Change We Can (Almost) Believe In

It’s blistering hot, and I’m walking a stone labyrinth, wending toward a central clearing lined with crystals and chanting to angels. This is the Angel Valley Retreat outside Sedona, Ariz., and the New Age minister who runs it has instructed me to walk this maze while repeating the words “my higher self is guiding me.” Only then will I feel the power of the land beneath me, the red-walled mountain behind me and the angels above me.

I am a few hundred yards from the spot where three people died in October 2009. They were on a “spiritual warrior retreat” led by James Arthur Ray, a man with improbably white teeth who claimed he had been initiated into 12 shamanic orders. He had been a guest on Oprah and was featured in the best-selling DVD The Secret, and the nearly $10,000 weeklong course was his platinum self-help offering. On the last day of the retreat — the final chance to “play full on” — he harangued his pupils into staying in an overcrowded, overheated sweat lodge even after some of them had passed out and one had fallen into the glowing rocks in the center. The 55 participants, already weakened from a 36-hour “vision quest” with neither food nor water, suffered terribly in the sweat lodge, but the vast majority stayed. “You’re not going to die,” Ray told them. “You might think you are, but you’re not going to die.” He was only partly right. In the end, 18 were hospitalized, and three died from heatstroke or organ failure. Ray’s manslaughter trial is due to begin March 1.

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It is easy to judge — not only Ray’s hubris but also the strange submission of those who elected to stay in the sweat lodge. Why would people want change so badly that they would overrule the violent protests of their bodies and wait for death? They seem like the most extreme disciples of a very mainstream American faith: an unofficial religion of personal transformation. The inner voyages of its adherents fuel a $10.53 billion self-improvement business spanning books, DVDs, courses, life coaching and retreats. They’ve turned an ancient meditative practice — yoga — into a $6 billion growth industry. They are swelling the ranks of the Landmark Forum, one of the country’s largest personal-development workshops, which collects about $75 million a year training up to 200,000 students around the world.

These seekers are, to put it mildly, not my tribe. I’m not just a journalist — the lowest order of skeptic — but I have also lived my personal life under a somewhat darkening cloud of cigarette smoke, cynicism and unbelief. Yet there’s a reason I’m in a labyrinth chanting to angels I don’t believe in. I just turned 35 and have been hounded by enough “is this all there is” thoughts in the past year to constitute a sort of pre-midlife crisis. I love my wife, love my kids. But I’m less thrilled about myself and my default noir outlook on life. Like a lot of guys my age, I feel stalled a long way from happiness. I went to Sedona to report on the Ray tragedy; I came away no less unnerved by it but increasingly curious about the vast number of people in the midrange of the self-help spectrum: the enthusiastic brigades of the transformists and yogis and New Agers who embrace change as a call to action.

(See why yoga therapy is booming in place of psychotherapy.)

So I joined them. It’s not just chanting to angels in Sedona. I took part in the mentally exhausting Landmark Forum. I traded in my notions of masculinity for a foam mat and began a martial style of yoga. I stopped asking, What’s wrong with these people? and started asking, Can they help what’s wrong with me?

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In Search of Breakthroughs
The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. It’s about as old as the nation. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion of Christian Science, premised on the limitless power of faith and mind. Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard, a lean, wolfish former salesman, who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded EST seminars in 1971. His courses were legendarily uncomfortable. He paced and cursed at his students. He had them writhe on the floor and scream out all their anxieties. He challenged participants to control their bladders so they didn’t have to leave the long sessions. (“You are not a tube,” he preened in the documentary Transformation while sipping water at the end of a seven-hour session. “You have transcended peeing.”)

But it’s a tribute to the power of his central concept — you have imprisoned yourself, and a few days of endurance ontology can set you free — that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees who went on to create Landmark Education, Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour.

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The seminar I attended, held over a long weekend in the basement of Landmark’s center in midtown Manhattan, was led by a slight, silver-haired former Air Force pilot named Roger Smith. He started our group of 127 students off with some nonnegotiable ground rules: No food, no drink except water. No texting, no note taking, no talking except at one of the three microphones set up around the room. No narcotics, alcohol or aspirin until the entire course is over. Commit to being there from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. or later each of the three days, with just two 30-minute breaks and one longer break for dinner. There were assignments — usually attempts to make “breakthroughs” with people in your life, on the phone or in writing — to be completed during those breaks and at night. The rules felt harsh, almost punitive, and yet nobody left, least of all me. In the first hour, Smith had effectively convinced us all that if we walked out on him, we’d only be walking out on ourselves.

At its heart, the course was a withering series of scripted reality checks meant to show us how we have created nearly everything we see as a problem. A fair amount of time was spent explaining the Forum’s peculiar vocabulary, which reads like bad fortune-cookie copy. (“Transformation,” one poster said, is “the genesis of a new realm of possibility.”) These opaque missives came to life, though, through “sharing,” the testimonials that participants gave at the microphones. In our course, at least, this became a speed-walk through the awful things that people do to themselves and to each other — infidelity, incest, anorexia, abuse. Weeping at the mike was so common that one dry-eyed grandmother seemed compelled to explain, “If I wasn’t taking antidepressant pills, I’d be crying right now.”

