Her Incredible Longing and Culty Experience

“Her Incredible Longing and Culty Experience”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Blair: If I only looked at how people suffered in that organization, then I would be betraying myself. So in order for me to not do that, I honor every piece of heartbreak that happened…and I hold my own experience of being healed.

August/narration:

Blaire Glaser -mis an executive coach and writer. Her new memoir, This Incredible Longing: Finding My Self in a Near-Cult Experience is “a memoir about devotion, discernment, and the complicated beauty of spiritual seeking.” The culty experience brought her healing and challenges…impacting her relationships with loved ones, her sexuality, her body, and more.

But, let’s go back. [curious music]

Blair doesn’t really recall learn much about sex early on. She does recall one of her first experiences with turn on.

Blair: When I was eight, my cousin, who was like my idol. I call him my brother cousin. He found and shared a Playboy magazine with me. And I was really turned on by the women and thought they were beautiful. And I told my parents I wanted to be a Playboy model.

Can you imagine? I mean, they were hysterical, but what I remember of their response was how embarrassed I felt, and that was my first introduction to real sexual shame.

August: What was embarrassing to you? Was it that they were laughing or did they say something that made you feel a little like, oh, this is not

Blair: They were laughing at me as I probably would if a young person said that to me in their innocence.

We didn’t have the education then that I think we do now. Certainly my parents’ generation didn’t about sexuality and you know, they didn’t ask me more questions about, oh, what’d you like? And what’s it like to feel that in your body? It was just more like, oh.

August/narration:

The rest of her childhood sounded to me almost sounds like scenes from a movie.

Blair: My childhood, from an outside perspective and sometimes from being in it, was beautiful. It was idyllic. It was sophisticated. I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan, and there was a fair amount of privilege. It was also a very different time. New York City was dangerous and kids didn’t wear helmets to everything.

August/narration:

She was younger than eight when she had a “magical experience” in the theater.

Blair: And I told my parents, “I wanna be a singer and an actress.” And so by nine, I was taking the bus by myself on Saturday mornings to get myself to acting school.

I don’t have kids, but if I had one, I can’t imagine sending my nine year olds out on public transportation. but that’s what I did and it was great to feel that independent and I ended up going to the FAME school.

But I did have this God curiosity when I was young. It was like I knew there was some kind of mystery to life and I wanted more of it, and I wanted to touch it.

August/narration:

That wasn’t all easy or positive.

Blair: I also had some psychological issues which I share in This Incredible Longing that really formed this sense of hunger and this unnamed ache of wanting that I couldn’t really grasp or identify that took many shapes throughout my life.

I did have an eating disorder. When I studied acting, I was told I was blocked. I went to therapy and got a diagnosis of depression, and then I did a lot of spiritual seeking. And the word longing really fit. That was a good word for what I hadn’t been able to name.

August: And did you have any sense of what you were longing for?

Blair: I didn’t. I didn’t know what it was.

August: When you said that you were told you were blocked in acting class, I just, I feel that so, so like viscerally because when you are putting yourself out there creatively like that, and when somebody says something like that to you, it’s not like they’re saying, could you stand up straight or could you articulate?

I mean, it’s such like a personal affront to you. How did you navigate that?

Blair: I love that you’re homing in on that because that was a tragedy of acting studying when I was younger, that the teachers would really Shame you. You’re so right that like when someone says you’re blocked, it doesn’t help you unblock.

It doubled down the shame I felt about not being perfect, about not really knowing how to act, because as a young kid, I was very talented and it came very easily. So when I got older and self-consciousness started to creep in and I couldn’t access that inner state of flow as easily, I thought there was something wrong with me.

So when I was told I was blocked, it was just like, there is something wrong with me. I think the good part about that is that one of my acting teachers was also a therapist. Now this was the eighties and there was a lot of weird mind body stuff going on. one of my acting teachers did become my therapist.

She’s a character in the book and boy is she a character. She’s a very influential person in my life. So it did end up leading me towards more freedom.

August/narration:

Blair’s college days brought more freedom, and more complexity, too. It was there that she met Alex, who would become her boyfriend. That relationship helped set the stage for her culty ashram experience.

