Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want

The Cult Dynamics Hiding Inside "Sacred Sexuality" Spaces — with Anke Richter

• Laura Jurgens, Ph.D. • Episode 121

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You don't have to join a compound to end up in a high-control group. Sometimes it starts with a neo-tantra festival. A weekend workshop. A community that feels like finally, finally, you found your people.

Anke Richter is an international cult journalist, author of the bestseller Cult Trip (HarperCollins), and founder of Decult — the first cult awareness conference in Australasia. She spent six years inside ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) before becoming one of its most informed critics. She's also researched Centrepoint, Osho/Rajneeshpuram, and OneTaste firsthand.

This is Part 2 of a series. Start with the previous episode "The Men Behind Sexual Polarity Have A Lot to Answer For" — or read the full article on Substack (link below).

In this episode:

  • Why smart, educated, well-resourced people end up in cults — and the myth that it couldn't happen to you
  • What actually makes something a high-control group (and why "you can leave any time" doesn't disqualify it)
  • How ISTA and similar neo-tantra spaces specifically target ex-evangelicals and ex-Mormons leaving purity culture
  • The slippery slope from a weekend workshop to deeper entanglement — and what the escalation actually looks like
  • Osho/Rajneeshpuram as the ideological origin of modern neo-tantra — and the documented child sexual abuse that history includes
  • The playbook: how spiritual framing gets used to override consent and silence complaints
  • "Acting from your wounding" and "stuck in victim consciousness" — the specific language used to shut down resistance
  • The veneer of consent: why trauma-informed language and consent frameworks can be used as cover
  • Why the word "victim" gets weaponized in these spaces — and why that needs to stop
  • How David Deida's sexual polarity ideology functioned as a gateway into neo-tantra spaces for a generation of people, and why it is harmful

Resources mentioned:

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

TRANSCRIPT — Pleasure Uprising Episode 121: The Cult Dynamics Hiding Inside "Sacred Sexuality" Spaces with Anke Richter

Laura: Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

Today I am so excited to bring and welcome Anke Richter, who is an international cult journalist. She's the author of four books, including the international bestseller Cult Trip, published by HarperCollins. She's the founder and director of Decult, which is the first cult awareness conference in Australasia — it's an international conference. She has researched a number of cult dynamics firsthand, including neo-tantra cults, Centrepoint, ISTA, and OneTaste. She's joining us from New Zealand today, which means she's graciously agreed to be here very early in her morning. Welcome, Anke. I'm so glad you're with us today.

Anke: I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Laura.

Laura: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your origin story — how you got here. How did you end up being the person who investigates sex cults? What was that journey like for you?

Anke: To sum up the journey: I was the accidental sex cult tourist who became the accidental cult reporter. I've been a journalist for 40 years, and the last 20-plus years as a foreign correspondent for the German media from New Zealand. I had never researched cults before. I hadn't even done any reporting about sexual abuse or high-control dynamics of any sort. I really fell into it by going to a spiritual festival in Byron Bay in Australia — a neo-tantra festival. I was hooked in there into this culty organism called ISTA.

But what also happened at that neo-tantra festival was that I met a woman from a former sex and therapy cult here in New Zealand called Centrepoint, which was massive even on a global scale. I hadn't heard about it because all of this happened before the internet, and the guru had gone to jail and a lot of children had been abused in that cult. But I met Angie, a former teenager who said she was the commune concubine at Centrepoint, and she told me some of her story. I thought, wow, this is a book.

I'd written three books at that stage, got a great publisher on board, and went off to write the story of the aftermath of this former community in New Zealand that had been shut down by a massive court case in 2000. I wanted to know what had happened to all these families that had lived there, and all these children — over a third of them, at least, had been sexually abused in the cult. They had manufactured drugs on the premises, psychedelics they were taking together with teenagers in group experiments. New Zealand is a small country, and hundreds and hundreds of people had lived in this therapy community. A lot of psychologists from Auckland University had flocked there. It wasn't even such an outlier in the community landscape of New Zealand at the time.

Two years into the research, I had to stop that initial book about Centrepoint because it really messed with me mentally and emotionally. The vicarious trauma I accumulated from talking to so many sexual abuse victims — some of whom had never told their story before — was more than I was prepared for.

