Nicola joins Sam to talk about her experience inside the Osho Rajneesh community, a high-control group that doesn't always get the airtime it deserves and what the process of leaving and recovering from that has actually looked like. She speaks openly about the disillusionment that comes when beliefs you once held close begin to fracture, and the particular challenges of rebuilding your sense of self and spirituality in the aftermath. It's a thoughtful conversation about the role community plays in both keeping people inside these systems and in helping them heal once they're out, and Nicola brings a warmth and honesty to it that makes the harder parts of her story genuinely compelling to sit with.

Who Is Nicola?

Nicola Ranson is a writer and psychotherapist who has worked with survivors from multiple cults and has presented internationally on cult recovery. She has a lived experience of ten years in the Osho/Rajneesh cult in the UK, India, Canada and the United States. Her memoir, A Slice of Orange: loving and leaving the Osho/Rajneesh cult will be published by Unsolicited Press in December, 2026 and is now available for preorder. Nicola was adjunct faculty at National University for seventeen years and provided services for Survivors of Torture, International, San Diego.

Ranson’s writing credits include co-writing the documentary, “Tattooed Trucks of Nepal – Horn Please!” which won Best Script at the Sicily Art Film Festival. Excerpts from her memoir have been published in the anthology Shaking the Tree: Brazen. Short. Memoir, Volumes 3 and 4.

Born in the UK, Ranson grew up in Canada and now lives in California with her husband, film-maker Ron Ranson.

Connect

• Nicola's website - https://nicolaranson.org/
• You can also connect via Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn

• You can find out more about Sam on her website - www.anchoredcounsellingservices.com.au
• To connect with Sam on Instagram - @anchoredcounsellingservices
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• Also check out Religious Trauma & Cults

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work, the Gundagara land and people. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I also want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you, our listeners, are joining us from today.

I recognize the deep connection that first nations people have to this land, their enduring culture and their commitment to the preservation and care for their country. This land was never ceded and it always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Welcome to beyond the Surface.

This is a space for conversations that sit at the edges of faith, identity, power and recovery, especially for those of us who have been shaped so stretched or harmed by fundamental religion or high control systems. Some episodes are personal, some are reflective, some are educational or curious or quietly disruptive.

All of them are grounded in lived experience and a deep respect for the complexity of leaving, questioning and rebuilding meaning.

We will be talking about religious trauma, various forms of abuse, cult dynamics, queerness and recovery, not in answers, but in honest conversations. In listening to these conversations, some parts might be heavy or activating for you.

Please take care of yourself while listening and feel free to pause or step away if you need to. I'm Sam and I'm really glad that you're here with us. Just a quick heads up before we dive in.

For transparency reasons, this episode includes a short paid message.

At the beginning, I'm conscious to only ever share things that feel aligned with the values of this space and as always, I appreciate you being a part of it.

Leaving a high control faith community can feel terrifying. Everything we once knew seems to disappear beneath us. The fear, isolation, grief and pain of all we have lost can feel overwhelming.

But we don't have to do it alone. At EMJ Counseling, I offer therapy designed to support you as you heal from high control, religion and spiritual abuse.

With both lived and professional experience, I provide provide a safe, confidential and understanding space that supports you reach out today to receive the support you deserve. Www.emj counseling.com.

Welcome Nicola.Thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Great to meet you Sam.

I'm really excited about this episode. It's been. I feel like it's been a little wild for us to get here, but I'm really excited.

I like to start all of these episodes with just a bit of location grounding for people. So where in the world are you? At the moment.

I am in San Diego, California, USA on Kumeyaay Country.

Beautiful. I. I Am coming from Gundangara land in southern New South Wales in Australia. And I like to start these episodes with a big, broad, vague question.

And I've had to start saying that beforehand because everybody goes, oh, that's very vague. It is intentionally vague, which is tell us, where does your story start?

I can see why people give you that response. Depends what story you want. This is a program about recovering from cultic abuse. Is that correct? Is that the main gist of it?

Yes.

Okay. Well, it's interesting because I know you and I both have worked a lot with trauma.

And if you're talking about trauma, I think that starts way back when as far as how you come into the world and what happens next. My cult adventures started after university in my early 20s, when I became a disciple of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, now known as Osho.

And I guess they really continue because they say that when you leave, you know, it's not a thing that happens. And in my case, it certainly wasn't a thing that happened because I didn't leave the cult initially.

The cult kind of left me because it blew up in a lot of drama and criminal activity. But I still hadn't left it. But I was cast out of the commune that many, many thousands of us lived in in Oregon, usa.

And then there was this diaspora around the world, and that's what brought me to California.

And it was only after that, in my own healing from that incredible shock, that I started to really come out and have a healing of that particular part of my life, which is still on. Good.

Yeah.

I've never heard someone describe it as a cult adventure. So that's a nice new terminology.

But I imagine, you know, I know a little bit about the group and so I imagine adventure probably does feel like the most apt word for you. But take us back to like post university.

I mean, I usually will ask some more like childhood based questions and I'm going to sort of bring that in in a particular way. But how did you land in the group that you did?

I was exploring and I was always interested in spirituality and trying new things. And this was something that really drew me.

It really called me and I was living in England at the time, where I'd gone from university, where I originally was from, but I lived in Canada a lot too, and I was really called to find out about this particular guru and that took me to India. So that was a big sort of jumping off the cliff kind of thing. But it was an adventure.

It was stepping into the unknown and it was all about, you know, taking risks and facing your fears. Because at that time the human potential movement was really a big thing in psychology.

And this particular guru at that moment in time had put together a combination of Eastern spirituality, which was fascinating to me, and Western psychotherapy, which at that time was kind of cutting edge stuff that we would certainly recoil at now if we go into those details.

But for a young 20 something year old going to that ashram and suddenly seeing what I didn't expect, which was thousands and thousands of really interesting people from all over the world, and I've always had a soft spot for international communities, it was an adventure.

It's always.

