it's awesome.
I love bowling.
Yeah, I'm horrible.
I bowled my best game ever, and then one of my worst the next ones.
It's just ridiculous, but it's so much fun.
Yeah.
Okay, back to Catherine.
Now I have the challenge of addressing my therapist of over a year, who recently suggested I look into Byron Katie.
No, no, no, stop it.
No, no.
And yet, so, so common.
Like, this is not unusual.
I would like your point of view about how much New Age confusion, specifically Byron Katie, has worked its way into traditional psychology and therapy.
I especially looked for EBT therapy, so this latest development has left me in the uncomfortable position of choosing to end this therapeutic relationship, which has been helpful to me, up until this latest twist.
Sincerely, Catherine.
Yeah, like somebody can, a therapist can be reasonable and skilled in a lot of different things and then somehow, somehow the Hay House marketing machine delivered this book into their hands maybe at a turning point in their lives, maybe when they were going through something and they didn't really look farther into it.
and they somehow felt that it would integrate into the rest of the literature that they
used but it just doesn't and then they didn't look farther into what Byron Katie does and
how she actually treats clients and or how she does her public performance therapy. Very,
very strange. The problem I think is that if you have some if you are a therapist who
has discovered that there are aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy that are very effective
that are very pragmatic that are helpful for people especially, especially a certain kind
of patient perhaps like early in their in their therapeutic journey those kinds of cognitive
behavioral tools and perspectives which are about You know, looking at your thoughts with more critical thinking, catching yourself when you're going down certain spirals into negative self-talk, all of those sorts of things, they seem to fit really well with what someone like Byron Katie is saying, and she seems like an interesting kind of charismatic pop
Spirituality voice for those same psychological principles.
And unless it's very hard, unless you are familiar with some sort of, you know, comparative analysis on those ideas to know that you're probably sending them giving them a bum referral, right?
Well, I've never done therapy before, but I recently met with one to see because I was like, I've read so much about it.
Let me try it.
And she was very nice.
And at some point she said, I focus on trauma and physics.
And I was like, I can't.
What am I going to do?
I told her, I even said, I was like, you know, physicists don't know a lot about physics.
So if you're bringing that into this, this is not going to go well.
Yeah.
And you, and you, you know what that would have been, right?
Yes.
Yes.
It would have been that the higher truth of quantum physics is that your trauma is from a superposition.
You can avoid your trauma altogether by going through the other slit.
Yeah, yeah.
Last point on this before the next story though, I recently saw someone share an article and it's called, Is Therapy Speak Making Us Selfish?
Boundaries are important, but our relationships require a touch more compassion than some online blueprints offer.
And I just want to read the first two paragraphs of this article because that idea of therapy speak being used in interpersonal relationships I find is really problematic as this article highlights.
Last summer, Anna, 24, was dumped by a longtime friend over text.
While making plans to meet up, the friend pivoted and told Anna she wanted to end their five-year friendship.
When Anna asked if it was something she did, her friend told her she wasn't comfortable answering and that there was no more room for discussion.
Quote, I'm in a place where I'm trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life.
And I'm afraid our friendship doesn't seem to fit into that framework, the friend wrote.
I can no longer hold the emotional space you've wanted me to and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.
Whoa.
Yeah, that's not, I mean, like, I don't know.
I know generations change, I know times change.
I don't know, it's not friendship and that's not how you talk to people that you're close with.
Derek, I just want to, we have to get on to the next story, but I just want to say that I support you in your search for therapy.
And I want to say that not everybody does, combines physics with trauma or speaks to you like that.
Oh, I know.
I understand.
Yeah, okay, all right.
Okay, you will find somebody.
You will find somebody.
I can feel it.
Breaking up with naturopathy.
And this is Lillian is the pseudonym that we're using.
Hi, Derek, Julian and Matthew.
This is my hopefully concise story of spiritual heartbreak.
I feel like I'm in a long term relationship where I know I need to break up, but I haven't told the other party yet.
I'm done.
I can't feel about them the way I once did.
I can't forgive them or unsee what I now see more clearly.
Which I think she means like not on their birthday or right before their birthday happens.
So let them have a good moment first.
But in my heart, I'm done.
I can't feel about them the way I once did.
I can't forgive them or unsee what I now see more clearly.
I have to find a way to tell them and get myself out.
Naturopathic medicine broke my heart.
I'm seeing here there's also a theme that these are good writers who submitted their stories.
Yeah.
I've been a practicing licensed naturopathic doctor, a protected title in my jurisdiction, whether or not the doctor title is warranted, for over 20 years.
I felt like I was doing good, helpful work for most of that time.
And that I was part of a good profession trying to improve things where conventional medicine was getting it wrong.
Yeah, and there are a lot of areas as we've covered.
