Method
This page explains how the essays here get made: where the stories come from, what has been changed to protect people, where the facts come from, and which parts involve AI. The site keeps asking you to test what you're told, so its own rules are written down where you can check them.
Who writes this
Soren Ross is a pen name. Behind it is one person with close to three decades of contemplative practice: seven years inside an organization that turned out to be cult-like, then more than twenty in a second tradition, part of that time as an instructor. The About page explains why the name and the missing face are deliberate. In short, an essay should hold up without you trusting the person who wrote it.
Are the stories real?
Yes. Every story told in the first person happened to me. What changes is anything that would let someone else be recognized: names, places, and the small details that point to one person. I don't name either tradition, any organization, or the people inside them. There are no composite characters: each person in an essay is one real person, not two people merged into one.
When I don't know what someone else was thinking, I write what I saw and leave their inner life alone. Dialogue is as close to the words as my memory allows, and I would rather cut a line than invent one.
Where the facts come from
The essays lean on research where research exists. Each study gets a numbered note at the end of the essay with the authors, the year, the journal and, when there is one, a DOI link, so you can read the original instead of my summary of it.
Much of what I cite was measured on something other than meditation or spiritual groups: a 2010 Harvard trial of open-label placebos in patients with irritable bowel syndrome, a memory experiment, a survey about regret. When I carry a finding across to a different setting, the note says it is an analogy, and the essay doesn't ask the study to prove more than it did. What isn't research is labeled as what it is, my own experience, which is a sample of one.
How AI is used here
I write with an AI assistant. The experiences, the stories and the judgments are mine.
English isn't my first language, which is why I started writing with AI in the first place. It helps me say what I mean in English that anyone can read easily.
The audio versions use a synthetic voice built from my own, tuned to read English better than I do. Every episode says so at the start. The images on the site are generated illustrations, and none of them shows a real person.
What gets checked before an essay goes up
The facts get checked against the sources they come from. Then I ask whether anyone could recognize themselves or someone they know, and change whatever would let them. Last comes the voice: anything that reads like a brochure, or like a teacher handing down an answer, gets cut.
When something is wrong
Essays get corrected. Each one shows the date it was last updated next to the date it was published. If you find an error, a study I misread, or a detail that points to a real person, write to the address on the contact page. I read those myself, and a fix for an identifying detail goes up before anything else does.
How the essays are organized
The essays are grouped into four collections by what they're about: Foundation, Practice, Thinking for Yourself and The Honest Mirror. Most sit in one, a few in two. Trails work the other way round. Each one starts from a question a reader arrives with, such as what happens after you leave a cult, and leads through the essays that answer some part of it. An essay can belong to one trail, two, or none, and its address never changes when the trails do.
What the essays are not
They are not therapy and not medical advice. Some of them touch on what it's like to leave a high-control group, and for many people that experience includes real harm that deserves a professional who can sit across from them. Understanding how something worked on you can go alongside that help, and it can't replace it.
What this site doesn't do
No ads, no sponsors, no affiliate links, and nothing for sale. The essays and the free guide cost nothing; the details are on the About page.