How to use this page ↑ Top
Most of the substantive first-person material on ISTA is spoken, not written — hours of it, spread across podcasts and conference recordings that are hard to search and slow to sift. If you are a journalist, researcher, clinician, or someone deciding whether to attend a workshop, this page is meant to save you that time.
Each entry below gives the source, the date, the running time, who is speaking, a summary of the substance, and timestamped links to the specific moments. The summaries are our own. We have deliberately kept direct quotation to a minimum: the only transcripts publicly available for most of these recordings are machine-generated captions, which are unreliable on names and exact wording, and we would rather point you to the moment in the recording than put approximate words in anyone’s mouth. Where we do quote, it is short and the timestamp is given so you can check it yourself.
Every recording is hosted by its original publisher. We link to their channels and encourage you to watch there. Nothing on this page substitutes for the original.
Dr. Steven Hassan — “ISTA response” ↑ Top
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Steven Hassan is the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center and the author of Combating Cult Mind Control; his BITE model (Behaviour, Information, Thought, Emotional control) is among the most widely cited frameworks in cult-recovery work. He recorded this short video for a specific reason: he says ISTA had been citing his work to argue that it is not a destructive cult.
He rejects that use of his name directly, calling the claim “audacious and presumptive” (1:47). In the opening seconds he describes ISTA as “a group that is problematic” (0:00). He states that his office received several email requests from ISTA for an interview, that he declined them, and that he was offered payment (1:10).
The substance of his concern rests on two things: what he says he has heard from former members, including through the Israeli Center for Victims of Cults, and the fit between what he has heard and his own Influence Continuum — he places ISTA on the side of concern rather than ethical influence (2:22). He asks former participants to reconstruct, honestly, what they believed they were consenting to, what actually happened, and whether there was abuse of authority or boundary violation (4:05).
Two further points are worth noting. He observes that it is “very unusual for a problematic group to say we’re not problematic” and points to a familiar pattern in which groups announce that past abuses have stopped without the accountability, removal of unethical leadership, and checks and balances that would make the claim meaningful (4:37). And he notes that spiritual teachers engaging sexually with students is not merely unethical but unlawful in Israel and elsewhere, precisely because of the abuse-of-power dynamic (5:47).
Source: watch on YouTube · Freedom of Mind Resource Center. Related: what expert analysis says.
A Little Bit Culty — “Two insiders expose consent, control, and cult dynamics” (part 1) ↑ Top
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Hosts Sarah Edmondson and Anthony “Nippy” Ames — both former NXIVM members, whose exit was documented in HBO’s The Vow — interview two former ISTA participants: Cara Cordoni, a leadership coach who attended three ISTA retreats and later co-founded the survivor-advocacy group 3SC, and a second woman speaking anonymously under the name Lina, whose account also appears in the 2025 New York Magazine investigation. The episode carries an explicit trigger warning from the hosts.
Part one is about the entry: how two intelligent, self-aware people ended up there. Cordoni describes a familiar setup — the end of a difficult relationship as COVID lockdowns lifted, an online intimacy course, and another participant recommending ISTA in a breakout room (9:02). She describes the website as glossy and festival-like, and the level one retreat as costing around US$2,500 for a week (10:06). Lina had heard of ISTA years earlier in Berlin, where it circulated as “the Harvard of sacred sexuality” — the thing you did once you were ready to advance (23:29).
The most concrete material concerns the fourteen agreements read out on the first evening. Cordoni says one of them disclosed that facilitators could become sexually involved with participants, subject to review by the facilitation group — and that she had not seen this before arriving, that it came in the middle of thirteen other agreements while a room of strangers assented in turn, and that she had already paid and taken a week off work (11:47–12:58). Other agreements they recall: take one hundred per cent responsibility for your own experience; do not leave the room when intensity happens; no gossiping, take issues directly to the person; and do not comfort a distressed participant unless asked. Both interviewees read the last two as suppressing lateral communication and dampening ordinary empathy (15:41).
They describe specific exercises: “horse and rider,” in which facilitators demonstrate a dialogue between mind and body while undressing, with participants then breaking into small groups (26:17); and later “sacred spot,” a genital-touch exercise with randomly assigned partners. Cordoni describes waiting in line feeling acute anxiety, and a female facilitator responding to the group’s visible nervousness by saying she would let any man present perform the exercise on her — which Cordoni experienced as shaming rather than reassuring (39:33–40:38).