That's actually how I got into cult journalism. After stopping that project — which years later was resurrected in my current book, Cult Trip — I started looking into other cults, like Agama Yoga in Thailand, which I helped to blow out of the water. Again, it was all about sexual abuse. And then another cult here in New Zealand that is still going called Gloriavale — a fundamentalist Christian cult that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Centrepoint. What I found through my research was how common the dynamics are, but also how focused on sexuality they all are. The similarities were striking. And how children had suffered in all of them. That's become my focus. And now I'm a cult journalist, I guess — though I actually stopped my journalism to run a conference.

Laura: And then you wrote this really important book, Cult Trip. Can you give us a brief overview of the scope of it and who you think really needs to read it?

Anke: As far as cult books go, I've read so many myself. There are many great ones out there, and they're usually either handbooks or recovery guides. I'm the journalist who got too close. My book goes through journalism — people can follow me trying to piece the puzzle together, getting too close to people, and actually becoming part of the story at some stage. People find it really hard to put down. It's also very confronting, especially the Centrepoint section. There's one woman in my book — the Girl in the Caravan — who is now over 50 and had never told her story to anybody before. What her life was like being a 10 or 11-year-old, being sexually abused and hiding from men in this sex and therapy cult. So it's quite confronting. It's very personal. I bring myself into the story, and I think it helps people understand the dynamics and why we have a cult problem — not just in New Zealand, but around the world. Vicariously through me, people can get closer to people they might have just thought of as weirdos or broken or lost. I really try to bring a lot of humanity to people who've come out of cults, because they're the heroes in my book.

Laura: There are so many people who've been impacted. I think a lot of people don't understand the scope and scale of the problem, or how common it is, or how much of a slippery slope it is from just curiosity about something to suddenly being really entwined and impacted. So my second question was about the confusion around what a cult actually is. There are myths that people carry. What are the biggest myths you see in people who haven't been impacted by a cult, and what's the definition that actually holds up across your work and experience?

Anke: I'm really glad you're asking about the myths — those are actually two different questions, right? I'm passionate about changing some of these misconceptions.

Probably the biggest one, and I come across it every time I give a public talk, is that people think they're not susceptible. Normal people think they would never be in a cult because — what they're implying is — they're too smart, they have too many friends, they have a good life. The misconception is that only stupid, lost, or gullible people end up in cults. That is not true. Look at some of the big names — from Tom Cruise to Allison Mack. There's a fantastic former supermodel from LA, Horace Richards, who I met at a conference in Manchester years ago. Princeton graduate, one of the first male supermodels in LA, well-educated, obviously rich, obviously not poor and lost — and he was part of a doomsday cult that almost stripped him of everything. He was the one where I really learned this: everyone is susceptible. Don't think it couldn't be you, because the more you think it can't be you, the less you're able to see what you're involved in.

And also: a lot more people are involved in something they don't see as a cult, for exactly those reasons.

Another myth is that people think they can spot a cult because it will look sinister or satanic or there'll be weird stuff happening all the time. That's not what cults normally feel like. They feel pretty good when you get into one. They don't advertise as cults. They're yoga schools and meditation classes, self-improvement groups, religious or spiritual communities. I've heard of pole dancing cults and vegan cults. It's not about the content. It's not about the belief system, not whether they're right or wrong in what they believe. It's about the levels of power and control, the leadership, the organization, the group dynamics.

Which brings me to your second question — what makes a cult? There are a few key things. There's usually a charismatic leader, normally male but not always — we know of Nicole Daedone and Teal Swan and others who are female cult leaders. There's always a common goal, a common purpose, an ideology, something that binds people together. They think: if everyone would do this, the world will be better. That actually shows you that the people who end up in cults are there because they want a better world, because they're idealistic, because they're do-gooders who believe in community. All these best qualities of people are being exploited.

Then you have us-versus-them thinking. This can be quite extreme — like in Gloriavale, where the world outside is evil and everyone will be lost if they leave — or it can be the lesser version, just being elitist and arrogant, putting yourself at the top of the heap of what's going to change the world or bring forward sexual freedom. It's a sliding scale from arrogant elitism to outright radicalized behavior.

There's always a level of exploitation — that could be a lot of volunteer work, or it could end up in slave labor. Group think. Not being able to question the leaders. And you don't notice these things at first. It's not like you step into your first workshop and see all of this. It often comes much later, once you're on staff or you've climbed up the ranks into the inner circle.