You know, as we fill this out a bit, we know that naturopaths are like really good at bedside manner, at some forms of therapeutic relationship, or they can be.
That the meeting times are longer, that they will take a holistic sort of appreciation of the whole person, and that can be really soothing.
Yeah, I mean, I think the way I would frame it is that there's a way that this kind of service is positioned in contrast to conventional medicine as being more caring, more respectful, more willing to look at, okay, let's talk about your diet and let's before we go right to pharmaceuticals, let's talk about some supplements that might help you and let's draw on these different points of view.
Let's look at your doshas, let's test your acupuncture points and So, all of that feels very affirming and, you know, I suppose loving and like you're being tended to in a way that is... Individualized?
Yeah, individualized.
There you go.
Right.
Over the years, I actually leaned away from using modalities like homeopathy because it never seemed to work.
And then she says here, I roll slow learner, I guess.
Like she gave it the 20-year shot, right?
But I absolutely did lean into using treatments without a lot of evidence because that's how I was trained.
In many ways, my training was legitimized.
Anyway, like so many others have experienced, the pandemic forced me to look hard at these issues.
What jolted me into awareness of the problems with my profession was seeing some of my colleagues challenge public health measures and platform people like Christiane Northrup, Sherry Tenpenny, and even David Icke.
Oh, what a nightmare.
I felt appalled and horrified that people I respected would have blood on their hands for such irresponsible behavior.
I spoke to one of these colleagues directly who was defensive and worried about vaccine side effects but didn't really seem to see the problem with Northrop.
I reported the activity to my regulating body and the page was eventually removed.
I really felt there should be a public statement of some kind saying that they were wrong and sorry but of course that didn't happen.
There was very little outcry from other colleagues.
I also didn't speak up publicly, but I did try to reach out individually to other colleagues and, apart from one friend, few seemed as bothered as I was.
I joined a group of naturopathic doctors who are committed to evidence-based practice, and they seemed to be doing good work from within the profession.
This is hopeful.
Yet, even this group recently advertised their upcoming course on a page that also posts a podcast with the problematic Dave Asprey.
No!
We're evidence-based, but we're going to promote the worst human being.
Well, but there's something different.
I mean, isn't he in a different sort of, I don't know, affect class?
Doesn't he strike a little bit differently than David Icke?
He's an aspiring bro influencer.
That's the line that he tries to draw.
He tries to be like, he tries to play the line between open hearted, love and light wellness and fucking straight up bro influencer.
And he's just, everything comes out wrong.
Yeah, so pseudoscience claims, but also during the pandemic, he became very, very harshly, not only critical of quarantine measures, but like posting things on his social media where he was shaming and attacking people for doing things like wearing masks.
Or being fat.
Or being fat, for sure.
Right, yeah.
My good friend, who is as bothered as I am, asked me, why can't you just focus on the good parts of naturopathic medicine?
And that's a fair question, I think.
But to me, the profession is so polluted with wrong ideas that I keep having to search through the filth and fucking Dave Asprey-Poskes to try and distinguish what's worth salvaging.
And I should say that she said effing, but I went there.
I don't know anymore which are the good parts.
The only thing that eases my heartache is to continue to learn with empathy why I was drawn to naturopathic medicine and to consider my path forward and away from it.
I'm considering jobs where I can work as part of a team helping in a community setting somehow.
I also want to leave without causing harm or maybe I should say further harm to clients, but I haven't figured it all out yet.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for the really great work you're doing.
It's felt like an emotional lifeline during a really painful time.
Gratefully, Lillian.
What a difficult position to be in.
Yeah.
I mean, because what kind of...
Is there a retraining avenue that they might be able to take?
Is it?
No, eh?
Not really.
I mean... You have to start over?
Like what kind of credits do you have towards a conventional medical degree?
Like if you graduated from Bashir like 20 years ago or whatever, what are you going to do?
Yeah, I don't know the details of that, but I doubt that there's much crossover.
I mean, the thing that stands out to me is that when the pandemic hit, Either, if you were in her kind of position, either you doubled down and continued following, you know, the Easter eggs that were leading you towards being red-pilled, or you recognized, wow, actually, I am ill-equipped and my community is not handling this well.
My community of colleagues doesn't really know how to reconcile a kind of And there's an opportunity there to be a reformer, a voice for reason.
They go to their regulatory board and they get a particular social media site shut down, or what was it, a Facebook group or something?
But there was some action that was taken, but it's not like the fundamentals of that sort of community epistemology are going to change.
Yeah, and to be fair, you know, you interviewed two naturopaths fairly early on on the podcast who were appalled by all of this COVID denialism and anti-vax rhetoric, and they were really trying to toe that line.
And we argued, I have to say, internally about whether or not it was actually a good thing to do to platform them.
