ARIZONA
This Is Not a Cult
Part 1: Is Sedona a spiritual healing mecca or a crime scene?
Julia Siverls traveled to Sedona, Arizona, to become a master yoga instructor.
She’d grown up in public housing in Brooklyn and graduated from Antioch College. After earning two master’s degrees and a doctorate, Siverls obtained a tenure-track job as a professor of education at the City College of New York. She’d practiced yoga for years and began attending classes at Dahn Yoga. Dahn’s mission — helping individuals heal themselves — inspired her to become a master instructor.
In July 2003, Siverls, 41, traveled to the Ilchi Meditation Center in Sedona to complete her certification process. The facility was located in a peaceful valley that offered views of Sedona’s famous red rock formations. Desert sage lined its many trails, and gardens and a lake provided space for reflection.
The organizers of Siverls’ retreat emphasized the need to recognize and transcend self-imposed limitations. She and four other certification candidates spoon-fed one another, traversed rooms without using their legs, and crossed a log raised off the ground. All seemingly harmless stuff typical of retreats.
The keystone event was a hike up nearby Casner Mountain in the summer sun. The trail gained 2000 feet of elevation over two miles. The U.S. Forest Service categorized it as very strenuous. Instructors promised the trek would break down the body and deliver heightened spiritual awareness. To increase the intensity, they limited the water the hikers carried and filled their backpacks with rocks.
Once the incline started, Siverls struggled and voiced concern to the leader. Because she’d complained earlier in the week, the guide insisted she remain silent on the hike. He prohibited the others from saying anything negative.
Siverls collapsed on the trail. She said to the group, ‟I don’t want to continue anymore, I want to die.” When the leader reminded the group that their certifications depended on finishing the hike, the others insisted Siverls try harder. “She began to give up and we begged, pleaded, and yelled for her to keep moving,” said one of the hikers.
Eventually, when she could go no further, the group placed Siverls under the shade of a tree and waited for her to recover her strength. Instead, she began shaking uncontrollably and soon lost consciousness. One of the participants felt her wrist for a pulse. Finding none, she started CPR.
Siverls died before paramedics arrived. The leader had already instructed the group to empty the rocks from her backpack and warned the students not to mention them. ‟We were told not to bring [them] up, that I know for sure,” one hiker later told the Village Voice. ‟It was not only implied, it was stated very clearly.”
Sedona has become a fertile ground for cults. But they’re not all cults. In 2024, I visited Sedona to figure out what constitutes a cult and why this city attracts them. I wanted to understand why, for some seekers of enlightenment, a visit to Sedona can be deadly.
I first visited Sedona with Wayne in the early 1990s and again with my friend Lisa around the turn of the millennium. On a trip in 2004, I stayed at the sprawling Enchantment Resort, where a new spa offered hypnosis. Intrigued by hypnosis since childhood, I signed up for a session. When I arrived, the hypnotist asked, “What are we going to address?” I learned that hypnosis isn’t just a meditative state; it must be used to fix something.
Sedona was like that too. The landscape was shockingly beautiful and otherworldly, the perfect place to relax and reflect. But it was also different from tropical beaches that beg leisure and laziness. Sedona presented itself as a place to find answers. And to find answers, you must have questions. I didn’t know what my question was. Yet, every giant red stone formation in Sedona begged, “What are we going to address?”
In Uptown, Sedona’s commercial core, organic juice bars huddled near shops selling turquoise jewelry and fudge. Strolling through the town, I wondered why tourist locales always feature fudge shops. Is fudge the fanny pack of food? Every third storefront offered backcountry jeep tours. I took one, and other passengers on the bumpy trip kept asking why I was traveling alone. It’s a question I hate because it implies either that I lack close relationships or that solitary travel is somehow deficient, neither of which is true. But I don’t know why it riles me up so much.
The jeep trip took us to several of Sedona’s “vortexes,” geological formations where the earth’s energy is said to be stronger and more accessible to humans. Visitors often find that time at a vortex fosters healing, meditation, and self-reflection.
