The accidental cult tourist

After visiting a new age festival in Byron Bay, Anke Richter pursued a ten-year investigation into high-control groups. In her book Cult Trip, she grapples with her own explorations that became increasingly conflicting.

On a wet summer night in 2012, I stood on the balcony of the community centre in Byron Bay and stretched my arms out into the rain to cool off. Each drop felt like a kiss on my skin. ‘This…’, I thought, ‘is how I always want to be.’ I was on a euphoric high after a session of ecstatic dance at the Taste of Love festival – Australia’s largest annual gathering of tantric teachers, sexual healers and shamanic practitioners. It wasn’t really my scene, but I was curious. Within a day, I was intoxicated by what the shiny happy people there called ‘life energy’. Something clicked. My cynicism vanished along with my apprehension.

Without any sneaky recruitment, Taste of Love gave me my first taste of infatuation with a new ‘tribe’ – a word that years later, along with its cultural appropriation, became conflicting and even repulsive. But on that hot and sweaty weekend, when I hugged, laughed, danced and exhaled into ‘Omm’, my internal shift on the balcony became a reference point. I experienced what thousands of people do when they get hooked by a teacher or group: a sense of tapping into something profound. It felt like falling in love.

Cult journalism 

The new-age festival was also my unintentional entry into cult journalism after a decade as a foreign correspondent in New Zealand. On my last day, while sipping iced chai in the courtyard, I met Angie Meiklejohn. The fellow Kiwi, who gave sensual massage in Wellington back then, opened the door to a historical tribe far more extreme than the gentle seekers floating around us. Angie, in her 40s, had lived as a teenager at Centrepoint, the infamous 1980s therapy commune outside Auckland where many children were sexually abused, and adults later ended up in jail. As her survival strategy in this intense sexualised environment, Angie became a ‘commune concubine’.

When we first met, Centrepoint’s spiritual leader and self-appointed therapist Bert Potter was still alive. Only months later, after he died, was Angie ready to talk about what had happened to her at the place that was a happy home for many, but an ongoing nightmare for others. Hers was a story of drug rape, grooming, alcoholism, prostitution. It still lingered.

Utopian dream

The lasting shadow of New Zealand’s ‘free love’ community soon became my obsession. I embarked on a labyrinthine investigation into the emotional carnage. ‘Centrepoint was a selection of average, normal people,’ Angie had told me. ‘Not monsters or freaks.’ They had pursued a utopian dream of sexual freedom and self-realisation. What had gone wrong? I wanted to know what they were thinking, the gullible lovers who competed for their turn in Potter’s bed, and the idealistic parents who placed their daughters at his mercy. How did their children move on?

I spoke to over a dozen survivors, but also enablers and perpetrators, including the guru’s son John Potter. I surprised the cult’s drug chemist, who had manufactured the ecstasy pills that were taken in group sessions with young teens. I met a woman who had arranged a ‘threesome’ with a 12-year-old for her husband’s birthday. And I found a girl who had barricaded herself with junk in her caravan on the property so men couldn’t come to her at night. Louise Winn was possibly the most violated victim of the warped ideology about the sexualisation of ‘free children’. She had never told anyone the horrors she suffered, to the point of attempting suicide at 11. Her disturbing account was a turning point that affected me deeply.

The years I spent mired in the damage wrought by Centrepoint eventually took their toll. The weight of all the unresolved trauma of others crept under my skin while the legal and psychological challenges seemed insurmountable. I was overwhelmed by what I had unearthed and eventually gave up.

While struggling with the aftermath of a disastrous sex cult, I became entangled in current cult-like groups myself. Since the Taste of Love festival in Byron Bay where I had my own blissed-out awakening, I went on a rollercoaster of personal exploration around the world and into every corner of my heart.

The initial weeklong training I took with ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) in the Yarra Valley turned out to be more cathartic than erotic. We learned ‘emotional release tools’ where you bash cushions and scream into your hand – teachings from the human potential movement and ‘70s encounter groups. We held rituals out in nature that were raw, tender and physical, and we sat in sharing circles to reveal our fears, wounds and desires – all to heal and free us. I thought I had found the real me through ‘embodiment’, the buzzword for these visceral experiences promising higher states of consciousness. From now on, I hoped, this adventure ride was going to enrich my life on every level.

