The Truth of How I Was Recruited Into a Cult
Mistaking peace for freedom during the weekend that changed everything
As we’re approaching Christmas, I’m trying to remember what I did for Christmas during the eight years I was in a cult—and I can’t. There are still many memories from those days I have yet to recover. This is a story about trauma, transcendence, and why the beginning of harm doesn’t always feel like harm at all.
The year was 1999. I graduated from high school at seventeen with no clear sense of direction. After a childhood shaped by drugs, abuse, sex, and a suicide attempt, I drifted. I enrolled in a local college and leaned toward majoring in psychology—perhaps some part of me was already trying to understand pain.
But between school and work, I spent my nights in bars and the weekends going to hippie festivals, chasing anything that could quiet the ache inside my body and the noise in my mind.
That’s the state I was in when my mom called. She told me that she and her boyfriend had just taken a life-changing meditation workshop, and insisted I attend the next one. It cost $200 for the three-day course, but she was so excited for me to go that she offered to pay for it. I agreed. I had no idea that decision would reroute the rest of my life.
My upbringing had already trained me toward altered states and spiritual exploration. I had grown up going to psychics, studying astrology, having my tarot cards read, and taking large amounts of psychedelics.
Transcendence was not foreign to me—it was familiar. So when meditation entered my life, it didn’t feel strange or extreme. It felt like the next logical step.
The Ishaya’s Ascension
The workshop was held in a house in a quiet Indianapolis suburb. When I walked in, I immediately noticed two teachers—a woman and a man. They were both dressed entirely in white, and the woman had long, beautiful blonde hair. They looked like angels to me, although they called themselves monks.
That weekend, I learned the Ascension Attitudes—mantras based on praise, gratitude, and love—for the first time. I was exhausted, traumatized, and dissociating long before I ever learned to meditate, so when the noise in my nervous system finally went quiet, it felt like a miracle.
For the first time, maybe ever, I felt something that resembled peace.
The Puja Ceremony
On the third day, we were individually taken through a Puja ceremony in a private room—a Hindu ritual of worship. The room was filled with chanting, incense, ritual movement, and spiritual intensity. It was utterly foreign to anything I had ever experienced, and yet it somehow felt like it fit the spiritual language I had already been living in for years.
That’s when the visions began.
During that ceremony, I saw myself becoming a monk and moving to North Carolina. I saw a future that truly felt sealed in destiny.
When I later shared this with the monks, they didn’t question it. Of course, they didn’t.
Instead, they affirmed what I felt was a sacred calling, saying they could see it for me, too. They encouraged me and validated the call. Just like that, what might have been interpreted as a dissociative spiritual experience in any other setting was confirmed as divine direction.
The Aftermath
When I walked out of that workshop, things in my life shifted for the better. I enrolled myself in Narcotics Anonymous almost immediately. I got clean and stayed clean for seventeen years. That matters because not all of what I experienced inside the Ascension community was destructive. Some of it stabilized me at a critical threshold. And some of it quite literally saved my life.
There’s also a deeper reason why I stayed with the Ishayas for the next eight years. Within this setting, I was given a chance to make a difference. I honestly thought I was aligning with a group of enlightened monks who would change the world. And with my past, I didn’t want anyone else to suffer the way I had.
After everything I had lived through—the abuse, the drugs, the shame, the grief, a suicide attempt, and an abortion the year before—I wanted to help people find a kind of peace I had never known before that weekend.
From Hope to Devotion
So, I finished my one and only year of college. And then I did something that, from the outside, might have looked extreme—the story of my life.
I sold everything in my apartment, packed my life into my car, and drove off to the mountains of North Carolina.
I believed I was answering a spiritual call and becoming who I was meant to be. What I didn’t yet understand was that the same longing to ease the suffering of the world would also be the doorway through which a high-control system fully entered my life.
This was the beginning of my life in a cult.