Etiquette issue for the modern age: yoga class, or cult recruiting? →[More:]Dear MeCha,

I sometimes go to yoga class at a really neat place in my town. It's a yoga studio that is completely donation-based - pay what you can. The people who teach there are mostly also teachers at other places, who agree to teach one or two classes a week at this place. As a result, the schedule is varied. There are a lot of different kinds of yoga offered. There are also other practices offered, like Pilates, reiki training, tai chi, meditation, etc. So there is a certain amount of 'wild card'-ness in the way the place is run, and I believe a general openness to inviting the use of the space for a wide variety of specific practices.

Well, last week I showed up for a class that fit my schedule but which I had never been to before. It was billed as more of a meditation session, which I wasn't aware of before I got there, but whatever, I was there so I stayed.

There was a small group of people who had been coming since the class started - about 6 weeks. As it happened the night I chose to be there they were having a 'guest speaker.' The guest speaker led us through some interconnectivity-type exercises followed by a basic meditation - nothing especially weird, honestly. It was really your average lovingkindness, we're-all-manifestations-of-the-universal, carry-forth-your-inner-peace-into-the-word-kind-of-stuff.

There were two things that made me raise my third eyebrow, if you will. The first was that in introducing the guest, the speaker described how the guest had started 'teaching centers' in America which have grown and grown, and that teachers around the world have established a university to study this particular spiritual path. Hm, that's interesting. The second was at the end, an assistant to the guest teacher handed out a handsomely bound piece of literature about the university and encouraged the class to continue the path of seeking more and more training and becoming more deeply involved with this organiztion.

Hmmmm. So I got home and Googled it, and sure enough, it's one of these enormous organizations that draws people in at an innocuous enough level, and then gets increasingly controlling at the serious levels, encouraging you to 'release yourself' from your 'earthly family' and devote yourself to living in this spiritual path, which of course should include working for the university, continuing to reach out to new participants, and donating your income to it, and so on. There's at least one message board for ex-member support, and the Wikipedia entry for this group is ridiculously scarred with disputations and content warnings - it's obviously become a battleground for believers and ex-believers. It's not the Sri Chinmoy cult but it seems a lot like it from what little I can observe.

So here's my question: I haven't been hurt by my one little meditation class, which was actually quite relaxing, and I'm not a particularly easy mark anyway. But I'm wondering if I should write to the guy who runs the studio and let him know about what I found out about the teacher's organization.

I'm not sure what would happen if I did so. On the one hand, he might say 'hey, our studio is open to all kinds of paths, and this is just another one, so don't be so uptight.' But on the other hand, he might be really unaware that this one class is connected to a specific organization whose intent is to get students more and more deeply connected to this organization. There were some really lovely people in the class who I suspect just consider it to be your average meditation class and would be surprised to learn about how things happen at the higher levels.

So should I write and let him know? Or just drop it? It's no skin off my nose, and I may be oversensitive to this issue - I've had a few experiences with friends and family members who had some involvement with cultlike religious groups, so it always raises the hairs on my neck when people are ardently interested in getting you to the next level, seeking total allegiance and total union with some spiritual path.