Part I: What the Osho cult taught me about spiritual abuse

Hint: It all comes down to power

Spiritual abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens through small, micro-betrayals and boundary violations that compound into a pattern of predatory power dynamics.

Before my recent two-year hiatus from social media, I thought I was done writing about cults. I had spent over 5 years deconstructing the messiest corners of new-age spirituality, self-help culture, and the wellness industrial complex. Not just intellectually, but, like, personally too. Right before I left, I was in the thick of healing from my own cult trauma and trying to put context and language around what happened to me. Leaving the Osho community was disorienting, painful, and frankly a little embarrassing at times. It took me a full year just to drop my cult name after leaving.

At some point, writing and talking about it stopped helping. I hit a point where my preoccupation with healing hindered me from healing. I decided to get offline and just live my life. Honestly, it has felt so good to psychologically and emotionally distance myself from new-age spirituality and all the predators, abusers, and grifters that have bastardized the teachings that once reached and touched the depths of my soul. Good thing you don’t need a spiritual doctrine to be spiritual.

All this to say, I didn’t think I’d return to writing about new-age spirituality and whatnot. But the response to my Deepak Chopra exposé made something very clear: spiritual abuse is alive and well and people still don’t know how to identify it. One day you’re reading a spiritual book on your nightstand, the next day you’re waking up to a headline that the author of said book was bffs with one of the biggest child sex traffickers of our time. It’s a disorienting thing to reckon with because it forces two incompatible truths to co-exist:

“This person helped me.”

and

“This person is a predator.”

We want our teachers to be wise. We want our mentors to be safe. We want our spiritual growth to be wholesome. Which is why, when the cracks start to show, it can be difficult to hold that tension without collapsing into denial or cynicism, hence why we submit to cognitive dissonance. But cognitive dissonance is not a bug of the new-age spiritual industrial complex, it is a feature that makes us vulnerable to psychological manipulation tactics used by predators.

So if you found me from my last post about Deepak Chopra, welcome! This is a space where explore the intersection of spirituality, society, and politics so we can heal, grow, and evolve without getting swept up in cult dynamics and other pitfalls on the spiritual path.

As my readers know, I’ve been raging against cultic circles or other high-control groups ever since my own brush with the Osho cult, which was fairly short-lived (4 years) yet long enough for me to sniff out the subtle and not-so-subtle signs of spiritual abuse from miles away.

Alas, hanging out with spiritual culties did not bring me closer to enlightenment (darn!), but it did give me a front-row seat to the psychology of spiritual predators, the people who support them, and the systems that sustain them.

And this is the part that most people miss:

Spiritual abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens through small, micro-betrayals and boundary violations that compound into a pattern of predatory power dynamics.

The key word here is power.

This post is my attempt to offer clarity around spiritual abuse. The ideas in here are informed through my own personal experience and grounded in social work theories and frameworks that have helped me make sense of how power gets abused in spiritual cults.

Why spiritual abuse comes down to power

Here’s the thing: Nobody ever walks into a spiritual community thinking they are entering a cult. It wasn’t until a month into my meditation retreat that I fully realized I was at an Osho ashram. By then, my sense of self was already unraveling.

While it’s true that vulnerability and timing partially explains why smart, educated, and otherwise self-aware people like me fall into cult dynamics, the missing piece has to do with the way we underestimate power. No surprises here, given that our culture both glorifies power and excuses abuse.

The logic here is simple: when you don’t understand power, you won’t know when it’s being abused.

Given our social conditioning around celebrity worship and influencer culture, is it any wonder that we trust authority figures who promise stability, belonging, clarity, and relief when we are most vulnerable?

Looking back now, I realize that what tripped me up most in the Osho cult was my misunderstanding of power. I didn’t know how to see it, name it, or question it. And that’s precisely why their tactics worked on me.

Now that I’m in social work, power is a central concept we discuss because understanding the power dynamics between ourselves and our clients ensures that we carry out our work thoughtfully, ethically, and responsibly.

This is why I’ve structured spiritual abuse around the social work framework of power over, power to, and power with.

• Power over is about domination, coercion, and control (the red flags)

• Power to has to do with denial, deflection, and false humility (the yellow flags)

• Power with pertains to accountability, trauma-informed leadership, and shared humanity (the green flags)

Every spiritual teacher uses power in one of these three ways. And every spiritual student is impacted by that choice.

I started this post writing about the red, yellow, and green flags for spiritual abuse, but then I realized that they only make sense in the context of power. And then, I realized that there are many misunderstandings about how power actually functions in spiritual spaces. These misunderstandings are not minor, which is why it deserves an entire section. This is what I wish I knew early on in my spiritual journey. They are the cracks that create the perfect conditions for predators to hide in places where you’d least expect.