It's really interesting because I remember when I first learned about the group, one of the biggest things that stood out to me was that there was like some really good strategy here because it was beyond all religion, it was beyond race, it was beyond culture. It was kind of like, you know, we look at other sort of like cultic groups and things like that and they are quite niche. Whereas this was.

This felt like. I imagine looking into it, it would have felt big and expansive at the time.

It was. And there were certain benefits from that.

For someone who'd grown up in a fairly rigid Anglo culture and was suddenly doing all these cathartic groups. Did I mention they were naked?

I was gonna get to that, Nicola.

I was gonna introduce people in. But it's very interesting in looking at cults.

I'm a psychotherapist now and I don't put myself out there as a cult therapist, but it just so happens that people from cults either find me or there's a vast amount of the population have been in cults. I think they're both. Those are both kind of true.

But I found it absolutely fascinating to see how thought systems evolve and are influenced and how indoctrination happens. Whether you're talking about sort of an orthodox Christian, patriarchal, rigid cult or a wild, free sex Indian guru cult.

Of course we thought we were beyond indoctrination and I'm sure many other people have that experience too, because our belief system was about questioning things.

It wasn't one of these things where you didn't question you were supposed to sort of explore and ask questions and except of course, he weren't really. So the double think, the hypocrisy that no, you couldn't actually challenge the guru himself. And yes, he said it was.

He was really empowering women, which I think is also unusual in cults. And women did run a lot of the commune and a lot of the departments. However, he was at the top. And was that really empowering women?

I mean, there's a lot of interesting questions and a lot of similarities I think in the whole indoctrination process, regardless of where you're coming from.

Yeah.

And you sort of touched on it a little bit. But one of, I think the biggest. Well, the.

My biggest gripe is that like somebody who joins, and I don't particularly like the word joins a cult anyway, but like who is recruited into those systems or who lands in those groups dumb or naive or you know, something like that. But that is not the case and I like dispelling that myth.

And so what was it you sort of started to talk a little bit about what it was about your upbringing and who you were at the time and what you were seeking and all of those sorts of things that led you to find something in this type of ideology.

Well, I'd say idealism is a key thing and I think that's true for many joiners. And I think it's also really important to make the point that I joined.

My experience is so different from a second generation or a third generation person who didn't make that choice or who was born in a very, very different experience. But I chose this. And my idealism was very much that I wanted to do the best thing.

And I felt that goodness and love and spirit were really important values that I wanted to enhance in my life. And that relates to my upbringing in that my parents were atheist and they weren't the least bit interested in spirit.

And so if you're talking about rebellion, there was a rebellion against that. And in fact, my parents, curiously enough, sent me to a convent school where I boarded.

I was a weekly boarder for throughout high school and I loved it. You know, you always hear these horror convent stories, but this was a pretty benign place.

There were nuns who were committed to social justice and education, the SA heart nuns. But they would have things like meditative prayer days where you just had silence for a couple of days.

And all my classmates would rail about what BS this was. And I just loved it.

But so I was curious and I thought if people know this, this thing That I thought was the most, the biggest love, the most everything people had this word for which was God, which I didn't particularly relate to, but it seemed like, well, if you gotta call it something, I guess that's okay. But I didn't see what it had to do with a religion where there were intermediaries.

I didn't see what the priest had to do with anything because the nuns seemed to really defer to the priest. And I never liked that. I sort of thought in the ethos of the time, well, it's within me, whatever truth there is within me, and I need to find that.

And so the Rajneesh philosophy was very much supporting that, saying, yes, there's all kinds of religions and you can find the truth within various religions, but don't be fooled by the human beings and don't be fooled by the structures. You. You just want the essential experience. And they really supported individual experience, sort of the mystical aspect, and that I was gung ho for.

I just loved mysticism. I still do, really, you know, like being immersed in the experience. So, like most cults, I agree with you. You don't. Of course, you join a cult.

Come on. Yeah, but a belief. And maybe it's not a cult at the time you join either.

No, it's a very interesting term, but this particular group didn't believe in belief systems. They said, we are the rebels. We are questioning authority. We're questioning the status quo, we're questioning religions.

The guru loved to be outrageous and shock people with what he said. So that fit for me.

So it was really, really inconceivable that I would be receiving an indoctrination when I'm thinking I'm receiving a complete wash from all the indoctrination of my life. Yeah, yeah.

And you're right. Like, yes.

To sort of say, like, nobody joins a cult is sort of, like, ludicrous, but people join groups and they join belief systems and all sorts of different things.

And.

And so, like, to sort of expand on what you were just talking about, what did you think you were joining at the time? Like, when you got to India, when you went to that commune for the first time, what did you think you were a part of?

I thought I was part of a pathway to inner experience, to a depth of inner experience that required an act of trust to really go deeply into. And I understood that this whole idea of a guru was really an Eastern thing, which.

That there was some way that if you participated in that guru disciple relationship with somebody who didn't think that they were a guru as somebody who really respected and reflected who you were. They weren't in it for the ego, that that was a way for greater expansion, understanding.

And I'm trying to say this in voiding the word enlightenment, but that was the word that was used. And I still don't really know what that is. But at the time I wasn't that interested in what that was either.

There just seemed to be a path to being better, to being more, to living more joyously, to living more fully, to living more totally. And when I came to that ashram in India, it was so vital and so alive. It really felt like this is happening, this is the real thing.

And though, I mean, I had really chosen to do this before I got there, not expecting that the thousands of people would be an influence. But in retrospect, that was in the end maybe a bigger influence than the guru. Meeting all these people. And they were so exciting.

And we were young and there was great music and great dancing and a lot of ecstatic states. It felt a lot better than the world of my parents, which was particularly sort of post war rigid and depressed.

And all they cared about from my adolescent perspective was security and trying to not go through the depression again and having money and that's what they wanted for their kids, which now as an adult I totally understand. Of course we want that for our kids. We want them to do better than we're doing. But as a kid it was like, no.

What about making the world a better place? What about more love for humanity?