Cordoni frames the whole format as a large group awareness training: build psychological pressure, release it, and the participant leaves elevated and eager to return (50:39). She notes that assistants continue to pay to attend while working. The episode closes on her first attempt to raise concerns in a feedback session — teachers on their phones during rituals, a facilitator who would not debrief with her after a demonstration — and a response she characterises as DARVO: that by naming the problem she was casting them as persecutors, and that her lack of responsibility was probably ruining her life (52:53).
Source: watch on YouTube · episode page. Related: what former participants describe.
A Little Bit Culty — part 2 ↑ Top
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Part two is the harder half, and the more consequential one. It covers what happened at level two, the two-year attempt to reform ISTA from the outside, and why both women eventually stopped trying.
Lina’s account. She describes booking level two in Turkey in May 2022, being told days beforehand that the level one group had a COVID outbreak, being assured the two groups would be kept separate, flying out on that basis — and on arrival being told the groups had been merged “because love is more important than fear and separation” (8:16–9:57). She raised it in front of the group and describes the facilitator’s entire response as “thank you for sharing; anybody else?” (10:31). Participants were assigned substitute identities for the week. On the second night, during a ritual, she says she was raped; she does not recount the details on the podcast, referring listeners to the New York Magazine account (11:37).
She describes not being able to name it as rape for roughly six months, and only doing so when a friend’s outrage gave her permission to feel her own (14:55). She then describes requesting a refund and compensation for therapy after ISTA publicly announced it had transformed; waiting seven months without a substantive reply; and eventually being sent a document to sign that she describes as a strict non-disparagement and liability release — an NDA — attached to a refund of roughly €1,500, which she refused (29:49–32:04).
Cordoni’s account of the mediation. This is the part of the record least covered elsewhere. She describes finding a survivor Facebook group that became 3SC (Safer Sex-Positive & Spiritual Communities), collecting and analysing harm reports, and concluding that the bulk described re-traumatisation, boundary and consent violations, and facilitators approaching students sexually, with at least one report of rape (22:36). 3SC used those reports to bring ISTA into mediation: over thirty hours of meetings across 2023 with four of its leaders, funded by ISTA, with a recommendation that three named facilitators stop teaching and that the organisation suspend operations for a year. ISTA withdrew three facilitators from circulation; it did not suspend (23:11–23:43).
What ended the effort, she says, was ISTA’s response to the February 2025 New York Magazine article — a public post, since removed — and the reply she received when she contacted a facilitator who had been on the mediation team to raise concerns about it: that she did not have consent to talk to him. She describes that as the moment the spell broke, and as consent being weaponised (25:57). She adds that ISTA’s subsequent accountability apparatus — mediators, consultants, trainers — was drawn from its own orbit rather than being independent, and that survivors she encouraged to approach it reported being re-traumatised (27:37).
Structure and reach. Both describe ISTA’s self-description as an “organism” rather than an organisation, operating through independent organisers, as making money and accountability hard to trace (37:36). They describe an entwinement with Highden Temple in New Zealand that both entities publicly deny, traceable through shared facilitators, and a progression in which local “temple nights” function as an entry point and the most expensive residential trainings sit at the far end (39:13–40:53). Lina argues that the commercial structure warrants examination as trafficking; she is explicit that this is her characterisation and that experts would need to evaluate it (33:13). She says she has been in contact with cult-monitoring bodies in France and Belgium, and reports made in multiple jurisdictions (41:25).
Source: watch on YouTube · A Little Bit Culty. Related: documented allegations.
Anke Richter — evidence to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry ↑ Top
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This is the most formal item in the archive: evidence given to the Victorian Parliament’s inquiry into the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups. Anke Richter is a journalist, the author of Cult Trip (2022), and director of the New Zealand non-profit Decult. Her testimony draws on more than a decade of reporting — and, unusually for expert evidence, on her own participation.
Her general argument is that the harm she is describing is largely not religious: that the wellness and self-help industry is a substantially unregulated market, that most of it is benign, and that some of it is a shop front for coercive commercial operations (2:08).
She then names ISTA specifically. She describes it as originating in the United States from what she characterises as an alleged spiritual brothel raided by police in 2011, calls it the main commercial player in Australia’s tantra scene, and says it faces mounting allegations of serious harm including sexual assault, psychotic breaks and lasting emotional damage — citing New York Magazine, Radio New Zealand, Bali News and the Israeli Center for Victims of Cults (2:42).