I really appreciated what they had to say about the social struggle that they were in, but you both said, we're not quite sure how they resolve it, actually.
So where is this?
Where is this episode going to go, Matthew?
Yeah, I mean, that's right.
And we all really appreciated them as human beings and their their ethical principles were in the right place.
Okay, our next story comes from Katie, and I've titled it, From Shambhala to Squirting to Sanity, and that's because she's said, you know, feel free to laugh at some of the stuff I'm going to be able to share with you.
So, she writes, the first and probably most acute experience with spiritual heartbreak was when allegations of abuse came out in the Shambhala community.
I was active at my local center for about three years, and I practiced some with Dharma Ocean as well.
Stop there and give a little bit of background that Shambhala International is the secular arm of a religious cult initially called Vajradhatu which constellated around the demented genius of Chögyam Trungpa in the 1970s.
He had a dramatic And traumatic backstory that included escaping the Chinese occupation on a long march over the Himalayas where many people died.
He became a lifelong alcoholic.
He suffered partial paralysis on a car wreck.
He emotionally captivated and abused his students, and he did clerical sex abuse with as many as he could
with his henchmen often on the lookout during events for young women to almost like force march back to his
quarters.
So just total wreck of a person who was poetically gifted, but benefited from an immense amount of propping up
by his acolytes, including a lot of people who did ghostwriting for him on his endless books.
And then the propping up was just sort of capped off by his traditional funeral,
because after he died of terminal alcoholism, they wrestled his withered legs into full lotus position
and actually propped him up on a throne in meditation posture for the wake.
Now, wasn't he like in his late 40s or something when he died of alcoholism?
Yeah, 47 I believe.
Yeah, yeah.
Incredible, incredible stuff.
So he just, you know, fast track to liver cirrhosis and early death.
Yeah, an absolute death spiral that lasted for about 20 years I think at top speed.
Eventually, his failed son, Sakyong Mipham, took over, but was recently busted for multiple incidents of sexual abuse.
Of course, he's still in charge.
Dharma Ocean, that Katie refers to as an offshoot, who is run by this crusty, charismatic guy named Reggie Ray, whose shtick was to imply that he was Trungpa's true inheritor and not the son.
And he might have a point, because his students describe him as emotionally abusive, too.
All right, so Katie goes on.
Watching the older, white, mostly academic and financially very comfortable folks who had been involved with Shambhala for decades, some of whom studied directly with Chogyam Trungpa, do things like suggest that the women involved were mentally ill.
This came from a female Shastri, or head teacher, who knew how disgusted I was as a rape survivor.
This all felt so counter to what we were practicing, what these people decades older than me were teaching me.
encourages forgiveness and loving kindness for all, trying to bypass over the abuses of power.
And that was shocking for me. This all felt so counter to what we were practicing, what these
people decades older than me were teaching me. I revered them, and seeing them pay lip service to
victims with a listening circle while desperately clinging to the Shambhala name because as I
learned that was the only way to maintain access to the Shambhala course materials,
which are copyrighted and owned by Shambhala Incorporated, this was a total heartbreak.
Really devastating.
I mean, I had my daughter blessed as a baby in Shambhala tradition by a visiting teacher.
I watched my husband take the refuge vow.
I was welcomed in immediately.
I remember being told, welcome home at the first event I attended.
And over time, it felt like spiritual home.
But then the entire organization rallies to protect its leader, wait out the anger, and go back to business as usual.
I think Sakyong Mipham is actually personally teaching again after going into self-imposed exile in 2017 to wait it out.
I realized it's all about the business, the money, and the IP of Shambhala practice.
What a con.
I can't do any of the practices anymore.
I've experienced a more chronic disillusionment with spirituality and wellness since developing chronic fatigue syndrome after a severe infection from a feral cat bite in 2019.
Yikes.
A lot of my disease progression was hidden by the pandemic, but as I came out, Formerly vibrant and now broken to attempt to practice yoga again, receive massage, do all the woo-woo self-care.
I realized most of the people I had taught for or with as colleagues or whose services I once thought were profoundly beneficial were all snake oil charlatans who are only interested in healing at full price.
Definitely not if you haven't worked for close to two years while you deal with the nightmare that is the social security disability process.
I'm glad, just to pause here, I'm glad we have a pointer at this type of heartbreak, which is realizing your wellness friends can't give it away when you're in need.
And it made me want to ask you, Julian, when you were going broke treating your Lyme disease, did any of your yoga colleagues reach out and offer you free Reiki?
No, that certainly did not happen.
But I'll tell you what did happen is that people who knew I had Lyme disease would go and see their kind of holistic practitioner.
And then when they saw their holistic practitioner, their symptoms, whatever they were experiencing in their lives, would be diagnosed as Lyme disease without a blood test based on muscle testing or something or some set of clinical reporting.
