My Dark Dance...

For a few years in my early 20s, I was involved with a spiritual group that turned out to be a cult. And now, in my early 30s, that experience still haunts me. This writing is a way for me to work through my thoughts and feelings on what happened to me during that 4 year time period of my life. 

My memories of what happened are still very clear to me. The whole ‘spiritual journey’ of the cult was a long process of me giving up myself, my family, my personality, all while super sad about it … feeling like it was for the betterment of my spirituality or my spiritual enlightenment. I was going to finally make it to where I needed to go as a spirit and finally come home to who I really was and feel whole and loved. (At least that’s what I was taught.)

The sad part is that at the beginning of “spiritual enlightenment” in a cult modality, you are told that the feelings and mental constructs of who you were growing up was just a programmed and conditioned version of yourself, and that you’re finally coming home to your “true” self by shedding all of it. To anyone who suffered as a child with feeling unloved or feeling abused or feeling like you never truly felt yourself as worthy … this is a perfect storm and a perfect equation and a perfect *trap* for you to go all in, and to throw yourself away even more; being *tricked* that you’re getting closer to the love you’ve always wanted.

So, for me, the hook, line, and sinker were that, at the beginning, I got to emotionally share some pretty deep shit that I’d been holding in for my whole life, and to feel super loved for it. This was the priming phase. And it was incredibly satisfying and rewarding. I truly felt I was being seen and heard for the first time in my life. Tears of joy would stream down my face. I truly was in awe that other people wanted to listen to me. They loved me for sharing my pain. They accepted me. They showed me meditation, spiritual topics, how to heal, how to become more in life, how to finally feel loved. I actually was so blissful at the beginning. I can’t stress enough how at home I actually felt.

But after this brief euphoria, for me it just became more and more and never enough. I was then coerced and egged on to go all in and to go deeper. Go deeper, look deeper. I was literally rewarded for having extreme exorcism-style emotions, like demons-coming-out-of-me-shit. I went so far down a hole that my entire nervous system was completely fried. I was in an unhealthy deep-pain-to-super-bliss, deep-pain-to-super-bliss, deep-pain-to-super-bliss cycle. I never got a chance to feel in the middle. The crazy part was that it never ended. There was always another phase of enlightenment, or dark thing I had to face, more of my old life I had to give up, more of myself I had to throw away. Or more suppressed traumas to uncover. 

And, oh my god, after I’d dealt with this lifetime’s traumas … (as if that wasn’t enough) I then started dealing with past life traumas (apparently to help me understand why this lifetime’s traumas exist and to help me heal them quicker). I saw so many dark visions of me. I saw tortured souls, me raping my little sister, me playing the part of an evil person, me living on Mars as an entity with my brother, me in love with another soul (from the cult) and being married to him every lifetime. Like I started to go so far beyond my life … I believed all these visions about myself in this disassociated state. My entire reality was in shambles. And it never ended. There was always another trauma to surface that I’d forgotten about. I even remembered that my father beat and raped me in a past life, as well as apparently sexually abused me in this one.
It came to the point where I just didn’t know what was real anymore. 

I was always in extreme trauma, recycling through deep pain in my body, and my mind was broken. This whole process truly destroyed me. It was unhealthy. It was unsafe. And on top of all that, the cult leader I was working with, this was his first spiritual retreat he had ever run. He had no professional training to deal with an entire group’s traumas or psychological wellbeing. He literally was just following a spirit (he said he was “one” with the Divine), saying everything that happens is all Divine. Even all the pain. And that love was destructive. And we must go through some deep dark lessons to really realize ourselves. 

The thing is, it kind of became like a “high” to feel like I was going to these deepest darkest parts of myself and “healing” them. And after every “high” there would come the inevitable “low,” so that I would then be more than willing to search again for the next “high.” In the beginning, though, I do believe I did let out a lot of anger and sadness from my childhood, as well as a lot of suppressed pain. This in turn made me feel lighter, more loved, and like I was truly doing something great for myself. But after that initial scratching of the surface, the healing meditations became much deeper and much more extensive, as well as the darkness that came out of me and out of others. And that is when my “highs” went so much higher and my “lows” went so much lower that my psyche was basically split in two.

Guatemala. Where the dark dance truly began. 

