- When I was seven, my parents joined a cult.
(whooshing)
(creaking)
- I was in a cult.
- I was born into a cult.
- I was a part of the Advanced Training Institute
from the time I was seven to the time I was 17.
- I was part of the Unification Church for the first
18 years of my life?
- I joined One Taste in 2012 until 2014.
- Unification Church is a religious movement
that was founded by a Korean man named Sun Yung Moon
in the 50s.
- One Taste is an organization that teaches health
and wellness, mainly around sexuality.
- So the Advanced Training Institute is a fundamentalist
Christian sect that has seminars
and a home school curriculum.
And their central beliefs are that men are ordained
to be superior over women, that birth control is evil,
that your father should choose your husband,
that music and television and books
are corrupting influences, so I wasn't allowed
to partake in any of those.
- Reverend Moon said that Jesus came to him
and wanted Reverend Moon to continue a mission
that He failed by being crucified.
The point of the mission is to unify the world
through international marriages, creating a global family
under God.
- Their business teaches something
called Orgasmic Meditation which is a sexual practice
that typically a man and a woman do together
to sensitize their bodies.
- They're very anti school and anti college.
So for a long time, I had what was the equivalent
of a second grade education, since that was the last year
that I went to school.
They believe that God places men in authority
over women and so a woman has to obey either her father
or her husband without question.
And so, if your husband says, "I wanna have sex
"with you tonight," if you say no, you're saying no
to God.
- Mainly the OM practice is the thing.
Orgasmic meditation is a 15 minute partner practice
where a man typically strokes a woman's clitoris
in the upper left hand quadrant for 15 minutes.
This is a specific container, there's 10 steps,
and it's done exactly the same every time.
- Well, my mom was a teenager when she met a member
of the cult.
And my dad was in his early 20s.
They were both looking for a purpose, a spiritual purpose,
and looking to find God.
- So, I saw the founder's Ted Talk in 2007.
I was in college, I watched a lot of Ted Talks,
I thought it was amazing.
- My parents became Christians when I was seven years old,
and they started home schooling me and my brother.
And we began attending a local church in which
all of the families homeschooled their children.
And it turned out that everybody in this church
were members of the Advanced Training Institute,
which is how we got pulled into it.
- They found her when she was 18, and just was like,
"We have this community of people that want to give
"our lives to this man, Reverend Moon, and to God,"
essentially.
My dad was similar.
He was in a commune before, like a hippie commune,
before he met a member of the church.
And then decided to give his life to the church as well.
- I'd just gone through a break up, I'd just stopped
doing drugs, I was, I kind of just like, in a millennial,
existential crisis for lack of a better term.
And I went to one of their intro meetings hoping to learn
some sex tips, and my mind was completely blown
by the level of emotional vulnerability.
- He wrote a continuation, essentially, of the Bible,
called The Divine Principle.
So we read a lot of that in the morning and at night
before bed.
- My life was get up at seven, stroke some women's genitals,
do yoga, meditate, clean the house because it's like
a spiritual cleansing.
- I wasn't allowed to go to school, I wasn't allowed
to have friends, to play with children that weren't a member
of our church.
I wasn't allowed to watch movies or listen to music.
- We did a lot of tithing, like 30% of your income
was supposed to go to the church.
- The intro course, at the time, I think,
it was a hundred bucks, it might be 150 or 200 bucks.
They have a coaching program which was the first
big purchase that forced me to make a huge life decision.
That was $15,000.
- Arranged marriages, which is probably the most well known
in the Unification Church.
Mass weddings.
- Basically, the home school curriculum was fake news.
(laughs)
So it taught that the earth is 6,000 years old,
it taught that women should obey their husbands.
- That they would make people spend money they didn't have,
and make it seem normal or like, beg, borrow, steal
to pay this amount.
It's like the way it's set up, you can't save money.
They actually make it so that everyone just stays broke
which is just like a way that they keep you trapped.