Oh no.
Then they would be put on a special supplement protocol.
Then they would come back and be told by their practitioner that their Lyme disease was healed.
At which point they would reach out to me and say, oh, I've been healed of Lyme disease and you can too.
And I would want to just, you know, become violent.
It sounds so much like what happened my last few years in LA with people and their mold.
And mold is a real thing.
Like mold infection is real, but All of a sudden, dozens of people around the circles I was in had mold in their apartment, and then therefore it was like messing with their immune systems and they were on all these supplements.
But also undiagnosed, right?
Yeah.
And that's the issue here, not if you actually have it.
Because you could actually get like tests, blood tests for mold infection, I imagine.
Absolutely.
Yes, yes.
Okay, alright.
Yeah, and this is the norm, right, is that there are in vogue diagnoses, quote-unquote diagnoses, that go around in these circles and then suddenly everyone has celiac, haven't done the celiac blood test, but I have it on good authority that I'm gluten intolerant and so then here's the expensive protocol that's gonna help you with that.
I would go out with those people and they would be like, I have celiac and I'd order a pizza and they would eat some.
And it'd be like, a little bit won't bother me.
I'm like, that's not how it works.
Lactose intolerance neither.
It's interesting what you say about there being sort of a fad or a cycle of a particular diagnosis or non-diagnosis.
It's kind of a rumor, isn't it?
Like, a rumor of something that's happening to a bunch of people in your circle.
Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because during the period I was dealing with my Lyme disease, it became one of those in vogue diagnoses where more and more I would hear from people, oh, I have Lyme disease too.
And I would say, did you get the Western blot test?
And they'd say, oh, no, no, I didn't do any blood test.
But this is what my doctor told me.
And I'd be like, what kind of doctor?
Why are you so cynical, Julian?
Why are you so cynical?
Lyme disease is a state of mind.
So Katie goes on about her condition and, you know, in discussion with her former friends or her friends and colleagues, I've been told, she writes, this illness is a kundalini awakening.
Of course, you need to thank it and let it go so it can purify you.
The more you struggle to accept it, the harder your physical process will be.
This is from a yoga teacher and she says former colleague.
All right, quote, you need to learn how to squirt.
Now that came out of left field.
Hold on a second.
There's tons of research, listen Julian, come on.
Okay.
There's tons of research on the healing benefits of emptying those glands.
Another yoga teacher, also a body worker and former colleague.
Can you imagine like having a chronic illness and your friend basically hands you a dildo and says, you really need to, it's incredible.
All right, quote, good for you coming here and trying to get better.
So many people just give up.
This is an owner of a salt cave, and I dressed her down on things like having no money, being too sick to drive, all the barriers that the people who give up live with, and she was very embarrassed and offered me a discount.
But no blanket discount for all disabled folks, just a personal one for me.
So, real change there.
So, what's a salt cave, guys?
No idea.
No idea.
We're gonna have to look it up.
I have no idea on that one either.
I know salt lamps, but...
Yeah.
And then the classic quote, you are 100% responsible for everything that happens in your life, unquote.
This is the owner of a wellness studio who gave me the worst massage of my life.
The only massage I've ever walked out of after she began gently hitting me with some branch
without asking permission or explaining the purpose of this supposedly ancient Ayurvedic technique,
which sent me into a full-on panic attack as a survivor of child abuse.
God damn it.
But she's a self-proclaimed, literally amazing healer and reader of people's energy.
And that must not have been a panic attack, but a release of past energy that was ready to let go.
Bitch, shut the fuck up and give me my refund before I show you release.
Okay, a salt cave is hello therapy.
I thought you just said Assault Cave.
No, that's where she just was.
She was just in the Assault Cave.
She went from the Salt Cave to an Assault Cave.
This is important.
It's taken from the Greek word halos, which means salt.
It's a simple and natural therapy created in a microclimate controlled environment, salt rooms or salt caves, by combining the healing properties of nature with innovative technology.
That sounds groundbreaking.
We have created an environment that replicates the salt mines found in Eastern Europe and the Himalayas, where halotherapy has been in use for over 150 years.
Oh my god, so it's basically Siberia, but with an air conditioner?
When I was in Morocco, I went to a thermal pool that was in a cave like that.
And also, being Eastern European, I do know that saunas and these practices are part of the culture there, but this seems a little New Age-y to me.
Katie writes, the worst part is how unless there is a financial transaction, all these people I knew in the yoga and wellness community who love me so much have just disappeared.
The most anyone has done, except for my mentor, but she doesn't count because she's more like a loving mom to me than my own has ever been.
Well, that's good.
Is to send a message asking if I want to meet up for coffee, to which I have to explain that I'm housebound, And the energetic expenditure of putting on clothes and driving to a coffee shop will leave me too sick to even go outside to go go inside said coffee shop.
