About this talk
Sarah Fuss Kessler spent years investigating the events surrounding her 2009 meditation breakdown, which began after a weeklong retreat held by Open Heart Meditation, a small but international group that she had been devoted to for nine months. Her findings come together in her reported personal essay “Through a House of Mirrors: Rewriting the American Cult Story,” published in the 2024 winter issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR). While the piece scrutinizes popular beliefs around coercive control and totalism, her research extended much further as she pursued an urgent need to understand precisely where and how she had gone wrong—each missed red flag in the meditation group, each implicated element of her own psyche. At first, the purpose was to figure out how to heal from the breakdown; later, it was to protect herself from future harm. In this talk, Sarah will share the practical discoveries she collected as she studied her experience alongside subjects such as kundalini, the psychology of charisma, depersonalization, and derealization.
