The Era of Self-Help Gurus Might Not Always Be So Helpful – The Liz Newman Story

This is part one of a two-part series. Today, we’ll cover the events of the Spirit Warrior case and put ourselves in the shoes of James's followers to figure out what kept them in that burning air. Then in part two, we’ll talk about the life of James Ray and learn why he doesn't see himself as a torturer who preys on the insecurities of the middle-aged. Even more, we will look at the steps it would take for us to become extreme self-help gurus ourselves.

Elizabeth Newman, a database administrator, considered herself a health nut. At 49, she watched her nutrition, worked out regularly, and stayed spiritually active. She was also experienced with fasting, meditation and has taken part in sweat lodge ceremonies before. Liz was also strong-willed, something her three children would tell the press after her death in 2009. She was strong-willed and intelligent, which might have contributed to her grit and stick-to-itiveness when she chose to stay in the sweat lodge that killed her.

When the screaming started, and people began crawling on the ground to escape the burning air, Liz didn't budge. The guru running the event, James Ray, had recently shamed her publicly for breaking a two-day desert fast and sharing snacks and wine. Liz was strong, so while real estate agent Dennis ripped the tent flap open, vomiting and shouting, “My heart! I don't want to die!” Liz stayed in the lodge curled up on the floor. Calling it a lodge might be too generous, by the way. In the news pictures, the sweat lodge looked more like a patched dome of sticks and canvas in the Arizona desert - just big enough to cook 55 people, half of whom would need to be life-flighted out.

The sweat lodge event was supposed to be a high point of a $10,000 spiritual retreat. A hippy-dippy empowerment event operated by motivational speaker James Ray. When James heard the screams of the people who inhaled the burning steam, he encouraged them to stay. He told them, “You're stronger than this. You can get over this. Mind Over Matter.” When the screams became too much, even for James to tolerate, he asked his followers for silence during the last rounds of steam, like they were playing the quiet game while being boiled alive. These last few rounds came after an already two-and-a-half-hour steam event. By now, several followers had lost consciousness entirely.

Their skin had turned bright red from the heat or purple for those whose organs had begun to shut down. There were covered in dirt almost completely. Liz was coated in damp desert soil. She and the man she was lying next to had worked out a taping system to check on each other, but Liz had stopped tapping somewhere between the fifth and sixth rounds.

By the time James asked for silence, she was already limp, slumped against his shins. James, who hadn't fasted or abstain from hydration during the retreat, dumped more water on the coals.

He continued dumping water for another two rounds - generating more and more steam. He had prepared his followers for the event by shaving their heads and making them watch The Last Samurai. In the tent, he misquoted Bushido and Native American Proverbs, and when he finally allowed the flaps to be opened, half of the 50+ Spirit Warriors had to be dragged out. They were washed off with the hose, and the volunteers found that some were turning purple or foaming at the mouth. That's when someone thought asked where Liz was. Nobody had, because while the survivors and dying were outside being washed, Liz was still inside on the ground.

The followers who were still able to stand began CPR. They would keep performing CPR for another 45 minutes while James slipped out the back and quietly drove away from the retreat. During the steaming when Liz had first gone unconscious, someone asked James if they could check on her to see if she was okay. James’s response was, “Liz, has done this before. She knows what she's doing.” Because Liz was strong-willed, right up until the end.

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In the 1990s, the self-help industry hit its confident, self-empowered stride. Tony Robbins was on TV throwing fists into the air trying to unlock your unlimited power and Spencer Johnson wanted to give you a better cheese to chase. Then in the early 2000s, our appetite for self-help gurus changed. We needed them to be available online or just a text message away. For a small fortune, they (or their assistant) would access our unlimited power over the phone like a sex hotline for CEOs. Except the gratification they would receive would be spiritual and self-actualizing instead of sexual.

This is still a service offered by most gurus we will talk about today. Fast forward to today, gurus are now referred to as influencers. They live plush, disconnected lives where they rise to the top of the Instagram or Facebook pyramid as long as they seem relatable. For as long as they can connect to their followers and make their Jet and white wine lifestyles look obtainable.

Then, as these influencer gurus became insulated by wealth, followers turned their backs on the gurus who became unrelatable. Case in point, Rachel Hollis never hid the fact that she came from money. Nevertheless, when she casually mentioned during a live stream that she has a domestic servant who “cleans the toilets," her value plummeted, and her $100,000 price tag as a keynote speaker was slashed. But somewhere between the area of unlimited 90s power and the influence of our boom, we got spirit warriors and people like James Arthur Ray boiling people in the Sedona desert.

On today's episode, we want to bust three simple myths about the sweat lodge manslaughter case, which left three educated and reasonable people dead, and dozens hospitalized – myths about how James Ray's followers were all cultists, and they somehow deserve what happened.

Myth 1: You and I are clever, think for ourselves people, right? Not crabs. We would have left the tent long before we were ever boiled alive.

Joe: When is it a cult? When is it self-help? These both have very similar elements and in fact, I remember hearing news anchors talking about the emergency medical responders who showed up to James Ray's sweat lodge. They thought it was a cult and that these people were killing themselves.