I never heard from her again.
We're addicted to the narrative of the morally superior triumphant sick person who won't let anything hold them back.
It's prosperity gospel and the Horatio Alger myth in flowy skirts.
If you're just sick and not wearing a constant smile, manifesting your wellness as your body rips itself apart from a disease that has no treatment, no cure, not even a specialty that owns it and offers guidance on how to live well with it, Then, you are at a low vibration and it's really just too bad.
She's choosing to stay so sick that she's not allowing herself to get better.
Finding this podcast has honestly saved my heart.
You have no way of understanding how the way you name and call out and even make fun of this bullshit feels to someone stuck in the self-hate it engenders.
It's a way out of the trap, so I thank you sincerely, and I mean it for all your hard work, regardless of whether or not you choose to use any of my story.
We used all of it, Katie, thank you.
I just appreciate what you do and know it's brought me more healing than any selenite stick ever will.
Love to you all.
Yeah, I want to say thank you, especially Katie, because my mother has a very similar journey to yours and what you said about people not understanding how exhausting trying to engage in any kind of, you know, social activity or like leave the house to go and do something, how it will make you suffer afterwards.
That's exactly what she goes through.
So thanks for sharing your story.
And it also kills me that people have to actually go through such a disease for their eyes to get open to what's going on.
So many people we've talked to have had chronic illnesses or have had cancer or have had all of the things that these wellness influencers say you can get over with your thoughts or supplements.
And they're like, no, you can't.
And that's the way their eyes are opened.
I don't want people to have to go through these things to be able to see what these grifters are doing,
but I'm very happy that people who have gone through it and come back with a story are willing to share it
to hopefully help others not have to go down that path.
♪♪ Okay, we have Heartbreak of a Dancer,
and this is from Jenna, not her real name.
I used to train in a physical theater methodology.
As students of the Forum, we would train our bodies to the point of precision, exhaustion, and vacancy.
Your spiritual-slash-physical body feels and embodies energy which is expressed both in the text of the performance piece and presence.
You train to lose yourself in the method and the body moves to serve the ideas of the master.
Oh, no.
It's really beautiful.
It sounds like Gnawa music and culture and dance.
Right.
A lot of the training is about getting out of the head, bringing on a type of trance as you overlay this mundane world with another one of your imagining.
The performers are a set of drones.
The best ones are the ones most precise in the form.
Now we're talking ballet as well.
It is deliberately anti-modern in the sense that the body's value is in the work it can do.
It's a rejection of the psychology of Western and 20th century performance styles and individualism.
You access the energies of the spirit-slash-body through intense exertion and suppress the reflexive questioning of the consciousness.
Clear your mind and build an imaginary world around you.
This disconnection from the mundane makes you otherworldly and interesting to watch.
There is a seductiveness in the idea of the pre-modern.
Of subsuming yourself to the importance of the work, it attracts people who want to sacrifice themselves to their art and those who want to avoid the complex responsibility of individualism.
Like many rigid hierarchies, it also leads to favoritism and exploitation.
Wow, so complex.
And you mentioned, Dylan, great writing on these.
You mentioned earlier another one.
Okay, she goes on.
Strive for physical precision and perfection while knowing there is no perfection.
Compete with each other.
Be careful what you say as having the wrong attitude could see you expelled.
You could be reported by anyone.
Please the master.
Make your master look good to their master.
The spiritual experiences of the craft are a feeling of transcendence and de-individuation.
Exhaustion from long hours of strenuous training was designed to both keep you in your body as a performance technique, but without any opportunity to reflect on your own experience.
Oh man, it's so interesting how many of these, you know, group exercise, discipline, you know, artistic situations foster, you know, transcendence and de-individuation as a pathway to being in your body.
It's such a paradox.
Well, it does have standing in terms of, I mentioned Gunawa, there's also Haitian voodoo dance, there's also flamenco and the singing.
These rituals of communal experiences through dance that enter trance states is very old.
But what I'm thinking, like when she gets please the master to please the master, then you're getting into cult dynamics, which is not traditionally part of the music and dance forms, or at least we hope not from our understandings of it.
Let's get back to Jenna.
The inanity of the intricate physical perfection of the body was a distraction set into the training to keep the company oriented to obscure small details and to pleasing the master.
Oh dear.
Okay, so there's the cult dynamics.
How does the hand look?
How does the foot position reflect a person's higher understanding of the technique?
There's the Jeeva Mukti.
If you can't backbend, your heart isn't open, right?
The arbitrary favoritism.
The inspiring beauty that the bodies create on stage and in the rehearsal room.
The artist's desperation to belong and be in a stable environment and to work in their field.
The seriousness of the work.
The importance of the dedication to training and how that makes the artist feel at peace.
The exquisite simplicity of devolving responsibility.