It's like you spend all your money there so you can't leave
because they're the only place that will let you live
in a cool apartment in New York for cheap.
- It's very restrictive, we isolate ourselves
from the world because we're afraid of it.
- In an OM circle, you can have anywhere
from two to 300 people performing orgasmic meditation.
It'd be 15 minutes where usually a man would stroke a woman,
it'd be on a timer, and then after the first 15 minutes
you'd switch partners.
- And my dad would go to work and my brother would
go to work, and I would just sit there by myself
and go over the home school materials all day.
And so I never talked to anybody unless I went to church
on Sunday, which of course, kind of makes you
more into the beliefs because it's like your entire
social world becomes tied to other people who believe this.
- The Moonies would go to college campuses
and try and recruit all these kind of impressionable, young,
open minded people that wanted answers.
And then they come with answers, you know?
The Moonies had all the answers.
Like, Reverend Moon made this new scripture
or new doctrine where you can live your life
according to this and you'll find God and go to heaven,
and you'll be a perfect person.
- I think a lot of people are very afraid.
I think people have been afraid for awhile.
I think over the last 50 years, there's been a lot
of social changes in the country, progressive values,
that frighten people from small towns.
And I think compassionately, there's been a lot
of economic devastation in the south, and I think
that that's made people very vulnerable to falling prey
to people who want to take advantage of them
because they're suffering.
- You felt like you're a part of something,
and something big, and you're important.
And that was really attractive to a lot of people
at that time.
- Unlike other cults, One Taste doesn't have like,
super formal structure.
It's not like Scientology where there's rankings
or you have to do this at this time.
They influence your perception of reality
which makes you just perceive the world differently.
Like you shift your reference group from society
to this small group of people that do
these weird sexual things that you now see as normal.
- It was just more gradual.
I became, you know, an adult and realized that I can
live a life that doesn't involve the church,
and I would rather do that than be a part of it.
- As I got older, I started to really fear the life
that was being set up for me.
Basically, my entire life would be having children,
home schooling them, staying home, obeying my husband,
having sex with him anytime he wanted, never being able
to use birth control so you'd never stop.
And I just wanted so much more out of my life than that.
- I got a message from one of the executives
of the team basically saying like, "We only want you
"if you're willing to commit your life to us."
And I was just like, "Well, I'm not gonna do that,
"so, here's my limit," basically.
- I just left.
My grandma had bought me a little car
and I used that to leave home.
- My mom felt her world was crumbling.
Everything she worked for didn't matter anymore
because her child decided to just throw it out the window.
- (sniffles) Sorry.
- I went from living with 15 to 25 of my best friends,
and I went straight from that to living in a one bedroom.
- Leaving the church really created a permanent chasm
between me and my parents, and me and all of the people
that I grew up with.
And it's something that's been a very real sadness for me.
- It was really a shock.
I was super lonely for like, two months.
- I was kind of marked as sinful and as a bad person
after I left.
- It's definitely been for the better.
I feel like I'm my own person, and I'm able to live
the life that I want to live, and not feel bad
about that.
- Well, I really like my life now.
I got to know myself, I got to learn how to read people
really well.
Compared to other people, I didn't really suffer
too many damages.
- My life couldn't be any different now
than it was then (laughs).
The cool thing about what I've been through
is that makes me appreciate the small things even more.
If I go out and have a glass of wine with a girlfriend,
that's not something I was supposed to ever
be allowed to do.
And so even that tiny little thing feels like
an enormous gift to me.
- You're a strong person and you don't need to find answers
in another person that's claiming to have
all of the answers.
- Go out and meet some other people, go spend time
by yourself and realize what you actually want to do
with your time.
Because no one knows better than you do what's best
for your own development or life.
- There's always hope.
There's always a chance to change your life.
And if you make a choice to make your life better
the way that I did,
it's always worth it (laughs).
(gentle instrumental music)
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