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Like the Zen master who strikes his students while they try to serve him tea, Smith was unsparing. Each time someone looked to blame others or the world at large for his or her problems, he hammered back. His tone was compassionate, but the message was steely. “Who was there every time you got fired?” he demanded of the group. “It’s not the economy, the climate, world conditions, your mother, your father. The right person to make a difference in your life is sitting in your chair.”

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What difference was I looking to make for myself exactly? I quit my staff job at this magazine in early 2009, in part because I felt I was missing the lives of my children, two marvelous little creatures under the age of 5 whose childhoods wouldn’t wait for me to figure out how to make it home in time for dinner or push work aside on weekends. I still wanted to work, but I also wanted to be the one to take them to the doctor, to drop them off unhurriedly at school in the morning, to travel with them. It was a serious enough project that one of the first things I did after leaving TIME was start a parenting blog with a few other journalists as a forum for examining our lives as fathers.

I fell short, however, of my goal of becoming one of those insouciant new involved dads, those creative types in skinny jeans who were continually doing awesome craft projects with their kids. There was lots of joy, yes, but surprising amounts of exhaustion and frustration that came from being a constant caretaker. I blogged about this enough, apparently, that when Calgary Herald columnist Jeremy Klaszus, a man I’ve never met, wrote a column about the anger of fathers, he used me as his prime example. Though he lauded me for being honest, it seemed my parenting could use some workshopping.

(See five ways to stop stressing.)

When I stepped to the mike at Landmark, I thought I could start by offering a mild testimonial. Something true but not as intimate or confusing as confessing to losing my temper with a doe-eyed 2-year-old. So I said, blandly, that even as a freelancer, I still felt unable to make enough time for my kids. Smith immediately gutted even that disclosure. There’s no such thing as being torn between work and family, he said. Either someone is with one’s family or not. All I was really doing was using the pretext of immovable scheduling conflicts to gloss over the fact that I, of my free will, was not keeping promises I had made to my children.

Smith is not a trained therapist — Landmark has been criticized for delving into the traumas of largely unscreened participants without having mental-health professionals on hand — but I found him to be remarkably insightful. He saw through my timid testimony and got right to a truth: if I can’t handle being a full-time parent, it’s probably because I don’t want to. I couldn’t argue with him, not because he had a clever script but because he was right.

(See “Do We Really Need Psychiatrists to Do Therapy?”)

Stillness and Silence
I didn’t continue with Landmark after that seminar. By the end of the course, almost all of us felt giddy with exhaustion and catharsis, but there was a fair amount of pressure to sign up for additional instruction. If we were serious about our transformation, we were told, we would enlist friends and family and even co-workers to take the $495 Forum themselves. It had just enough of a Ponzi taste that I stepped firmly and finally back outside the Landmark circle. (A Landmark executive later told me the company is “committed” to toning down the hard sell.)

But I benefited tremendously from the uncomfortable mirror the course had put in front of me. With Smith’s mantras of personal responsibility playing on a loop in my mind, I started to take stock of the quality, not just the quantity, of the time I spent with my family. And I saw something in myself that plagued a lot of the other new fathers I’d met from around the country through my blog: we are powerfully distracted. We may change more diapers and pack more lunches than our fathers did, but our minds are more absent than ever. Soon after I left my job, I developed a kind of information-anxiety disorder, compulsively checking and sending e-mail, reading news headlines, tinkering with my blog, even at dinner. It was becoming the same noisy mix I had hoped to leave behind when I left full-time work.

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What I needed was grounding, a chance to quiet the buzzing apiary of my mind. With Landmark’s admonition to break out of old habits fresh in my mind, I looked to a pursuit I’d disdained in the past: yoga. I enrolled in an Ashtanga class in my neighborhood led by John Campbell, a limber yogi with a blond ponytail and a penchant for making “adjustments” to my poses that feel as if he set my cartilage on fire.

Ashtanga, I found out, is a particularly stern form of yoga. There is almost no talking. Everyone works at his or her own pace. The more advanced you are, the more your poses look like Dante’s description of the damnation of fortune tellers: “mute and weeping” bodies with “their faces twisted toward their haunches.” Also: students are allowed to breathe only through the nose. There is no music. The only sounds are Campbell’s whispering and a chorus of pneumatic hell breathing.

(See pictures of Ashtanga yoga.)

I am not a smoker anymore, but I am doughy and inflexible and wholly nonspiritual. Still, within days I began to appreciate the intensity of Ashtanga. In the 118 years since Swami Vivekananda first made an impression as “the Hindoo Monk of India” at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the U.S. has changed his raja yoga into a booming growth industry. There’s so much yoga lite available now — a quick Netflix search called up titles like MTV Yoga, Yoga Flava and Yoga Booty Ballet — that it’s refreshing to be in a class that doesn’t ignore the fact that yoga is at heart an ancient and esoteric tradition.