It brings me to tears to even hear the music as I remember feeling a part of something.
My spiritual heartbreak when I left was for the loss of belief in the community.
I don't think the actual loss of community was as real because the bonds were ones of power, suspicion, and favoritism.
At least that's how I experienced them.
But my heartbreak was very real and spiritual, and it took many years for it to dull.
Perhaps with all the emptying out, my fellow performers became shells unable to form a community, unable to create bonds of understanding and kindness with each other.
Jenna.
So I just want to add here, you know, what you were both talking about a moment ago, right?
This sense that your individuality and your awareness of where you are in space and time and your sense of self is being subsumed in order to enter into these trance states where this is defined as being in your body.
And that there's actually a dissociative quality to that and there's a way in which there's then a lot of the boundaries are down and there's a lot of vulnerability to all sorts of dynamics that might come into play.
But when one of those dynamics then is so beautifully described here, right?
The setting up of a new hierarchical structure of what it means to really get the work.
and to really be dedicated and to really be embodying it in a way that demonstrates intuitively
in a way that would be obvious to the people who have access to the esoteric understanding
that you are a good exemplar of this particular approach.
And so even there's this massive contradiction right behind, oh we're going to let go of
concepts and go into the purely experiential intuitive realm of just like accessing something so pure
and so lacking in that judgmental structure and then what happens here's this massive judgmental
structure that's authoritarian in nature and actually mystifying in terms of like well how do
I get it right? Well and she says the arbitrary favoritism. Yep. Perfect.
And it is perfect because the value is de-individuation, and as you're saying, there's this sort of new constellation that emerges of experts or perfect expressors of things, and that creates a whole, as you said, like a cascade of, you know, failures and potential failures, right?
We have one last story that I've titled Orgasm Denial, and it comes to us from Lynn.
And we'll do a little bit of background work after her first couple of sentences here.
She says, Hi.
Hi there.
My name is Lynn.
I was involved with a mystical occult group that followed a guru.
named Samael Aoun Weor, who died in 1977. He based his doctrine mostly off of Blavatsky's work
and Gurdjieff, but also weaving in Catholicism and Buddhist meditation. So I had to go look this guy
up because he was totally new to me. Right. Here's a four-in-one as I understand it.
He was born Victor Rodriguez in Colombia in 1917.
He took on the Hebrew name Samael Anwar and thereby styled himself as the messenger of God.
Samael was a kind of Gnostic syncretist, drawing on a variety of texts and traditions and claiming personal revelations and initiations as the basis of his teachings, all starting from a quite young age.
It looks like it's all fairly typical perennialist and teleological in tone.
In other words, all of the world's religions are pointing us towards some kind of universal process of self-realization, which has a sort of inevitable omega point quality.
By the time he was in his early 30s, Samael was quite focused on white tantra and using sexuality as a vehicle for awakening.
As his life continued, he began referring to himself as the Kalki Avatar, which is actually something that Adi Dai used to call himself the Kalki Avatar as well, which is the final incarnation of Vishnu that will signal the end of the Kali Yuga.
Lynn sent us a lot of references for this guy, and I didn't get very far with them, and I know she would have a lot to fill in, so maybe we'll actually catch up with her later.
But what stands out to me is he has a kind of L. Ron Hubbard level of hypergraphia, which we all know stemmed from his temporal lobe epilepsy.
Here's a guy who wrote 60 books.
You know, we always have to think about ghostwriters when there are lots of devotees, but here's just a selection of titles from his Galaxy Brain Library.
So, 1950, The Perfect Matrimony, or The Door to Enter into Initiation.
Also, The Revolution of Beelzebub.
1951, The Zodiacal Course.
1952, Secret Notes of a Guru.
52, Treatise of Occult Medicine and Practical Magic.
54, Treatise of Sexual Alchemy.
55, The Mysteries of the Fire, Kundalini Yoga, of course.
Also 55, Cosmic Ships. 58, Esoteric Treatise of Theurgy.
Have you heard this word before, Julian?
No, I've heard it, but I couldn't tell you what it means.
59, he publishes The Mountain of Juratana and Fundamental Notions of Endocrinology and Criminology.
Right, right.
1968, Constitution and Liturgy of the Gnostic Movement.
It goes on and on.
1973, Aztec Christic Magic.
1974, The Metallic Planets of Alchemy.
1975, Revolutionary Psychology.
And then 1977, The Kabbalah of the Mayan Mysteries.
That's the year of his death, so he really packed it all in.
That's my favorite.
At that point he was really hitting his stride.
You know, in a parallel universe, this guy was like a J.R.R.
Tolkien.
Totally!
Oh, we've got a whole episode on failed artists as gurus, like the dividing line between that.
That's actually coming up, I think, Julian.