Most cults don't look like Gloriavale, all dressed in blue, or like the Sannyasins, all dressed in orange. They look normal. They're yoga, meditation, self-improvement — giving you tools to make more money or have a better relationship or be radically honest. What's wrong with that? Nothing, in itself. Only if it's in the hands of coercive, controlling leaders.

Laura: In the US, Mormonism often comes up in these conversations because it impacts so many people — the sexual control of women in particular is very real. What does your research tell you about that connection?

Anke: I personally don't have much insight into Mormonism itself. But what's relevant from my own experience in ISTA and the neo-tantra world is that I've seen ISTA especially — and I wonder if other groups do this too — really target ex-Mormons and ex-evangelicals, those who've come out of fundamentalist Christianity.

ISTA is the International School of Temple Arts. There will be more exposés — New York Magazine has done a deep dive into the alleged abuse there. They've got a pretty bad reputation these days. I was involved for about six years. I wasn't harmed, but I see them very critically now.

I want to bring this up in the context of Mormonism because I know some of their online marketing, and I know people who've done ISTA trainings in the US, and there were ex-evangelicals there. Some of ISTA's marketing was directly targeted at them — which makes total sense. If you come out of purity culture, you want to undo all the shackles of it, all the guilt and fear and shame. Those three words were the first ones that stuck with me when I got into ISTA. That was the mantra: undoing guilt, fear, and shame. So who doesn't want that, especially if you've come out of something that suppressed your gender identity and sexuality?

I'm really worried about people going from the fire into the frying pan — thinking they've found their healing in a space with a track record of abuse, victim-blaming, and lack of accountability. They're very likely to come across sexual predators, because that's often what these spaces attract. If you have sexual predators in the leadership, you might not see it at first. You might read it as: everyone here is so free and liberated and it feels amazing.

That link between ex-evangelicals falling into sacred sexuality spaces that aren't actually safe — that's what I'm really worried about.

Laura: You've documented that vulnerability, and the pull toward "sexual liberation" as the hook that draws people in before they see what's actually happening in the leadership. Walk us through the slippery slope — for someone who starts with a seemingly benign introductory weekend. What does the escalation actually look like?

Anke: I want to give a disclaimer: there are neo-tantra schools that don't operate this way. This is not a generalization about neo-tantra as a whole — there's some great practice and great people in there. But some of the bath water really needs to be tipped out, and ISTA probably has the dirtiest bath water at the moment, at least that we know of.

Taking you through the ISTA experience: I started around 2012 or 2013 with my first training. It's a week long — Level 1. For me, it was incredible at the time. It completely blew me away. I didn't have my guard up. I didn't know about red flags or abuse in the tantra world. I came in completely open, hungry for intensity and deep connection — some kind of authenticity I'd been lacking, maybe after many years as an immigrant in New Zealand. Everyone has an Achilles heel where something can land.

In the week-long training, you do a lot of group sharing, work in circles. The more you expose yourself emotionally, the better the feedback. You do different rituals — from group masturbation, which they call self-pleasuring, to other things like predator-prey exercises, acting out certain dynamics and desires in a kind of psychodrama or Gestalt therapy framework. It's a grab bag of Jungian psychology, neo-tantra, Gestalt, Esalen-type stuff from the human potential movement. It's quite physical, and it can look quite sexual from the outside, but you're told it's not an orgy — it's about activating energies inside you.

The first week was genuinely amazing. And I think that's an important part of the story — because people will be drawn in by something that does feel real.

But then you're on the trajectory, where you isolate yourself more from the "muggles," the normal people outside. Everything seems boring by comparison. You're kind of hooked on the intensity. And the more you're hooked on the good stuff, the less you're able to realize where it becomes really problematic. It's a sunk cost fallacy. You've invested too much, you're too deep in.

Even for me — someone who was never a victim, who wasn't harmed — I can totally feel those dynamics. The sense of betrayal by former leaders. The fear of speaking up. It took me a long time to even have a podcast interview like this and name all this clearly. The loss. The grief about what you thought was real, about what you thought a better world could look like. Even though it was largely money-based — you had to attend another training to get that — the friends who suddenly weren't there once you became a critical voice. And the confusion: was it really me with all those great feelings? Or was it some kind of group hypnosis? I still haven't fully worked that out.