I was invited to go on a 2-month adventure, with a month long intensive retreat. (Bruce’s first retreat he ever ran.) This made me feel so special, because I was one of only 13 chosen to go. Bruce talked a lot about who would be a right “fit” for the retreat, as though some of us just weren’t ready or, perhaps, not spiritual enough for his retreat. I later found out that he’d asked another member to send me messages to encourage me to go. The other member told me he’d asked her to go specifically because he felt that I would only attend if she did. So, even back then, he was already trying to rope people in through manipulation. 

Guatemala was beautiful. I actually felt as though my soul knew I was home, and I’d done this before, and my whole life had finally fallen into the right place. It was a magical time, even though there were still extreme depths of darkness to endure. But after every dark thing I got through, I was “high” on spiritual enlightenment right after. And, as I said before, it seemed to me that the darker the darkness I had to clear away, the higher the highs. And when I was in one of the euphoric highs, I felt so good and strong and like I was clearing away lifetimes of pain!

What a shiny carrot, eh? Clearing all your pain and suffering away. To become enlightened and live in bliss and love forever … LOL!

Everyone I remember at the Guatemala retreat seemed so qualified. These people were hardcore holistic hippies! They’d attended many retreats before, did yoga, and read and studied spiritual books. They all had “the look;” you know, the no-makeup-I-am-wise-and-spiritual kind of thing. They mostly ate bird seed and vegan/vegetarian diets. I was actually quite intimidated by them. I was this blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 24-year-old, who loved wearing makeup and pink things, and eating cheeseburgers and pizza. I honestly had almost no experience with spirituality, except what I’d already learned from the group. 

But my willingness to heal and my submissive manner in listening to Bruce, without talking back, was what Bruce liked. I went all in. And for cult leaders or gurus, these types of willing “followers” are diamonds. I didn’t realize it until much later, but my submission to Bruce’s authority was a “mirror” reflection back to me of my childhood relationship with my father. I was terrified of my very strict and authoritarian father, and I did whatever he asked of me. But that same pattern of fear/obedience/submission to an authority figure was the same pattern that I had with my relationship with Bruce, just in a different setting and with a different authority figure. 

The intensive part of the retreat was 1 month long. We spent every day from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed in some kind of meditation, some kind of group exercise, or some kind of lecture from Bruce about how life really was. This was every day all day indoctrination. Even the way we watched movies was about learning our emotions and to always be aware. Being “aware” was the prize jewel. 

“The more aware you are, the deeper you are.” 

That was one of Bruce’s little spiritual jargons. He liked to quote them to us, while looking at us with his blank, gaunt stare. And even if he smiled or laughed, it always still looked or sounded as if he were somehow “suffering.” I remember him telling me once that he was happy and excited, but to me he looked blank and empty, totally devoid of any emotion. Bruce actually thought expressing human emotion was beneath him. He said he was so aware, he just “witnessed” these emotions and had no need to express them, because he was in such “joy” of enlightenment. 

Looking back now, I can’t believe I didn’t see his lack of emotions as a red flag. In fact, most gurus I’ve seen on TV share this same empty look of “enlightenment.“ I remember Bruce always trying to split me and my friend up for giggling and laughing, because we were too expressive and disruptive. We had to sit away from each other. Of course he made it seem funny, like oh you girls just need to learn to be more aware, so you can’t sit together for the betterment of your soul journeys. But there was nothing funny about it. I see now that he was literally suppressing all the joy and fun out of our experience and out of our very human connection. 

Every morning, immediately upon awakening, we would do an OSHO meditation. I’m not sure if you’ve seen Wild, Wild Country on Netflix, but the meditation where all the people are screaming and ecstatically rolling and shaking on the ground in a disturbing way is the one that we did every morning when we woke up. For 21 days straight. It is designed to allow you to go to an “expanded” state of being beyond yourself. Well, ain’t that the truth? It expanded me all right – it completely rewrote the way I thought. It was almost like taking a drug without taking one. I truly became high and scattered and could make no sense of anything during this meditation. I saw many visions and was brought to a place of my mind, or beyond my mind, I didn’t understand.