On scale, she tells the inquiry that ISTA’s Victorian presence began in 2009 with the first Australasia Conference of Sexuality and Consciousness in Melbourne, and that since then between roughly 1,000 and 1,500 people have attended more than thirty ISTA trainings across Australia at around A$3,000 each (3:15). On method, she describes deliberately secretive and hyper-intense courses run with little sleep or privacy, which she argues push participants into group conformity and degrade critical thinking and consent boundaries — and notes that participants sign broad waivers placing the duty of care on themselves (3:47). She offers the inquiry more detailed material on ISTA’s Australian expansion, facilitators, business structure, and what she describes as fifty-plus international reports of harm.
On recruitment, she describes conferences and festivals functioning as deliberate funnels into the costlier core trainings, with week-long retreats scheduled to follow immediately — and says she was drawn in this way herself: a 2012 ISTA conference in Byron Bay, then level one in the Yarra Valley the following year, then further trainings in New Zealand and the UK, and assisting at events. She says she left after six years, and that although she was never violated she left because of what she describes as an overt harm culture among the leaders, sex with students, the harbouring of predators, and an absence of accountability or trauma-informed care (4:19–5:25).
She closes that section by stating that since publishing Cult Trip in 2022 she has been targeted by ISTA through online attacks and legal interference with her work — a claim that matters for anyone assessing how the organisation responds to criticism (5:25).
Source: watch on YouTube · Decult. Related: press kit.
Decult 2024, session 14 — “Issues with ISTA, high on Highden: from LGAT to mystery school” ↑ Top
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The most research-driven item in the archive, and the only one that treats ISTA and Highden Temple together in detail. Bronwyn Rideout is a Wellington midwife, a PhD student, and a leading member of the New Zealand Skeptics; what began as a single newsletter article became a multi-year study of Highden Temple and its founder Bruce Lyon. Dave Booda is a founding member of 3SC and was part of the eighteen-month mediation with ISTA. The session includes recorded input from two Israeli activists, psychotherapist Shany Kedar and Mordechai Braunstein.
Rideout opens by setting limits on the argument, which is worth noting because it shapes everything after it: the presentation is not an indictment of sexual practices, sex work, or sexuality as spiritual practice, provided participants are adults, uncoerced and enthusiastically consenting. Her stated concern is that the wellness and spirituality industry is poorly regulated, with none of the complaint pathways that exist in New Zealand for nurses, midwives and other practitioners under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 (8:00–9:05).
On the two organisations: she describes them as distinct entities with different origins that are nonetheless deeply entwined — overlapping students and facilitators, ISTA trainings held on Highden’s grounds, and ISTA figures including Robert Nichols involved in the 2017 purchase of the Highden property near Palmerston North (9:37). ISTA proper dates to 2007, preceded by the Sedona temple; Highden in one form or another goes back roughly 24–25 years.
On ISTA itself: founded by Robert Nichols, known as Baba Dez, an American entrepreneur, author and musician who was the subject of the documentary Manifesting Maya. The core curriculum is described as multi-day immersive workshops combining breath work, cathartic exercises, and a range of no-, low- and high-contact intimate and sexual activities — including sacred spot massage and yoni gazing. Rideout notes that participants are in principle free to opt out, but that alumni reports on how free they actually felt to say no are mixed (13:24–15:03).
The pricing detail is unusually concrete: around US$2,600 at full price, about US$2,100 for repeat attendance, and roughly US$1,500 for assistants — who are working the event and still paying to be there. Scholarships exist for low-income participants (15:36).
On structure, Rideout traces the “organism, not organisation” model to Nichols’s stated wish not to be a guru and to his collaboration with Bruce Lyon around 2009–2010: no shareholders, no copyright holder, no managers, a horizontal structure intended to let faculty operate independently. Her assessment is that what worked as a growth model has become the organisation’s central weakness once complaints and allegations arrived, because there is no accountable centre (17:19). She also traces Lyon’s esoteric lineage — Alice Bailey’s writings and claimed telepathic transmissions — and Highden’s origins as a Shambhala school at an Edwardian mansion outside Palmerston North (20:40–21:44).
Her framing argument for why any of this still matters is the strongest single point in the session: when high-demand groups dissolve, the ideas outlive them. Hundreds or thousands of alumni and facilitators have been through these programmes, and many now teach elsewhere without the ISTA label — so the practical skill is recognising the concepts, not the brand (6:20).
Source: watch on YouTube · Decult · copyright The Decult Trust. Related: resources for clinicians.
IndoctriNation — “Cult hopping chronicles pt. 2” with Cara Cordoni ↑ Top
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Rachel Bernstein is a licensed therapist specialising in cult recovery, and this is the more clinical of the two long Cara Cordoni interviews. Where the A Little Bit Culty episodes trace the narrative, this one dwells on mechanism: what is actually being done to a person in these rooms, and why it works.