If I really focus on the most exciting thing that my heart is called to and the methods that are being presented as ways I can be more alive and more human and more open and face my fears, I'm doing something that is better, not just for me, but I mean, this sounds so egotistic to say it, but we really thought we were doing something for humanity.

Yeah, I mean, I think said every cult ever, right. Which is that they think that they're doing something great for humanity. But like, like take me back to that moment of like thousands of people.

And I know that we talk about community and the, as a, as a sense of belonging and being a part of those groups, as being one of the core reasons why so many of us potentially stay in those groups far longer than we either might want to or that we might have thought that we would have.

And you know, I talk a lot about group based coercive control and how that sideways control makes a big difference as well, as opposed to, you know, the top down, how do you feel about, like, how do you remember being in that community?

I felt like the little kid. So I was like 23 or thereabouts. And the demographic was a little bit older. It was more like 25 to 30.

And when you're just 22, 23, and you're looking up at 30 year olds, they're pretty impressive. And these were people who'd had jobs in the real world and were generally fairly educated and had given it up to do this.

So that impressed me a great deal. And they looked radiant. I mean, there really was an incredible vibe.

I don't know anyone who spent time in Pune who doesn't sort of rave about it a little bit that Pune was the city in India. Later, the organization moved to the United States in Oregon, that was a very different scene, but about the peer pressure.

I remember at the time hearing about cults because Jonestown had gone on and we talked about cults and people would say, oh, you're influenced by other people or no, that was. I knew that was an aspect of cult dom. And I would have just laughed that off because my feeling was, I'm there for the guru.

This is about my relationship to the guru. Just so happens these other 10, 20,000 people have their own relationship to the guru too. But it really was like a triangulation.

We were there because of our shared love. And it was only over time and over years that I have come to see more and more what those peer relationships were.

And especially in Oregon, after the guru left and realizing, oh, well, it's still a pretty good place. Oh, we're still a pretty cool community. We have something going here.

And then later, as a psychotherapist, looking at the relation group behaviors and how subtle that is, that of course we want to belong. There's all these tribal instincts going on that make a lot of sense that I really didn't see at the time.

Yeah, you mentioned that it was always about your relationship to the guru.

And I will often ask, you know, this type of question, particularly for, you know, those who come from evangelical kind of spaces, which is, what did you feel like your relationship to the guru was?

It's a little one way, Sam, just slightly, but he was an extraordinary person, and that's something also.

I think most of the people I talk to who have met him have had very similar experiences in that he would look in your eyes and you would feel like, absolutely seen that. Oh, my God, this guy can see everything going on in me. And he was very, very gentle with Me, like, he talked very softly with this very loving.

He had a very sort of feminine presence. And it felt like he was channeling love intellectually. I wasn't there for a relationship with a guru. I was there for a relationship with the divine.

And this was a way for me to get closer, to help me. And the whole cult thing was about surrender, that if you were a disciple, you had to surrender. And, you know, I really didn't like that initially.

It's like, yuck, you know, who wants to surrender to someone? And I had to sort of do these intellectual somersaults of, no, I'm not actually surrendering to someone. I'm surrendering to the divine.

And this someone is just an instrument to help me get there. The whole thing relied on my trusting that that was true. And then all those other people, I looked around and would see, well, they're so devoted.

That made it a lot easier to get into. And then the therapy groups that we did were really designed to make that so.

Yeah, it's always really interesting when I've heard people talk about the guru in this sense that there is still very positive, almost terminology used to describe him. And so I'm curious what it is like for you to now reconcile that with the harm that has happened and how.

Because, you know, part of, you know, what we talk about is holding the. That nothing is all good or all bad coming out of these groups a lot of the time. And so how do you hold that tension?

Well, like, I've written an entire book about this.

Yes, you have.

It took me some 400 pages to really try and explain that. Yes, I think the phrase you use holding that tension is very true. I mean, my journey.

I feel like it's really important to tell the truth and to figure out what the truth is and to look at the truth. And my particular journey has revealed a lot of truths about that guru that are not very pretty.

I believe he was responsible for a great many of the crimes that took place. Not all of them, but I hold him responsible for a great deal and a lot of harm that happened to people. And not insignificant harm.

I mean, this group poisoned over 750 people in restaurants in a nearby town. There was attempted murder within the commune. There were rapes that went on.

I didn't know any of this at the time, but since then, some of the kids have spoken out saying that this permissive culture of sexuality led to a great deal of abuse. You know, surprise, surprise, but we didn't know that. And then people have come out and said that they were personally sexually abused by the guru.

So I find this a lot easier to accept because I saw him at the end of the ranch and I saw some of his behaviors that were really wacky. For example, I had described him to you as this very kind, loving, gentle. And certainly I had that experience.

But I saw him be cruel to people in public when he was sitting on the.

The stage on his throne with thousands of people in the audience, and he would take someone and mock them and make fun of them and rather like some leaders in the world at the moment. And there's the same sort of behavior of. And I could also kind of see where it was coming from.

Like, for example, a journalist calling him on what he was saying. The journalist said, you know, there are people here who doubt that you're telling them the truth, which of course, was true.

We'd all be talking to the journalists at that point as the things were falling apart. And he was outraged, absolutely outraged. No people of mine would say that, da, da, da. And then would just call the journalists names he would call.

And this sort of behavior happened in a number of instances. And I saw it. So it was like seeing a fragile psyche, a fragile ego that couldn't bear to be questioned.

And at that time, I was absolutely struggling in my mind of how to put that together with this man I'd loved and given years of my life to. And it was very, very confusing.

And so sorting that out is, excuse me, years of processing and talking and thinking and studying and speaking to people till I've come to a place where I have some. My own clarity about what I think happened and what was actually true.

And at the same time, I can still tell you, wow, he was responsible for some of the highest moments in my life. And those are both true. Although I think also in the aftermath, it's very important to claim, where do I put the cause of things?

So if I hold him as responsible for the highest moments in my life, I'm putting that on him as if he created that, but he didn't. He created a lot. He created the community, he created the atmosphere.