I did feel euphoric in a way. But it did also scare me the amount of screaming and strange behaviour I saw from others. But I’d been “chosen.” I was here to be the best I could be, and to finally heal my life. So I went all in, despite my initial misgivings. I even discovered I was quite good at “being spiritual,” and everything I’d learned from Bruce, I could *do.* I could see the spirits he talked to. I could transform the fastest. I remember even telling him I was destined to meet him, that he’d written my life out before I was even born as a soul, and that I was so happy to be home. I was incredibly intuitive. I could sense where people were in the house. I could telepathically call to Bruce with my energy, and he would come, saying he’d thought I was calling him. In this Guatemalan house, we created a container where, as a group, we became “one” with our consciousness. In some ways it was neat, but in others became extremely damaging. 

Bruce always knew what was “really happening.” If we had an issue we couldn’t solve by ourselves, we went to him. He appeared all-knowing. But his thing was he was always just following what “spirit” was instructing him to do, and he had no part as “Bruce” in all of this. It was all Divine. Aka – he took no and zero responsibility for how fucked up each of us were actually becoming. It was spirit’s doing. 

Anyways , just to give you a typical idea of what a day looked like in the Guatemala retreat. It went as follows:

-wake up, OSHO extensive meditation 
-reflection time/journaling about your experience 
-breakfast 
-lecture
-group interactive meditations (dyads, aura reading, silence walks) 
-lunch
-lecture
-group activity (sharing circle of how you feel) 
-night time OSHO meditation (similar to the morning one, just a bit lighter ) 
-dinner 
-group activity (sweat lodge, group movie awareness watching, chanting ) 
-bedtime 

This was repeated everyday for about a month. So you can see there was not much time for self reflection. I also believed I was “called” to be there and was “chosen” from a very few to do this transformation. So in a way I felt “honoured” that my soul was doing this mission.

But Bruce was a bubble popper. If you felt special, he’d say you’re not special, that is just your ego, you must look deeper. If you felt happy to express something excitedly, he’d raise his finger to his mouth with a shhhh look and bring your energy down to “awareness.“ If you experienced anything, really, no matter how trivial, he always seemed to believe there was a deeper meaning to it. *Everything* became a deeper meaning .

There was one particular part of the Guatemala retreat that is still weird to me. We started working with demons. Yes, you heard me … demons. Only very few could expel the darkness, and I, apparently, was one of them. I could see spirits so easily. This really did drain my energy to do this type of work though. I remember having a ceremony to switch someone’s soul out of their body and to then put the real one back in. It was called a soul retrieval, and I was “lucky” enough to have the Divine choose me to play this part. We made a circle, made an intention, and then had the girl lay down in the center. The ceremony started, and I did my Divine work. I went up into the universe, found her real soul, brought it back to her body, and then talked the other soul out of it (which supposedly was her twin brother who died at birth, but never let her take the body). We were all convinced that she was unquestionably more feminine after this ceremony. 

There was also another time Bruce was caught with a soul-sucking demon on him. I remember being downstairs and everyone came running to me saying, Amanda, you’re the only one who can help! Bruce is frozen! He’s taken captive by dark entities. I remember going upstairs feeling like, wow, I am the only one who can save him. So I sat with him and removed the darkness. It worked. I felt like a level 5 Harry Potter by this point! And it all was thanks to *me* giving my life over to the Divine and letting it run through me to do this work. This was typically what we were taught to be – “the Witness” to our experiences and to let the Divine take the lead (i.e. suppress ourselves and allow another energy to take the lead). 

It’s hard to put into words what this was like, except being possessed by something, but willingly. We called this something our “higher selves.” The whole lectures were about letting our higher selves completely take the lead in our lives, or, in other words, giving up our lives to our higher selves.  

Those words – our higher selves – make me cringe today, because I can see now how, back then, I was *giving up* my life to both Bruce and to some possibly very dark energy. Everything I’d learned from Bruce, from my vows to the ceremonies and meditations, all taught the *me* that was Amanda to *give up* my “driver’s seat,” while the new energy did all the “driving.” The strange thing was, though, that it really was euphoric to let the “Divine” do all the “driving.” I had no problems anymore, because I had no free will to make choices and, thus, had no choices to make. So, in a way, it was all actually quite peaceful and liberating … until it wasn’t. 

