The Spiritual Community & Its Dark Side

Sadly, traumatic experiences are all too common in the spiritual community.

Spiritual groups often purport to be incubators for huge self-transformation, a place for like-minded people to connect and inspire one another. Sometimes they have a legitimate right to this claim.

In this article, I want to take a look behind this façade and expose the unsavoury side of the spiritual community such that we can clean it up and help communities reach their own high standards.

I have some trauma around this subject, so it’s difficult for me to discuss it objectively, but I’ll try to put that aside and get to the root of the situation. I also have contributions from social media followers to help me out!

I should also say that the spiritual community is remarkably diverse. In a sense it’s inaccurate to speak about it as a single thing.

FYI, I’ll focus on subtle forms of spiritual abuse, not open sexual abuse and scamming, though that certainly exists. Subtle abuse is much more prevalent and still very damaging. And I’m not talking about rogue charlatans or conmen, but established institutions and centres that run events and courses.

We have a lot to cover, so let’s get right into it.

My Rough Experiences in the Spiritual Community

I’d like to begin this one with a little anecdote. I’ve been the student of a well-known meditation teacher for nearly a decade and have undertaken a considerable amount of training with him.

One day I was exploring his Facebook group, which has healthy number of members, and I saw someone had written a post asking how to deepen their practice.

I responded: “have you ever thought about doing serious practice, you know, solo retreats, really long sits, etc.?”

Well, it turned out he was a senior member of the group. He proceeded to respond with a nasty comment along the lines of “yeah man, I’ll think about it”, then responded again with his “meditation CV”, which listed in great detail all the retreats and workshops he’d attended, along with books and resources he’d used, as well as his total meditation hours.

His response came across as very patronising, and I was pretty angry and annoyed by it. All I tried to do was help, and I was ridiculed and ostracised. I reported it to the group admin, but they never got back to me. I had a couple other experiences with that same person, where they were equally nasty and condescending.

This is a fairly harmless example, but it’s symptomatic of many people’s experiences in the spiritual community, and I’ve had quite enough of people turning spiritual communities into breeding grounds for abuse and disrespect.

Dysfunction #1 of Spiritual Community: Using Spirituality To Justify Being A Dickhead

Leaders often have a superiority complex and consider themselves better, higher and more evolved than their students or followers. This is sometimes true, but it’s also a trap that leaders fall into when they believe their own myth.

This can lead to them to talking down to people because they haven’t done x amount of hours of meditation, read x amount of books, had such-and-such an experience, or any other spiritual criterion.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced a great lack of respect on many occasions, to a level I’ve rarely had on any other occasion. Those that disrespected me had this exaggerated false air of morality and righteousness, but their behaviour exuded remarkable obnoxiousness.

I was a bit younger and a little bit more fragile, so I took it personally and thought I’d done something wrong, but now I wouldn’t take it personally and have less qualms about telling them they’d overstepped the mark.

Though this kind of contempt is fairly common, it’s unjustified, and you wouldn’t find it in other situations. Rarely would a university professor would never say such things. If they did, they’d likely receive disciplinary action.

It likely stems from unrecognised insecurity, trauma, envy, a desire to dominate, a broken soul underneath the tough, overbearing exterior, so in some ways I feel sympathetic towards spiritual leaders who behave like this.

In the spiritual world, leaders are often given free reign to think of themselves as being better with impunity. I’m not saying we don’t acknowledge our greatness, but we can’t take ourselves too seriously.

The solution is to see spirituality as a “skill”, just one of the many areas in life that we can develop. You wouldn’t condemn someone for not being good at maths, or art, or computer programming. You’d encourage them to practice and show them the way.

It’s also important for teachers to check their motivations, clean up their trauma and develop greater self-awareness before leading others.

As someone remarked on social media, “The best spiritual teachers are humble and don’t pretend to be above you, despite showing great knowledge. The worst spiritual teachers humble you to them so they don’t have to fully explain their supposed knowledge.”

Spiritual Community Dysfunction #2: False Morality and Saintliness

The spiritual community has an air of morality and purity about it, and it then judges outsiders according to their level of these traits.

It’s true that spiritual practice leads to a certain kind of saintliness, but many self-identified spiritual people get themselves into a tangle. Their morality and purity become a source of judgement and exclusion rather than acceptance and sympathy for all.

“Consciousness” is often used as a measure for everyone and everything. During a retreat some years ago, a woman said to me “it doesn’t seem like you’re very conscious, you know”, because I was a little bit clumsy on a given day. In fairness, she did apologise, and we got on well otherwise.