But I was responsible for some of those experiences and the group energy and the group whatever was going on with all those thousands of people celebrating, that held a responsibility, but he was part of that, so I'm grateful to him for that.

Yeah, it's always. I think it's one of the trickiest tensions, and I think it's hard for people who have not been a part of groups like that or.

Or Any sort of fundamental group to sort of understand holding that tension. And so it's one of the reasons why I like to talk. I ask those types of questions because I think.

I think for people who have never existed in those types of groups, it can be hard to understand, to have to hold that, to hold.

Well, I think one way to understand it is simply looking at this thing we call love.

I mean, how many people have been in love or considered or thought they're in love with someone who can be a total asshole and say, in a divorce situation, it's so easy to say that person was a complete asshole. I absolutely hate them. And I was in an illusion and it was all nonsense, which is a way to separate and a way to begin to make a new life.

But that's black and white, and it's not necessarily true. They was pulled into that relationship at the beginning when things were roses in just the same sort of way.

So I think it's not outside normal human experience to just simply look at who we love. Whole cult and guru thing just puts it in a more obvious context.

But I think it's a big mistake that a lot of people make going, well, that's just those weird people. And I'd never do that when they've done it with every stupid relationship they've been in.

Absolutely. I completely agree.

It's very easy to sort of see that as an over there or a them problem and not actually realize that we see the same sorts of things in all sorts of different relationships and, and settings and things like that. So, okay, I want to ask a question about what happened and what was it like?

And I guess the differences in when everything shifted from India to Oregon, because they're pretty different locations just slightly.

Yes. Well, the, the reason behind that was that they were looking for a larger piece of land to have. There were so many people.

Unless you look at Wild Wild country, that Netflix series, or have some realization, it's hard to really get how big it was. It was never as big as they said it was, mind you, but there were certainly tens of thousands of people involved.

So the idea was to have a commune that in the end, many, many people could come to. And this was eventually found by Bhagwan's secretary.

I still think of him as Bhagwan, his secretary, Sheila, who was an Indian American, and she found this place. So that was the move. And it was a hundred square miles, so remote, just absolutely in the middle of nowhere. And it was immensely.

This immense preoccupation with land Use difficulties because it was zoned agricultural, and they sort of neglected to take on board that this maybe wasn't the best way to build a city on agricultural land.

So initially, there was a lot of deception about, oh, we're not going to build a city or a commune, just a few people farming, and we're farmers, and we really want to repair the land. Even the look, you know, this was denim jeans and boots and dealing with mud. India was, you know, flowing robes and men with long hair and beards.

But we were all supposed to be very straight to try and pass the Oregon farmer test. And the work of actually farming and building the city was very. It was a lot to do. So it was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, essentially.

And in India, there were people who worked, but I was not one of them. I went as an outsider. I was a visitor. I was doing the therapy groups we were all required to do, but I could come and go, and it was fun.

And Oregon, it was work.

And the work was also enjoyable for a lot of us because it was great fun building a city, you know, especially when you didn't know what the heck you were doing and you'd be put in charge of things. And, Nicola, you're going to have to change the sheet metal on the front of this enormous building.

Go figure out how to do it, or how are we going to do the sewer and water and irrigation system, and let's figure it out and those sorts of things, those sorts of challenges. So it was a very different culture, and I felt like I was building my city, that it was for my future and my people.

Of course, I didn't get paid, you know, you would get paid to do your own garden shed, you know. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, sort of hearing you saying, like, yes, you're building something physically, but, like, spiritually and ideologically, what did you feel like you were building? Because I imagine, like, this, you know, huge sense of, again, like, building something enormous for humanity. Even though, like, yeah, you're just.

You're putting sheet metal on a wall, but, like, internally, what were you building?

Well, it was a lot of trust involved because the drive was to build this place that people would come to and have a flowering of themselves. So in the tech, in the technology. That's the wrong word. But the terms of enlightenment. No, this was a Buddha field where people would become Buddhas.

And as soon as you'd become a Buddha, you'd be having this incredible influence on the world. And so that didn't actually happen. Sam but it still felt like my job was to be aware and to make use of this time.

And in a way, there was something very sacred to me about not being in the world.

A we were in this gorgeous countryside and you didn't have to do all those things like worry about the bank account and so on, because, yes, we worked these incredibly long days. But all your food was there. This beautiful vegetarian, organic food. You'd get back to your tent or your little house or wherever you were living.

Someone had done all your laundry and folded your clothes neatly on the bed. So it was different. And I don't know if that answers your question, because I don't think we really knew what we were doing.

We knew that we were part of an experiment and we were always being told how incredibly lucky we were to be there. How many of you get that opportunity? It's only one person on the world every thousands of years or whatever.

The same sort of thing you hear in every group.

Yeah. You get like. We get to do this, like. Which often, you know, bypasses the physical and mental exhaustion that is. Is at play a lot of the time.

Because I imagine there would be people who would be hearing this who are going, if you like. Now we can potentially see that as like, you know, a labor, exploitation, obviously. But how was it presented to you as.

Not that in the time other than like, you get to do this. This is like a once in a lifetime opportunity kind of thing.

Well, one thing was that I was part of a group that was greatly envied by the rest of the group because I was living on this ranch.

Yeah.

And there were people all over the world who would give anything to be there because I was near the guru. So the guru was living there. So even though initially we didn't see him at all, and then we just saw him as he drove through.

He was in silence for the first few years. It still felt like, oh, there's a real privilege to being in proximity.

I mean, I'd wake up in the morning and I could hear the peacocks that he had in his garden. It's like, I'm living that close.

And then I got to see him now and again and do some work that met, you know, I went out with him on a boat at one time. Or just these things that just felt, I'm so lucky. So that's one way. And I was invited to go. You didn't know? You didn't. You didn't just rock up.

You didn't just rock up there.

No. Yeah. And if you did then you'd have to go through pay and be in classes or whatever the visitor program was.

