“Pink Drama” - original painting by author

When I was twenty -two, I uprooted from Southern California after completing a degree in theater at UCLA, got rid of everything I owned, moved Paris, France on a three-month visa. I had a notebook with a few people to contact there, and no other plan or preparation except a bilingual education and the intention of staying indefinitely. I was following my dreams.

I was also escaping my life in California.

My mother had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge when I was 14. The incident was swept under the rug by most everyone while I struggled to blend in, to feel and act normal. I was living with my narcissistic father and his enabling second wife and family in an emotional wasteland, isolated within a group. I was only able to walk the bridge a few years ago.

I threw myself into the theater in Marin County where we lived, and became a star player. I tried grief counseling after a while, and experienced a brief emotional oasis from the caring therapist. She tried contacting my father to speak with him about ways to best support me and was told off. She left that conversation shell shocked and let me know she was powerless to help when it came to my father. I assume through the power of his intellect, he tried to convince her she knew nothing.

He believed that intuition was an inferior form of intelligence. He was also deeply misogynistic.

Before heading to UCLA to study theater, I was told by one particularly predatorial theater teacher to lose ten pounds to prepare myself for the agents he’d be introducing me to in LA. I was already thin. I developed an eating disorder trying to hit the designated goal weight.

I sought help when I arrived in Paris. The eating disorder had been with me for six years and had followed me to France. The veneer around my mother’s death was cracking, leaving me feeling the waves of depression I’d managed to keep at bay till then.

Soon I found an intriguing looking poster announcing a conference about a radical New Therapy. Having been involved in experimental theater in downtown Los Angeles for many years, I was drawn in.

I did a session with the conference leader soon after that. A wave of love flooded my system with a force I’d never before experienced after the exhausting rebirthing session and I literally floated out of there on a cloud. I never had another bulimic episode again.

In retrospect, it’s obvious now what a prime recruit I must have been. I was fresh off the boat trying to integrate a foreign culture, very young, impressionable, used to being told what to do by my controlling father, in emotional distress with a painful, unresolved past topped off with a very healthy dose of idealism.

The leader was an ex-Osho Sannyasin who had been up close with Osho in the early days but disillusioned during the Oregon years. He’d then gone on and experienced rebirthing with Leonard Orr before heading back to France. I know so little of his past, he disclosed almost nothing. I knew from others that before doing the conferences, he was a psychic, reading tarot cards in front of the Pompidou center or at fairs, bringing people into his first therapy groups after the card readings.

Though he stopped doing them once his group was underway, those readings were amazing. He clearly had a gift.

He was all the things: Physically beautiful with dark curly hair, big brown eyes and a soulful gaze, he had a brilliant mind, charisma, was an original thinker, and had an astonishing presence that made you feel like you were the only person in the room when he gazed deeply into your eyes (yes, he did that thing…).

His insights were remarkable. It felt as though he could read into your soul and psyche. He seemed to have mastered the therapeutic art of expertly guiding a patient step by step, lifting one onion peel after the next, uncovering glimpses of the psychological and emotional liberation and spiritual freedom we sought.

He himself seemed so free. Free from anxieties, free to live life on his own terms, free to do as he pleased, free not to conform. His partner was a woman I’ll call S, who was leading her own Jungian based groups. She too was astonishingly beautiful and powerful in her own way. The two of them made a formidable couple, admired and idealized by all.

I wanted what they had. We all wanted pieces of what they had but I would come to learn that none of those things I aspired to were ever attainable while under this man’s control.

I could not have the great career like they had, the loads of free time to create, the autonomy, the spiritual enlightenment, or the healthy partnership. I would never be able to afford to live in the exquisite places they lived in or travel. I would be a slave to an unfulfilling, soul-sucking job, as would we all, working at dead-end low- level careers to pay for therapy sessions and retreats to afford him the lifestyle I coveted.

I would be asked to give up the theater and not engage in any kind of career or artistic training. We were to be self-trained, and almost everyone worked at jobs that required no real education.

How ironic now that I’m a very well-trained career coach and an artist supporting others in the absolute opposite way.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Le Travail” (the Work) that I was involved with for twenty years, was a mish mash of transpersonal psychology, lots of Osho meditations, gestalt, rebirthing, talk therapy, massage, group energy work, writing and whatever the guy made up or took from other teachers.

We’d do summer retreats in villas in the South of France, waking at 6 am to do 7am dynamic meditations, followed by rebirthing sessions, followed by sharing in the group, followed by dance, by meditation. Lots and lots of energy was stirred up. You’d go deep, work hard, and walk away from those weeks blissed out, feeling purified, seeing the world with eyes no longer tainted by your past. You’d feel cleansed, emotionally released, connected to life in a much deeper way. I felt alive, seen, heard, accepted for who I was.

After my first week long retreat, the teacher told me he didn’t think “le travail” was right for me. I was approaching it like a theater exercise. I told him it was very important to me to stay…I was struggling, I now realize, to do therapy like this in French with my then broken French. No easy task. I desperately wanted to fit in, to integrate the country and I was smitten by this man – as were we all.