Now, he also opposed science and modern medicine, as you do, in favor of what he referred to as occult magic and elemental medicine.
Impressively, Samael correctly predicted the year in which he would die.
If that's not strong enough evidence for you that he was the Kalki Avatar, he was able to do this at just 60.
But he has so far failed to come through on his more tricky promise of being resurrected.
Amazing.
Okay, so Lynn goes on.
The kicker was the sexual practice.
In order to awaken your consciousness, because of course you were asleep to your true nature, members were required to have sex with their spouse.
Only cisgendered and opposite-sex partnerships allowed, but- Wait, he forced people to have sex with their spouses?
No, but they had to do so without having an orgasm.
This is a fairly toxic mix of New Age occult ideology and Christianity.
So Lynn, pardon us just for a moment where we run down the whole having sex but not coming and how great it is especially for men thing.
Okay, so the basic for our listeners, The basic 101 on this is that esoterically fixated dudes in many cultures over many centuries have come to believe the following things in broad strokes, so to speak.
Semen is an essential life force fluid.
Your body's spiritual digestive fire boils it down like boiling maple sap into syrup.
Syrup for your subtle body to slurp.
Next, ejaculating is biologically expensive, leaving men languishing and indolent on their Victorian cheslong, but it's also spiritually expensive, leading them away from higher aims into the purgatory of animalistic...
One core idea is that if men learn to have penetrative sex without ejaculating, they can reabsorb the energy that would otherwise reproduce suffering material life into their spiritual bodies, driving it upwards in the ecstasy of enlightenment.
So the bro-scientists among them also believe that the brain floats in semen, and so you can always add more and become smarter and more enlightened.
Now, women are not generally included in many of these schemes except as kind of fluffers for men's access to the edgelord god, and they're often thought to be distractions on the path.
So, if you go to our Instagram, I have We've posted a thread of memes with cursed quotes from a Twitter account called Retention Kings, and one of them features a gif of the psychopath General Jack D. Ripper from Doctor Strange Love saying to Peter Sellers, who's playing Lieutenant Mandrake, I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Yeah, so this is a really widespread idea.
Starting in the 18th century, there are Catholic theologians who are saying that coitus reservatus could be a pious form of birth control, although not very reliable, I don't think.
There were Western esotericists who were into it.
Aldous Huxley was into it.
It shows up in Neo-Daoist, Neo-Yogic, Neo-Tantric discourses, and I'm saying Neo here because Figuring out the sexual politics at the time of their medieval origin is kind of difficult, but we do know, for example, that male groups of Hatha yogis in India were really misogynistic, and some argue that female tantric practitioners, on the other hand, are actually elevated above their low caste status via their sexual value.
Now, all that is in the far more distant past than what we have coming out of the postmodern fascism of the celibate Narendra Modi, the BJP, the RSS, which actively encourages sexual continence so that the saved-up semen can spiritualize the male bureaucracy.
So, this idea of using semen retention to fuel reactionary politics is the main source of inspiration for today's no-fappers, if you've heard of that.
Now, I also just want to mention that the idea of men not orgasming is not always so misogynistic.
So, for instance, in the 1850s in Oneida in New York, there's a guy named John Humphrey Noyes who established the first free love community in the U.S.
based on what he called biblical communism.
Where the possessiveness of monogamy was frowned upon, and all consenting adults were expected to be just fucking each other.
Consensually, they made clear.
And while men were forbidden from ejaculating so that they could preserve strength and build discipline, women were supposed to have as many orgasms as possible.
And maybe slightly better, but also creepy, this scenario, I think.
It is with some Nicole Didano vibes, where in the OM cult, women were treated like their orgasms made them into the power cells for the group, right?
Like, this is where the energy of the world comes from.
So, Oneida's kind of interesting, but also it appears that young people of both sexes I couldn't find out how young, but I'm a little bit concerned.
We're supposed to be initiated by middle-aged members.
So, yeah, so potentially that's very gross.
What Lynn is describing seems closer to what a contemporary of noise named Alice Stockham promoted with her idea of carezza, which is Italian for caress, because we know that going back to the Romans, Italians never ejaculate.
That's a joke.
But Stockholm advised that women not orgasm either, and she had some kind of alt-health rationale for it.
She was an early OB-GYN who believed that both men and women would be more deeply satisfied by lots and lots of edging.
I just want to add here to your really, really comprehensive historical rundown, Matthew, that the idea in the ancient myths of yoga mythology that you could attain to immortality through yoga is then linked to this notion that you're retaining your semen and driving it up your spine so that it sort of pulls in your brain and creates the holy nectar that will enlighten you to the ultimate truth of the universe.
And then that by cutting the underside of the tongue to free it up so that it can go up the back of your throat, it would be able to then drink that Amrita, which would result in your enlightenment and understanding the truth of eternal life.