But I happened to be living in Canada and then in the United States when it was happening. So I was lucky, lucky to be called to the ranch. And so the opposite is also true, that the fear of being kicked out was immense.

And did you see that happening? Did you see people getting kicked out?

There were some odd disappearances. No, I was there, someone was there and then they weren't there. And we'd be, well, whatever happened, where did he go? What happened?

So some people left, and I don't know if they were kicked out or they left voluntarily, some of each.

But if you were in trouble, if you were doing something like being negative, for example, which is the greatest sin, then you were told, you're free to leave, go. Not that that's very easy when you're 23 miles down a dirt road and you don't have any money and there's no public transport.

I wouldn't have known where to go, but I knew I didn't want to leave my people. And then, of course, we all had our romantic relationships and our friendships and people had children and parents.

I mean, there were all kinds of ties that this beyond the tie with the guru. It was a community, it was a culture like any other culture cult. Leaving is not an easy thing.

And I mean, what were you told anything in terms of, like, what would happen if you did leave?

Like, was there any sort of, you know, I guess we talk about, like fear based indoctrination of any kind, but, like, yes, obviously, you know, there were difficulties and it was like, logistically difficult for you to leave. But were you told that there would be any sort of spiritual ramifications of you leaving? Also?

There was one group that left a couple of years in and it was a group of friends and they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and were known as the Camels. I don't remember why, but they were talked about as if they were really disgusting people and traitors.

So there was this element of shunning that goes on in other groups in that we were told, you know, they are no more. I can't remember Rajneesh's exact words, but something like, they are no longer my people.

So we were really told to look down on these traitors who didn't understand him and had wasted their everything and bad things were said. I can't think of the exact words right now. But you knew that you would be frowned upon when I left.

And then various Other people left at different times, but not many. Most of us really wanted to be there.

But when it collapsed and I left, I went to see someone I'd known previously who had left just a few months before. And she said to me, you know, how amazing it was that we'd come and we'd come to see her.

Because when she left, she didn't know she would ever be able to see any of her friends again. She was fully aware of the price of leaving. So it was a very scary thing and a very brave thing for people to actually make that choice to leave.

And then there were a couple of people who left who were very close to the center of things. Lived in Sheila's house, for example. And this couple was a couple highly regarded by a lot of us. And they left in the middle of the night.

And they'd borrowed a car from the commune because they were high enough that they could get keys to the car. Left it at the airport. But that was a trigger for me to think, no, something's actually wrong here.

When people are choosing to leave, do they have to do it in the middle of the night under cover of darkness? And I think people who actually had information and knew what was being done were afraid for their lives. Yeah, yeah.

And I want to get to the moment of, like, implosion, so to speak, and when everything shifted and changed for you. You mentioned a couple of times the aspects of the group around sex and sexuality and things like that.

And I think a lot the time people mistakenly hear the word cult and they think repression of sexuality and that it is like, you're not allowed to have it. You're only allowed to have it in certain demographics, like all of those sorts of things. And there are other groups where it is the pol.

It's the opposite. And sex is not necessarily repressed, and yet abuse can still thrive and be protected and go unnoticed in those spaces as well.

And so what did you notice about the way that sexuality was in the group for you?

I think that's such an important point because we were convinced that sexual energy was sort of divine energy and it should be fully experienced and make a lot of noise while you're doing it. And there was a lot of celebration and liberation in that. And that existed before this particular group.

It was very much part of the 60s 70s free love scene. And one way I think that was distorted was in the feminist movement and the feminist path, which I certainly still ascribe to.

But I think we saw that sexual freedom and liberation looked like what men were doing that, if you just followed your libido and went and fucked whoever you wanted to fuck, you know, you were free. And what got lost for me was really understanding intimacy.

And I think that has a lot to do with a sexually promiscuous group, because sex was promoted.

And I think one thing that occurred to me is that this was a way to give people kind of a drug to get high on that would take care of a great deal of their energy, that they wouldn't be looking to go and do something else or fulfill creativity elsewhere, because the sex drive is so strong. And if you're surrounded by a lot of very attractive people with lots of possibilities, there's an appeal to that.

And the niceness of it to me was that it was a very safe group, that I cared a lot about the people in this community. When there was intimacy felt like. And I mean sexual intimacy, it felt like, no, this is part of my family. Not in an incestuous way, but in a.

These are my people. I trust them. So that we all loved somebody else. We shared our love for the guru as we had relationships with one another.

And then there's the impact on the kids.

And Rajneesh said some pretty awful things that have been given some air time on social media recently about bringing up children, which he had no experience of.

But he would say, I remember this is back in India, I think, because that was when he was doing most of his talking, that it's great for children to see their parents have sex. No, that this. They. They will learn that it's a natural thing and this is nothing to be afraid of.

And he was not unique in that there was a thinking at the time that was used in different school. Summerhill was an experiential school in the uk.

Not that they were saying they should watch people have sex, but that the idea was that the way their parents had been conditioned to fear and repress, it was not the way to go. This was the pendulum going another way. So that didn't work out so well.

And then the idea that there would be underage kids having sex and experimenting. No, that has led to a lot of damaged lives. And then the LGBTQ community.

One thing about Rajneesh is he always said the opposite of whatever he said, so he couldn't really be accused of, oh, well, you're saying that that's what we believe. Because he'd say, oh, my words are only to mess up your mind so that you can have a full experience of.

I'm not putting it very Eloquently, but that the mind was not the way to go. The experience was the way to go.

And the words were to confuse our minds and challenge us and to say things that when we felt upset about them, was an opportunity to look at ourselves and where our attachments were. So he had said positive things about homosexuality, and then much later on, he said some pretty nasty things.

So if you were gay in that community, you know, what did you make of that? It was very confusing. And there was certainly a heterosexual, you know, enormous dominance because of this. That's.

That's what was sort of portrayed as the ideal. Yeah.

But I know some gay men who found their way within that and they were out and seemed pretty happy women, not so much, because that never got the light of day. But, yeah, there were many people doing many things and you'd have to ask them what their experience was.