I still believe he wasn’t consciously running a cult back then.

I believe instead he’d landed on a great way to make a well-paid part-time living as a “therapist-spiritual guide” in France, a highly regulated country, without a license of any kind, or the appropriate experience. I guess he devoted the rest of his time to his spiritual and art making practices though I never knew anything about his life beyond the therapy walls.

At my second retreat, I met my husband to be, dropped twenty pounds, and had a two-day satori, where I felt connected to God and all beings all at once. It was an overwhelming experience. A mini enlightenment that I’ll never forget.

After that I was hooked.

I truly believed it was a good thing for years. I thought I was healing deep, deep wounds and maybe for a time I was. I married my boyfriend in order to stay in the country and embarked on the journey.

Soon if not immediately, the rules of the game started to come into play. If we wanted the spiritual and psychological freedom this teacher had, we were to follow his life choices. Otherwise, we were always “free” to leave the group. That was the line for all twenty years whenever presented with a terrible choice, deep moments of doubt, or a desire to not follow the rules. We were free to leave and…endure the inhumane shunning that would follow –

Some of his rules started off small then grew to include:

• No contact with family in order to cut ourselves off from our pasts.
• Very little to no contact with friends or people of influence outside the group.
• He decided he didn’t want children, held up Osho’s practice of sterilizing women as an example, so…no kids for any of us.
• He gave up his inheritance, so… if we came into one, we had to give ours up too.
• We weren’t to clog up our energy by saving money, so…no savings accounts.
• We weren’t to get professional training in anything that he didn’t agree to and certainly nothing that took up too much time.
• We were not to buy property because he’d decided it would tie him (and us) down.
• We couldn’t live outside of Paris.

I was not allowed to visit California unless he agreed to it, and it always came with warnings about the many months it would take me to recover from a visit (and that proved true, though the recovery was about both dealing with my father, and how homesick I was, how much I missed California. I felt locked in prison in Paris. I suffered from weather induced SAD and was chronically ill.

Little by little as “the work deepened” we could not choose partners outside this group of 12 to 14 people. No one from the outside could possibly fit the mindset, match the belief structures, and especially be willing to endure the control techniques that we were used to dealing with thinking it was “Le Travail” and we, the elite few seekers. This teacher would inevitably uncover some impossible trait in the other person, and break the relationship. A few of us managed to bring outsiders in. I was one of them.

When couples in the group broke up, they’d recycle relationships with others in the small group. It was very incestuous, but the alternative was solitude as finding a partner outside was nearly impossible and bringing someone in highly unlikely. When the couples would play musical chairs, they’d have to listen in excruciating detail to their former partners describe their intimate lives with the new person. Again, I was one of those people.

I managed to bring a new partner in from the outside. It was a novel, first time thing. He was someone with a Ivy League higher education, career and status in the world. That had never happened before. Sure enough, this senior executive lost his job because of one of the leader’s caprices,

He, the teacher was against success, and the pursuit of professional ambition. I guess it took away from “his work.” But really, I realize it posed a serious threat to his credibility and ability to control us.

All the rules were enforced by the oversharing that went on in the groups and in sessions. It was impossible to stand in integrity with “the work” and hide the truth.

He exploited the deep spiritual urge to surrender in the search for inner freedom. We surrendered to life on the condition that he was in that life, guiding the us.

For years and years I believed the close examination of our shadows, most often conducted through public shaming and humiliation masquerading as therapy, was a purification of our egos.

For twenty years I believed his victim shaming of the sexual abuse I’d endured growing up.

Each assault had me go into resistance only to release and accept my blind spots after a while and feel my heart opening as a result. I thought I was “doing the work.”

I didn’t know I was in a sense being psychologically beaten into submission, my painful past weaponized against me and my desire for independence.

I hit a pivot point when my maternal grandmother died and left me two million dollars. As per the rules I wasn’t allowed to keep it and stay in the group. I was free of course to keep it and leave, but was warned that I would most likely be absorbing the energy of my mother’s suicide and could very possibly also kill myself. I’d be saying good-bye to my creativity (by then I was an artist though not allowed to take any art classes). I’d also have to leave the group, leave my husband, and endure the cruel shunning that would result.

I’ve since learned that the shunning practice he engaged in like every cult leader, has deep roots. It’s the oldest form of punishment using people’s inherent need for connection against them. It’s experienced as unbearable physical pain and has caused many to kill themselves.

I was to give my inherited money to a cause of my choice (not the teacher or the group) just as he had done. I gave it all to my brother despite my teacher telling me that was a bad idea. It was a poisoned gift he said. I remember very clearly how I felt doing it. It was as though I were jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, I saw myself jump, except unlike my mother, I was jumping to freedom.

I had a nervous breakdown, developed a permanent anxiety disorder, continued on in the job I hated, endured harassment on that job from the toxic leader, all while being held up as a spiritual hero in the group.

