I have recently been fascinated with the story out of Northern Arizona about the loss of three lives during and after the sweat lodge event at a New Age retreat. I was astonished to learn that the participants were folks who had paid ~ $10,000.00 or so for a week long retreat to become 'Spiritual Warriors'.
I was further astonished to discover that these folks had ponied up the big bucks to, among other activities, fast for 36 hours on a mountainside and then pile into a closed, super heated hut with 40 or so people as part of a 'vision quest'.
How is it that these folks were willing to subject themselves to this, where is their 'common sense'? Why was it not obvious that this was not something to participate in? Why are people willing to believe that if you go through some kind of arduous, discomfiting experience it will 'change your life'?
I am not writing to condemn or judge the attendees, but rather out of genuine curiosity about what causes people to suspend their good judgment, their critical functions, and undertake these 'healing' or 'life expanding' practices.
And why is it that commonsensical methods of confronting the difficulties of life that are safe, and without drama are overlooked by those same seekers? I am going to try and propose some answers to these questions, and maybe query deeper, because this issue has intrigued me for as long as I've worked in the field of psychotherapy, which is now over 30 years.
As a young therapist, I had to accept early on that the field was not, is not, one that is highly paid. Starting salaries were below those made by entry level publis school teachers. The hours were long, the patients numerous. I quickly began to look at private practice, and eventually moved into it within five years of leaving grad school. I've been in private practice since 1983.
When surveying the financial landscape of the late 70s, early 80s, I noticed there were certain giants. Wayne Dyer had written an extremely popular book, 'Your Erroneous Zones'; the author of 'I'm OK, You're OK' was raking it in; EST was beginning its massive impact on the culture. It seemed that if you wanted to do well in the field of psychotherapy and human potential, you had to go beyond the idea of simply wading through a weekly schedule of troubled individuals seeking help.
You had to develop a show, a routine, a product, a schtick of some kind. You had to somehow promise or imply that you could help create a more enjoyable life, or remove the obstacles to the enjoyment of same. It seemed it would never be enough to patiently listen to people as they offloaded their cares and concerns, and try to help find solutions to what could change, and accept what couldn't.
Most seeking psychotherapy are not suffering 'mental illness'; rather, they are you and me, the moms and pops and brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters of the world. We who do the best we can with our lives, and from time to time fall prey to all the traps the world and human nature have to offer. The truly evil and truly ill seldom seek help voluntarily.
At any rate, I began to learn that the field was open to the entrepreneurial and opportunistic. If a therapist could appear to provide solutions that were sudden, dramatic, magical, extraordinary, if those solutions, methods, cures etc. could somehow slay the beast of human failure and insecurity, then he was going to see more clients and make more money.
And so, over the years, we've seen providers of every kind of pseudo-scientific healing practice come into the marketplace: there are Voice Print Analysts, Color Therapists, and there are those who insert tubes into peoples' rectums and irrigate their bowels; others will read your feet through Reflexology, and Phrenology is still alive.
There are providers of Iridology, in which the colors of the iris are read. There are Rolfing therapists and Cranio-Sacral Therapists, and those who read auras and others who do Past Life Regression. Some do healing through different scents, and others apply crystals to the forehead, while still others insist that patients buy CDs and listen to them while resting under a pyramid built in the home. Still others will help you walk over a bed of 1100 degree coals, and thereby eliminate 'failure' from your life.
Much of this is what is called New Age. A common fixation in the New Age is the 'toxin'. Many are the therapies and healing procedures intended to remove or flush toxins from the system. For instance, fasting for 36 hours and then plunging into a super heated hut with a bag of nicotine tied around your neck will not only 'flush' all the 'toxins' from your system, and thus rid you of what all has been 'holding you back', but will also completely divest the body of all sugars and electrolytes it needs to keep the major organs and central nervous system running. As these elements disappear from the body, major warning signs in the form of hallucinations occur, signalling breakdown, or, as the healer interprets it, visions and spirits are now visiting and carrying the participant to a 'higher place'.
Why is it that if a solution seems commonsensical and relies on the adult faculty of taking responsibility for oneself and accepting that there are no rapid solutions to the challenges of life, a good number of seekers will look elsewhere?
Or maybe I just answered my own question, but I'll go on for now.
Good psychotherapy proposes that each patient become aware of his or her own part in sustaining the difficulties they are wish to free themselves from. It does not exonerate a perpetual sense of victim-hood, nor does it endorse dangerous, spurious, magical cures. In many ways, it can be said that it also neither 'heals' nor 'cures', in the medical sense.
Rather, it increases awareness and indicates possible paths to change. It is not sudden or dramatic. It does not relieve the Biblical itch to drive the demon out. It suggests that some problems simply come from a resistance to taking responsibility for oneself, and adult solutions come from facing the truth and acting accordingly.
This is not very dramatic or sexy. There are no short-cuts. You do not walk through hot coals, or take a shamanic journey, or become a 'spiritual warrior', or walk with spirits, or take an animal avatar. You simply look the truth in the eye and take heart that responding to it, no matter what you must give up, whether it be the affair, the drugs, the gambling, the dishonesty, whatever, will work out for the best. And that being a perfectly ordinary, self sustaining human in itself is an act of heroic proportions.
And, I suspect that many of us simply don't want to accept that. We hunger for the ecstatic, the epiphanic, the extraordinary. We want to believe that there is something out there, beyond our everyday experience that can lift us up and make life the thrilling adventure we want it to be, like the lives of those who've 'made it' however the culture currently defines such. We don't want to patiently and painstakingly face the truths of our lives, and let go of the drugs, the booze, the gambling, the affair, the dishonesty, the greed, the whatever, and deal with the pain of its loss. We want something, someone, to make it better for us. We want, as Scott Peck pointed out (Peck was one of the honest gurus, in my opinion)our lives to be different, without us having to change.
And to that I would add that we also don't want to accept our lives, as imperfect and filled with struggle, confusion, bewilderment and partial success, as they are. We reflexively attach to Buddhas, Gurus, and Healers, forgetting that what is here and now, right in front of us, transpiring minute by minute, is the life we seek to lead, and the truth is obvious if we would but see it.
In the late 60s, an humbly brilliant man, Sheldon Kopp, composed one of the true masterpieces of self help, entitled If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! He borrowed his title from the old Zen dictum meant to indicate that in our search for the Buddha (enlightenment, coming to terms with oneself), we must accept that the Buddha is not to be found 'out there', on the road. That such Buddhas are false, and dangerous, and must be destroyed, i.e. ignored.
The true Buddha is only found within, through the slow process of accepting life the way it is, and discovering the true self-- a gift that, once found, we would never turn over to someone else, or endanger in any way.
In the end, I feel badly for those individuals who lost their lives in Sedona, for their families, and for the other attendees. I feel badly for them because, quite plainly, they got ripped off, and some paid with their lives.
Let it be said, there is no Buddha on the road, or in the mountains; there is no healing to be had in a fast or sweat lodge; there is no 're-patterning' to be achieved through Voice Print Analysis or Iridology or Color Therapy, there are only people willing to take your money and give you nothing in return.