But there were lots of ways sexuality could be manipulated and be harmful to people. Yeah.

And I find that that's pretty prevalent in every sort of, like, high control or fundamental group, because I think the more that you can control the body, the more that you can control in general. So it's not surprising.

But I appreciate, you know, what you've said, because I think it counters that idea that repression is the only way that sexuality is used as a weapon or as a method of control. And I think that that's the opposite. It's not the only way.

Anyway, take us into, I guess, when everything changed for you and the group imploded and you sort of were thrust out of it, but not necessarily mentally and emotionally just yet.

I think I just want to add one more thing to the sexuality aspect, which was the pressure to have free love and open relationships. I believed in that before I joined. So it's not the fault of the cult. It was the ethos of the time. Oh, love is supposed to be free marriage.

What's that? You know, why should the state get involved? You know, that sort of thing.

So I suffered a great deal with the concept that I should share my boyfriend and share my husband. And it was very difficult. And I went through a lot of mental shenanigans of, you know, well, that's. I'm a bad disciple. That's not really love.

That's just my possessiveness. My God, this thing called jealousy. I felt terrible for having it.

So trying to fit myself into that mold, you know, there was just one other area of pain. It was so liberating to find out afterwards. Actually, it's quite normal to be jealous.

Yes. And like, as somebody who is like, I'm very open about the fact that my wife and I are like non monogamous and.

And yet jealousy is still the most normal human emotion and experience in that. And like, to sort of see it, for it to be treated as this distortion within you is just so counterintuitive to it just being information within you.

But you're. Yeah, it is. It is such a. Like, that is an additional aspect of that sexuality, like free sexuality. Piece of that as well.

Yeah. If it's something that's coming from above or you're buying into rather than this is what's right for what I'm choosing for my relationship.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so your next question was about how did it fall apart? Yeah.

And what it was like for you personally when that was all happening.

Because I know that, you know, people can do a quick Google search and they'll find all of the information about what happened or they can, like you said, watch the documentary on Netflix. But what was it like for you?

It was absolutely devastating.

Yeah.

So in these four years that I lived in Oregon, the commune was there for four and a half, maybe five.

We were constantly in kinds of litigation and struggling and trying to fight for our right to survive and to keep our buildings and fighting court injunctions. I mean, there was all sorts of stuff going on that I think the Netflix series explains very well.

The first sign things were really wrong was when Several thousand, like 3,000 homeless people came to live with us that we had invited to come from all over the country on buses promising a home. And suddenly this largely white middle class certainly were Indians there too. And it wasn't completely white, but it was majority white.

Was suddenly had even more people from different street gangs and largely black, largely male living with us. So it was a bit of a shock to our community.

Some people made friends and welcomed this, but mostly the homeless were kept apart and had a separate cafeteria. But it was weird, like. And this cult had never been good on social justice. The guru used to really knock Mother Teresa.

And it was all about, no, you just need to focus on yourself. That's the best way to help the world is by your evolution. So there was charity, not so much.

So obviously this was a bullshit party line that suddenly we developed this social compassion. And there just so happened to be an election coming up. And the homeless who were coming in were all American citizens.

So it didn't take too much to see that something very fishy was going on.

But what happened was the Oregonians also caught onto this and suddenly changed the election law so people would no longer qualify to be able to vote.

And this was a very important election to maintain our incorporation or to disincorporate the city, which might mean we'd have to take our buildings down, and it would be disastrous. So the election from our side was actually. We were told not to vote in the end because they knew it was not going to work.

But what happened was the homeless, whom we called the Sharer Home because they were sharing a home, was suddenly kicked out. And this was absolutely heartbreaking to see because it was just so wrong and cruel. And people who'd come and some of them had mingled a lot hadn't.

I mean, there were a lot of really seriously mentally ill people and some violent folks, but some of them were very glad to be there. And they'd gotten medical attention, they'd gotten jacket, but they'd been promised a home.

And to be at this group event where Sheila was at the front on the microphone, saying, you get to the back. You know, take him out. There you go. There you go. There you go.

And some of her thugs, you know, were dragging people out, and these people were screaming and crying, and there were women there, too. And I just went, oh, my God. You know, something. Has something cracked inside me in that moment?

You know, I knew it was wrong, and I was in no position to say anything. I couldn't. I wouldn't have known what to say. But even the people who drove the buses to take some of the homeless out, not all of them, a few stayed.

They said they were terrified, because if you said, I'm not doing this. This is wrong, they'd just be told, okay, you joined the bus. You're going out, too. So the threat of expulsion felt very, very real.

But that was the first really obvious sign that something really weird was going on. And then they were. To try and put it in a nutshell. Let's see.

So Sheila Rajneesh's secretary and her group that she lived with in the house, who were very. They were the top of the hierarchy, we were told, oh, they've all gone. And they had left the night before and flown away.

And we were suddenly leaderless, and no one knew why. And then the guru, who had been largely in silence, he'd just started talking maybe a few months before, but, you know, just to a small group.

And then in a very orchestrated way, he was the one who called the meeting to explain what had happened. So we'd never heard him talk in a way like that. It wasn't a spiritual lecture.

And what he said was that the reason that they were traitors and had been betrayed and that they had been criminals turning us into a fascist camp, and that they'd been ruling his commune and hurting his people and had been doing all these criminal activities, like poisoning people in the Dalles.

So suddenly, all this stuff that was just about to emerge in legal indictments was out there, and it was all blamed on Sheila and the people closest to her.

So I heard this, and I thought, well, that makes no sense to me whatsoever, because whatever Sheila may or may not have been, she was devoted to him and met with him twice a day. And it didn't make sense to me that she was doing all these things behind his back, even though I think some of the things.

I think she also did do some things behind his back. So it's not totally clear.

And if you talk to people who are disciples, especially those who are still disciples, everyone will take a different position. And one of the positions people take is, no, he was telling the truth. Sheila had done all these things. She created this commune.

She did all this nonsense. She's the one to blame. I didn't decide that. I felt like, no, that wasn't true. But I still loved him. So I wasn't bailing at that point.

