ARIZONA
This Is Not a Cult
Part 2: When is a guru culpable for harming people?
Are cult leaders ever held responsible for the damage they inflict? That question led me to a seeker named Kirby Brown.
Brown visited Sedona at 38, looking for love, children, and financial stability. ‟She was not overly New Agey,” said a close friend, ‟just looking outside the box.” After college, she’d managed horse farms, driven limos, and waited tables. The vivacious Brown, with long brown hair and fair skin, traveled the world every year. She ultimately settled in San José del Cabo and built a decorative painting business. Most mornings, she surfed.
Brown attended a talk in Mexico by a visiting American motivational speaker. After traveling to two more of his courses, she signed up for his Spiritual Warrior program in Sedona in 2009. The $10,000 cost depleted her life savings.
Brown didn’t know that many people pursuing spiritual awakening had encountered trouble in Sedona. Nor did I, originally. The seekers were not your stereotypical free spirits alienated from conventional society. Like Julia Siverls and Kirby Brown, they had successful careers, strong families, and solid friendships. Said one sociology professor who studies the self-help industry, “We like to think that these people were different from us, that they were lemmings. But they’re not. These are very motivated, focused individuals who are trying to improve their own lives and carve their own paths out for themselves.”
The motivational speaker who inspired Brown was James Arthur Ray. Ray was a handsome man who looked like a Los Angeles plastic surgeon but possessed a name like a political assassin. Brown had seen Ray in the 2006 movie The Secret. She knew that Oprah Winfrey had spotlighted him on her show twice. She read Ray’s book, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want. In it, he promised, ‟Start living in harmony right now, and know that everything you want is within your reach.”
Ray held his Spiritual Warrior program at Angel Valley, a retreat facility on the edge of Sedona that offered labyrinths, medicine wheels, and stone arrangements that facilitated meditation. Above, an autumn sun penetrated a quiet, deep blue sky.
By the end of Ray’s five-day program, hovering television news helicopters brought clamor to that sky.
The best way to enter Sedona is from the north. You wind down State Highway 89A through a tangy-smelling pine forest out of an alpine fairy tale. The flat plain then cracks open, and you inch down 20-mph switchbacks into the deep, verdant Oak Creek Canyon. You pass Slide Rock, where slippery stone forms a natural water slide that offers visitors a wet, rollicking break from summertime heat.
Beyond some more curves, the leafy curtains part, and you find yourself in a 1950s Cinemascope western. Giant sandstone buttes glow in the sun, beckoning you into a spectacular valley. The physical beauty is like nowhere else on earth: weathered buttes rise in horizontal layers of brown and ocher or rusty orange and red. Those deep, earthy tones are dappled with the penetrating green of junipers and Ponderosa pines.
You wonder why this area wasn’t protected as a national park. Did Sedona’s proximity to the Grand Canyon diminish its significance? The stores, homes, and traffic lights seem out of place among all the natural grandeur. But after several visits, I realized that the tension between spiritualism and commercialism generates the very essence of Sedona.
The retreat center in Angel Valley sits alongside Oak Creek, several miles from where the narrow gorge spills out onto Sedona Valley. I visited it this year. Like the Dahn Yoga facility, it’s a long way down a rough road, and it would be hard for guests to walk out on their own. Though both facilities are outside the Sedona city limits, you can see the red rocks in the distance, and the majesty of the environs still does its trick: the landforms are so breathtaking they convince you this is a special place and you’re having a magical experience. The mind-blowing magnificence of the landscape triggers a constant sense that answers are just around the corner or over the next hill. The beauty encourages people to keep seeking, to travel deeper, and then go even further.
During the Spiritual Warrior event, Ray had Kirby Brown and her fellow participants shave their heads and isolate themselves for 36 hours inside their own ten-foot circle without food or water.
On the final day, they entered a makeshift sweat lodge, 24 feet in diameter and just five feet high, built with vinyl tarpaulins spread over tree branches. Fifty-five people squeezed inside and sat on blankets and sleeping bags. They hung their written goals onto the tree limbs.
Orange-glowing superheated stones were shoveled into a pit in the center of the tent. Ray poured water onto them, creating steam clouds that scalded nasal passages. The plastic tarps trapped the heat, and the temperature climbed to over 100 degrees. Ray then announced that was just the warm-up round. There were more to come. He promised more hot rocks than he’d ever used before.
Participants sweat through the few clothes they wore. Breathing became more difficult. When some asked to leave, Ray told them, “‘You can get through this. It’s mind over matter. Ignore what your body is telling you.” Every 15 minutes, Ray added more smoldering stones and poured water on them, building up the cloud of burning steam. Many participants gasped for air. Disoriented and frightened, some began to scream.
Before the group entered the sweat lodge, Ray had declared that each participant should have their own experience and instructed people to refrain from helping one another.
As the temperature in the tent reached 120 degrees, Ray told people they needed to surrender to death in order to survive. They needed to be stronger than their bodies. However, when Ray called for new rocks every 15 minutes or so by opening the tent flap, he got access to cooler air that the others were denied.
Participants dug their hands into the sandy ground to reach cooler temperatures. After more rocks were added a fourth time, a few people stumbled from the tent. Some were vomiting. Inside, others began to disassociate and lose consciousness. Brown was foaming at the mouth. Her skin turned purple.