My natural self started to become manic after Guatemala. I started assisting Bruce in running portions of his retreats all over B.C., just like the one in Guatemala. I kept doing it because I was set to make it! To be enlightened. But in my mind, I began to feel more and more ill, and I started not being able to turn off this manic euphoria. And it began to feel like madness, like I’d really lost my mind through all this. In Bruce’s teachings, though, this was great. He hated his mind. He wanted no thought of his past self to ever exist again. So, in this “process” of losing my mind, I was actually being rewarded for it, as losing your mind was the “price” of true enlightenment. It was a very sick fine line to try to follow and very hard to make sense of while inside the “machine” of a cult experience. Back then, I truly thought I was doing great work *and* being rewarded for it. 

About 3 years in, though, I really started to crack. I began to feel like I *hated* going to these retreats. Something inside of me kept screaming, I hate this! I remember telling my friend, Erik, who attended all the retreats from the beginning with me, about this. The sad thing was, though, if I questioned these retreats or teachings with any of the others, *I* was the one made to feel delusional, and not my experience. Or that my “delusional” questions were all part of the process. Just a phase of my experience where my “ego mind” was in charge. And I should just let it play out. I feel so angry just writing this! As I can see now how completely my own thoughts and feelings were dismissed back then. And I wish I could go back and *stand up* for myself; stand up for the “me” who was crying inside, saying, Amanda, NO, stop going to these things! 

But, back then, the darker the stuff I faced and came through the other side … the better. This was the plan from the start – to face death and the ultimate darkness, and then to be enlightened and fear nothing. It took me another couple of years, though, before I literally cracked up.

But what does it feel like to crack up? I’ve had 8 long years now of living through this experience, and though it’s hard to put into words, I’m going to try. The real first thing I felt was that I was completely dissociated with reality. I started to be at war with myself, thinking who I was before was “bad.” Extreme self-hatred arose from this. I felt I was failing if I couldn’t let go of all of my “ego.” If my old patterns (which were literally my natural self) kept turning up … then I hadn’t gone all in enough. Or I just wasn’t seeing deep enough. I even doubted my own inner safety system. I don’t know how many times I thought I was speaking my truth, or being my natural self … and I got told to look deeper. Or *Bruce* saw something deeper, so I should look. This taught me to not trust myself. And to listen to him. It’s so tricky!!! And such a fine line. It’s gross.

But hey, I thought I was enlightened … I could now hear “spirits,” and I lived in the veil between spirit realms. The cult called this enlightenment. But I now called it torture, and me being so psychologically beaten and abused that I had no will power left and would now easily listen to spiritual leaders or any spirits. Even to the point of killing myself if spirit told me to. I even believed, and told one of my friend’s mom and dad, that if a man came to kill me and spirit told me it was my time to go, and I needed to experience being murdered for the good of my soul experience, I would let the man kill me and not struggle, because spirit told me I must learn this lesson and experience the murder of myself. Needless to say, I was never allowed to hang out with their son again. But that is how extreme my mind was suppressed. I truly started to believe abusive behaviour, or harm to my body, was part of my spiritual awakening. I started to believe that each dark thing that happened, I *had* to get through it, like some kind of spiritual obstacle course, if I wanted to be spiritually enlightened and to finally be complete and whole as my “true self.“

I had vowed my entire life away during those retreats. I forgot to mention, though, that in Guatemala, near the end of our intensive retreat, I did a vision quest. Over 3 days, with no food and only 1 bottle of water with lime and maple syrup. We fasted leading up to this event.  During the 3 days, I was to make a circle around me and stay up all night, while I imagined the death of my family, to allow spirit to show me my true self unattached to any earthly construct. I saw many visions, as I mentioned previous. During that quest, ultimately, along with the entire intensive retreat, I believe it lead to the death of myself I used to know. Those last words could not ring more haunting to me … the death of myself. After finally having the courage to leave the cult, I spent 2 long agonizing years almost entirely alone. I went to a small island off Vancouver called Cortez. This was where I spent most of my days trying to complete my “soul journey” and doing countless “death circles,” while my mind became more and more shattered. Whatever I had tapped into in the past few years of the cult was still with me, and it was furious. 