Todd: I want to take you a little bit back on James and give you a little bit of his credibility. I've read his books before all this happened. He was actually on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Oprah gushed over him. He was also in a movie called The Secret. Even more, he was on The Today Show and is a New York Times best-selling author. Now, James Ray was a very charismatic public speaker. He got so much press from The Secret that he traveled worldwide giving seminars and did his Workshop camps.

Joe: Something that will come up a few times throughout this episode - If we know your face and name in pop culture, we assume you are successful. What I read from this is that as soon as he got the secret out, that's when he had like a license to print his own money, basically.

Todd: Now James Ray had been in trouble before. There have been some red flags through the years and some of these you would think would ruin his reputation and he would be out of business. People have been seriously injured on some of his events before this one. One woman even jumped to her death (Colleen Conway) during a homeless embodying retreat he designed.

Joe: Now, since she paid for multiple sessions, that tells me this wasn't like a suicide, right?

So, if I'm Liz Newman and about to go into a sweat lodge, you would think that history would set off alarm bells.

Todd: Liz had attended a lot of these events before. She was a very loyal follower of James Ray and she believed in him. However, she had been embarrassed a few days earlier when she was chastised in front of the group because she shared snacks and a bottle of wine during a fast. So, she likely felt like she had something to prove. And the scene was horrific. Responders seriously thought it was a cult doing a mass suicide.

Joe: I do want to follow James Ray out of the desert, but are you okay with leaving that for our second episode, part 2?

Todd: Sure! It only gets better and weirder.

There's no way that we would allow ourselves to be in that tent – or would we? I started looking into the science of this. Many, let's say politics, have lately been convincing people of untruths. You can get sucked in no matter how intelligent you are. You can be convinced to believe interesting things. Remember, all the people in the tent were educated, affluent, and successful. Well, I'm going to go through a couple of studies that ultimately claim we could have very well been in that tent willingly as well.

Why? It boils down to the craving to learn. They fit the standard success profile, worked in social groups, and learned from authority figures. They had good social skills and were educated. We have basically bread a generation of people who are good at soft skills and good at following instructions. Because of that, James used that against them as far as getting them to go through this challenge. He got them to treat it like it was work or a job. He put himself in a place of authority and made them rely on each other through his ridiculous challenge. In short, he took people who wanted a challenge. With that, perhaps simpler people or people who go against authority would not have fallen for this.

I want to get into a study. These are fluency studies, and I want to test you and myself on this a little bit. This comes from the Guardian, and it is an article that came out years ago, called ‘Why Smart People Are More Likely To Believe Fake News.' The idea is that smart people are vulnerable to certain ideas because their brain speed of thought allows them to rationalize incorrect beliefs. It's easy for our brain to process simple questions even if they are inaccurate, and we roll with it. Our brain is designed to process things fast when it's possible, and that can lead to aligning with false truths or claims.

For example, James wrongly quoted Native American Proverbs, but no one noticed. Our brains are programmed to map information as fluent if most of the boxes make sense. Even more, people are more likely to believe pseudo-scientific claims if it has like a visual of a brain scan next to them. You're more likely to believe it just because your brain sees an image and it has fluency. We're not going to get into how the authority works in psychology, but when Liz passed out and somebody asked if she needed help, yet the authority in the room said she'd done this before. That screams of the Milgram Experiment. If you ever want to look that up, that's a fantastic example of how authority tricks us into obeying.

Myth 2: Self-help is one thing, but the steam lodge event was just a hair shy of whipping their own backs like zealots. You and I would have never fallen for James’s self-help torture, let alone paid for it.

There's no shame in wanting to give your power to authority. Because no matter how smart you are, you can always imagine finding someone who's smarter than you and has a better life plan than you. In fact, we do that on a financial level; we seek financial planners. In general, there's no shame in risking things and looking for somebody else who might have a blueprint for life.

That's why I think these people were susceptible to this because they had become financially secure. They had reached middle age and were at a time in their life where they would start looking for Maslow's hierarchy. It is a very popular system of thinking in self-help; once you take care of your base needs, you start looking for other things to complete your life as a human. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is stuff that our country is struggling with right now, which is physiological, air, water, food, shelter, clothing, and the notion that money solves all of them. Once you have money and all basic needs are met, you reach the top of the pyramid, which is discovering what you are made of in life and what you can accomplish. And that's what draws in people who already have their basic money problem solved.

Turning to EQ for a moment, anecdotally EQ makes you more likely to succeed in life. If you've ever read the book on EQ, EQ makes you a better person across the board. However, it doesn't make you a good person. In this article, they point out that Martin Luther King Jr. was very emotionally intelligent, and so was Adolf Hitler. Both knew what gestures to make and how to use them to their advantage. They knew how the emotions were being reflected by the audience. They also knew how to project the right emotions, so it hit emotional cores. The simple way to say this is that morality counts just as much when you apply EQ. What you come in with, if you raise your emotional quotient, that's probably what you're going to walk out with. So, James Ray had emotional intelligence, but he was not using it for good. If somebody is a cult follower, they have a level of desperation, and they're usually estranged from their family. Now, there were many rumors about his members being kind of in a desperate state, but it turned out that was not the case. His followers were not estranged at all.