Blair: College was a mixed bag for me. There were certain things about it that I loved, but I also became very depressed in college. my relationship with Alex was one of the high points. He was a year older than me and he had already moved to LA by the time I was graduating. The emptiness of what lay ahead for me as an actress after graduation, being a theater major was terrifying.

And also the thought of not continuing our relationship. Even though in that last year when he was in LA and I was at college, we were on and off. I just couldn’t conceive of going out into the world alone. And so we got engaged and it was kind of ridiculous.

Our parents knew it was ridiculous. Like we didn’t even have a ring, even though our parents met and everything. But I was going to LA to live with my fiancé. That was a story I could hold onto.

August/attention:

That didn’t go so well. A heads up that there’s a brief mention of suicidal ideation coming up.

Blair: I mean, I’ll say that Alex was handsy and flirtatious with other people. But also LA was a tough place for me. His friends and our friends were edgy. They seemed successful. They seemed confident. I wanted to talk about feelings and spirituality and process, and they were witty and they were hard, and they were fashionable, and I just felt like I was lagging behind.

So this emptiness in the sense that I wasn’t enough, really reared its head and the heat and my eventual decision to break up with Alex and the ability to get a good job or find an apartment really wore me down to the point where I wanted to kill myself. The seeking was paired with despair.

August/narration:

Before that, Blair first encountered Siddha Yoga, the community she’d get entangled with.

Blair: In that year where Alex and I were seeing other people, he was living in LA. I was still in college. I met a guy who I had this attraction to and I couldn’t figure it out. And he brought me to his meditation teacher and that’s where, the first time I encountered Siddha Yoga. And I thought it was really weird. And I didn’t really think about it that much after.

When I was in Los Angeles and I was desperate very depressed and feeling extremely isolated and alone, I ended up snooping around the apartment we were sharing with some of his roommates and collecting the pills from the cabinets. And I was coaching myself to get some vodka from the freezer to chase them down, and I remembered the mantra that I had learned that one time on that date in the center. And I chanted it:

“Om Namah Shivaya,” which means as they translate it, “I bow to the highest within.” And everything felt different. I felt this sense of waves moving through me and calm. It was extremely powerful.

August/narration:

Blair decided to chant that mantra every day.

Blair: Even though I didn’t have that same experience of wow, it’s still calmed me. And then things started falling into place. I found an apartment finally, I found a job. I worked up the courage to go to the center, and then I started to meet like-minded friends.

August: Yeah. Which does so much for that despair feeling.

Blair: Oof.

August: Hm. Yeah.

 

August (ad):

August/narration:

So Blair started to really practice this type of spirituality.

Blair: I found a place where people welcomed me. I remember the first time I opened that door and this woman with this big, genuine smile said, “Welcome.” And I felt like I’m gonna be okay here.

You know, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone or get an agent or work an angle, which is what I felt the other environments that I was in in Los Angeles were encouraging in me. I also remember the beauty of the instrumentation and the chants and the joy I felt chanting because Sanskrit is a very beautiful and powerful language.

Being Jewish, I did not find that in Judaism. I was brought to an Orthodox temple probably when I was too young and I was bored outta my mind, and we weren’t really chanting. I don’t remember singing very much, or if it did, I didn’t know the words. So this was really a powerful experience of just having ritual and community, which I had been missing for a lot of my life.

August/narration:

She developed a relationship with the woman leading it all.

Blair: The head of the City Yoga Path organization, I guess you would say,is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. She’s a beautiful, full Indian guru.

August/narration:

Blair’s first relationship with her was in her imagination

Blair: I was in Los Angeles. She was either in India or the Catskills.

August/narration:

A picture of Gurumai sat at the head of the room. They’d all bow down to the picture.

Blair: At first I didn’t do that ’cause I was so freaked out by it. But eventually as one does, you get in the groove. And I would talk to her. I would pray to her. Oftentimes I heard what seemed to me like her voice talking back to me. I felt like I had this spiritual fairy godmother or imaginary friend that I had this deep relationship with, and then I got to meet her.

August/narration:

For real, in person.

Blair: And this woman who was so magnanimous, is that how you say it? She was so magnanimous to other people, rejected me. She was dismissive. Even the person who introduced me to her was kind of shocked by how disinterested she was in me. And you would think that that might just wake someone up and say, well, this is bullshit.