3 Major Misunderstandings About Power in Spiritual Communities

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Myth #1: Spiritual communities are “above” power structures

Reality: Under capitalism and patriarchy, nothing sits outside power—least of all spiritual/religious doctrines that have been authored, interpreted, and institutionalized by men from deeply patriarchal cultures.

This is probably the most seductive lie in the new-age spiritual ecosystem: the idea that spirituality sits outside sociopolitical systems of oppression. Unfortunately, meditation retreats are not impervious to the forces of patriarchy and capitalism. No amount of chanting mantras will neutralize the exploitative industry of new-age spirituality. And you certainly cannot “raise your vibration” out of the politics that shape our lives every day.

This line of thinking is its own form of spiritual bypassing.

New-age spirituality exists inside the same inequality-generating hierarchies as corporations, workplaces, governments, hospitals, universities, and literally everything else.

These spaces are not separate from politics, cultural trends, and social conditioning.

We fall into a huge trap when we think our particular lineage/doctrine/philosophy is an exception to those rules… which, ironically is a direct symptom of Western exceptionalism.

Take the manifestation / Law of Attraction (LOA) doctrine, for example. People think it’s a spiritual teaching, but it’s actually rooted in puritanical values, the Protestant work ethic, and the myth of meritocracy. These value systems divide the classes and moralize wealth accumulation. LOA is not a spiritual truth; it’s a colonial ideology shaped by American individualism and sold back to us as “mysticism.”

Myth #2: Spiritual teachers don’t hold power and if they do, it’s unwanted/accidental

Reality: Every teacher, mentor, and leader holds power. When someone is in a position of authority, power is not optional or accidental. It’s structural.

We tend to think of power as having to do with someone’s wealth/status/fame. But leaders can hold symbolic, relational, psychological, and epistemic power. And spiritual teachers hold all four, often simultaneously. That’s what makes the dynamic between guru and disciple so charged, and the abuse so harmful.

Spiritual teachers hold relational power because students trust them and look to them for guidance. They hold symbolic power because the title of teacher, “guru” or “master” feels sacred and carries weight. They hold psychological power because they help you make meaning of your experience and interpret your inner world. And, perhaps the most dangerous of all, is the epistemic power they hold over what counts as truth, awakening, or spiritual evolution.

This is why harm in spiritual communities does not always look like overt abuse. Sometimes it looks like insight, surrender, or devotion.

Ironically, Osho used to vehemently rail against spiritual teachers who called themselves gurus. He would literally say, “guru is a dirty word.” He taught that “gurus” exploit people in the name of spirituality. He preached that the moment you put someone on a pedestal, you give your power away. There are countless other spiritual teachers and leaders who have taken a similar stance against guru worship, while building an entire spiritual brand around their name, identity, and teachings.

Spiritual teachers like Osho, Deepak Chopra, Joe Dispenza, Tony Robbins, Teal Swan, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie….self-appoint themselves to positions of guru-ness through status, fame, and wealth while distancing themselves from spiritual titles and the responsibilities that come with it.

I couldn’t tell you which is worse: a spiritual teacher with unexamined power, or one who uses power as a tool of destructive social influence.

The thing to understand is that power inherently is not necessarily evil. The harm happens when power is unexamined, unquestioned, or vehemently denied. The problem with denying power is that it makes it harder for people to identify harm when it happens because it blurs boundaries and creates confusion. It gives the teacher plausible deniability: If something feels off, that’s your mind. Your ego. Your trauma. Not me.

It also gives them leverage to abuse you and then say, “there are no victims.”

Myth #3: Abuse of power always looks like domination or coercive control

Reality: People underestimate spiritual abuse because they imagine it looks violent, forceful, or obvious. But power in spiritual settings rarely presents as force. It presents as someone who speaks with such conviction, insight, and authority that you slowly start deferring to their interpretation of your inner world.

This is the one that tripped me up the most.

When I first arrived at the Osho ashram, an Indian friend from home sent me a message on Instagram when she saw my post about being excited to have a “guru.” She warned me that I might be in a cult and to be very careful around these self-appointed spiritual teachers. This was back in 2018/19, when not much information about cults was Google-able. I explicitly remember searching, “how to know if you’re in a cult.” I laughed when the results returned a caricatured version of cults—people walking around like zombies, performing bizarre rituals, humiliating each other, etc— what you’d expect from Jim Jones or Charles Manson. But no one was yelling at me, no one locked the doors, no one demanded my obedience, no one was physically restraining me, so I brushed off her concerns. That could never happen to me. I’m too smart to be in a cult!

What my experience in the Osho cult taught me is that the most destructive kind of power is quiet, stealthy, subtle. It can be so subtle that you hardly notice it take over your meaning-making and your identity. By the time you recognize the red flags, you’ve already absorbed the yellow ones.

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That’s it, for now! Please stay tuned for Part 2 where I do the full breakdown of red, yellow, and green flags of spiritual teachers through the lens of power over (red flags), power to (yellow flags) and power with (green flags).

Stay tuned!

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