Bernstein’s introduction establishes the scope: Cordoni joined ISTA in 2021, and after discovering reports of harm co-founded 3SC, which collected more than fifty harm reports and achieved some reforms within the group (0:36).
The central observation concerns groups that claim to have no dogma. Cordoni notes that ISTA, like another group she had been in, presented itself as having no rulebook and nothing to teach — and argues that ideas are nevertheless installed precisely during the highly open states the exercises produce, with “one hundred per cent responsibility” drilled in as the load-bearing one (15:49). It is a useful frame: the absence of an explicit creed is not the absence of indoctrination.
She returns to the “organism, not organisation” self-description and its practical consequence for participants — that with no structure and no vetting, the informal advice among attendees was to research your facilitators yourself before booking. She says she declined one training after researching a facilitator she found sufficiently troubling (37:23).
Two further points. She discusses psychotic breaks as a reported outcome, referencing an account in the New York Magazine investigation (55:21). And she describes the moment of discovery: being told about a Facebook group called “Issues with ISTA and Highden,” joining among its first hundred members, and finding accounts of sexual assault, rape and victim-blaming going back more than ten years (57:01). That group is the origin point of 3SC and, indirectly, of much of the reporting that followed.
Source: watch on YouTube · part 1. Related: what former participants describe.
Speaking of Cults — “Good sex and bad groups” ↑ Top
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The longest item in the archive, and the most analytical. Chris Shelton is a cult-recovery counsellor and former Scientologist; his guests are Cara Cordoni and Dave Booda, the two people who led 3SC’s engagement with ISTA from opposite vantage points. The organising question is not “is ISTA bad” but “what category of thing is it” — and the answer they converge on is the large group awareness training.
Booda explains that he became involved in mid-2022 because he had friends on both sides of the dispute, and describes ISTA as, in his view, the apex predator of the tantra space (4:35). Cordoni retraces her entry — a breakup as COVID ended, a class where a participant mentioned ISTA, a website describing a mystery school whose first level is a week-long “sexual shamanic spiritual experience” (7:17).
The most substantively new material is on protocol change. Booda describes the starting position as one where facilitators and leaders could interact sexually with participants, and a subsequent refinement to make such contact participant-initiated only — changes he attributes in part to the 3SC process (18:05). Anyone assessing ISTA’s claims of reform should watch this passage: it is a critic conceding that something changed, which makes the surrounding scepticism harder to dismiss.
The LGAT framing is where the episode does its real work. Booda describes having done a series of trainings — forums, advanced courses, Mankind Project weekends — that he only later learned were classified as large group awareness trainings, and credits Cordoni’s research for the connection. He notes that of the many people he has spoken to who attend such trainings, only a tiny fraction had ever heard of the category (37:38–38:11). His long written treatment of ISTA and the LGAT model is at boodaism.com/ista.
For clinicians and researchers this is probably the single most useful recording in the archive, because it supplies the category rather than the anecdote — and the category generalises well beyond ISTA.
Source: watch on YouTube · 3SC · Dave Booda’s essay. Related: resources for clinicians.
What recurs across all seven ↑ Top
These recordings were made by different people, in four countries, over roughly three years, for different audiences — a therapist’s podcast, a skeptics’ conference, a parliamentary committee. They were not coordinated. The overlaps are therefore worth listing:
- The fourteen agreements, and specifically the disclosure that facilitators could be sexually involved with participants, presented on the first evening after payment and travel.
- “One hundred per cent responsibility” as the central framing device — described independently by multiple speakers as the mechanism that converts a complaint about the organisation into a personal failing.
- Suppression of lateral communication — no gossip, take it directly to the person, don’t comfort others unasked — described as preventing participants from comparing notes.
- The LGAT structure: intensity, sleep deprivation, secrecy, an emotional peak on exit, and immediate upselling to the next level while the participant is still elevated.
- “Organism, not organisation.” Cited by every speaker who discusses structure, and consistently characterised as making money and responsibility difficult to trace.
- Entwinement with Highden Temple in New Zealand, publicly denied by both, traced by several speakers through shared facilitators, shared venues and the 2017 property purchase.
- Assistants pay to work. Stated independently by Cordoni and by Rideout, with figures attached.
- Response to criticism. DARVO in feedback sessions, consent invoked to refuse conversations, NDAs attached to refunds, accountability processes staffed from within the organisation’s own orbit, and — per Richter — online attacks and legal interference against a journalist.
None of this is a finding of fact by us. It is a description of what named people said on the record, where you can hear them say it, and where their accounts converge. Read alongside the investigative journalism, the expert statements and court documents, and the exhibits.