: 10 years in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, 6 as a monk in an ashram in India. Left a year ago at 30.
I spent my entire twenties inside it.
I found the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita in my early twenties and went all in. Took vows of celibacy, chanted, meditated two hours a day, driven by a deep search for truth. Six of those years I lived in an ashram in India as a brahmacari. I believed I was doing the most important thing a person could do.
A year ago something broke open and I was finally able to look honestly at myself and at the community I was in, and admit that I had joined a cult. That the thing I'd been chasing for a decade was already in me, and I'd spent ten years handing it to other people.
Leaving was harder than staying. I had no career, no savings, no relationships outside the movement, and no idea who I was without the identity. I flew back to Chicago, got my guitar and a motorcycle, and rode out to Arizona to start over.
The part nobody warned me about: the deprogramming didn't happen in my head. It happened in my body. Ten years of dissociation dressed up as transcendence. What actually brought me back to reality was physical — training, boxing, being outside, being in my body again. The thinking caught up afterward.
I don't have anything to sell here and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I just know how alone it feels in the first year out, and if anyone's in that stretch right now and wants to talk to someone who's been through the eastern-tradition version of it, my inbox is open.