I remember trying to sleep, and from my gut came pain and seemingly wretched “voices” that continued to egg me on to do my death circle and to complete my mission. I could barely sleep or eat during this time. My main goal was to experience the death of my “self” as Amanda, so I could finally be free and my soul would be enlightened. When the pain at night would get too great for me to ignore, I finally gave in and said, “Fine I’ll go do this mission.” I spent countless nights outside in the freezing cold, drawing circles around me in the ground, attempting to sit there and experience my death. I was told by the “voice” not to leave the circle until it was complete. There were times I would spend anywhere from 6-9 hours out in the deep woods with no food or water and little clothing in the middle of winter. I was told to break the veil of pain, to endure a little more … then a little more … to the point where I broke down in tears saying, “I just can’t do this! I can’t!!!” It became a long cycle of me running back to my cabin sobbing, shaking with cold. I remember looking at my body, now skin and bones, in the shower or tub, crying furiously, while feeling ashamed I couldn’t complete my soul mission. My heart still breaks for myself reading this back. After a month or so, I eventually completed the stay-up-all-night task in a death circle … and, guess what … nothing happened … But there was more. Once again I was asked to endure more. 

You may be wondering if this was so painful, why did I do it? I wasn’t even part of the cult anymore. Why did I keep on this tortuous path? The sick part was that I *still* did feel like I had spiritual bliss in this process. This ties back into that deep-pain-to-spiritual-bliss, deep-pain-to-spiritual-bliss cycle I’d experienced from the beginning. While all this pain was happening to me, I did still feel close to … something. To this day I think it was death. Death itself is peaceful, in a way. But not the way I was going about it back then. Back then, my way (the cult’s way) was plain insanity and complete spiritual brainwashing. I’ve even wondered if, perhaps, there were some evil spirits involved, as sometimes I’d felt so much like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, possessed by some powerful dark energy.  

Those “voices” I heard, the ones I thought were my “higher self” did not seem kind or loving. Although I still thought, with the euphoria I felt, that they meant well and were truly my enlightened self trying to guide me. I remember once being told to stand in front of a school and to not look at any children walk in as the bell rang, as I needed to “learn” to not give in to the joy of children. I was also told to do other negative things, like to kill a pregnant spider. (Those of you who know me (the real me), know how much I love bugs … so, of course, I couldn’t kill it.) And I was told once to go to an ATM and drain out all my money, so I could experience no attachment to money. At the time, I don’t know how I stood up to these “voices,” but somehow I did, and all of these tasks, or tests, always ended with me sobbing and saying, “I just can’t.” 

But the worst part for me was the emotional turmoil I would feel when I would refuse to obey the “voices” of what I thought was my higher self. Then the absolute torture inside my body would return, and the voices became even more domineering and demanding, telling me they would kill me if I didn’t do my soul mission. Yet, if I started to make plans like I was going to continue to do a task, the pain would quiet, and sometimes would even feel kind and loving. It was a very difficult fine line to walk between – going right to brink of doing something that was repugnant to me, and then stopping myself before I could actually do it. It was like living with a split inside of me, with not much room for breathing in peace. Like no matter which way I chose in life, I was going to be living in extreme anguish. I spent about 8 years of my life like this … living in this dark hinterland of unreality.

There were moments, though, where the voices would recede a bit or would feel somehow “nicer,” and I seemed more normal and more like the Amanda I’d known my whole life. But, unfortunately, those respites usually didn’t last for long. 

One of the truly diabolical strictures of this darkness inside me was that it never wanted to be shared. I was told I’d be *punished* if I spoke about my journey to other people, that other people wouldn’t understand my “mission,” and that they would try to stop me from completing it. So, as a result, in the beginning, I told no one what I was going through. I willingly isolated myself from others and did my dark dance with Death all alone. 

But still, my darkest dance with Death was yet to come … 

When I returned home from the island, I suffered a back injury that led me back to living with my father on my childhood farm. This was where some of the worst pain happened to me. At this point, the voices in my head were so loud and strongly manifested that it felt like I was living in some dark Twilight Zone reality. And being back on my childhood farm, with a whole back country of nature, was a prime breeding ground for me to fall even deeper into that other alternate reality. 

What I’m about to say may trigger some people. So just a heads up. 