Sedona’s vortexes were popularized around 1980 by Page Bryant, a local tour guide and psychic. Bryant was an earth mother with intense green eyes. To those who questioned why Bryant’s vortexes were so easily accessible — all within short walks of paved roads and never in rugged backcountry canyons — Sedona wags pointed out that Bryant was a big-bodied chain smoker.
My favorite is the ‟Airport Vortex,” a sandstone platform overlooking most of Sedona I have visited many times. Standing here, I wonder whether it is simply the breathtaking natural beauty that captivates people. Perhaps the overwhelming scale of the spectacle prompts us to reach for deeper explanations of the feeling it conveys.
The Sedona vortexes were also promoted by Dick Sutphen, a hypnotherapist who described himself as a specialist in past-life regression and spirit-contact therapy. With his long white hair and impish eyes, Sutphen gave off a Western vibe and looked a bit like Ralph Lauren. Whoever identified the vortexes first, Sutphen deserves credit for launching Sedona’s spiritual retreats. After time at the vortexes and in his sessions, participants reported full recovery from long-standing knee problems, nearsightedness, and chronic bronchitis.
People seeking enlightenment can be fascinating, particularly when they join groups of like-minded souls and follow gurus promising secret knowledge. While investigating why such organizations thrive in Sedona, I learned that entities accused of being cults are litigious. They also inspire minions of internet trolls who target detractors and whitewash online criticism. So, I’ll be clear: I’m not saying any of the groups I describe in this series are cults. And, while traveling to Sedona and writing these reflections, I’ve come to believe it may not matter; there’s a danger in walling off cults as a unique risk and separating them from the organizations we regularly encounter in our lives.
Looking into Julia Siverls’ death and Dahn Yoga, I learned that in Korean, dahn means ‟primal, vital energy.” At over a hundred locations nationwide, often in college towns, Dahn studios offered yoga, specialized meditation skills, deep-breathing techniques, and tai chi. Weekend workshops included self-discovery activities and trust exercises that triggered personal confessions.
I discovered that Dahn Yoga and the retreat center Siverls visited were run by Dr. Ilchi Lee. In 2003, every Dahn location displayed Lee’s picture. He was a genial, white-haired man whose face exuded the serenity of the Dalai Lama. He developed and popularized his brain-training techniques in Korea and then spread them around the world. He taught people how to increase sensory awareness to reduce stress, make the brain more amenable to learning, convert negative thoughts to positive ones, and improve decision-making. All good, right?
However, I soon learned that not everyone believes Dahn Yoga is as benevolent as it first appears.
In Rolling Stone, some former employees claimed that Dahn Yoga was designed less for self-improvement than for endlessly extracting money from participants. One said to Forbes, “Disguised as healing and nurturing sessions, the masters talk you into spilling your guts as they literally beat your chest, stomach, and back repeatedly to remove ‘blockages’ from your soul and your system…you end up feeding the Dahn predator with reasons why you need more help than you realize. After you’ve bared your soul to them, they suddenly have a class or series of healing sessions to sell.”
Students reported being encouraged to go into debt to pay for Dahn programs. Siverls was in for $15,000; others maxed out credit cards and borrowed $50,000 or more for Dahn classes.
Some former employees claim the group’s profits fuel Lee’s luxurious lifestyle and global jet-setting. I visited his former home in Sedona, a sprawling modern mansion surrounded by open space. According to Rolling Stone, Lee claimed Nicolas Cage tried to buy the house for his new bride, Lisa Marie Presley, but Lee outbid him.
I then drove towards the Ilchi Meditation Center. As I navigated my car down the unpaved, sometimes wash-boarded roads, my tires spewed clouds of red dust. Thankfully, it was winter, and the sky was clear; the flash floods of Arizona’s monsoon could trap me here during a summer thunderstorm.
I couldn’t get too close to the retreat center, as I wasn’t going to trespass. But I drove to the property boundary and experienced its remote location. Though you could conceivably walk out, you’d have to traverse a wilderness area far from town. The isolation was palpable.
