Editor’s note: A former Self-Realization Fellowship Meditation Center volunteer recounts some of the abuses she experienced with the group. She describes her decade-long financial and psychological crises as a group member. She outlines why and how she joined, left, and recovered from the Center’s undue influence.
By Jennifer Smith1
The monastics guided our meditations and activities at a silent weekend retreat. I experienced profound inner peace. At age 24 I’d joined Self-Realization Fellowship. It was 2004. The allure was a certain spiritual path of inner stillness and meditation techniques. There was a SRF meditation group I attended in my hometown. (SRF has numerous meditation temples, centers, and groups around the world.) I volunteered most of my free time to volunteering to produce the Center’s services. During this time I had been looking forward to my initiation into Kriya Yoga, which is the SRF student’s pledge of unconditional loyalty and obedience to the SRF gurus in exchange for the guru’s introducing me to God.
The Kriya Initiation ceremony was strange. It was 2005. We were not supposed to talk nor to ever reveal the Kriya meditation technique to anybody. The solemn pledge between Parmahansa Yogananda, the SRF line of gurus, and me as a student-disciple was supposed to be eternal, for as many life-times as it takes to introduce me to God, that is when I was ready. When ready was only known by the gurus and perhaps the senior advanced disciples who were his supposed channels of divine wisdom. Not being able to know when I was ready or speak directly to God bothered me.
Before I joined SRF I’d felt a direct connection to God. But here I was in a darkened ballroom at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles pledging eternal loyalty to a guru who’d introduce me to a supreme God. I kick myself now for ignoring the red flags.
Red Flags in the Teachings
In the Lessons (SRF’s home-study how-to-live course), students are encouraged to read or study only SRF-approved publications or recordings. All other kinds of music, such as hip-hop, rock, electronica, and jazz, no longer felt right to listen to. I sacrificed so much in order to comply with the SRF rules and show my love and loyalty to the guru. The teachings contained many other red flags.
Rigid Gender Roles and Social Isolation
The SRF Lessons contained stories that were misogynous and insulting to women. Women were often depicted as unwise nags. While men were often presented as channels of wisdom deserving of unconditional, unquestioning loyalty from their wives.2 These stereotypes seemed wrong. I had tried to focus only on the positive, despite the troubling messages in the Lessons.
Non-SRF members were to be avoided. That is family, friends, or acquaintances who did not contribute to your spiritual “realization”—meaning, people who do not belong to SRF. Supposedly the loyal devotee sees God and Guru’s organization of Self-Realization Fellowship as one’s true family. I abandoned my relationships with non-SRF members. And when it comes to romantic relationships, they encouraged people to partner with other SRF members. Being around “worldly people (non-SRF members)” could prevent the devotee from attuning with God and hamper spiritual progress.
Human love was base, impure. Whereas meditation, the SRF way, was the path to perfect human relationships and to attain perfect, divine love.3
My feelings of being isolated from relationships I’d understood as a sign of spiritual progress. But wondered why I often also felt depressed. I believed the SRF teachings that I could meditate away my human “shortcomings”, as SRF loves to call them.
Nothing seemed to help me. The more I meditated and followed the teachings the worse I felt. But, I still didn’t want to admit the red flags. I wanted to believe and told myself the teachings were correct. So I tried to practice even harder, while seeing any of my “shortcomings” as my fault. Not heeding the red flags also took a heavy toll on my finances and career.
Not My Goals, but Guru’s
To become perfect and loyal I made SRF’s goals my goals.
Why SRF’s goals and not my own goals?
My goals as a disciple were 100% motivated by the SRF precepts of:
- Living near an SRF temple or meditation center,4
- Volunteering my time for free to support the organization of SRF,
- Isolating myself socially to meditate as much as possible, and to follow SRF’s rules for attaining self-realization, enlightenment, or God’s love.
In my desire to live near an SRF Center, I moved and worked low paying, stressful jobs, unable to pay my debts. It was so I could fulfill my desire to live and serve at an SRF Meditation Center. My ultimate goal was to move and live near Mother Center (SRF’s International Headquarters) in Los Angeles.
While I wished to move to Los Angeles to be close to the SRF Mother Center, my depression got worse. The red flags were lashing me at this point. I reached out to the supposed “divine” friends I’d made at my local SRF Center to ask for their advice and companionship. After sharing about my depression, devotees at the Center, who I’d believed were my “divine” friends, kept their distance from me. Seldom, if ever, would they even reply to my messages. I realized there was only false “fellowship”!
False Fellowship
What would happen if I stopped going or communicating with anyone at the SRF center? Would anyone check on me: especially since I”d been a regular and committed volunteer? Only one person checked on me. Once. This further demonstrated to me the fallacy of the SRF teachings. As I stopped attending the Center I started feeling better about myself. I began to make friends outside of the cultish group of SRF members. My self-identity and independence from SRF brought me a new sense of inner freedom. My depressions faded.