Soon I started to pull more friends in so they could get the same benefits. But a few years on, the sparkling world of love, liberation and learning that had enticed me revealed its first cracks. There was a covert harem culture at ISTA. Male pioneers surrounded themselves with young female lovers, often from their trainings, who were then accelerated to apprentices and facilitators. Although my unease grew, I mostly ignored what felt ‘off’ and instead held on to what worked for me.

Then in 2018, the international tantric school Agama Yoga in Thailand was rocked by a sex abuse scandal. Thirty-one women had submitted reports, including rape allegations, about the Romanian head of the school and other lead teachers. The ‘Swami’ had just fled the island when I flew to Koh Phangan to help break the story.

Like Centrepoint, Agama was full of likeable, smart and caring people; spiritual seekers, many of them from Melbourne, who wanted to become yoga teachers. Some students who raised concerns in the past were dismissed. An Australian filed a rape complaint against Swami (Narcis Tarcau) in Thailand, but too late; the statute of limitations at the time was only three months. Another victim, British sex educator Mangala Holland, reported her rape at the Melbourne embassy.

Agama became another turning point for me. The tantra field, which I was first sceptical of, and then so passionate about, was tainted. Finally, the wellness and woo world came under scrutiny and #MeToo caught up with some of its worst perpetrators.

Innocence gone

While I finished a ‘Wheel of Consent’ course in Byron Bay, I also closed a chapter in my life that began in the seaside town seven years earlier. My former workshop highs were now demystified. Constantly ‘dropping the mind’ while you’re loved up or turned on can result in overriding your inner ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and even trigger past trauma. In a weeklong 24/7 training full of cathartic release, a potent cocktail of brain chemicals clouds your thinking. If you crave a desired outcome like the rest of the group, or don’t want to be labelled as being ‘stuck in victim consciousness’, then you won’t speak up.

I stopped recommending the ISTA trainings I once raved about. My innocence was gone. This edgy work had helped me at the time, but while I was chasing transformation around the world, I had blocked out its shadow. I became wary of charismatic leaders and was frustrated by organisations that didn’t have sufficient complaint and aftercare systems in place because they felt exempted from ethical codes of conduct by their evolutionary cause. Justified criticism was labelled as a ‘witch hunt’ or ‘gossip’. I’d seen too much arrogance and obfuscation but not enough accountability from the top.

I even wondered whether I had unwittingly pushed people’s boundaries as an ISTA assistant, with the best intentions so that everyone could get with the program – and because I wanted to keep playing with the cool kids. Suddenly, I could empathise with those who wanted to call out the dark side of Centrepoint or Agama while trying to hold on to their community. Both are rarely possible.

Once I realised my own blind spots and what had pulled me into a ‘tribe’, it became harder to demonise those who had done questionable things in their own groups. Instead I wondered where they stood after the downfall. Are they still holding on to their old ideology and making excuses, or are they involved in a process that helps the survivors? So far, only a few former Centrepoint members have shown commitment to reconciliation with the second generation. Agama Yoga is still up and running, with the sex guru at the school instead of in a courtroom.

Abuse of power

While wrapping up my book last year, another call-out stirred up the cultiverse – and my own past: after flying under the radar for years, ISTA and the adjacent mystery school Highden Temple in New Zealand have come under scrutiny. Over 600 people joined a Facebook group where more and more disturbing details were shared, many of them new for me too. Emotions flew high. Activists contacted venues to get events cancelled. In the following months, more than 60 reports were collected by an independent group called Safer Sex-Positive & Spiritual communities (3SC). These address sex between predatory teachers and vulnerable students, obfuscation of serious complaints, lack of aftercare and abuse of power.

ISTA reacted with legal threats, but also with changes. It is a ‘top priority’ that people feel safe to say ‘no’ in ISTA spaces, one of their teachers wrote to me. This month – one year after the social media storm erupted and after rounds of mediation with 3SC – they announced a ‘radical restructure’, including accountability processes with three accused unnamed teachers who will pause their roles, for now.

It’s crucial how ISTA handles this crisis. In a PR statement, they told me they ‘welcome any legal action and proceedings, but at this time, will not respond to rumours or hearsay’. If the wild child of the conscious movement protects perpetrators instead of making amends, then I’m left with a sad conclusion: I too have been in a cult.

♦ Cult Trip: Inside the World of Coercion & Control was published by HarperCollins. Anke Richter is speaking at the Byron Writers Festival on 12 & 13 August. More info: www.ankerichter.net.