Laura: What finally made you step away?

Anke: What it took was seeing how they were damaging themselves publicly — on "Tantra Not Trauma," which was like the MeToo platform of the neo-tantra world, a year after the MeToo movement in 2018. I had just helped to expose Agama Yoga in Thailand, so I was a lot more aware of these dynamics by then.

More and more people started talking about ISTA, and especially about Baba Dez — Robert Nichols is his real name, let's not give him the honorific. People were accusing him of how he'd treated them after having sex with them. And then my complete disillusion started from watching how he and other leaders basically gaslighted those women — victim-blamed them, mocked them, shamed them. I thought, those are the leaders of a conscious evolutionary, sex-positive movement? And then a top lieutenant in ISTA wrote an open letter basically whitewashing those actions, saying they were all pioneers who made mistakes. That sealed the deal for me. No accountability. I can't expose other culty organizations and still be aligned with one that has a really dark side I didn't see for so long.

Laura: It gives you an idea of how powerful those dynamics are. If someone is listening right now and thinking about friends going deeper into these spaces — the hunger underneath is really legitimate. People carry so much sexual shame, so much repressive history, have had trauma, feel disconnected from their erotic selves. There are legitimate ways to get those things. But it can be really hard to tell, especially at the outset, whether a space is part of that slippery slope or a genuinely safe place to explore. And then as you get deeper in, you have that investment.

So I'm wondering: across Centrepoint, Osho, ISTA — is there a recognizable playbook for how spiritual framing gets used to override consent?

Anke: Absolutely. I'm glad you're mentioning Osho, or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh as he was called — the Indian mystic who started his commune and cult in Pune, India, and then later in Oregon, which you can see in the documentary Wild Wild Country. I also highly recommend watching Children of the Cult, because that's the missing story of those who were sexually abused there. And read Shivam O'Brien Carroll's book In the Shadow of Enlightenment.

When I read her story as a sexually abused child at Rajneeshpuram — a young teenager, openly sexually active with men in their thirties from the age of 12 — it added another piece of the puzzle to my Centrepoint research. The commonalities of what was inflicted on children because of the underlying ideology.

What Osho and other so-called spiritual masters have been teaching all along — and it's still prevalent in the spiritual and New Age world — is that it's always on you if something bad happens. Law of attraction and all that. First level of victim-blaming: you attracted this. It's an opportunity to learn. It's a gift from God. You almost have to thank your abuser for giving you this opportunity to grow. And in the worst case, to forgive them.

We see this in religious cults too — there are people at Gloriavale where victims as young as nine years old have to forgive their sexual abuser, because that's what a good Christian does.

So you have these different layers: New Age philosophy where there are no victims, we're all empowered here, you chose this, it's a gift. And then the fundamentalist version: it's all about forgiveness, don't rock the boat, you'll harm the community. Putting the community above everything else is what cults do.

And where do you even go with a complaint? In ISTA and similar groups, you have a group agreement — and I use that term loosely — made on the first day in front of everybody: don't gossip. Now, "don't gossip" sounds like a nice moral tenant. But they use it to stop you from making complaints, seeking accountability, or comparing notes with others. Because if you know there's someone else in the group who had the same experience, it's very different to confronting a leader alone. They use "don't gossip" to prevent exactly that.

Laura: Right — it's spiritual gymnastics that obfuscate accountability. There's nowhere to bring a complaint, and no one who will take it seriously.

Anke: Absolutely. And I'm so allergic to the word "victim" being used as a dirty word in those circles. It doesn't feel empowering to call yourself a victim — I know many people prefer "survivor" — but we need to strip the word "victim" of its loaded meaning and see it for what it is: something bad happened to this person. It shouldn't carry shame. It shouldn't be spiritually bypassed away.

And another thing I want to name, especially with ISTA, is the veneer of consent. Consent trainings are everywhere now — the Wheel of Consent by Dr. Betty Martin is a genuinely wonderful framework and a wonderful book —

Laura: I agree.

Anke: — but you can use anything in the wrong way. You can put a veneer of consent on a space and then set up all the other frameworks such that people don't feel safe to say no, walk away, stop things, or say they don't want to work with a particular person.

Do you really uncondition yourself from decades of saying yes and being a nice girl in half a day, in an intense week-long workshop where you want to get your money's worth, where you're being paired with people without a real say? I kind of call bullshit on that consent framework in those contexts.