I was just in a state of complete shock because my mind was cracking because I couldn't cognitively take on board. I think this guy is lying, and I love him, and he's my guru. Is he a divine being? Is he.

You know, the words pathological narcissist hadn't come to my mind at that point, but it was this terrible, terrible time of just feeling that my brain didn't work. And when I looked at the faces around me that was reflected on thousands of faces that we were going.

I mean, first of all, to even take on board that our commune created, to love and make the world better and have us all become kinder, better, more beautiful people had poisoned people. No, it made absolutely no sense. I couldn't figure out why would that ever happen?

No.

Made no sense. So this terrible cognitive dissonance was quite extreme, and it lasted a while.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm curious, I guess, like, if we sort of move into, like, the recovery piece, which I feel like is, you know, an ongoing thing for most people.

It's never. There's no end point to that. But the. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is, like, what it was like for you.

You know, we talk about questioning and. And things like that. Afterwards and being able to be curious for people who have potentially never been able to be curious in their life.

But you had, like you said, like it taught you to question things. But what was it like for you to shift those questions towards the group and the guru that you were a part of, that you had not been able to before?

What initially, it was an extraordinary process that was a shared process because the questioning was what really happened and who's telling the truth. And we were all doing that.

And so I think there was this openness that sort of happened at the same time as a great deal of confusion to, well, we don't really know. But my understanding is the human brain just can't live in that not knowing for very long.

And we tend to go to, well, this is what I think happened and this is what I believe happened. But it was simultaneous with the dissolution of. We were told we had to leave.

So suddenly after, for me, four plus years, no money, not watching tv, not listening to the radio, not knowing what on earth was going on in the world, suddenly we had to go and start afresh.

So all these people and this sort of brain fog state we were in, also terrified of the outside world feeling we were hated, which I think a lot of Oregonians had good reason to hate us. But everyone was watching the news and seeing what was going on.

So it wasn't like you could go out and get a job and say, oh, I came from that cult that wasn't going to go down too well. Suddenly we were homeless and broke, and I was homeless on the beach in San Diego going, where do I start?

How do I begin my life at 30 something when my brain is so fragile at the moment? But we were lucky in that we did have one another because so many people left at the same time. So there was an enormous peer support.

And the peer support at that time was about, how do we get somewhere to live? How do we earn money? How do you start a bank account? How do you get a credit card? That was one of the hardest things ever.

That was the focus rather than, well, what do you think of the guru and what was true and what wasn't. Because you gotta have a sort of shelter and food before you start trying to sort that out. Yeah.

Yes.

All of the reintegration piece of, like, money and food and like you said, shelter and just all of those basic. The basic needs of just being able to exist and live for sure. What was it like for you when you did start to pull apart?

I guess the indoctrination Piece of all of this,.

I think the first word that comes to mind is satisfying. And I did it because there were basically about two people I could speak with. And I think that's. That's what it takes. One is enough.

But people that I could share these terrible questions because the question of, who is Rajneesh? Who is he, who he said he was? Is he a divine being? Was he lying? Was he responsible for any of these crimes? Really, really scary questions to ask.

And as people started to find their way, the belief system started to settle in. It started to form in. Into sort of camps of people who were. Well, of course he was telling the truth. That'd be ridiculous.

You know, Sheila did all the crimes, and this was. Oh, this is the big one. This was really an intentional device to wake us up.

And so that if you questioned it, obviously you were never a devoted disciple in the first place. So people developed these different pathways, and some went off and went to follow him and still follow him, and he is deceased.

But the ashram and the organization is still going under the name Osho. It kind of got rebranded, and then others turned really against. And that was evil. I was deceived, and it was all a horrible mistake.

And, no, it was understandably a lot of anger. And I sort of felt that I was in between the two.

I didn't want to dismiss this enormous part of my life and all these people I cared about and my personal spiritual experiences that involved a Rajneesh. I felt like I had to find a way that acknowledged the good part of it and faced the evil part of it. And I think that's.

That's the route I've tried to tread. Yeah.

Yeah, it is, I feel, like the most accurate word I can find for people who are, I guess, in the ongoing journey of cult recovery is messy because there is no. There's no clean way to do that. There is no one way to do that. And everybody's answer to that is always a little bit different.

Some people choose to write books, though.

And so I do want to find out, I guess, what it has been like for you to put all of that in writing for the world to eventually read when that comes out.

I've always wanted to be a writer, and it was one of the things on the commune.

I felt that my creativity virtually had no outlet except through just doing the work as beautifully as I could, which was actually quite a good lesson to learn. But I did write one play to train people how to use the trash system, the recycling system. That was my One moment of creativity.

Other people were given jobs that fit. You know, if you were a journalist and you were put in charge of the paper, you would not have that problem.

But for me, it's like, no, I didn't feel I got seen in who I really could be. So I've always had that yearning to write. And finally, when I could pay the rent, I started to make a little time to be able to do that.

And this was very much the story I wanted to tell. Not necessarily about just the 10 years of my life. I saw myself as a disciple, but just me. And I was a therapist, still am.

And as a therapist, you're always listening to people. So as you are right now, Sam. And for me, it's like, this is amazing. I get to talk and people ask me about myself. It's so different.

It's so refreshing. So writing. What started to emerge were different parts of my life and family and so on, and I just started writing and writing and writing.

But when I read it to people, what they were interested in was the guru stuff. And I belonged to a writing group at one point, and I would try and write this and that, and they'd like, no, we want to hear more about the guru.

And realized, well, if I actually want to make this a book, that's probably what people are going to be most interested in. So I started to focus on that. And when you're writing memoirs, it's really important to not go all over the place, but to try and stay focused.

So I do write about experiences outside the guru, but they're all under the rubric of my spiritual journey, essentially, and what took me there and what took me out of it. And it's been wonderful. Another adventure, a writing adventure and trying to tell the truth adventure.

