One of the big takeaways I have from this conversation with Renee Linnell was when she reminded me that shame dissipates as we tell our stories. When we tell the truth about an experience we feel shame about, that act of speaking up breaks up the shame, the same way a frozen river’s ice breaks up in the spring. Telling the truth is like sunshine and warmth on that river of shame. Even when we just tell the truth to ourselves. Perhaps especially then! It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It can be scary and it can make us feel vulnerable. But it is always worth doing. Renee talks about her journaling practice and how full of anger it was when she first left the cult. I’m glad we talked about that because expressing those feelings is SO important, especially after a cult situation where we’ve been told our thoughts and feelings and our very being don’t matter. It’s healthy to get the river of feelings flowing again. Another thing that Renee points to in this conversation is that writing a memoir about a traumatic experience like being in a cult is difficult. If you’re trying to do that – to write your story – and you’re finding that it’s hard, you’re right! It is hard! But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Just because something is hard or has difficult moments doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort. Ask anyone who’s ever raised a child. Renee Linnell is an author, inspirational speaker, entrepreneur, and lifelong adventurer. She has been featured on The Today Show, BBC, NBC, NPR, and numerous other media outlets. Before becoming a writer, she traveled the world as a surf model, danced tango professionally, earned an MBA from New York University, and founded or cofounded six wildly different businesses—from tango shoes and dance companies to fitness, fashion, tech, and publishing. Through her writing and speaking, Renee explores freedom, self-trust, and what it means to return to who we were before the world told us who to be. Learn more about Renee Linnell at ReneeLinnell.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. This free ebook guides cult and other trauma survivors into the healthy and healing practice of journaling. With a gentle hand and relying on her decades of writing experience, cult survivor Alexandra Amor encourages readers to develop a journaling practice as part of their healing path. Click here to get your complimentary copy. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Knowing early on that a punishing deity didn’t make sense Starting a spiritual quest at age 15 Creating the perfect life and still feeling empty and sad Falling under the spell of a toxic teacher Beginning to write as a way to deal with the difficult emotions after leaving a cult Finding that shame dissipates as we tell our stories Lessons learned about how to write a personal story Working with an editor and getting what was needed from that collaboration Moving through the painful process of working with edits Resisting suggestions to change the book for a publisher and telling the true story How writing helps us to see our part in what unfolds in life Remembering the joy of creativity for its own sake Resources mentioned in this episode Renee’s books The Burn Zone and Still On Fire The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron Transcript of the Interview with Renee Linnell Alexandra: Renee Linnell, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Renee: Thank you. It’s so nice to be here. Alexandra: It’s nice to have you here. Why don’t you give us a little potted history, as they say in the UK, about yourself and about your time in the Buddhist cult? Renee: I lost most of my family when I was young, and my father died on Thanksgiving Day when I was 15. And so there had just been so much death around me that. He was like my best friend and my hero, and so I just was like, there has to be more out there than what I’m being taught in church and in school. I was raised very Catholic, and I remember sitting in church when I was like five, and I was like, “It doesn’t make sense.” I loved American cheese slices, and so when they said Jesus, I thought they were saying cheese-us. So I pictured like this big American slice of cheese in the sky, and I just remember thinking like, if Jesus, like if God made me and made all of us, then He would love us. Like we’re not sinners. That doesn’t make sense. We’re not flawed. So I was like, okay, the adults have holes in their logic, and so even from a young age, I was like, “Doesn’t make sense.” And then when everyone was dying, I was like, “It doesn’t make sense that we would fall so in love with people, and then they would die, and we’d never see them again.” Like that’s just cruel and horrible. When my dad died, someone gave me the book *Many Lives, Many Masters* by Dr. Brian Weiss, and that introduced to me the concept of reincarnation and souls constantly finding each other, and loved ones always being reunited. And so that was like, okay, that feels good to me. I started, without realizing it, a spiritual quest at that age, and then I started to question everything. My mom was very Catholic, and she said, “You don’t have sex unless you want to please the man, and that’s the only reason women have sex.” And I was starting to learn about my body, and I was like, that doesn’t seem right. I mean, I think sex is probably going to feel really good. I want to go out and have as much sex as possible. Then I started traveling. And then the more that I traveled around the world, the more that I realized what I was hearing on the news wasn’t really accurate. And so I became a mystic more or less. I wanted to know for myself what was real. I ended up creating this great life where I was surfing, traveling around the world surfing, and I was a model, so free surfboards, free bikinis, free trips, lots of pro surfers to play with. Then I became a professional dancer, and I was dancing Argentine tango and traveling dancing, and I was still unhappy inside. I was well educated. I graduated magna cum laude with a double degree, so it was like I had everything from the outside looking in. My life was perfect, and I was empty and sad, and I felt like everyone else out there had it figured out, and I didn’t. And so I read all kind of self-help books. I studied all different religions. I traveled all over the world. I slept with all kinds of guys. Nothing was filling the void inside, and nothing was answering the questions. Then I walked into a meditation seminar, and which is the opening of my first memoir, *The Burn Zone* I sat in front of the teacher, and we started to meditate. And I realize now that I went into samadhi, which is the highest mind state you can go into meditating, apparently, according to books I’ve read. I erroneously attributed that to the teacher, and so I was just hooked, like hook, line, and sinker. I was in. I didn’t care who she was. I didn’t care what she said. I was going to be her student for the rest of my life because that peace that I felt inside my mind, I realize is what I’d been searching for my whole life. Alexandra: Wow! Take us forward to when things went sour with that teacher. Renee: Well, they went sour. Okay, it’s like after I’ve done so many interviews with the book for the book tour and everything, I compare it to any toxic relationship where it’s like, well, if you went on a first date and somebody verbally abused you or hit you, you would get up and leave the table. You have nothing invested, but they love bomb you and they make you feel like loved and seen and cherished. And adored and safe. Then slowly over time they start removing your foundation and the things that empower you and the things that make you you, and then slowly they start introducing the self-doubt, the gaslighting. So it’s like in hindsight, I could say things started turning bad like within the first three months, but I would say, well, I am an extremist, so I became the number one student. I ended up kind of running the company and working with the teacher, who was a woman, with her right hand man, who ran the company, and then he and I were together all the time. He was 15 years older than I was. He started seducing me, and I became his consort. So that’s when it really started to turn ugly. But at the time, I was-I don’t know-I-I also was raised with an abusive mother, so the love pattern that I learned was like neglect and abuse followed by love bombing. So this was just all these patterns were being mimicked and recreated. But it turned when I became his consort was about a year in. Alexandra: When did you end up leaving the group? Renee: Well, I got thrown out of it, which saved my life. Alexandra: Me too! Renee: Did you? Yes. Probably not for the same reason I did. Maybe not. It turned out that the right hand man was her boyfriend and her lover, which I didn’t know. So my joke is, if you want to get thrown out of a cult, sleep with the leader’s boyfriend or girlfriend. But I it saved my life because what happened was I think, let’s see, I joined in 2006 in September. Oh, it’s probably this is probably today might actually be my 20-year anniversary. It was probably summer 2010 when my teacher called me and she said, “I have a new task for you. Your task is to go get into one of the hardest business schools in the country”, she said. “That’s not the task, though. The task is to then graduate and make $10 million profit after taxes, and once you do that, you can come back to the group.” And she said, “But you have 48 hours to say goodbye to e