The voices called me to go out into the woods, and to go through a massive amount of thorn bushes. I was to bleed out my blood to finally shed Amanda. And I did this … for quite a while. But, once again, I could only go to a certain point before breaking my resolve, and then I ran back into the house sobbing saying, “I just can’t.” A while later, I tried to drown myself in a stream. But I couldn’t go through with that either. I still remember, though, lying naked by that river bank, wondering how I got there. 

Some nights, I was “called” to find a ravine to complete my death circle, and I would walk up the number one highway with a bag of my clothes, my wallet, and my cell phone, looking in the dark for a ravine deep enough to work. I was told that when I found the right place, I would throw all these belongings away and would finally rid myself of my old life. One night, a kind woman even tried to pick me up, as she was so concerned for me walking the highway at night. I calmly replied that everything was fine and thank you, but no thanks. I truly thought I was doing some kind of soul mission. And that I wasn’t “actually going to die,“ just the ego death. 

Obviously, though, I never succeeded in any of these night time searches for deep ravines. And every time I “failed” to find the right “spot,” I would then go back to my house in abject misery … until the next time. And there were many next times, as each night a new spot would start to call to me, and then another, and another. It was endless. It seemed this spirit or spiritual teaching I’d learned had me so clutched in its grasp, I just couldn’t breathe. I remember this one time giving my mother her house key back, telling her I wouldn’t be returning, and that I loved her and goodbye. She told me later, she’d felt I truly meant I wasn’t going to be on this planet anymore, and it really scared her. 

My final straw back at the farm was when the voice told me to break my ankles, because I wouldn’t need my legs where I was going. I actually did try to do this. For a few minutes. My heart ACHES for myself just remembering for a moment this horrible ordeal. 

I experienced so much abuse. Psychological, spiritual, physical, and emotional. And the worst of it was that most of the abuse was by me by myself. Which, of course, didn’t help me make sense of my journey, as I only had my damaged mind for logic. And damaged as it was, it never thought much to be that wrong, because it was just me and a spiritual experience. No one from the outside world physically forced me. I was just so spiritually abused in the cult, that my entire mind was gone. I had nowhere to draw any lines, because of what I had learned (or had *not* learned) during those spiritual retreats. So after that day, I said I would do everything and anything to get help … 

And I did! :) 

To this day I still have some moments that shake me up. It has been a very long hard journey for me. The most astonishing part of my story is that those, my friends and family, who have always been a part of my life, very few of them know the depths of what I have been through. That is how strong this darkness in me wanted to stay hidden from the light of others knowing about it. Now, though, I want to shine all the “light” into that darkness that I can, so that it can never stay hidden from anyone again. 

So that was some of my journey to “spiritual enlightenment.“ 

What wonderful words - spiritual enlightenment. They sound so shiny, and like they’re something anyone would be “lucky” to obtain. I mean look at Jesus and the Buddha - holy beings of love and light bringing wisdom to humanity (if you read their stories, though, they’re all about extreme suffering that later turned them to a path of enlightenment and the great wisdom of love). Like who wouldn’t think that’s a cool path to follow? Yet, in my experience, and now hearing the experiences of many others, the most evil people can be behind these paths of “spiritual bliss.” I am not saying that every spiritual group is a cult, or that every spiritual leader is an evil person, but I am saying that many are, and that I would like others to be able to learn from my experiences so that they can avoid falling into the same “traps” that I once fell into.  

There are two questions now that I have come to learn to ask myself when encountering spiritual groups, leaders, people, or even spiritual ideas:  

Do they encourage my own self-discovery and awareness, directing me inward to my own guidance, or are they pointing “the way,” pushing me down their path of illumination? 

Do they honor my power or take it from me? 

These are very simple questions that will give anyone the power of discernment in learning to recognize what spiritual paths/people are beneficial and expansive to their soul’s growth, and what spiritual paths/people will delay or impede their soul’s growth. My experiences, though dark and harsh as they were, have still given me a great gift, in that I now SEE very clearly when something or someone is trying to take my own power away from me, and I know now not to give it. And I hope by writing about my experiences, that I can help to shine a light in someone else’s darkness, and maybe help them not to have to go through the deep depths of that darkness that I went through.

 Lots of love, Amanda.