What got me to really wake up years later despite this, was a series of things. First it was a little voice in my head that went off in the middle of what became intensely boring weekend retreats listening to the same stuff, by the same people for up to 11 hours a day through the sharing sessions. I hated it. I remember thinking, “what if this man is a fraud”?

I brushed off that voice, that quiet call of my intuition, but I did start fighting. Despite him and his rules, I got trained in art, I got trained in coaching, I strengthened my position “in the world”, I had a relationship with someone outside the group. I maintained my friendships outside the group, I kept in touch with some family.

I was told I was “untamable”

I developed a chronic illness that I still have. I was always sick, always dealing with an infection of some kind, always miserable. I started to notice that no one was healing from illnesses, or progressing towards goals they cherished. All the women were chronically depressed.

The end finally came after twenty years, when the teacher had a kundalini awakening. He started a sexual relationship with the youngest of the new fanatic followers (who had tried to seduce everyone’s partner). Never, ever had a boundary like that been crossed with any of us before. There was never the slightest hint of a personal relationship of any kind with anyone. He seemed full of integrity for all those years. He seemed devoted to his partner.

I was invited by this young woman to dinner for my birthday somewhere in Paris. I had no idea she was now in a relationship with the teacher. Shrouded in mystery and pride, she guided me to his door instead of the restaurant.

I left my body walking up the stairs, I completely dissociated. We entered his home and therapy room in the beautiful stone church in Saint Michel. And there it was, my worst nightmare come true: He sat naked in a corner of the room in front of a shrine of some sort. He let me know that his new name was Shiva, the young woman, follower, sexual partner was now Shakti. He’d made a profound transformation. Did I think he could teach the up-coming weekend naked or in a loin cloth? I thought he’d lost his mind. I could become an important player in this next phase of “the work’. He got dressed and off the three of went to “my birthday dinner.”

There he told me that I was attached to my suffering and would never be happy if I didn’t let go.

That really gets to me now when I think about it. I was not only not free from the suffering he’d inflicted on me for decades with his constricting rules, but all that talk therapy, ALWAYS coming back to core family wounds, round and round in circles for decades really keeps one psychologically stuck in place. Once, after my nervous breakdown I was given an antidepressant for my obvious depression. He told me I seemed numbed out, no longer conscious, and said I had to get off of it.

It got more insane from that moment forward, though I didn’t last long after that intense moment of betrayal. It all culminated for me in a month-long retreat in Kathmandu where we were instructed to arrive with one very small carry on backpack, were pushed into hours and hours of mind numbing meditations, told not to leave the hotel (which I ignored) instructed to wear a mala with his face on it, told from then on to wear red clothes and…I could hear him having loud sex with the young woman follower in the room next to mine. The poor woman had to walk behind him several paces wherever he went and could not speak with any of us. God knows where that whole situation is now.

I got back from that hell and broke more rules. I rented a place in the South of France at a friend’s house for a month and finally told her, an outsider what was really going on. The spell was finally broken as I sat there that summer finding a connection with my faith without him anywhere in the mix. I also found myself rehearsing how I’d justify to him that I was going to find a place to live in the South of France.

Suddenly it hit me all at once. Why in the WORLD do I need to ask this man’s permission to do anything? He’s not my father, I’m not a child, I’m a free 43 year old woman.

I got the FUCK out.

I was immediately shunned. It was a hard pivot but thank GOD I made it.

That was fifteen years ago.

I moved back to my native Northern California 8 years ago in 2013, again without a safety net or a job. I’ve made a life for myself as both a coach and an artist. I do what I love. I make my own hours, I’m a decent earner, but I still suffer from the lack of financial security all of those years led me to unknowingly create, the spiritual and psychological abuse and complex PTSD. I’m coming to terms with all of it, rebuilding, healing.

My recovery only started recently after what I can call cult hopping, and a series of relationships with narcissists. Those relationships finally led me to examine this two-decade long period. It was hard to find a therapist who got it and didn’t fixate on the men in my life or my family of origin. I’d mention the “cult” (though I couldn’t reconcile the fact that it was one until very very recently) and the subject was ignored. I finally found someone specialized and here I am.

To my knowledge the group lives on Osho’s ashram but follow this self-proclaimed enlightened man, not Osho. They’re all off the grid, with new names, untraceable.

One of them died as a direct result of following him there. I couldn’t put my finger on any real crime he’d committed and therefore couldn’t really accept that he was a cult leader. He also never had us recruit for him. In fact, it was very much the opposite. He had seen what had happened to Osho and wanted to stay small, under the radar, exploiting only a select few.

I was further awakened listening to the Erin Robbins episode on “A Little Bit Culty”. Any lingering doubts I had about Osho being an enlightened and great spiritual master as I’d been taught for so long, were lifted once and for all, revealing to me the true nature of my experience.

I’m so grateful to discover this movement around cult recovery, to feel the stigma around cult involvement explained and held with compassion. I’ve also met some very wise, intelligent, highly resilient people in recovery, all survivors taking back their lives with dignity.

~Andrea

Freedom from an Osho Inspired Cult in Paris...