In 2014 I stopped going to the SRF Center for meetings and services. Instead I began dating men and pursuing interests outside of SRF. I sold my expensive astrological bangle5 and moved in with some friends. Slowly I cleared my environment of all SRF pictures, books, and memorabilia. And, indulged slowly in “worldly” (non-SRF) pleasures: drank beer and travelled with friends and family, and started to plan for a new career.
Meanwhile, I contacted some of my SRF friends to tell them I’d decided to leave SRF but I valued them and would like to remain friends. They never responded to my messages. Shunned? I’d believed that the Fellowship, my friendships within it, were grounded in lasting love and friendship. Rationally, I understood those “friends” were abiding by SRF’s “suggestion” (rule, rather) to keep the company of “loyal” SRF members. Finally, the warnings I’d not heeded until then became clear. The red flags were the cultishness of SRF.
Recovering from Abuses at Meditation Centers
During the Christmas holidays of 2014, I moved away from that city with the SRF Center. I had not meditated for a year and I felt great! During this time I started my new career and met my now husband. In my spare time I volunteered for causes to help disabled people and animals. I repaired my relations with my family and friends I’d neglected when I was in SRF.
Perhaps not everything was loss during my years in SRF. My experience of meditation reminds me to stay calm in the midst of difficulties. Also, I have a deeper appreciation for lasting relationships whether they be marriage, family, or friends. What’s most important I learned is to be open and acknowledge the facts of who we are, despite our differences.
My Wish for You
Looking back, I see I could have learned my “lessons” without sacrificing a decade of my life to a guru and his organizations. The lessons learned were not worth the physical, financial, and psychological abuses I experienced. So, I wish to save others the trouble.
True friends and family are outside abusive relationships or groups. The SRF’s demands for unconditional loyalty and obedience to a Guru (and his organization) violates the notion of an all compassionate and loving God. That loyalty only went one-way–from student to Guru and his organization. When one no longer is considered loyal or obedient the guru and group shuns you. No relationship can bind you forever. Dance, travel, have a beer—whatever is your thing. But, you are the only one who can free yourself.
Image: Flickr
EDITOR’S NOTES
1 The author’s and location’s names in this article have been changed to protect privacy.
2 An example of the teaching of psychological abuse and submission of women to men, from SRF Lesson #59, is: “A successful marriage is usually owing to the efforts of the wife. By showering love on her husband, by ceaseless service to him, and by daily thought for his comfort, convenience, health, and general welfare a woman can make herself indispensable to, and beloved by, the most cantankerous husband. At the same time she will be hastening her own spiritual evolution, transmuting unlovely egotism into consideration for others–a quality possessed by all truly attractive people.” Not only are women in SRF encouraged to submit to husbands, but submission period is considered a sign of spiritual evolution.
3 “Human love, when it is charged with the Divine, becomes perfect.…Will you doom yourself to suffering and ignorance or will you say: ‘I shall free myself! ‘ If restlessness troubles you, meditate. The greatest of all temptations is restlessness. When restlessness comes it causes evil by turning our thoughts away from God, the source of all good. If you meditate regularly, you will be with God all the time. Peace, love, and joy will be yours eternally.” —SRF Lesson #59. The implication is the disciple is “doomed” to suffering, ignorances, and “restlessness” (temptations) UNLESS she performs more and better in the obedience of discipleship, and mind-numbing, guru-initiated meditation techniques. The disciple is ensnared within a double-bind. The psychological bind is based mostly on unquestioning obedience to some authority who promises perfection, love, or divine self-realization.
4 “Environment is stronger than will” was oft quoted in SRF. The implication: For SRF devotees to make significant spiritual progress they should be located as close as possible to the SRF gurus, leaders, monastics, ashrams, centers, meditation groups, or loyal (to SRF) devotees. There’s some truth to environment’s influence on us. But the case is dangerous within systems of closed-ideology and creates psychological feedback loops. Similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous creed that AA members are helpless in their addiction to alcohol and affirmed their helplessness that it was futile to try to free themselves from their addiction without the group, and it was necessary to remain in and come regularly to meetings, and so on. Using this AA comparison, SRF members are taught that they are addicted to Maya (cosmic illusion), worldly temptations, restlessness, karma, or sin and so on. In SRF heavy doses of meditation techniques are prescribed for follower-members. Psychosomatic techniques, such as meditation, act as a kind of self-hypnosis, numbs the practitioner intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally making the devotee dependent (addicted) to feeling helpless (surrendering the will) to SRF gurus, doctrines and techniques. Environment, in this context, becomes a closed and sometimes abusive feed-back loop.
5 Astrology is an important part of the cosmology of yoga manuals, SRF’s included. Some SRF devotees may wear an astrological bangle. The bracelet is made of twisted strands of pure gold, silver, or copper (because that’s what Sri Yukteswar, one of the SRF gurus prescribed). The pricey bangle bracelet purportedly protects the wearer from bad karma, speeds spiritual evolution, and bestows various and sundry spiritual wishes. For readers interested in an outsider’s exploration of yogic cosmology, see my articles on Yogic Cosmology and for a scholarly explanation of yogic cosmology I suggest reading the writings of David Gordon White, especially The Alchemical Body.