Laura: It's like a veneer of consent. And the Wheel of Consent by Dr. Betty Martin is actually a really wonderful framework — but you can certainly use it to put a veneer of consent on something and then set up all the other structures such that people don't feel safe to say no or walk away.

Anke: Exactly. And even if it's not intentionally built that way — I want to give some of these so-called pioneers the benefit of the doubt. There are probably leaders in ISTA and other groups who didn't build a whole system to abuse people. But Baba Dez? I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt. He was the kid in the candy shop who built the candy shop. Others sort of fell into something really problematic because the dynamics were never healthy, criticism couldn't be voiced, and leaders couldn't be questioned.

And I want to get to the veneer of being "trauma-informed," because there's barely a course these days that doesn't claim to be trauma-informed. Who really checks what that means?

Laura: It's one of the reasons I don't use that terminology myself — I see it overused and it doesn't functionally mean anything anymore. I want to bring another question here. I did a recent episode on sexual polarity teachings — the divine feminine framework defined by men as a receptive, submissive role — and neo-tantra, and all of that seems to me like points on the same line: a section of the wellness industry that profits from women's compliance and makes compliance feel sacred. Does that framing match your research?

Anke: It absolutely tracks, and especially with my own personal experience — because I'm a good example of this. My gateway drug into all of this, before I even went to the neo-tantra festival in Byron Bay, was David Deida. His book The Way of the Superior Man, right?

I cringe now thinking about it. But when it was introduced to me, it fell on open ears. I'm a typical stroppy feminist, raised in a family where it was all about achievement. The word "feminine" was kind of repulsive to me — it sounded like female hygiene products, too frilly and pink. I was a tomboy. But there was something — in my middle years, having started a family, being married for a long time, bigger questions arising about who I am — where suddenly the idea of the woman who's never really lived her feminine side landed for me. I think this is true for a whole generation or two of women who think they're accessing something sacred or something they've missed. How good it feels to just... surrender.

Laura: Submit.

Anke: They mean submit. But the word used is "surrender." And look, I admit to being a control freak. I'm a high achiever. I'm in overdrive most of the time. Of course I love to just surrender.

Laura: There's nothing wrong with wanting to surrender or be submissive. There are really good guardrails in BDSM — in dominant-submissive play, in kink — for exactly that reason. These spaces have stripped those out and put a spiritual mandate on it instead. Rather than playing with this in a way that could be safely and erotically explored, they want women to submit to their sexual agenda.

Anke: Yes, and it's a bit more complex because they do seem progressive on the surface — they say masculine and feminine are energies married inside everyone, it's not about physical gender expression. That sounds rad and fun and progressive. But then I've experienced male teachers subtly shaming you for being too masculine as a woman. Even though they claim otherwise.

And you see what's modeled: the goddesses on their pedestals, the temple priestesses on the leading faculty — all wearing a certain type of clothes, very feminine, showing their breasts and hips, soft and hugging. Even if they don't directly teach you to be a submissive soft female gazing at your man, you see it modeled by the cool, evolved people around you who seem to have these amazing lives and sex lives. That's the mind fuck I'm still trying to undo, to some degree — figuring out what were real teachings and what was just ISTA culture, a world that was created and that I believed in.

You can see this also with the Drama Triangle — victim, perpetrator, rescuer — and other psychological concepts that get misappropriated. People who haven't studied psychology take on these concepts, take on the language, run around with these frameworks. It scares me sometimes.

Laura: It's a legitimizing tactic — just like appropriating science terms, Sanskrit words, Indian culture, and now pop psychology.

Unfortunately we're running out of time, and I could talk to you about this all day. For anyone who wants to go deeper, I'm putting links in the show notes for resources on red flags in workshops and more. Anke, how do people find you and continue to learn from your work?

Anke: People can find me at ankerichter.net. And if you want to learn more about the conference I'm organizing, which will be livestreamed around the world, go to decult.net.

Laura: Wonderful. Thank you so much — it was absolutely my pleasure to have you on.

Anke: I really love that you've tackled this with me. Thank you so much, Laura, and thanks for your good work.

Laura: Hey, before you go — if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things I've ever created. It's a free guide called Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and Shoulds Around Intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'll find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. Go grab it at laurajurgens.com/guide — the link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes. See you next week.