I mean, it's such a fascinating preoccupation.
Preoccupation is a good word.
All right, so Lynn, sorry to take that detour, Lynn.
Back to your story.
My husband and I were involved from 2001 to 2018, so 17 years, and became missionaries, teaching actively for eight years.
In the beginning, I mostly lived in a state of fearful reverence and the smug assurance that we at least knew the truth.
And it was exciting to learn how all religions are interconnected and all teach the same thing, only in secret code that we who knew the truth could see between the lines of the other teachings.
And that's the perennialism that has come up a couple other times, right?
I had gone to college and was missing aspects of academia.
I felt I didn't fit well into what life offered and was drawn to contrarian lifestyles.
I hadn't been raised with a religion and this new group seemed to offer all the answers to life's questions.
It wasn't until we moved to a new town to start a new Gnostic center, and we finally had a break from teaching five to six nights a week, that I began to feel really harmed by my faith.
I also began to have trouble not having an orgasm during sex, which was the fork in the road in our faith for salvation or damnation.
I got horrible advice from the other members around my issues around sex and other aspects of the doctrine I found problematic.
Mostly I was told how I didn't pray hard enough to my Divine Mother for guidance in the sexual practice and that I was lying to myself about wanting to have an orgasm.
Cool, she says.
So incredible stuff here, and Lynn isn't saying it explicitly, but what I'm taking from this is that this very private matter, like it's supposed to be a topic of confession and conversation within the group, And I want everybody who's listening to remember, we referred to this a number of times before, that controlling the sex behaviors of members is like cult basics 101.
And that can go in any direction.
Never have sex, always have sex, never ejaculate, ejaculate 20 times a day, leave your partner, take a new partner.
The point is that the quickest way to biohack a person's relational matrix and reorganize devotion towards a group is to subvert their sexual agency.
So Lynn goes on, I was really torn in two by this as my husband seemed not willing to ask the hard questions I was starting to about the doctrine and if it was helping or harming.
After many scandals from other centers came to light and the very awful responses from people I had long trusted, I could no longer participate in either the groups or the faith itself.
I had to leave and I was very much in love with my husband.
But because of how the sexual practice dictated the core of the religion, there was a very big risk of having to end my marriage.
I made a call to a couple of other Gnostics I'd known over the years to tell them I was leaving.
They, of course, were pleasantly condescending and uninterested in why I'd lost my faith.
They just wished me good luck, essentially.
My husband and I were in talks about what my leaving would mean, how we would manage ourselves, when we got an email that he was kicked out, without any inquiry about what his position on the doctrine was at all.
And I mean, no one reached out to him.
It really felt like a betrayal of all we had put our energy, money, time, and faith into.
Can you believe that?
Mm, incredible.
It's like your wife, we know your wife is starting to have orgasms.
And you might be guilty by association, I think.
And then they don't even ask him, and I mean, well, let's go on.
It's almost been five years, and the things that have continued to help me has been my, have, mm, okay, let me start that again.
That's got to be half, right?
It's almost been five years, and the things that have continued to help me have been my deconversion process.
Learning what crazy things the OG occultists actually believed, understanding how much Samael plagiarized them, Mr. 60 Books, listening to various podcasts, yours being one of them, being in therapy, and without being too graphic, enjoying a normal sex life again with my husband.
I will say, even though I've been through a really awful trauma and still have to deal with that residue, I am now happier than I've ever been in my life.
I enjoy just being a simple person now, without the ever-exhausting pressure of having to perform my religion to awaken my consciousness.
It's interesting to me how many of these cults, wellness or otherwise, require so much commitment and the achievement of results of whatever doctrine is being sold.
Anyway, thanks for your time and this opportunity.
Cheers, Lin.
Thanks, Lin.
That was really beautiful.
What a life.
You know, it reminds me of that old saying from Taoism or Buddhism uses this as well.
When I started my journey, a mountain was a mountain.
As I journeyed, a mountain was no longer a mountain.
And when I reached the mountain, a mountain was again a mountain.
And to live a simple life I've personally felt that my too many experiences with psychedelics in my 20s catapulted me to some places of searching that I eventually got exhausted by.
And simplicity and contentment are really all I strive for at this point.
And I'm really happy to hear that having gone through way more than I ever did with, you know, a cult leader like that and being involved in a group in that nature, that you've landed at a similar place.
Yeah, I mean, I second all of that and thank you so much, Lynn.
To say I'm now happier than I've ever been in my life, I enjoy just being a simple person now without the ever-exhausting pressure of having to perform my religion to awaken my consciousness, that to me is the antidote to spiritual heartbreak.
That's the place of arriving in that, to go back to the person who inspired this episode, is not just being a cynical nihilist.
It's actually discovering Thank you, everybody, for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
