“Shame and Betrayal”: Sexual Abuse Within the Spiritual Healing Industry Comes to Light | Rape and Sexual Assault

Shamanic healing or opportunity for ritual abuse? A lawsuit filed last week in New Mexico alleges that a “shamanic master” assaulted a woman during a training in “energy medicine” in March.

The claim, which is currently being investigated, may shed more light on the dark side of some currents of modern spirituality, particularly those associated with the ceremonial use of often intense psychedelic treatments.

The New Mexico woman, identified in the lawsuit only by the initials MG, says she paid the Four Winds Society and the Chi Center thousands of dollars to become a certified energy medicine practitioner and live “an extraordinary life of health, purpose and inner guidance.”

The lawsuit, first reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican, says the woman scheduled a session with an unidentified Peruvian “wisdom keeper” and “shamanic energy training master” and told him she had been sexually abused as a child. The man said in Spanish that he understood him.

But after instructing her to lie down on one of the beds in his room at the Chi Center, the shaman used the healing session for “his own personal interests or gratification.” The lawsuit alleges that at least two other women had similar experiences with the man.

A lead teacher at the center told MG that “what was done to her was not a normal part of the healing session” when she raised her concerns, according to the lawsuit. The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said the woman did not complete an evaluation by a sexual assault nurse because she “had left the state and was waiting to report the incident by phone from California.”

The shaman had already left the United States at that time and had flown from Houston to Panama. The sheriff of Santa Fe, Adan Mendoza, said that criminal proceedings would be “difficult” because the accused shaman was from abroad.

Nevertheless, this allegation joins a long line of allegations against spiritual gurus that suggest that some practicing shaman masters may commit sexual abuse, a disturbing trend that has previously been associated primarily with more established religious practices.

Last year, Jeffrey Glattstein, a shaman in Georgia, was accused of sexually harassing coworkers and clients, including at least three women who said they were attacked “under the guise that he would heal and help them.” The defendant then filed suit against two former coworkers based on the state’s slapp laws against defamation, but the suit later failed.

Sex scandals in spiritual or self-enlightenment communities are nothing new, says Patrick Paul Garlinger, a former lawyer and author of a 2022 essay titled “The Spiritual World Has a Sexual Abuse Problem.”

“We’re seeing an increase, and that’s partly due to the growing number of people who wear the mantle of spiritual teacher. But it also has a long history, in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, in New Age circles, and there are obviously parallels with the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.”

The proliferation of spirituality, coupled with the willingness of victims to come forward in the #MeToo era, has created the conditions for more and more allegations to come to light. “The power imbalance of a master teacher who is considered enlightened or ascended in some way is often used as a justification for why this is not abuse,” says Garlinger.

Scandals within such organizations date back at least to 1983, when Richard Baker, then-director of the San Francisco Zen Center, was fired for having affairs with several students. A decade later, Amrit Desai, the spiritual leader of the Kripalu yoga school, was similarly ousted. More recently, Bikram Choudhury, the founder of a popular form of hot yoga, was sued for sexual harassment in 2016 and fled the United States for Mexico.

Sogyal Rinpoche, the author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was accused of abusing students in 2016; three years later, Sakyong Mipham, the head of the Buddhist meditation organization Shambhala, was exposed, and Zen master Joshu Sasaki, who was accused of abusing students, is said to have proclaimed that the path to inner peace leads to touching one’s penis because “true love means surrendering to everything.”

The increasing use of psychedelic drugs such as ayahuasca – often with the claim that they promote spiritual growth or emotional healing – as well as the increase in shaman tourism could also exacerbate the problem.

Ayahuasca ceremonies, usually held at night, involve drinking a sticky brown liquid – a decoction of two Amazonian plants – followed by vomiting before the drug takes effect, often accompanied by strong visions. Under such circumstances, consent to any form of sexual contact is not possible.

In one case, an alleged taitaor shaman, Édgar Orlando Gaitán, was convicted by a Colombian court of rape of women and three counts of sexual abuse of minors with disabilities, some of them during “traditional indigenous” therapeutic practices.

Scientist Daniela Peluso warns of “increasing abuse of power, intercultural misunderstandings, the proliferation of inexperienced shamans and enormous power imbalances that have led to the unacceptable reality that ayahuasca ceremonies can become potential sites where sexual abuse can occur.”

The dark side of the ayahuasca scene led to a code of conduct co-authored by Peluso that was “aimed at helping individuals within the psychedelic community understand the common scenarios that can lead to abuse when using ayahuasca.”

The authors warned that “mutual intercultural misunderstandings and misconceptions between healers and participants can at least cause confusion and at worst can be brutally manipulated” – under the guise of spiritual empowerment or through the use of “magic spells”.

“As ayahuasca’s popularity increases, the number of cases of sexual abuse of women is also increasing at an alarming rate,” they wrote, noting that “the majority of these cases involve abuse of female participants by male shamans.”

This, the authors added, “is particularly damaging and shocking considering that many women who drink ayahuasca are seeking healing for past sexual trauma.”

Another study published by Psychedelic Invest warned: “Many of the people who run these programs are not qualified to work with people suffering from the aftereffects of trauma. Others are qualified but cross important boundaries because they believe they are entitled to do so.”

But a code of conduct is no good substitute for opportunities to complain and make amends. Garlinger writes that the relationship between master and student is problematic from the start, especially if the way sexuality is not articulated.

“There is a lot of shame and a sense of deep betrayal in an environment that means so much,” he says. “These abuses are difficult to investigate, and in the past there have been efforts to silence the victims, reframe their experiences as part of their spiritual development, and protect the teacher and the institution.”