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If I’d Had a Life Coach, Would I Have Joined a Cult?

by helenzuman in Coaching, Cults, Zendik

I am an ex-cultist; I am a life coach. As a life coach, I use a tool called the Model (developed by Life Coach School founder Brooke Castillo). It’s based on these premises: that circumstances—facts—are neutral, i.e., don’t mean anything until we have a thought about them. That our thoughts create our feelings, which drive […]

Hitching with Mavis

by helenzuman in Cults, General, Memoir, Zendik

This is an excerpt from Mating in Captivity, my memoir of five years in a cult called Zendik Farm. In this scene, I’m on an “out,” which I’m hoping will fix what I see as my lack of commitment to Zendik. The first thing I noticed about the woman who pulled over for me, about […]

The Cult of Busyness

by helenzuman in Cults, General

Back in 2011, I signed up to write a column for the Carroll Gardens Patch. Each month, I was to turn in a five-hundred-word story, with photographs, then promote the hell out of it through my personal networks. My pay? Fifty dollars per column. At first, I was just thrilled that I was getting published. […]

A Word That Signals Warning

by helenzuman in Cults, General

This year, the Communal Studies Association awarded Mating in Captivity the 2020 Timothy Miller Outstanding Book Award—and sent me a beautiful wooden plaque, handcrafted in Amana, Iowa, which now hangs to the left of my desk on my (wooden) studio wall. In addition, they asked me to record an acceptance speech, to be aired at their […]

Zendiks vs. Christians in New Orleans

by helenzuman in Cults, General, Memoir, Zendik

[Mardi Gras was one Zendik’s biggest money-makers. Each year, a passel of us descended on New Orleans and sold ourselves silly. Fanatics of other stripes also saw opportunity. In early 2000, after I’d been at the Farm for a few months and sold a handful of far tamer scenes, I begged a chance at the […]

Cycling Through Stories

by helenzuman in Cults, Memoir, Zendik

Once upon a time, in a coffee shop in Park Slope, I met up with a fellow ex-Zendik who’d lived at the Farm for a couple years (to my five). His outlook on his Zendik experience was essentially positive; he’d stayed as long as it served him, no longer. Soon after, I formed a hypothesis: […]

How Cults, Like Weeds, Can Help Us Heal

by helenzuman in Cults, General, Zendik

News reports about the cult NXIVM­ — whose leader, Keith Raniere, now awaits trial in Brooklyn on charges of sex trafficking and forced labor — brim with horrifying details. Female “slaves” were branded with Raniere’s initials. They dieted to the point of gauntness, and handed over damning “collateral” as insurance against defection. Of course, the particulars of the story […]

Cult Stories: Novels vs. Memoirs

by helenzuman in Cults, Memoir, Zendik

Since beginning work on my Zendik book, more than ten years ago, I’ve read dozens of cult memoirs. (In 2008, on a train from New York to Seattle, I binge-read maybe seven or eight.) Many are terrible; some are decent; a few kick butt. The terribles fall into two categories: self-published exposés with a side […]

My Cult and Infinite Growth: A Tale of Two Stories

by helenzuman in Cults, Zendik

[I wrote this essay in June 2014. A month later, a man I met at the Northeast Permaculture Convergence became the first to respond to my admission of cult involvement with a version of, “Yeah, me too.”] I spent most of my twenties trapped in a story. The story, roughly, was this: The mass of […]