But how exactly would twisting help me get centered? I didn’t know it when I signed up, but Campbell isn’t just any yoga teacher; he’s a leading Sanskrit authority in Ashtanga circles, a Fulbright scholar and Ph.D. who is teaching a seminar at Columbia University this spring on the texts and theories of yoga in India. He also studied under the late K. Pattabhi Jois, the guru who exported Ashtanga to the U.S.

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Jois liked to boast that Ashtanga “boils the blood” and maintained that 10 years of daily practice was needed before a student could gain new understanding. When I asked Campbell for a sneak preview of what insights a decade of practice might reveal, his answer sounded a lot like Landmark. Or Buddhism. Or, according to Campbell, Freudian psychoanalysis. Basically, we are “psychotically misinformed” about who we are. We overestimate our importance to the universe and are therefore stingy with our time, our love, our attention. Yes, being in better shape can enable us to play catch with our kids, but the real benefit is that we can lose ourselves when immersed in meditative physical practice. “Yoga’s goal,” he says, “is to strip away those misconceptions and then build ourselves back up.” In other words: transformation.

After five months of somewhat dedicated practice, yoga is still difficult for me. I still look and feel ridiculous at times. I do not believe that the Infinite is going to reveal itself to me because I sit in half-lotus. But I am beginning to see that the sequence of Ashtanga poses, the breathing, the daily ritual of it all, can help reorder my life in the right direction. As it has for many Americans — even those who see it as just a workout — yoga has made me more comfortable with stillness, silence and time away from the 3G network. Small wonder that the Web show DadLabs, whose Austin studio is a mancave-garage filled with enough power tools to make Tim Allen jealous, began live “Dad Yoga” broadcasts in January. Calmness is not everything, but for fathers of young children, it’s an important start.

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The Valley of Angels
One of the hardest things to understand about the people on Ray’s retreat — the ones who stayed in the sweat lodge even though it felt, as one survivor put it, “like breathing fire” — is that they had similar motivations as the rest of us. Beverly Bunn, a Texas orthodontist, was typical: she was at Angel Valley not because she was desperate but because she was ambitious. She didn’t have lots of spare time to workshop her life, so she saw the retreat as an effective, efficient way to push herself. And yet for all her intelligence, Bunn was, at a critical juncture, fully in Ray’s thrall. She tried to leave the sweat lodge just over halfway through the ritual but says Ray told her that it was just her body complaining, that her mind could control it. “It was unbelievably hot,” she told me over the phone, but she “persevered,” thinking maybe Ray did know more about her limitations than she did. “That’s what gurus do,” she said. “They pull from you, attack your weaknesses and try to turn it around into a strength. They coach you and manipulate you.”

Regardless of his trial’s outcome, Ray’s heyday appears to be over. His website is still running (“James Arthur Ray: Create Harmonic Wealth® in All Areas of Your Life”), but his lawyers do most of his public speaking for him, and he has stopped doing the live events that were the lifeblood of his company.

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But even tragedy won’t keep the seekers from Sedona. The American West has been the stronghold of New Age spirituality ever since the 1963 publication of The Book of the Hopi “made the River Ganges flow into the Rio Grande,” as writer Philip Jenkins put it. And Sedona, with its purported energy vortexes, is the first real New Age destination resort. Janelle Sparkman, head of the Sedona Spiritual and Metaphysical Association, which acts as a sort of chamber of commerce for psychics and Reiki practitioners, estimates that 40% of visitors to the town come for spiritual reasons.

And the metaphysical is mainstream far beyond Sedona. A 2007 Gallup poll found that around 75% of Americans believe in angels and that 50% think they have their own guardian angels. A Pew report on religion said a quarter of Americans held some New Age or Eastern beliefs like animism. According to Publishers Weekly, an upcoming set of books in the popular angels category will be “full of practical, detailed information on how one can attract angels into their lives.”

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Angel Valley itself has been slow to recover from the deaths at the sweat lodge, according to Amayra Hamilton, the Dutch naturopath who founded the retreat with her husband Michael (the New Age minister who gave me my mantra). The retreat is in Chapter 11, and the couple face civil lawsuits, even though they didn’t run the sweat lodge that day. As Amayra put it, the “chaotic energy” of death is still keeping people away. The only guests at a lunch when I was there were the IT repairman who had arrived from town to fix the wireless Internet service (lunch conversation: how he attaches electrodes to his temples to help achieve biofeedback-brain-wave balance) and an extremely fit couple — she from Germany, he from Hong Kong — who introduced themselves as Rama and Lalita. (“Our spiritual names,” they clarified.)

I never did feel any sign of angels. I walked the labyrinth and hiked the red hills with no message from the universe other than that I should have worn more sunblock. Afterward I asked Michael and Amayra what I should make of the spiritual silence, but they resisted feeding me any interpretations. The lesson of the sweat lodge and the “charismatic illusion” that is James Arthur Ray, said Michael, is that you don’t need to follow someone else’s path. “Everyone thinks self-help means finding your own guru,” said Amayra. “This will change that.”

This article originally appeared in the March 7, 2011, issue of TIME.

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