REVIEW: This Incredible Longing: Finding Myself in a Near-Cult Experience by Blair Glaser

Reviewed by B.K. Jackson

Those of us who read memoir are often drawn to books we believe will mirror the themes and challenges of our lives. The bereaved will gravitate toward stories of loss, for example, and those in recovery toward books about achieving sobriety.

As someone who grappled with the repercussions of family secrets, I devoured Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, empowered by their quests for truth. We read to know we’re not alone, to see ourselves reflected back to us. But if we too often hew to familiar terrain, we may miss out on one of the key joys of literature — its ability to captivate us with stories that take place in realms outside our own. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”

Admittedly, I’m the least spiritual person I know, skeptical about all forms of worship. That’s exactly why I was intrigued by Blair Glaser’s memoir, This Incredible Longing Finding Myself in a Near-Cult Experience (Heliotrope Books; Feb. 2026) — by how very “lands away” its subject matter is from my experience. I hoped the author would illuminate a world I couldn’t fully imagine. She did just that, as a novelist might, crafting a deeply thoughtful and compelling story about spiritual longing and recreating the emotional landscape in which veneration for a guru can blossom.

It seems fitting somehow that the memoir was kickstarted by a serendipitous encounter that prompted her Glaser to recall and reappraise both the path that led her to sit in devotion at the feet of a spiritual leader and the path that led away from a movement that, if not entirely a cult, was doubtless cult-adjacent. When the threads holding together her New York City life frayed, she found herself in Tompkins Square Park one day fantasizing about moving to Los Angeles, where she’d lived briefly after college.

Strangely turned around and not knowing which way was uptown and which downtown, she stumbled into a tofu dog establishment, of all places, where the music coming through a boombox, remarkably, was a thirteenth-century devotional poem she’d heard at the Siddha Yoga ashram in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she lived for more than a year after having returned from LA. It was a melody played during darshan, when supplicants kneel before a spiritual teacher for blessings and guidance. What were the odds she’d find herself in the presence of a stranger who was building a tofu pup business because Gurumayi — the spiritual teacher he and Glaser both loved and whose voice emanated from the boombox — had discouraged him from moving to LA?

Glaser excels at world-building, using vivid imagery and evocative sensory description to conjure the environment of the ashram and illustrate its daily rhythms. At the same time, she confirms my assumption that while spiritual quests may be motivated by faith, devotion, or a search for personal freedom, they often begin with a wound — in her case, a mother wound.

As a child, Glaser suffered from a “nameless ache.” “If I could have articulated it then, I might have said: ‘I want something, but I don’t know what, and it hurts.” A contentious relationship with her mother made her feel unloved, which, she reasoned, was because she was bad. She found comfort in religion, but it was short-lived. Then singing proved to be a balm for the ache and for a time brought the approval her mother couldn’t provide. Theater, she writes, “became my religion, and I was devout.” But attending the Fame high school for performing arts, where she struggled with binge eating and an intensification of that nameless ache of her childhood, her devotion waned.

Glaser’s revelation of a battle with depression and the suicidal ideation that plagued her college years is heartrending. They reemerged after she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career and broke up with the boyfriend who’d drawn her there. In the throes of wondering about the ways she might take her life, she recalled a conversation in which she shared a dream about Gurumayi with her friend Gabby, who lived in the Hudson Valley ashram.

They’d talked about the promise of Siddha Yoga and the lure of Gurumayi, but Glaser wasn’t convinced she wanted a guru. Her train of thought returned to ending her life. Then, “an escape hatch presented itself.” She began practicing a chant that came to mind — one she’d learned at the Siddha Yoga Center. When she began chanting it, “the fog lifted.” She continued that practice, and her life seemed to fall in place. And as she became more deeply involved in the Siddha Yoga Center in LA, her theatrical ambitions faded, crowded out by a desire for enlightenment and a preoccupation with Gurumayi.

Still struggling with a compulsion to binge, Glaser leaned into her spiritual work to help curb temptation, until one Sunday, after participating in a Guru Gita chant at the center and going out to brunch, she had a showdown with a box of Oreos:

“I ached for the relief of the crunch and cream filling in my mouth. But there was a new sliver of internal space between the craving to binge and the need to fill it, and I wondered what would happen if I did one of the practices instead.”

But as she focused on her breath, a pain moved from her jaw and stomach into her chest, tightening with each breath. As she willed herself to continue her mantra, she tapped into what may have been an early preverbal memory — she in a crib, her mother, annoyed by her fussing, leaving her and failing to meet her needs. “My heart was shattered, a searing pain ripping my chest in two…. I squeezed my little chest muscles in a concerted effort, trying to stop the pain flooding my heart.” And then the vision and the pain subsided:

“I had accessed my first samskara, a psychological impression or old wound — in psych parlance, a trauma — that impeded enlightenment, or the flow of Shakti in one’s life. I understood the root cause of tension in my chest. Untangling the knot of the heart and lightening the load of hate demanded that every stone be turned and looked under, and I was fully committed to this work of self-confrontation. Going so deep led me to believe that I was a little closer to being free.”

She knew the next step: “The only thing left to establish me as a full-fledged devotee was meeting the guru in person.” Previously, Glaser had been repulsed by the subservience of the guru’s followers yet at the same time was intrigued by a hint of her true spiritual power: “But if I went to meet Gurumayi, would I end up like Gabby, saying airy fairy things and living in an ashram?” she wondered. “It was unthinkable.” And yet, that’s exactly what happened. Soon she moved to upstate New York to live at the ashram and — despite her trepidation about excessive devotion — became still more in thrall to Gurumayi and desperate for her attention and approval.

Over time, she began to question the fervor of her spiritual devotion and consider the limitations of Siddha Yoga. “I was finally getting that spiritual practices were not the solution to life. They were a tool. And not always as reliable as advertised.”

Glaser writes with a raw and tender intimacy; she lays bare her vulnerability, her doubts, her shame, her hope for equanimity. Her words reflect an unflinching self-inquiry and hard won insights. There’s never a moment when I doubted her sincerity or wasn’t moved by that ache that gave rise to her longing, to her commitment to self-knowledge, and to her desire to be her best self.

At some level, This Incredible Longing reads like a timely cautionary tale about the potential consequences of ceding power to those who would claim to have all the answers. But more powerfully, it’s a wise message for our age that it’s still possible to find wholeness in a fractured world. It’s a clear-eyed expression of a both/and philosophy: that two things can be true at once; that something can be tarnished and broken and, at least through the cracks, still shine; that within a deeply flawed system beauty may still survive. She doesn’t turn away from the dark parts, but nor does she allow them to entirely dim the light.

This Incredible Longing demonstrates that a reader needn’t share the author’s spiritual longing in order to see the beauty and peace it brings her and others. And while the desire for a spiritual transformation may not resonate with me, I certainly relate to the author’s search for belonging and her desires to be loved, to experience inner peace, to live with purpose and intention. As excellent memoirists do, she’s uncovered the familiar in the foreign — the universal truths beneath all of our stories.