I want to write about the Wellspring with care, because the thing it got right was real, and the thing it got wrong killed the thing it got right.
The Wellspring began as a liberation. Its founder — a magnetic woman the members called simply the Source — taught that women's pleasure was not a private indulgence but a spiritual power, a current of shakti the culture had spent centuries teaching women to be ashamed of, and that reclaiming it, deliberately and in community, was a path to a fuller humanity. For many of the women who came, this was not a euphemism and not a scam. It was the first time anyone had told them their bodies were a doorway rather than a liability, and they walked through it and were, by their own accounts, changed.
What the Wellspring never built was the riverbed. It raised a genuine force and gave it no channel, no direction, no purpose beyond its own intensity — and a current with no banks does not stay a river; it becomes a flood. Over a few years the practice that had freed women became a container that held them: the sessions grew more demanding, the boundaries more negotiable, the founder's needs more central, the unpaid labor and the debt more normal. The language of liberation stayed exactly the same while the thing it described inverted. Women who had come to reclaim their own power found they had signed it over.
The Wellspring is mostly gone now, trailing lawsuits and broken people and a smaller number of people who still say, quietly, that the early years saved them and they cannot fully condemn it. I understand them. The tragedy of the Wellspring is not that it was a lie. It is that it was true, and truth without a form to hold it does not stay true — it just finds someone to drown.
This piece touches on coercion and abuse. If it's close to home, a licensed professional or a trusted person is the right place to take it.