Myth 3: Some of the people that tent had been to raise extreme seminars before. Why come back? What do we get out of being tortured by a guru?

To launch into our next myth, note that Liz often kept things about what Ray was doing from her family. She didn't want to tell them the things that would freak them out because she felt like she was having a breakthrough spiritually. I want to talk about two things – one I think would help smart people fall for this kind of behavior because, again, it hijacks a portion of the smart person's brain that will make them feel like they're having a breakthrough.

When you watch TED Talks, what does it feel like to you in your life? Like what are you gaining? Most people say they feel like they are getting insider info that will help them do better and feel better. Almost all gurus will get into TED Talks at some point, and they will share something groundbreaking to captivate in that way. It also sparked the concept of opportunity hoarding. If you're vulnerable with the people at work, this can appeal to you. They feel like opportunity hoarding and feel like those gurus are talking to them and giving insider information. Every guru or every Ted Talk speaker drops hints that they are in the upper class. So, when they share wisdom, it sounds like opportunity hoarding, and they are sharing an upper-class opportunity with you. And all you have to do is pay them a little bit of money and they will share all of it with your directly.

Going back to the case and why people continued returning to the torture, it is all about psychology. If you happen to survive a sweat lodge or live through a plane crash, why not break up your monotonous life? If somebody tells you it's going to cure you spiritually, why wouldn't you believe them? If you've done it before and lived through something extreme, how much can you lose? There's a study that the Scientific American reports on and this is about The Bitter Pill effect. They found that those who drank water with the placebo, nothing happened. But the people who took something bitter and strong that was supposed to be just water had the same reduction in allergies as the people who took actual medicine. Now, I think James Ray was giving people a very memorable experience that changed their lives, which can easily provoke them to go back for more.

Todd: The sweat lodge was designed to be a catalyst for personal transformation. The formal name was the Spiritual Warrior program. To prep, he had the participants shave their heads and spend 36 hours in the desert meditating without any water or food. He also had them watch The Last Samurai before they went out in the desert. Now, this is the weirdest one; they would play a game where Ray would dress up in a white robe and declare himself as God.

Joe: By robe, we do mean like a kimono. He’s pretending to be a death God, right?

Todd: Exactly, and he would point at you and say you are dead. At that point, you would need to lay motionless on the ground.

Joe: That is a sucky game of tag.

Todd: He was getting total control and power of these people between the fasting, the brainwashing, and then looking up at him. When Liz would come home after these events, her family saw the changes and saw she was better.

Joe: I can imagine. She basically volunteered to be in a car crash and knowing she would walk away from it. I would come back electric.

Todd: She would come back and talk about everything but the negative stuff. The only negative thing she ever talked about was the broken hand in the martial arts display. This is the heartbreaking part of the story. The daughter saw on the news that something had happened. Nobody from the Sedona Lounge had contacted them. They started making phone calls, but the first responders still didn't have any paperwork on these people. So, their mom was a Jane Doe at the hospital. Nobody was able to identify her.

Joe: Holy shit. She paid $10,000 to become a Jane Doe at a lodge.

Todd: The daughter and her husband hop on a flight to Arizona. They got to the visitation at the hospital, and at this point, Liz was on life support. She's in a coma. And with her daughter there, Liz died. Remember how we talked about some people coming out of the tent with purple skin from organ failure?

Joe: Yeah, they were washed off, and they were purple under the dust.

Todd: Liz, Neuman died of that; she died of multiple organ failure.

Joe: Damn.

Final Thoughts

The things that make us good at modern life - listening to successful people, taking good advice, educating ourselves, and seeking self-actualization - these are all positive pursuits that ironically makes us more vulnerable to the gurus; gurus who would ask you to walk over hot coals or sit in a boiling tent in the name of education or self-actualization.

Do you know how we fall for people like James Ray? It's not because his followers are gullible, vulnerable, or they're estranged from their families like cult members. Liz Newman wasn’t any of those things. She was successful and strong by anyone's measure. We fall for hucksters like James Ray because if we're doing life right, we never stop searching for the truth, nor should we. But gurus blend the truth with two very tempting nuggets: upper-class opportunity and the appearance of progress. You walk away after taking their bitter pill, feeling the strongest placebo effect possible.

That's also partially why the middle-aged are susceptible to gurus. If you've dunked on life hard enough to take care of your basic needs, then your next stop should naturally be seeking out wisdom or beginning a spiritual awakening. You desire to do something bigger than another college course or tax seminar so you can find the real you that's been powering your motor from the start. You'll be looking for self-actualization, and that means looking for people like James Ray, unfortunately. And why shouldn’t you? It is wonderful to pursue a life in this way, but make sure to be cautious. Because the distance from a yoga studio to a sweat lodge is a lot shorter than you'd think.