But to me, I was so involved that I saw it as a test because there was all this talk about the inner relationship with the guru was what mattered. And I believed that her rebuking me the first time I met her was almost a way to continue that inner relationship.

August: When I came to that part of your story and as you were speaking about that, it, it makes me think of, you know, the concept of negging in pickup artists.

Blair: Yep, exactly.

August: That strategy of if I put you down a little bit. It’s almost the like throwing spitballs at a girl when you’re little too. Like when you have a crush, like there’s something about that negativity, that can be used to,

Blair: Seduce.

August: There we go. That’s the word I was about to say motivate. And I was like, that doesn’t sound right. Yes, seduce.

Blair: Completely seductive.

August: Yes. And we don’t hear seduction talked about as much in non- romantic settings, but in this power dynamic, it’s, very real.

Blair: Oh yeah.

August/narration:

Blair did go on to have more of what was called an “outer relationship” with Gurumai — who would later be revealed as deeply harmful.

Blair: Even though she now has a reputation for having shamed a lot of people and yelled at a lot of people and done mean things, which I absolutely believe that she has done, I found our relationship to be very nurtured. I found it to be playful. she teased me. She uplifted me. She showed me not to be afraid of the mean mommy, because I would sometimes challenge things that she told me to do and she didn’t react badly. So I wanna say that that’s another complicated piece of this story.

When I heard through the grapevine that she called me enormously talented, this sense that I was broken, which I had come to the ashram with, changed. Even though the power dynamic was so off there was a way that we had in my mind, this teacher student relationship that had some very powerfully healing aspects to it.

August: Which is such an important point because people often hear about folks getting involved in cults and whatnot and coercive communities and say, “Why did you stay?” And I know there are many pieces of that, but one of them is because there has to be good in it.

Blair: Yes, absolutely. And especially if you have been really abused, it becomes very hard and almost pointless to preserve any of that. But because I wasn’t abused and because it was such a foundational part of who I became, it was very important for me to preserve what was useful and helpful in our connection.

August/narration:

One connection that suffered for Blair was the one with her body and sexuality.

Blair: One of the whole tenets of the spiritual path, is that you remain celibate and pure while you’re in an ashram in order to access that sexual energy and bring it up to the top of the head from the base of the spine. And so celibacy in the context of living in an ashram made sense to me because when I was involved with relationships and anytime I had sex, my mind would do somersaults.

So in order to stay on the task of training my mind to be steady and focus on meditation, I thought not having sex or being in a relationship was in line with my goals for enlightenment. But I was also a young woman with big sexual desires, and so there was an inner conflict.

On one level, I had this ability to put the celibacy stuff in the context of my ashram life, meaning that I didn’t really believe that I was going to be a celibate except for that one period where I really wanted to be a monk. Having said that, I did become cut off from my sexuality. And when I left I wasn’t meeting people, I was just trying to integrate into my life and I really wasn’t thinking about sex that much. But I was working at a theater magazine and in the late nineties I was working and writing for Playbill Online, and I saw a play called The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler who now goes by V. That play rocked my world.

I realized I’m not thinking about my vagina. I was barely masturbating and I really only touched myself when I had my period or like there was something going on down there. And I realized that I had lost my connection to my vitality and pleasure. And so I began the inner work of exploring, identifying and reclaiming my sexuality, which really was negotiating with my shame.

August: Ah, that’s so big, such important work. Do you think you would’ve gotten to that work without this experience?

Blair: That’s what’s so interesting is that I really don’t know. The way that my life is unfolded has a certain perfection to it. It because I became a therapist and then I ended up running the Vagina Monologues workshop so other women could reclaim their sexuality. And it was a process that was ongoing. I mean, as I evolved into my thirties, I was in a constant phase of exploration, of pushing the erotic edge, of being in my body rather than what I was doing in the ashram, which was trying to still my mind and in some ways transcend the body.

Even though they did have Hatha yoga and there were embodiment practices, I think that that philosophy lends itself towards dissociation.

August/narration:

Beyond the hot and cold from Gurumai and these ideas around sexual purity, Blair sees other red flags. Some bothered her straight away, and some are more clear in hindsight.