And in the process of it, I don't see it as therapeutic writing in that I feel that, thank goodness there's enough years of distance that a lot of what I'm writing about, I feel that there's been quite a lot of peace made. And yet when you write about stirs up more and more and more, and you have to go into another layer and another layer and another layer.

So it was really making friends with this young girl and seeing her sort of going through life in her naive, idealistic way. And instead of having shame about it, which I certainly have had of some of the decisions I've made, making peace with it.

And I think that's also something I have to offer, as there was nothing wrong with trying to be idealistic. There was Nothing wrong with following the path that looked like it was going to make the world a better place.

So coming to terms with that has been a lovely and unexpected part of the writing journey.

Yeah, that's beautiful. I want to finish with two questions, and this is sort of one that I ask a lot of people, which is, how do you view spirituality? Now?

I'm actually giving a presentation at the International Cultic Studies association conference this year on reclaiming spirituality after cult indoctrination. I know that some people have an aversion to the word spirituality. They just go, spirituality. Give me every distance you can have.

And, of course, we all have triggers around this, and I can understand that. For me, it's inner experience, primarily connected to our outer experience. And it's about being connected to the life force that we all have.

And people find different avenues to express and help nurture that. And I'm very reluctant to join anything I wish I could because I think it'd be lovely to share this with other people. I like meditation.

I think that really helps us go inside and find peace. And I think kindness is immensely important.

So this connection that we all have with one another and the planet and living beings and this potential that we have to be loving and kind and support one another, that to me, is spirituality, you know, in the life that we have here. Yeah, Yeah.

I think that's beautiful. And I will, you know, in my work, I will often. You know, you're right.

I have a lot of people who are pretty averse to spirituality, which is completely understandable given the experiences they've had. And I will often bring it down to. Spirituality can be just about your connection to yourself and your connection to the world around you.

And I think, you know, for some people, that goes beyond the living world, and for others it doesn't. And I think that that's okay.

But I love the people who are doing the work around what spirituality on the other side of these high control systems who have weaponized that, who want to reclaim what that looks like, is really lovely because it doesn't have to be an either or. You don't have to keep it or throw it away. There's so a myriad of other options in between those two things. And so, yeah, I love that.

Absolutely. And it's so individual.

And I think that's the important lesson, that if anyone is telling you what spirituality is or telling you how to do it, you're not listening to this. And I think that's what we who have come through experiences like high control groups or Coercive relationships.

Well, this is always the lesson, right? Or do it it start to not feel right and how can I listen and voice what is the truth as I know it and do do the best that I can.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

To use good therapy speak for a moment coming back to self, which is we've always just got to drop a little bit of therapy speak into to the episode. I like to finish all of these episodes with some encouragement for people.

And so if someone is list that they have left either last week or 10 years ago, similar to what you came out of, what encouragement would you have for those people?

I mostly want to say it gets better. And of course I can't promise that it does. Yeah. But I think it's just such a big world, Sam. There are so many good people.

And even though I think in today's political landscape it can be enormously depressing, you can look at all kinds of abuse being repeated and those who've had traumatic experiences of many different kinds are feeling that it's. I'm not going to get much support from society these days. And that's true.

There's a lot of evil stuff going down, there's a lot of people getting hurt. But I still have a lot of faith in kindness and humanity.

And the more I've been involved in the cult community, the more impressed I've been about what lovely people there are. And it's been just great fun meeting them.

And if you can't find someone from your own cult to talk to who's on the same page as you, if that could be very threatening to go to someone from your own cult, look at other cults. You know, even as disparate as your experience and my experience, look at the commonalities that there are.

And I think peer companionship, peer support is enormously important because we've all learned to distrust an authoritarian structure. And I think it's very tricky coming into therapy because therapy sort of has this built in.

Not imbalance of power, but I think therapists are invaluable. And trust yourself as you explore therapists, interview them, be in charge, don't let the therapist direct you.

Go to people you trust and they don't necessarily have to have a cult background, but you have to trust them. So trust your distrust, express your distrust, cross examine your therapist.

You have every right to want to know what their religious background is, what their beliefs are.

And I know there are not enough therapists attuned to this out there, but there are people like you who would give A consultation to therapists to help them in cult recovery situations. But there are so many organizations now offering classes as you do that yourself. And then the yalec center for example, has classes.

There are conferences of ex cult people. New Zealand is having d cult conference coming up in the fall. There's so much out there.

So reach out and find people that you trust and you like and that you can be as judgmental and negative as you like and as angry as you like and you'll find your way. Yeah, yeah, Beautiful.

I like the both the emotional and the practical components of that encouragement. It is, I think it's, you know, they're the two sides that people need.

They need to feel seen, but they also need to be supported logistically and practically and cognitively as well. And so I love that.

Absolutely. And that's one thing I think we failed at a great deal is the practical resources.

If people could have jobs and supportive environments, for example, that would help a lot. And let me mention books.

Yes, yes.

So I'm reading Tia Leving's I Belong to Me at the moment.

Fabulous.

Really lovely, lovely book. And she's a lovely person to follow on Instagram and so on. And there's so many books and people like that. And here's a little plug for mine too.

It's yours. Beautiful.

Slice of Orange is coming out in December and I checked on Australian Amazon and it is out there for pre order and you can see here I wanted this figure.

There's a dancing orange skirted young me on the COVID and then you can see the Thor starting to come in and entangle her skirt and then the community is represented there. So this was sort of everything I felt like I wanted to say. Slice of Orange loving and leaving the Osho Rajneesh cult.

And I have a website to nicola ranson.org and if you sign up for my newsletter, I'll send you my 10 tips for cult recovery.

Lovely.

And for those who are listening and not watching, all of that will be in the show notes and the COVID that Nicola just described will be on her website. So do go and check that out. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Well, lovely to meet you and thank you, Sam for the good work you're doing. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to beyond the Surface. If this episode resonated, challenged you, or named something you've struggled to put words to, I'm really glad you found your way here.

You'll find ways to connect, learn more and explore further in the show notes as always. You are good. You have always been good. And your story matters always.