Underneath this cloak is a prosaic truth. It’s not a sign of purity but of shadow dodging, self-avoidance. Every single one of us has impulses and desires that are quite dark. In pretending we’re morally superior and imposing our standards on others, we distract ourselves from them. This veneer of saintliness leads to ostracisation and a masking of the darker aspects of human nature.

The solution is to walk your own path and be your own leader, and love others for who they are as they walk theirs.

A follower of mine shared their experience of this: “I experienced bullying masked in ‘niceness’ and I saw so much ‘mean girl’ behavior that bragged about ‘I did 5 hours of meditation’. This felt no different than ‘I have the latest Prada’. It’s all the same human behavior you see in any other community.”

#3: False Niceness and Oversensitivity

In the spiritual community there’s an assumption that everyone needs to be nice and soft. The standard is to be a doormat, to turn the other cheek, to avoid anger, to hug people, to help one another, to bow to one another, to be kind. It has a forced feel to it, which isn’t surprising, because it’s highly unnatural. Notice how weird some of this stuff is!

And, as mentioned in number 2, you’re judged if you don’t tow the line. It’s not a matter of personal choice, but of morality and spiritual advancement.

At the end of the day, what really is spirituality? Is it just about being nice to one another?

We do want our spiritual practice to make us better people, ultimately realising that other people are not separate from ourselves, but this is a world away from the feel-good hugging and formal informality of the spiritual community.

The solution is to integrate these feminine qualities and foster a sense of togetherness without leaving behind quintessential masculine qualities like self-assertiveness.

#4: Emotional Abuse Masked As Trying To Better Others

A follower commented: “I’ve had some yoga teachers, who seem to be respected highly, single me out and treat me like sh**. And there’s zero accountability to it…. Seems like there’s a lot of emotional abuse in the spiritual community masked as trying to better others”.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced this too. Why does this happen? I think most leaders have genuinely good intentions, but in some cases the position of power, respect and responsibility brings out their dark side, which is full of domination drives. They may be so focused on growing upwards that they forget to look downwards and see all the lower drives governing them.

Or perhaps their spiritual practice has veered into disconnection rather than connection, objectifying rather than unifying, and self-aggrandisement rather than humility.

Spiritual Community Dysfunction #5: Dated Practices, Beliefs and Morals

There are cultural aspects of the spiritual community that leave it lagging behind rather than setting the pace.

My girlfriend and I were (briefly) part of a spiritual community that didn’t advocate homosexuality, and they had some quasispiritual explanation for it. They ignored the fact that nowadays homosexuality is a reality and thousands of people are experiencing remarkable liberation because of this.

My hunch is that it’s a smokescreen for intolerant pre-modern morality, and they’re putting spiritual lipstick on the homophobic pig. Rigid rules hark back to medieval times and don’t embrace the freedom of modern life.

You’ll also find that a lot of current spirituality is dominated by magical thinking. The deep transpersonal component is hidden by its pre-personal, infantile caricatures.

My solution is to embrace the past, but have some sort of context for it, and question tradition and routine. Make sure the spiritual system or practice fits with the times and incorporates modern knowledge and the Zeitgeist.

#6: Spirituality Dominating, To Detriment of Other Areas

This trap is about emphasising spirituality so much that it becomes almost the only thing we are interested in. This seems legitimate: if I focus on spirituality and only spirituality, surely I’ll advance much quicker, right?

However, I’ve observed that this leaves people terribly lopsided, and they end up exhibiting shocking deficiencies in other areas of their life. They often justify this with their spirituality, which only makes it worse.

What does this look like, and how bad is it?

Here’s an example: “I hate my job, I have a rubbish financial life, I hate money, but it’s all okay because [some quasispiritual explanation about the meaning of life].”

Let’s flip this around so we can see the dysfuction involved: “I hate spirituality. What a load of nonsense. I just want to make loads of money.” Most self-identified spiritual folk would be sick at such a stance, right? Yet this is merely the flipside of the avoidance of money, and the spiritual community encourages it! It’s also downright hypocritical. We need money, and if we don’t take charge of our money life, someone else will have to.

Often spiritual people forget about the interpersonal world, showing a shocking lack of social skills and basic respect for others.

There are many other examples. While it’s true that spirituality can offer a way out of these problems, that only works if we confront them head on. Running away from them will not work, and that’s what often happens in the spiritual community.

The solution is to run away from masters and gurus that promote this heavy one-sidedness. And never, ever use spirituality as a way to avoid the old, mundane problems of life. If anything, use it to help.

Takeaway: beware of these traps. Look beyond the shiny facade of the spiritual community and realise that you might not find what you were promised. Participation can lead to outstanding growth, but can also leave you a little bit traumatised!