Blair: In cults and high control groups, exploited workers are usually a theme. And that was definitely going on at the ashram People were working so hard, they were overworking, they were so geared to please.

There were big red flags. I mean, just the way that people parroted what the guru said. I often felt that people were almost like siblings to each other. Like, you know, when a kid goes, “we don’t talk with our food in our mouths.” I felt like people would do that kind of spiritual shaming to you. You know, like when my friend said, “don’t put your water bottle on the chanting book. It’s disrespectful.” Those kinds of things really got under my skin. And the way that everyone just bought what was being said, there wasn’t a lot of questioning going on there. And that’s a big red flag.

And how much power she had in the dynamic and the fact that people were almost giving her their light. And amplifying her through that way.

August/narration:

Blair didn’t continue to give her own light away. I asked her what she’d like to share about leaving the near-cult — and the whole fallout later, which is a big climax in her book.

Blair: In the honor of not revealing too much about the big reveal, there were, rumors that came out about the ashram that were printed in the New Yorker that truly disgusted me and shattered my whole faith in the system. But concurrent with that exposed information, was the fact that I was done, I had come to get some tools.

To deal with my depression. Now, let’s put this in context. This was 1994. That was the year that Prozac Nation came out. There were no SSRIs. There was like no plethora of SSRIs available. There wasn’t a lot of talk about mental health the way that there is today. I felt broken inside and I went to a place where I could get away from.

The burden of having to earn a living and figure out how to be an adult so that I could be in this incubator and give myself some tools and some skills to get through life. And I got them.

August/narration:

In the epilogue of This Incredible Longing, Blair wrote:

“Maybe Gurumayi had been laughing at — not with — me, to my face. And still. That possibility doesn’t cancel out the usefulness of my time with her. My story is not a tragedy.”

“Holding these two truths — the cultish abuses of the organization and its personal value to me — is perilous.”

Blair: There are so many levels of nuance in what it means to hold two truths at once, especially as Americans, as we are facing fascism because there is something about fascism that makes holding two truths at once impossible, in the sense that when people’s civil rights are at stake, it’s not good.

So I wanna honor that and put that aside from my experience in which, even though there was one person at the head of the organization, which has of fascist overtones, right? This was an organization in my mind, designed for spiritual growth and advancement, and it was extremely fraught and people suffered. If I only looked at how people suffered in that organization, then I would be betraying myself. So in order for me to not do that, I honor every piece of heartbreak that happened in that organization and I hold my own experience of being healed.

I think that is unique and it’s something that I hope can inspire people, specifically people right now who are struggling with loved ones that have a different belief system than they do, that there are things about those people that they can make space for and hold, and there may be things that they can’t, but to fight for the dialectical truth.

August/narration:

That made me think of people who’ve left evangelical communities, after experiencing good and bad.

Blair: I wanna say something else about that. Spiritual awakening is a kind of a madness. There’s no way that it looks sane from the outside, and I can talk about this even with people who are doing psychedelic drugs. If you’re in the middle of an amazing trip, whether it’s on Ayahuasca or molly or whatever people are doing these days, and you are experiencing something that feels very real to you and that deep down in your soul you know has aspects of yourself that you don’t access on a normal basis, and you talk to someone from that place to a person who’s grounded in reality, you’re gonna look insane. It’s just part of the dance, it’s part of the whole experience. And then being able to integrate those really out there experiences, I think is the work of becoming an integrated person that can hold two truths at once.

When I see evangelicals like talking in tongues or whatever, I used to be like, oh, that’s so bizarre. What’s going on there? But now I have an understanding that those people are having a real experience of surrender and going beyond what we deem as appropriate and sane and rational. That experience to them is real and powerful, and there’s some way that I try to honor that.

August/narration:

Blair wanted to leave you all with this.

Blair: I really wanna speak to anyone listening who has been haunted by a nameless ache. A feeling that you haven’t been able to name or grasp, or a hunger that you wish that you could fill or control. I would love for you to pick up a copy of the book and see if you find yourself in the pages.

August/narration:

Learn more and check out This Incredible Longing, at blairglaser.com/books or the link in the show notes.

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