6 years in snapshots

When I was in the cult there were so many things we couldn’t talk about. There were the vows of silence and the threats they carried. People were kept silent and isolated under the fear that awful things would happen to your health, your mind, your spirit, your chances of liberation, if you talked. 

Of course, they don’t. That’s one of the many lies. As you speak your truth and are more honest, life only gets better. Easier, maybe not, not for now, but better, 100.

We couldn’t talk about many of our real feelings, if these were considered low resonance they were to be ignored, repressed. You were supposed to do yoga and squeeze your mula Bhanda and meditate until it all just went away. 

Either that or you became so dissociated from it that you thought it was gone, you’d transcended another part of the human experience without learning its lessons. 

We couldn’t talk about the ways in which we weren’t the model cult member we strived, often enacted, pretended, to be. 

The look I see in my eyes in 2018 and 19 is, amongst other things, a seeking, an acting. A not talking about, or allowing myself to experience, the full range of things. A look that sought approval from certain people of the me I was becoming. Of the me I wanted to be in order to be part of them, to fit into their words, their rhetoric, their perceptions of good and bad, their curated aesthetic, their exclusive version of spirituality.

Now, there’s nothing I won’t talk about unless I truly don’t want to. Even when it’s embarrassing, painful, risky. I am a safe space for others to speak up about their experiences too. 

I left the cult because, primarily, I woke up to the fact that it’s behaviour and actions weren’t aligned my core values, and truth is the foremost of those. 

#cultrecovery #survivor #cult #tantra #yoga #speakup #safespace #authenticity