When Ray finally ended the experience, staff found four people — including Brown — immobile and unconscious. A volunteer called 911. Nineteen people were hospitalized, many with heat exhaustion, some with kidney failure. Brown and two other participants died.
I found it hard to understand why more people hadn’t exited the tent and why Ray hadn’t stopped the session sooner.
Dr. Glenn Doyle was a psychologist who’d initially been a fan of Ray but later had a change of heart. He came to question Ray’s insistence that participants push through inner feelings of resistance. ‟How does that come off to someone who has invested $10,000 to be there?” Doyle asked. ‟I’m being told by my guru, this guy I have invested in, that” resistance ‟is me quitting.”
Ross Diskin, a detective with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, investigated the scene and later recalled his observations on the Guru podcast. At first, he concluded that participants stayed in the sweat lodge of their own volition. Then, he slowly realized, ‟It wasn’t really their decision to stay in. They were conditioned that whole week to do what James Ray said.” Ray had told them, ‟It’s in the struggle that greatness is born.”
Ray had warned that once in the sweat lodge, they would feel like their skin was burning and they were going to die. He predicted some would pass out. ‟He basically lined out the symptoms of heatstroke,” said Diskin, ‟and presented that as if that were the desired effect.” Ray was charged with manslaughter.
Cult expert Rick Ross considers Ray’s operation an example of ‟large-group awareness training,” like the 1970s phenomenon est. Initially, participants feel a sense of community. ‟But once you get in,” he says, ‟they begin to break you down, or they begin to throw people overboard, and you start treading water, and you go under occasionally. You start feeling like, ‘I’m drowning, I’m drowning, I’m desperate.’ And there’s no one there to pitch you a life preserver. Until finally, someone like James Arthur Ray throws out the life preserver on a rope, and you grab it because you’ve gone under repeatedly, and you’re struggling, and you’re feeling like you’re going to drown. And at that point, he’s got you, and he pulls you in with that program, with that awareness that you think is going to cure you or save you from drowning.”
During Ray’s trial in 2011, two earlier incidents came to light. In 2005, after spending two hours inside a sweat lodge, a participant suffering from heatstroke became irrational and violent. The retreat center owner called 911 over Ray’s objections. Struggling with the aftermath of his breakdown, the victim lost his job, his marriage, and his home. Ray acknowledged to the retreat center owner that he needed to learn from the experience.
But in another Ray sweat lodge three years later, participants became delusional, and some stopped breathing. Ray refused to provide his cell phone for a 911 call. That same year, a San Diego program participant jumped to her death. Ray had instructed the group to go into the streets without possessions, cell phones, or identification and pretend they were homeless. After hearing about the woman’s suicide and recognizing her as a missing participant, Ray and his team waited six hours before contacting police to identify the body.
Ray’s trial for the 2009 sweat lodge deaths lasted four months. In the end, the jury convicted Ray of negligent homicide. He served less than two years.
While considering Ray’s culpability, a broader question popped into my mind: What is our responsibility as individuals to avoid the influence of dangerous, charismatic leaders? And how do we do that?
During my investigation into Sedona’s underbelly, I discovered that the best advice about avoiding cults comes from survivors and family members.
Laura Tucker survived the Ray sweat lodge incident and has devoted herself to building guru-free communities for spiritual seekers. She worked hundreds of hours to become a certified coach and now believes that legitimate self-improvement programs utilize tested methodologies. She warns against ‟the guru model of self-help” that relies on charismatic and supposedly omniscient individuals. But even Tucker believes Ray wasn’t running a cult. She thinks he operated a moneymaking venture whose product was self-enlightenment.
Ginny Brown, Kirby’s mom, has dedicated her time to preventing more tragedies like the one her daughter experienced. She distinguishes between motivational speakers sharing compelling life lessons from personal experience and gurus claiming secret knowledge and demanding participants silence their inner voices. She warns against self-help programs that feature constant upselling, no-refund policies, false urgency, artificial scarcity, and sensory deprivation.
That made me realize there’s another question for those of us who lead others as teachers, coaches, trainers, supervisors, or employers: Are there things we do that problematically groom people for manipulation?
I spent two decades in the corporate training industry, and I’m familiar with how to inspire an audience, heighten engagement, manage energy, and prompt behavior change. That’s what our clients paid us to do. And our training participants viewed us as having practical, specialized knowledge. Some of us were even referred to as gurus in our fields.
Cults seem so well-defined and obvious to those of us on the outside. But the truth is as slippery as Slide Rock in Oak Creek Canyon. There is a continuum from coaching to training to motivational speaking that bleeds into the realm of mind control and exploitation faster than any of us would like to admit. Anytime we introduce a new mental model to people, we risk destabilizing them. As professionals, we’re taught how to handle the difficult situations that sometimes arise, but people are unpredictable.
When we accustom audiences to inspiration from charming speakers and lead them to trade their inner voices for those of reputable experts, we make them more susceptible to exploitation. As a trainer and leader in the corporate world, there was probably more I could have done to reinforce people’s agency, life experience, and gut instincts.
In Part 3 — the conclusion of this series — I look into the most contemporary of Sedona’s inspirational sages, one known as the polyamorous tech-bro guru, and I discover what happens when self-help triggers self-harm.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