What culpability, I wondered, did Dahn Yoga have in Siverls’ death? The county sheriff’s office wondered the same thing.
When a detective interviewed the hike participants, he was surprised that none seemed to have any sense of time. They offered differing accounts of when the hike began, when Siverls started to struggle, and when she collapsed. Several said they were themselves disoriented during the hike. The detective concluded that the group initiated their trek around 7:00 a.m.
At about 9:30, an off-duty deputy driving his ATV on the trail observed two people lift Siverls from her armpits and drag her along with them. She seemed unable to move without assistance. He noted that the temperature was already quite hot, and the group’s water appeared insufficient.
All the hikers acknowledged that Siverls collapsed twice, but some said both falls were in the afternoon, conflicting with the deputy’s observations. Some placed the two incidents hours apart; others reported they occurred within one hour. The hike leader acknowledged that Siverls might have fallen three or four times.
When Siverls’ pulse couldn’t be found, the leader used a cell phone to contact the retreat center. According to the police report, staff there told him to keep trying CPR. Center employees later said only ten minutes elapsed between the first contact they received and their call to 911. The first paramedic on the scene, who arrived via helicopter at about 5:00, concluded that Siverls had already been dead for an hour.
The medical examiner determined that Siverls died from heatstroke and dehydration. Though he noted that the witnesses seemed hesitant to speak candidly, the detective decided the information he gathered indicated that Siverls was of sound mind when she began the hike and did so voluntarily. He concluded that the situation suggested questions of judgment and procedure, but ‟there is nothing to indicate anything criminal took place.”
Dahn Yoga and Ilchi Lee denied any wrongdoing and were not charged in Siverls’ death. In a statement, the organization called the incident ‟a tragic accident.” A spokesperson disputed the hike’s difficulty, claimed the group carried sufficient water, and suggested that carrying stones was voluntary.
Ilchi Lee’s group now operates across the country as Body & Brain, though he is connected to it only as a consultant. Dahn and Ilchi Lee have prevailed against multiple lawsuits from former students and employees. According to Rolling Stone, a negligence lawsuit by Siverls’ family was settled for an undisclosed amount. Dahn Yoga called the payout ‟a customary insurance settlement.”
Cult deprogrammer Steve Hassan has worked with several former Dahn Yoga participants. ‟I believe it is a destructive cult, complete with a charismatic figure who claims to be enlightened, deceptive recruitment and (questionable) techniques that make people dependent and obedient.”
Speaking to Forbes, a Dahn Yoga spokesperson said that referring to the group as a cult ‟is laughable” and ‟culturally racist. … It’s no different from acupuncture when it came to this country. It just takes a lot more educating for people to accept it.”
Let’s assume Dahn Yoga was not a cult. Still, several elements of Siverls’ experience are troubling. Most worrisome was how the leaders and fellow hikers failed to listen to her — in fact, silenced her. The requirement to complete the hike instilled a groupthink that discouraged lucid decision-making. Then there were the rocks and the seemingly insufficient water. We can all grow by testing our physical limitations, but when we participate in organized activities, we expect event coordinators to ensure safety and protect lives.
I’m not sure it’s helpful to call Dahn Yoga a cult because that excuses too many other, more reputable organizations that engage in similar behaviors. Excessive pricing and student loans are commonplace in higher education. Navy Seal candidates are discouraged from seeking medical care during their grueling training; one died in 2022. Corporate groupthink — often in media and tech companies — excuses harassment and abuse. Anyone who has ever been an employee at any level has faced decisions about whether to put profit over people. Businesses would collapse if they didn’t sometimes do that.
Was Sedona itself a culprit in this tragedy? Is there something about the city that has made it into a troubled intersection where accidents frequently occur? While figuring that out, I discovered two more Sedona fatalities. In Part 2, I delve into the deadly machinations of Sedona retreat leader James Arthur Ray and uncover more about the slippery slope of exploitation. In Part 3, I explore the latest Sedona phenomenon, a polyamorous tech-bro guru named Bentinho Massaro and share red flags that can protect all of us from exploitation.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
